At the Budapest Joyce symposium in 2006, in the same building in which the proceedings took place, another conference was being held at the same time, a gathering of industrial paint manufacturers. At the time I wondered, as I still do, what would happen if a delegate from each event were by mistake to sit down for a talk at the other conference. Which of them, the Joycean or the paintmaker, would be the first to realize the mistake or else simply have enough of the presentation and discreetly leave? Surely the odds are on the paintmaker; it is all too easy to imagine the Joycean patiently listening on and on with the quiet assurance that eventually all of what was being said would come back to Ulysses or, even more likely, Finnegans Wake.

That assurance can become reckless, even breathtaking. Though all writing is— as if by definition— susceptible to confused interpretations, there are certain texts and cultural artefacts that have historically, repeatedly attracted more than their share of monomaniacal readers with elaborate and bizarre theories. Holy writ, most conspicuously and consistently, inspires fiercely eccentric interpretations, the result of such texts’ combination of claims to universal, unassailable truth and the various nonliteral registers in which they are written. And while their uncertain authorship, too, contributes to the license with which their readers may cultivate their ideas free from worry about intention and textual history, the canonical brand of Shakespeare yields an opposite reaction, with complex conspiracies of plagiarism, pseudonymous authorship, or worse. (By contrast, even the most far-out readings of Joyce salute him as their genius spirit, but it's curious to observe that it is textual genetics, the hermeneutics most pledged to material evidence, that most assiduously dislocates Joyce's authorship of “his” texts.) And then there are records that have to be played backward or paired with films made generations before or after, iconography deviously concealed in currency: these texts and objects await their undiscovered functions as maps, spells, prophecies.