The passage I’d most like to write about appears in Episode 11, as Bloom muses about the relationship between math and music: “Numbers it is. All music when you come to think” (830). In the subsequent paragraph, he expands on this thought in several ways.<\/p>\n
He begins with “Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one,” or (2*2)\/2 = 2(1), which is true, if trivial (830-1). Then, in lines 831-2, we have “One plus two plus six is seven,” an erroneous calculation which presumably is meant to go with Bloom’s next thought: “Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetary wall” (832-3). I think a compelling reading of this is as one of many examples of rational systems of meaning breaking down in the text. Just as language decomposes, so does math, at least as Bloom sees. It also could be seen as a strange dig at Plato – mathematical platonism holds that numbers\/mathematical objects\u00a0exist<\/em>, and aren’t just mental constructs. Indeed, on lines 834-5 Bloom thinks, “Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial.” This could be read as sarcastic or ironic and thus as placing the immediate above the ideal in a manner reminiscent of Stephen’s conversations in the Scylla and Charybidis Episode.<\/p>\n Adding to this is his final cogitation: “But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is” (835-7). With the final sentence, he seems to conclude that whatever mathematical patterns may underlie music, the appeal lies in “the sounds,” whatever that may mean. It’s interesting that he imagines presenting his mistress wich an algebra problem. I’m not sure what to make of it, though it is another example of ambiguity in that x<\/em> is either 34,937 or 4,991 depending on the order in which operations are taken. That algebra problems make poor seduction attempts is surely too obvious.<\/p>\n Finally, it’s interesting to note that\u00a0Ulysses<\/em> was published nine years before Kurt G\u00f6del proved his incompleteness theorem. Nonetheless, Joyce seems to be anticipating the breakdown in mathematical certainty that it and similar discoveries (or are they inventions?) would precipitate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The passage I’d most like to write about appears in Episode 11, as Bloom muses about the relationship between math and music: “Numbers it is. All music when you come to think” (830). In the subsequent paragraph, he expands on this thought in several ways. He begins with “Two multiplied by two divided by half […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}