Speculation: as well as its economic and intellectual connotations, the word carries an astronomic meaning – contemplation of the heavens. And it’s within the umbra of this meaning that the largest of Un coup de dés’s shadows hides itself in Ulysses. Like Mallarmé’s poem, Joyce’s novel is full of constellational imagery. Stephen repeatedly invokes the delta of Cassiopeia, ‘the recumbent constellation’ that hung over Shakespeare’s birth. He pictures stars flung by archangels to the wormy earth, to be rooted out by pigs and poets. The link between poetic words, their formatting and spacing, and the layout of the stars is crucial to the climax of Un Coup de dés, whose high point (literally) is the North Star: a point at which a ‘place’ would fuse with its own beyond, and for that very reason a point never attained, but in whose orbit thought, writing-as-thought, rolls and flashes sidereally across the gutter of the page, forming its inky account. The same climactic movement builds up at the end of Ulysses, which sweeps us from the North Star Hotel to a barrage of meditations on constellations: the Milky Way, Arcturus, equinoxes, nascent new stars and ‘the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers’. After these meditations, Bloom tots up his own account, then pictures himself navigating, ‘septentrional, by night the polestar’, wandering ‘to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit … to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events’. But this is all speculation: what he actually does is lie in bed, viewing his lodestar Molly from the wrong end. If Bloom is always elsewhere, beyond himself, it’s because Ulysses is always elsewhere and beyond itself as well; just as it carries its own wake in it, it carries its own elsewhere in it too, or rather lets this elsewhere carry it. Which means it carries the novel in it, as elsewhere: a book-to-come, a possibility in impossible form.

How to write after Ulysses? What would this question even mean? Time, in Ulysses, is fallen too, a by-product of earth-pulled bodies; Dunsink done sunk, and the hours dance across a brothel floor. Joyce time doesn’t move in a straight line from past to future: it too accretes and consumes itself: the future plunges back into the past; ‘now’ is the transit-point or orifice through which this involution passes. When Stephen tells us as much in the library, he’s sketching out a new type of cultural time that we could say Joyce’s work inaugurates, a time not of cultural progress, even from one vanguard to the next, but one in which culture will consume its own tail: Mallarmé, Goethe, Hamlet, Pickwick, Swinburne – a never-ending zombie eucharist.

By the time of Finnegans Wake, this involuted schema will be fixed as a Viconian one of ricorso or re-enactment, in which objects and situations bob about and return, in slightly different form. The schema is already evident in Ulysses with its recirculation of detritus in the form of things, images, events, its many instances of ‘history repeating itself’, as Bloom puts it, ‘with a difference’. But the temporal metronome to whose beat Ulysses really dances is again that of the constellation, understood now in its Benjaminian sense, as a transhistorical joining-up of disparate or previously unconnected points, a joining-up that generates a sudden flash of paradoxical simultaneity, the revolutionary ground for a whole new realm of understanding. If you like, another hack. This is the hack performed by Molly, as, lying on the 53rd parallel of latitude, N., and the 6th meridian of longitude, W., she places the City Arms Hotel, Ontario Terrace and Howth Head and a soup altercation waiting for a train and an ankle-spraining incident at a party and the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the sea and Bloom and Stephen all on a plane of constellated simultaneity. It’s a constellation that can only be construed from elsewhere. Even as she plots her ties to Stephen, he has already wandered off: the very stars presiding over her are fading, and their light is years old anyhow; besides, the revolving earth is sending them, like Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’, westwards. But an alignment has taken place, a conjunction has been passed through, a plane of possibility hewn into existence: that of the word itself, its own unfolding elsewhere. Where Stephen, like Cordelia, says Nothing, Molly carries negative logic to its outer limit by not saying anything at all, but I don’t need to tell you what the very last word that she doesn’t say is.