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Book review: Ulysses by Numbers by Eric Bulson

Bulson, Eric Jon. Ulysses by Numbers. Columbia University Press, 2020. cuny-gc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, https://doi.org/10.7312/buls18604.

Summary: Eric Bulson employs a quantitative and computational approach to analyze the novel “Ulysses” by James Joyce. His objective is to gain insights into the novel’s structure and themes through the application of statistical methods. By examining the repetitions and variations of numerical patterns within the text, Bulson aims to uncover a deeper understanding of the novel. 

My experience: It was an interesting, but challenging read for me. I did skim through the “Ulysses” by Joyce on multiple occasions, but I never fully immersed myself in its pages. Now, I’m feeling more open to giving it a try at some point in the future. Having that in mind, I mostly focused on understanding the method Bulson used to convey his message.

Eric Bulson is a professor of English at Claremont Graduate University. He got his PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. His research interests goes on a range of subjects including Modernism, Critical Theory, Media Studies, World Literature, Visual Storytelling, and British and Anglophone Literature from 1850 to 2000.

Ulysses by Numbers highlights the presence of numeric patterns throughout “Ulysses,” asserting their role in shaping the novel’s structure, pace, and rhythmic flow of the plot. He suggests that Joyce’s deliberate use of numbers is purposeful, enabling him to transform the narrative of a single day into a substantial piece of artwork. Bulson explores the intentionality behind Joyce’s numerical choices, emphasizing how they contribute to the book’s richness and complexity. Additionally, the tone of Bulson’s analysis combines elements of playfulness and exploration, adding an engaging dimension to the discussion.

He emphasizes he will be focused on the “use numbers as a primary means for interpretation“, to make the point that a quantitative analysis is the missing point to compose a “close reading as a critical practice”. He proposed it as an additional method to the traditional literature review that focused on the text.

“Once you begin to see the numbers, then you are in a position to consider how it is a work of art, something made by a human being at a moment in history that continues to recede into the past. We’ll never get back to 1922, but by taking the measurements now, we are able to assemble a set of facts about its dimensions that can then be used to consider the singularity of Ulysses and help explain how it ended up one way and not another.”

Bulson recognizes that literature critique based on computational methods is still under development, and not quite popular yet. The utilization of computers in literary analysis is a relatively modern phenomenon, considering that the majority of such processes were conducted manually until a few centuries ago. The practice of using numbers to elaborate narratives was common until the 18th century in the work of Homer, Catullus, Dante, Shakespeare, and others. However, the rationalism of the upcoming area covered up this practice. Only in the 1960s did the search for symmetry and numerological analysis reemerged, culminating in the method of computational literary analysis (CLA).

Bulson explains that he differs from the usual approach to adapt the use of small numbers in his analysis. Firstly, his analysis is based on samples. It means that instead of analyzing the entire novel the author selects specific sections. Secondly, he recognizes that he applies basic statistical analysis. Despite the simplicity of his analysis, his goal is to make literature more visible. 

In terms of sources, he goes deep into finding the sources of data he considered in this analysis:

“Measuring the length of the serial Ulysses, simple as it sounds, is not such a straightforward exercise. In the process of trying to figure this out, I considered three possibilities: the pages of typescript (sent by Joyce to Ezra Pound and distributed to Margaret Anderson, editor and publisher of the Little Review, in the United States), the pages of the fair copy manuscript (drafted by Joyce between 1918 and 1920 and sold to the lawyer and collector John Quinn), and the printed pages of the episodes in the Little Review (averaging sixty-four per issue).”

It’s interesting to notice how he illustrates his arguments with both handwriting and drawings with graphs and charts, which encompasses the idea of a craftwork mixed with technological visualizations.

In terms of the novel’s structure, Bulson examines the presence of 2’s and 12’s, such as the address “12, rue de l’Odéon” and the year of publication (1922), among other recurring patterns. Additionally, he delves into the number of paragraphs and words in the text, and explores the connections between them. Through one particular analysis, he determines the level of connectivity among the chapters, identifying Chapter 15 as having the highest number of nodes and being the most connected to other chapters, which he refers to as an “Episode.” Chapter 15 consists of 38,020 words and 359 paragraphs. Another significant episode is Chapter 18, which contains the second-highest number of words (22,306) but is condensed into only 8 paragraphs. Chapter 11, on the other hand, has the second-highest number of paragraphs (376) and comprises 11,439 words.

Bulson also examines characters from a quantitative perspective, contrasting the relatively small number of character count in “Ulysses” with other epic works such as “The Odyssey” or “The Iliad.” He uses a visual representation of a network to enhance the understanding of the novel’s scale and structure – highlighting the crowded number of roles in episode 15. 

“Episode 15 arrived with more than 445 total characters, 349 of them unique. If you remove the nodes and edges of episode 15 from the network, Ulysses gets a whole lot simpler . That unwieldy cluster of 592 total nodes whittles down to 235 (counting through episode 14). Not only is a Ulysses stripped of episode 15 significantly smaller: it corresponds with a radically different conception of character for the novel as a whole”.

Moving from the text meta analysis, the authors examine who read the 1922 printed book. Outside of Europe and North America, only Argentina and Australia. In the US, the book was most popular in the West Coast. In the following chapter, he tries to answer when Ulysses was written. He mentioned that the traditional answer is that Joyce began writing the novel in 1914 and finished it in 1921. However, he points out that this is such a simplistic answer. He argues about the nonlinearity of the written process, more fluid and organic, and less structured.

In the final chapter, the author goes back to the content analysis, bringing a reflection that could retreat himself “after reducing Ulysses to so many sums, ratios, totals, and percentages, it’s only fair to end with some reflection on the other inescapable truth that literary numbers bring: the miscounts”. He refers as “miscounts” any bias or issues in terms of data collection of analysis.However, he defends the method by saying that literary criticism is not a hard science, and imprecisions, vagueness and inaccuracy is actually part of the process. Also, theories based on small samples are popular in historical and social analysis, and his work should not be discredited because of that. 

“Coming up against miscounts has taught me something else. Far from being an unwelcome element in the process, the miscounts are the expression of an imprecision, vagueness, and inaccuracy that belongs both to the literary object and to literary history. In saying that, you probably don’t need to be reminded that literary criticism is not a hard science with the empirical as its goal, and critics do not need to measure the value of their arguments against the catalogue of facts that they can, or cannot, collect.”

After reviewing the contribution of his perspective, he concludes that “readers might to bridge the gap, Ulysses will remain a work in progress, a novel left behind for other generations to finish. Reading by numbers is one way to recover some of the mystery behind the creative process.”

Book Review: Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection by Tung Hui-Hu

Tung-Hui Hu is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, a published poet, and a former network engineer. His first book, A Prehistory of the Cloud published in 2016, illustrates how the cloud grew out of older digital networks, and “examines the gap between the real and the virtual in our understanding of the cloud.” (Hu, 2016)

In his most recent published work, Digital Lethargy, Hu examines the phenomena of exhaustion and lethargy shared by digital users in an age of digital capitalism, where concepts of ‘liveliness’ and ‘agency’ are sold to users for the benefit of big tech and advertisers, specifically with data. Digital platforms created by tech industrialists gather data from “active users” through their clicks, likes, status updates, and even their racial and gender identity in order to generate profits from advertisers.

“Under digital capitalism, ‘being yourself’ is the dominant set of codes for how we understand ourselves and others. It is a form of empowered individualism, where we equate a user account with personhood, and we equate choice with agency.” (Hu, 2022, viii)

This results in users carrying the heavy burden of ‘performative livelihood’, in which personhood is intrinsically linked to the digital self, leaving little to no room for identity outside of digital capitalism. Instead of shaming feelings or acts of lethargy, Hu argues that lethargy in a digital capitalist system can be a form of resistance itself. It can be a response to a disconnect; in a digital system where communications are tracked, collected, and analyzed as data, the lack of relation to others can indicate participants refusal to adhere to scripted and algorithmic modes of “connectedness”.

Hu makes the point that privileged concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘choice’ presented by digital platforms are “not afforded to all populations in the same ways.” (Hu, 2022, xiv) In digital capitalism, microwork is typically employed to those who can afford to work long, menial tasks with little pay, given the circumstances they were born into.

“‘Robotic’ work takes place in countries like the Philippines and India and Mexico, whose populations are already stereotyped in the West as being hardworking and technically competent people ‘inherently’ fit for manual labor, for being given commands and executing them.”  

Hu, 2022, xiv

This system in which money is made from “propping up the active user at the expense of the passive server” creates what political theorist Cedric Robinson terms racial capitalism. The racial differences of regional or ethnic groups are exaggerated in order to justify employing such groups for ‘inferior work’, such as transcription (Rev), ‘digital janitor’ (CrowdFlower), or filtering out graphic, offensive content on social media platforms and language-based models like ChatGBT.  

It seems the theme consistent throughout the book is the idea that individuals, whether digitally or physically, do not and cannot exist within a vacuum. Even in a so-called liberal, Utopian system of “the Internet”, where users can construct visual identities of themselves without the limitations of a physical body, values such as race and gender are still taken into account. Hu provides the paradox of tech industrialists attempts at inclusivity, striving for more race and gender-neutral workspaces, with the 2016 controversy in which it became public that Facebook provided an option for advertisers “to exclude ads to Black and Latinx groups.” Facebook’s response was to make its internal advertising preferences that capture race as a ‘multicultural affinity’ visible. 

“These responses indicate that the technology industry understands race and gender as identity markers– in other words, data values– that can be chosen or are user preferences. Yet by tagging persons of color with interests in ‘African-American culture,’ ‘Asian culture’, or ‘Latino culture’, algorithms contrast them with the default values of whiteness. The inclusion of these ‘affinities’ only reinforce the power a system of classification exerts over those perceived as different: as the poet Edouard Glisant puts it, “I understand your difference… I admit you to existence, within my system.”

Hu, 2022

In Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, published in 2008, Lisa Nakamura explores the concepts of race and gender existing in cyberspace, not just as data, but as artifacts of visual culture and modes of communication between communities with ‘low social power’, such as women and people of color. 

Even though these two books are published at least a decade apart, there are still common themes when addressing digital culture. She touches upon Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, in which she deposits her theory of digital racial formation, “which would parse the ways that digital modes of cultural production and reception are complicit with this ongoing process”, and concepts of visual capitalism, coined by Lisa Parks in Satellite and Cyber Visualities: Analyzing The Digital Earth Project, as “a system of social differentiation based on users’/viewers’ relative access to technologies of global media.” Nakamura wishes to describe access to the Internet and other technologies not as ‘binary’, but instead, as a spectrum.

“The problematic that I wish to delineate here has to do with parsing the multiple gradations and degrees of access to digital media, and the ways that these shadings are contingent on variables such as class position, race, nationality, and gender.” 

Nakamura, 2008

Both authors refer to visual media to break down the response to digital and visual capitalism we currently exist in, and how users operate given the power relations created through binaries such as “user/server”, “spectator/owner”, and “object/representation”. Nakamura provides examples of visual representation on the Internet pre-2008, such as AIM buddy icons, online racial profiling in a Web site called www.alllooksame.com, and online web forums dedicated to providing emotional support to pregnant and conceiving women.

Hu analyzes contemporary and performance art, such as Unfit Bits Metronome (2015)  by Tega Brain and Surya Mattu, in which a Fitbit fitness tracking device is strapped to a metronome. He states “For, Brain and Mattu observe, the ‘healthy, active lifestyle is an economic privilege, one that is out of reach (and literally unaffordable) to many working consumers, who may ‘lack sufficient time for exercise or have limited access to sports facilities.”

Fitbit fitness tracking device strapped to metronome

Hu also analyzes the 2011 film Sleeping Beauty directed by Julia Leigh in which he describes the main characters endurance as a passive and unconscious sex-worker to the passivity of users constricted in digital modes of relationality.

The main character, Lucy, takes on a job as a sex worker to make ends meet as a full time student and waitress. The sex work involves her taking a sleeping drug, getting into bed, and sleeping until the evening is over. The subject throughout the film is, however, deadpan and seemingly nihilistic about the situation she finds herself in. In one scene, she is shown lighting a stack of bills on fire right after getting paid.

Screenshot of Sleeping Beauty, 2011

The viewers are challenged at the characters lack of resistance, or even lack of internal struggle displayed on the screen. Hu states “lethargy embraces the potential of being an ‘object being’ as one that relieves a subject of the burden of having to perform aliveness, individuality, and interactivity– all ‘human’ attributes that are actually gendered, ableist, or racially coded.” (Hu, 2022, 120)

Nakamura states in her Introduction:

“So rather than focusing on the idea that women and minorities need to get online, we might ask: How do they use their digital visual capital? In what ways are their gendered and racialized bodies a form of this new type of capital? What sort of laws does this currency operate under? It doesn’t change everything, but what does it change? This brings us back to the privilege of interactivity and its traditional linkage with the creation of a newly empowered subject.”

Hu states in his Introduction:

“For a server, lethargy is the exhaustion of having only a partial claim on selfhood: of needing to ‘be yourself’ for other people, or alternately of having to suppress it; of being what feminist scholars Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora call “human surrogates,” rather than full humans. And yet this is the same problem that afflicts users: a feeling of selfhood as something out-of-reach, burdensome, or even unwanted that trails the feeling of sovereignty like a leaden shadow.”

The books read were interesting, contrasting digital data with digital culture and the implications that follow weaving through concepts of gender and race. As gender has consistently been established as a performative aspect of ones identity, one can question how the performative aspect of gender is translated in visual medium in contrast with data– how do you define data that is gendered on a spectrum of male and female, when the performative aspects are tied to a culture that is every-changing? While one can argue that gender ‘doesn’t matter’, it becomes apparent that even on digital platforms where one can afford to be an anonymous, participating presence in a community, the lived experience of that individual, in reality, is affected by such physical attributes of race and gender, and it is a reality that cannot be ignored.