Riddling the Reader to Write Back

Abstract

My thesis here is that some modernist writers, and, preeminently, Joyce in Ulysses, create a new relationship to the reader by not only inviting the reader’s participation in the literary act (which is itself a dialogical interchange created by the interanimation of the acts of writing and reading), but also by soliciting the reader’s engagement in actively creating the text that the reader then goes on to read. In part, this is a quality of writing that Barthes claimed characterizes the writerly text as opposed to the readerly, the modern as opposed to the classic literary text, but I mean something entirely less metaphoric than this when I speak of the reader’s active engagement. That reading Ulysses is an unusual experience, one with rules and conventions of its own, is a familiar idea in the history of Joyce criticism; indeed, it seems to have hit nearly everyone who has had the experience of teaching the book or participating in a reading group devoted to it. At the beginning of Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Daniel Schwarz comments that “Ulysses teaches us how to read itself,” and adds that “the ventriloquy of its various styles establishes an unusually complex relationship between text and reader” (Schwarz, 2). Declan Kiberd makes a similar point when he states that Ulysses “is offered as a book that is co-authored rather than simply read” (Kiberd, 473).