Grasping whose point of view these sentences issue from is trickier, but key to the novel’s technical ambitions. The tower, an obsolete British defense fortress, overlooks the “snotgreen,” “scrotumtightening” Irish Sea-“a great sweet mother,” Buck Mulligan intones, playing the roles of both priest and jester before an unamused Stephen Dedalus, who is grieving the death of his mother. It is eight in the morning at the Martello tower in Sandycove. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed. Sometimes it greets me with a sentence whose origin and significance I know with the same certainty that I know my name. Waking up, sleepy and displeased, I roll over to see what it has been up to during the night. My relationship with UlyssesReader is intense and, I suspect, typical. Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus and an older one named Leopold Bloom, brought together in a hospital, a brothel, a cabmen’s shelter, and, finally, the kitchen of Bloom’s home-on June 16, 1904, “an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.” When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel’s historic signature, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. The novel’s eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences-Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body-are torn asunder. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel’s inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a “corpus-fed bot.” The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce’s modernist epic, “ Ulysses,” which was published a hundred years ago this month.
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