The work of Ulysses, far from having been completed on its appearance in 1922, had scarcely begun. In reality, the achievement of its status as a completed work would come to be dependent upon the labours of promotion, explanation, and evaluation undertaken by a couple of generations of scholars, labours which Joyce himself energetically fostered. The work would become complete only at the point at which it became available for reading, which is to say at the point at which the reader had been supplied with enough supplementary memory to be able to apprehend the structure of the work as a whole. Ulysses is, in perhaps rather a traditional sense, a didactic work, whose aim is the education of the reader, though that education has no moral or political aim. Indeed, perhaps it would be better to say that the work of Ulysses is the production of a reader, or a way of reading, that would make it possible to read the work in the first place – or the last instance, since there is no real temporal first place in which Joyce's book may be read. Ulysses is a work that inhabits a future perfect tense: it is a work that always will have been understood, in this or that manner. The reader beginning the novel is always in two places, or at two points in time; both previous and subsequent to a reading of the novel that would be adequate to it, inadequately supplied with the resources of patience, memory, and knowledge necessary to understand it and yet aware increasingly that such resources are steadily becoming available, in the form of the explicatory materials which supplement, surround, and support the work. From the very beginning, Ulysses proposes itself as a completable labour, as a work that can come to be read, even though that reading will require an enlargement of the notion of reading and the reader that puts pressure on the traditional idea of the self-sufficient work and its availability to the autonomous reader.