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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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"The Cybernetic Plot Of Ulysses." Essayworld.com. October 15, 2006. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Cybernetic-Plot-Of-Ulysses/53973.
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