For this post, I decided to focus on something I sometimes prefer to avoid thinking about: mathematics. While reading the first episode of Ulysses, I was drawn to the scene in which Stephen and Buck pay the milkwoman:

            —Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn’t we?

            Stephen filled the three cups.

            —Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a             shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a             shilling and one and two is two and two, sir. (Joyce 15)

As Anthony Madrid notes in the amazingly titled article, “Joyce’s Unpunctuated Rigmarole of Numerical Spangablasm,” Stephen and Buck simply owe the milkwoman two shillings and twopence; clearly, however, her language is rather confusing, presumably even for those familiar with the British monetary system of the period.

I again noticed a scene involving mathematics in the next episode. When all the other children go to play hockey, Cyril Sargent stays behind to have Stephen look over his book of “Sums.” While Stephen helps him, he “proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather” (Joyce 28). Then, Stephen imagines that “across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, . . . a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend” (28).

I find it fascinating that mathematics, usually praised by its devotees for leading to definitive answers and for its universality, leads to confusion in both of these scenes—the reader’s confusion in the former, and Sargent’s and Stephen’s confusion in the latter. Even the basic language of mathematics has been corrupted. Moreover, perhaps in an attempt to make sense of the math problems—or rather, to help Sargent make sense of them—Stephen acts as an archive by bringing up Shakespeare. Like T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, Stephen turns to the past to aid understanding in the present.