ABSTRACT
Ulysses followed the same path: serialization in little magazines, until the censor caught up; then rejection by mainstream publishers. Ulysses finally became available in America in 1933, and in Britain in 1936. The very title of Ulysses is a threshold which makes manifest the author’s intention to raise the novel-reading stakes substantially. The curve on which the episodes of Ulysses are plotted rises even more steeply. All grammatical descriptions of the language of Ulysses suffer from a similar vagueness. Ulysses has begun its long transmutation from novel into encyclopaedia. At the conclusion of ‘Wandering Rocks’, the conclusion of the initial style, the gap between decoding and inference, so characteristic of Ulysses, is confirmed by the Viceroy’s acknowledgement of an act which was not even intended as a gesture: Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.
