The Printed Letters in Ulysses

Abstract

Letters serve many purposes in Ulysses , including propaganda, thanks, sexual sugestiveness, joking, job-seeking, and suicidal announcement. The “voice” represented in them may be mimetic (indicating verbal imitation) or textual (inspired by the physical text) but can only be interpreted through the reactions of the fictional recipient. The medium inhibits the message, and written messages here are representational and doubly distanced from the reader by the text. Letters, for instance, from Milly Bloom and Martha Clifford are fully textual and reveal much of the character of the writers, while Rudolph Bloom’s suicide note and Denis Breen’s postcard are enigmatic and contradictory, giving little substantive idea of the authors involved. Through their signifying or simply suggestive power, Ulysses ’s letters become an essential part of the fictional universe that they inhabit.