Where?

The final question in Ithaca receives no answer other than a black dot—a mark that Joyce said should resemble the period or full stop at the end of a sentence, but larger. Here the hyper-rational language of the 17th chapter trails off into a striking absence of rationality and language—an endpoint, or a void. Like several other notorious enigmas in Ulysses, the mark has called forth many competing critical interpretations. Some may be incompatible with one another, and some may not contribute much to the reading of the novel, but it seems wiser to attend to many than to seek a single correct answer. This black hole in the text invites many different kinds of meaning-making.

John Hunt 2025


  Black Circle, 1915 oil on canvas painting by Kazimir Malevich, held in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Source: kazimirmalevich.org.