Ulysses by Numbers: Cracking the code of James Joyce’s masterpiece

There are almost 30,000 unique words in ‘Ulysses’, JP O’Malley discovers in a new book that aims to use maths to deconstruct the literary enigma

Puzzle: James Joyce said that Ulysses would keep professors busy for centuries arguing over what he meant

James Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914. The novel was initially published as 23 instalments that appeared between 1918–20 in The Little Review, a Chicago-based magazine. That serialisation was discontinued when obscenity charges were put against the avant-garde publication. They fought and lost the trial in New York. Nevertheless, Ulysses was completed in 1921 and 1,000 copies were first published in 1922 under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company: a Parisian bookshop owned by Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate.

Beach was a member of Joyce’s inner literary circle who received a cryptic document now known in Joycean forensics as the schema. It contained a column explaining the Homeric titles for the novel’s 18 episodes. In September 1920, Joyce sent his Italian friend and translator Carlo Linati the schema with an accompanying note. It read: “[My damned monster-novel] is about the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life).”