You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others.

When I got your express letter this morning and saw how careful you are of your worthless Jim I felt ashamed of what I had written.

Murphy happens to possess the novel’s other most memorable post-card, the one depicting “savage women” from Bolivia, and is thus associated with postcards generally.

Robert Alter calls a “transhistorical textual community,” in which “knowledge of the received texts and recourse to them consti-tute the community, but the texts do not have a single authoritative meaning.”

temura (rearranging letters)

Joyce composed and addressed his own Hellenic-Hebraic love letters to his homeland, it would seem that he was keen to take the Hibernian to heart from the outset.

Bloom’s secret love letters, then, written in English to and from his Irish confidante, but written in a boustrophedonic, vowel-free code that echoes Greek and Jewish patternings, may hint at the broader intertwining of Hellenic, Hebraic, and Irish strands in Joyce’s novel. We might see Bloom’s letters as another instance of his willing-ness to bring Ireland into dialogue with other cultures and races.

In the “Ithaca” episode of the novel, as part of the answer to the question, “What did the first drawer unlocked contain?” we are told that Bloom has three letters from Martha “in reversed alpha-betic boustrophedonic punctated quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed) N. IGS./WI. UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y.IM” (U 17.1774, U17.1774, U1799-1801). To crack the code, one writes out the alphabet, then writes directly beneath it the alphabet in reverse, assigning A to Z, B to Y, C to X, and so on. When the above message is decoded, we get “M.RTH./DR.FF.LC/D.LPH.NS/B.RN.” Once the vowels have been added to these surreptitious avowals, we see: “Martha Clifford [the surname has been reversed for extra protection] Dolphin’s Barn.” This much, of course, Joyceans know.

“put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter”

toyed with the shapes and correspondenc

ut abandoning the straight (auto-)biographical tale required inventing a new narrative structure.

the same time, although it is adequately signalled, the intertextuality here remains largely an ingenious game and virtuoso performance.

no awareness t

universalise the stories being told. B

ntertextual patterning,

rategy of re-telling stories bec

stories for Dubliners were written in swift succession, e

to name himself James Joyce, that novel's author, signalled further a decisive advance in reflection an

early Stephen Daedalus novel are notes dateable to late winter of 1904 at the back of a copy-book. Prospe