Joyce's Love Letters

Joyce's love of letters-of anagrams, acrostics, and palindromes-is well known. Here, Bevis offers fascinating tidbits about alphabetic codes concealed in Joyce's work. Letters are also part of the many plots in Ulysses and of the characters' imaginative lives. He suggests that Ulysses lovingly casts its own letters into portentous shapes from the very beginning. He argues that it is not clear how far the boustrophedonic coding can take one's interpretation of Ulysses, and Joyce's oxen do not willingly offer themselves up for sacrifice.