The Cybernetic Plot Of Ulysses

The Cybernetic Plot of Ulysses



A paper delivered at the CALIFORNIA JOYCE conference (6/30/93)

Good afternoon.

To quote the opening of Norbert Wiener's address on Cybernetics
to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in March of 1950,
The word cybernetics has been taken from the Greek word
kubernitiz (ky-ber-NEE-tis) meaning steersman. It has been
invented because there is not in the literature any adequate term
describing the general study of communication and the related
study of control in both machines and in living beings.

In this paper, I mean by cybernetics those activities and ideas
that have to do with the sending, carrying, and receiving of
information. My thesis is that there is a cybernetic plot to
ULYSSES -- a constellation or meaningful pattern to the novel's
many images of people sending, carrying, and receiving -- or
distorting, or losing -- signals of varying import and value.
This plot -- the plot of signals that are launched on perilous
Odyssean journeys, and that reach home, if they do, only through
devious paths -- parallels and augments the novel's more central
journeys, its dangers encountered, and its successful returns.
ULYSSES works rather neatly as a cybernetic allegory, in fact,
not only in its represented action, but also in its history as a
text. The book itself, that is, has reached us only by a devious
path around Cyclopean censors and the Scylla and Charybdis of
pirates and obtuse editors and publishers. ULYSSES both retells
and re-enacts, that is, the Odyssean journey of information that,
once sent, is threatened and nearly thwarted before it is finally
received.

We are talking, of course, of cybernetics avant la lettre --
before Norbert Wiener and others had coined the term. But like
Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain discovering that all along he's been
speaking prose, so Leopold Bloom might delight in learning that
he is actually quite a proficient cyberneticist. Joyce made his
protagonist an advertizing canvasser at the moment when
advertizing had just entered the modern age. Bloom's job is to
put his clients' messages into forms that are digestible by the
mass medium of the press. If Bloom shows up in the National
Library, for instance, it will be to find a logo (in what we
would call clip art) for his client Alexander Keyes.

The conduct of spirit through space and time is what
communication's about. And James Joyce was interested, as we
know, in the conduct of spirit: his own, that of his home town,
and that of his species.

* * *
Once they're sent, what are some of the things that can happen to
messages? They can be lost, like the words that Bloom starts to
scratch in the sand: "I AM A..." Signals can be degraded by
faulty transmission, like the telegram that Stephen received in
Paris from his father back in Dublin: "NOTHER DYING. COME HOME.
FATHER." A slip of the pen -- as in Martha Clifford's letter to
Bloom -- destroys intended meanings, but it also, as Joyce loves
to point out, creates new ones. "I called you naughty boy,"
Martha wrote to Henry Flower, "because I do not like that other
world."

Signals can be abused and discarded, like the fate of "Matcham's
Masterstroke" in Bloom's outhouse. Signals can be censored,
pirated, misprinted, and malpracticed upon by editors, as
happened the text of this novel itself. Signals can fall into the
wrong hands, like the executioners' letters in the pub, or they
can land where they're sent but make little sense, like the
postcard reading "U.P. up" that Dennis Breen gets in the mail.

And signals can, finally, reach their intended recipient with the
intended meaning, as in Bloom's pleasure in reading Milly's
letter to him in the morning's mail. And what about that book
that Stephen is going to write in ten years? There's a
premonitory cybernetic allegory for you, and one with a happy
ending to boot.

* * *
I would like to sketch for you, then, a brief and cursory
chapter-by-chapter account of the cybernetic plot of Ulysses. But
lest the listener persist in harboring doubts, as we say,
concerning the cybernetic signature of the Joycean narrative, let
me anticipate the first sentence of the 'Lotus-Eaters' episode:

BY LORRIES ALONG SIR JOHN ROGERSON'S QUAY MR BLOOM walked
soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher's, the
postal telegraph office. As befits the narcotic theme of the
episode, this first sentence is itself not quite sober. Even the
first two words -- "BY LORRIES" -- are ambiguous, since the mail
moves "by lorries" in a parallel but different sense of Mr Bloom
walking "by lorries." Most significantly for our reading, this
first sentence of 'Lotus-eaters' ends in "the postal telegraph
office," suggesting that the episode, like the novel at large, is
concerned with sending messages.

STATELY, PLUMP Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a
bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

That mirror will be used shortly for heliography, when Mulligan
will have "swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the
tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea." This is idle
signal-sending, with no clear sense of a recipient. Up close,
Buck has just hurt Stephen's feelings on the subject of his
mother, and is about to hurt them again. In other words, between
the two men, communication is poor. The signals don't get
through.

Also in the first episode, the old milkwoman prompts a Homeric
thought attributed to Stephen: "Old and secret she had entered
from a morning world, maybe a messenger." "Maybe a messenger!"
Cyberneticists love ambiguity, particularly about subjects like
messages and messengers in disguise.

The Homeric scheme for the novel tells us that the elderly
milkwoman as messenger stands for or signifies the goddess Athena
disguised in the form of Mentor. From the first, sending a
successful signal is understood from that great cyberneticist
Homer to require a disguise. The wire that conducts truth, in an
image that Pynchon favors, must be insulated. Furthermore, our
best ideas, the Greeks thought, come to us as if from
without. Thus, Telemachus receives his prompt from Athena
disguised as Mentor, just as Stephen is metaphorically roused
from inaction by the old milkwoman. A signal gets through, not
despite but thanks to its padding, and for both Homer's and
Joyce's young man, the signal prompts new ideas.

History, the subject of Stephen's instruction in 'Nestor,' is
what remains of signals from the past. Education itself is the
ultimate cybernetic challenge, and Stephen grapples with it in
trying to explain a math problem to a slow student from Vico
Road. Throughout the novel, ignorance and stupidity --
respectively, a lack of knowledge and a lack of intelligence --
pose threats to both the characters and the culture. They are not
helpful insulation; rather, they interfere with and frustrate
successful communication. "My patience are exhausted," writes
Martha Clifford to her penpal Henry Flower. Stupidity threatens
to reduce signal to noise just as surely as the citizen later
threatens to bean poor Bloom. The bigotry of anti-Semitism that
Mr. Deasy incarnates at the end of 'Nestor' epitomizes noise,
then, in the form of injurious stupidity.

In 'Proteus,' the third episode, Joyce combines the references to
space and time, respectively, of the first two episodes, by
allowing the sight of the midwives on the beach to prompt
Stephen's thoughts of a navelcord telephone to Eden. The famous
telegram from his father, containing the typo which Joyce
deliberately repeated from the actual telegram but which his
editors from 1934 until 1986 insisted on correcting, also appears
in this episode. "Nother dying. Come home. Father." Accidental
noise in the signal seemed to Joyce to possess profundity,
alluding as the error did to the universal condition of mortality
-- a theme dear, as we know, to the author of "The Dead."

Near the end of the 'Proteus' episode, Stephen on the strand at
Sandymount wonders "Who ever anywhere will read these written
words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your
flutiest voice." Stephen has just torn off the bottom of Mr
Deasy's letter to the editor, so as to jot a poetic idea on it,
and showing that for him the medium of a signal means nothing;
only its spirit, or content, matters. Bloom will write letters on
these sands, too; it's as if proximity to water brings out the
playful side in signal-sending, as with Buck's earlier mirror-
flashing. There is a kind of playful, throwaway signal-sending
that we indulge in for the pleasure of NOT knowing who will
receive it. "I shot an arrow into the air; it fell to earth, I
know not where." Sending real messages is serious business;
sending pseudo-messages, or non-messages to random audiences, is
play. Stuff for the beach, not the town.

In 'Calypso' (the first Bloom chapter), velopes themselves carry
meaning; the one from Blazes to Molly scorches poor Bloom's
heart. But the (quote) "letter for me from Milly" does Bloom's
heart good. Signals full of meaning, ones like Milly's that land
where they're sent, and are properly understood, can do a world
of good.

"Metempsychosis" is the word in this episode that prevents Molly
from understanding a sentence in the trashy novel she's reading.
The transmission of spirit across time and space is itself an
idea that Poldy must translate into plain words in order for its
meaning to reach Molly. But he does so, and she does understand.
Meanings need new clothes to cross some borders, but quick wits
know how to smuggle those meanings across.

The fate of the magazine story ("Matcham's Masterstroke") that
Bloom reads in the outhouse shows that some signals belong in the
toilet. The joke's cybernetic subtext concerns the need to
evaluate our culture's signs, to digest them, and to dispose of
the unworthy ones accordingly.

In 'Lotus-Eaters,' the first sentence of which we followed into
the post office, Bloom receives his letter from Martha Clifford,
with its misspelled "world." Noise threatens to wreck signal, to
put meaning to narcotic sleep, but again (as with Simon Dedalus'
telegram about "Nother dying") Joyce is fascinated by the
meanings born of random error. Like the bicycle tire's lemniscate
that fascinates John Shade, in Nabokov's PALE FIRE, the noise
that seems to spell out its own new meaning offers another kind
of pseudo-signal: not one without an intended audience, this
time, but one without a real author other than chance itself. The
Surrealists, of course, would have you believe that they cornered
the market in such random marks believed to bear meaning.

When Bloom tells Bantam Lyons that he was just about to "throw
away" the newspaper, and Lyons thinks that Bloom is tipping him
about the racehorse Throwaway, it's a clear case of noise being
mistaken for signal. That's why the winning horse is named for
disposable refuse ("Throwaway") in the first place: some signals
go about disguised as noise. Joyce, unlike Martha, DOES "like
that other world."

In Hades, Bloom very simply and matter-of-factly draws the limits
of communication at mortality. "Once you are dead you are dead."
No serious signals reach us from the other side, only ridiculous
ones, as Christine van Boheemen reminded us on Monday. The
cybernetic comedy of errors deepens here as an idle word,
M'Intosh, is boosted to human status, one more erroneous
conflation of words and things.

'Aeolus' is about communication, set as it is in the newspaper
office. The rhetorical devices that run rampant through the
episode show the dangers of one's medium going opaque on one, of
language becoming windy through a fatuous obsession with its own
sound. A thoughtful style strengthens, a thoughtless style
weakens any signal.

In 'Lestrygonians,' Bloom receives the novel's third throwaway,
the advertizing handout, which he throws to the unappreciative
gulls. Signals only work on their intended human receivers, as we
all knew already but Joyce still needed to show. As an
advertising canvasser, as we've noted, Bloom's occupation
centrally concerns the sending and receiving of commercial
messages, and so the cybernetic conundrums of the billboard
floating on the Liffey and of HELY'S sandwichboard men go under
instant analysis in Bloom's mind.

'Scylla and Charybdis,' outside the novel, may perhaps best be
seen behind the prudish censors on one side and the unscrupulous
copyright violators who threatened the book's successful
publication on the other. Piracy we call this latter crime,
unwittingly evoking a maritime metaphor of the novel as a ship on
a dangerous journey. (Recall how apt it was of Wiener to name
cybernetics for a Greek steersman.) In the case of Ulysses, a
novel that faced and continues to face Odyssean obstacles at
every stage of the journey, the metaphor is peculiarly apt.

In 'Wandering Rocks,' Father Conmee furthers the cybernetic plot
by posting a letter with the help of young Brunny LyNam. Boylan,
meanwhile, plays the cybernetic flirt: "--May I say a word to
your telephone, Missy? he asked roguishly." Stephen and Bloom,
meanwhile, are both eyeing the booksellers' carts, seeking stray
signals that may or may not be meant for them,

'Sirens,' for Joyce as for Homer, reminds us that some of the
most beguiling signals intend us nothing but harm. Survival may
come only through voluntary paralysis, as when Odysseus has
himself lashed to the mast. As Bloom ties and unties his fingers
with the elastic band, Joyce again shows us insulation proving an
effective defense against hurtful thoughts; in this case, Bloom's
thoughts of marital betrayal.

'Cyclops' has that mock-theosophic signal from the other side,
reporting that the currents of abodes of the departed spirits
were (quote) "equipped with every modern home comfort such as
tlfn," and so on. 'Cyclops' is also where Joe Hynes reads aloud
from the job application letter of one H. Rumbold, Master Barber,
implicitly reiterating the need for moral discrimination in the
matter of meanings received.

"Still, it was a kind of communication between us." So thinks
Bloom of his silent tryst with Nausicaa in the form of Gertie
MacDowell. And of course: "For this relief much thanks."
Successfully sent and received erotic signals gratify in this
narrative quite explicitly beyond the reach of mere music or
language.

'Oxen of the Sun' allows that medium of transmission, language,
to turn opaque again, to foreground itself at the risk of letting
meanings die undelivered. (Quote:) "The debate which ensued was
in its scope and progress an epitome of the course of life." Some
signals can be made to bear multiple meanings on levels of
varying profundity.

In 'Circe,' Bloom shows us that the recall and timing of
information can be crucial to success. He remembers what he's
heard about Bella Cohen's son at Oxford, and uses the information
in a timely fashion to protect Stephen from harm. Judgment of
what to listen to, what to remember of what one's heard, and what
to repeat and when are all essential cybernetic skills. Bloom
also, at episode's end, picks up an imagined signal from the
imagined spirit of his son Rudy, proving that to the artistic
imagination, at least, mortality is no barrier to spirit after
all. (Of course, readers of Dubliners had already learned that
from Michael Furey.)

Its absurd pedantic deadpan notwithstanding, the 'Ithaca' episode
nonetheless communicates that even the worthless crumbs of
Plumtree's Potted Meat in one's bed may be read as signal.

'Eumaeus' features yet more signal degraded into noise. The
newspaper account of the funeral inadvertently drops an L from
the name of L. Boom. Even the mock sailor's postcard from
landlocked Bolivia furthers the episode's theme of exhausted and
phony meanings.

In 'Penelope,' finally, communication comes once again to mean
the successful transmission of spirit among bodies. The flesh
assents all too indiscriminately in this episode, but Bloom is
home safe, dominant at last in his wife's thoughts, his message
of unprepossessing love mocked, ridiculed, travestied, and
betrayed, but ultimately received, understood, and acknowledged.

The style of Joyce's novel, with its access from the very first
scene to Stephen's own thoughts, and then to Bloom's, and finally
to Molly's, implies that no communication, no means of meaning,
succeeds so well as that of the artistic imagination. When he
said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," Gustave Flaubert was teaching
Joyce to disregard and ultimately to refute the supposed
inscrutability and reputed inaccessibility of the Other. The
lines may be down between husband and wife, they may be tottering
between father and daughter, but between the author's spirit and
that of his characters, le courant passe, the current flows
without impedance.

Any signal, like a Homeric hero, is threatened with ruin by the
alluring sirens of noise. Any piece of information, or any spirit
afloat in our culture, that is, faces an Odyssean battle in order
to make it through. Consider the obeisance of publisher to legal
power that used to appear at this novel's front gate, for
instance. This NOVEL had to undergo an odyssey before coming home
to our minds. The law tried to stop it, pirates tried to
loot it, but the text, like its characters, came through
relatively unscathed.

Cybernetic messages and the obstacles to their correct
transmission present one of the manifold yet parallel plots in
ULYSSES -- with our own successful comprehension of the novel
furnishing the happy ending to a cybernetic allegory in which
character, action, and text all come through, finally, loud and
clear. The book, that is, enacted a Joycean design over which
Joyce himself could have had little control, for the book itself
recapitulate d the Odyssean journey across perilous seas.
Pirates, monstrous one-eyed censors, Procrustean editors kept
mangling a Protean text. And yet here it is, home free, safely
harbored in our minds and in our hearts.

Thank you very much.

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