Until the very day of his mental breakdown in Turin in 1889, Nietzsche saw himself as playing not only Shakespeare’s characters, but Shakespeare himself. Central Nietzschean concepts—perspectivism and the genealogy of morals among them—emerged from this sustained attempt to become Shakespeare. In turn, a major vein of moral relativism in modern literature and philosophy—a relativism that continues to shape contemporary secular culture—stems from Nietzsche’s reading of Shakespeare and the literary techniques he developed to mask himself as the Bard.
Ulysses is Joyce’s field experiment in knowledge.
The constraints are absolute: one day (June 16, 1904), one city (Dublin), one finite population of minds. These are not narrative conveniences but boundary conditions. Within them, perspective is released as a variable and allowed to interact. Meaning is not discovered but generated—locally, contingently, and without appeal to transcendence.
Stephen Dedalus is the limit case. He apprehends perspectivism perfectly and governs it not at all. Intellect floods the system without regulation; insight accumulates without conversion into life. He mistakes maximal consciousness for control. In system terms, Stephen is unstable.
Leopold Bloom is the stabilizer. He functions as an $\epsilon_{x,t}$ term: small, local, easily dismissed—yet decisive. Care, patience, error-correction, embodied attention to others. Bloom does not dominate the system; he dampens it. He absorbs noise, converts disturbance into continuity, and allows meaning to persist across interactions.
If Shakespeare supplies multiplicity and Nietzsche supplies genealogy, Joyce supplies constraint—and Bloom supplies mercy. Relativism survives only when buffered by lived attention. Without $\epsilon_{x,t}$, perspectivism explodes. With it, the system holds.
Ulysses does not ask what is true.
It asks what remains coherent after contact with time, place, and other people.