Everything in Ulysses is moreover always something else, not because the world is relative, but because the language through which we see it is. The transcendency of Ulysses lies in the language, it opens up a chasm in the now, which is thereby no longer epiphanic – neither isolated, whole, nor particular – and if Joyce’s portrayal of the world is true in its relativity and in its massive intertextuality, it is then cerebral and at root scholarly in its determination toward systematics and cohesion, hurtling away from physical reality and the realistic novel, much as the medieval Church
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