Chapter 8 - Substantiation

Summary

The chapter finds in Ulysses the logical end to Loyola’s project. It is Joyce’s most radical experiment thus far in creating his own ‘exercise’, his own set of impossible demands on the reader. It closely reads a particularly overloaded passage from the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, a particular structure of paranoid frustration that Joyce has worked on before but one that here entails a most unstable position from the reader in the quest for that ‘sincere irony’ Loyola and Joyce demand.