James Joyce, Hibernian and Cybernaut : ‘Ulysses’: On this year’s Bloomsday, e-mail is humming with new appreciation for a masterpiece presciently made for a life in cyberspace.

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”--the first four words of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”--are being intoned today in pubs and reading rooms around the world. Meanwhile, so-called virtual celebrations of Bloomsday are filling cyberspace with echoes of the novel’s final word, “Yes.”

What does it all mean?

Students of the Irish novelist, teachers of Joyce and fans of Joyce--and they are numerous--observe June 16 with marathon readings of “Ulysses” and celebrations in which drink plays a large role--two activities of which Joyce would surely have approved. “Ulysses,” a work of 800-plus pages first published (due to its naughtiness) in Paris in 1922--takes place on a single day in Dublin; and that day is Thursday, June 16, 1904.

“Ulysses” retells Homer’s epic, “The Odyssey,” in modern dress, and readers know June 16 as “Bloomsday” because Joyce, presenting his modern Odysseus as an ad canvasser for Dublin daily newspapers, named him Leopold Bloom. Odysseus was a sailor and Bloom never ventures onto a ship, but Joyce, an incorrigible punster, liked the way that the phrase “ad canvasser” echoed the sails that propelled Homer’s hero across the wine-dark sea.

Where Odysseus fights giants like the one-eyed Cyclops and must steer between a whirlpool and a man-eating monster while sailing home from the Trojan War, Leopold Bloom must contend with metaphorically one-eyed bigots (for Bloom is a Jew in Catholic Dublin), and he must steer a course between the teetotalers and the drunks.

This year Bloomsday has aroused unusual enthusiasm, not only because the 1994 anniversary makes a round number with 1904 and not only because June 16 falls on a Thursday this year as it did in the novel. “Ulysses” is being rediscovered this year by the hordes of academics who have recently learned to communicate electronically by computer--and what they are finding, in many cases, is that Joyce’s novel has what they’re calling a cybernetic plot.

By this, they mean that Joyce seems to have foreseen that moving information around is what culture is really about. Bloom’s job, for instance, is to put his clients’ messages into forms that are digestible by the mass medium of the press.

“Ulysses” comically documents the advertising impulse that would come to dominate the 20th Century--readers have recognized that from the start. But what’s new about the 1990s reading and makes “Ulysses” seem so fresh all over again is that the novel now seems to be about the sending, carrying and receiving of information. Joyce’s characters are constantly sending letters, telegrams, even writing messages in the sand on the beach. In their evanescence they act out in turn-of-the-century dress the impulsive scribbles of e-mail--a realm now known as cyberspace. The term cybernetics itself comes appropriately from the Greek for helmsman, and was first used for the study of communication by an American scholar, Norbert Wiener, in 1948.

Like unfortunate sailors, some signals in Joyce’s novel perish in a sea of noise. Bloom, for example, although married to a vivacious singer named Molly, is conducting a secret correspondence with Martha Clifford--a connection he made by placing a personal ad. A slip of the pen causes Martha to write, “I called you naughty because I do not like that other world.” Typographic errors fascinated Joyce, who saw in them the sea monsters that threaten the successful passage of our signals. The day’s evening newspaper, in its account of a funeral that he attended in the morning, will nettle Leopold Bloom by noting the presence of one “L. Boom.” Stephen Dedalus--the sensitive young poet usually read as an autobiographical figure for Joyce, and the novel’s third main character after Bloom and Molly--has been summoned back to Dublin from Paris with a telegram that says (with a typo’s inadvertent profundity), “NOTHER DYING. COME HOME. FATHER.”

This year, Joyce scholars are conducting a dialogue in the cyberspace of e-mail and on Joycean electronic bulletin boards--a fast-paced communal discussion that is by turns jovial, pedantic, furious, obscene, tendentious--just what “joco-serious Joyce” had in mind when he promised to “keep the professors busy for centuries” with his major novel. While newcomers still charmingly dare to ask how to begin reading The Book, old hands serve up the cream of their bibliographies. It’s a sweet moment for the culture when Joyce’s novel--having itself, like its hero, slipped past one-eyed censors and piratical publishers--finds a new way to reach the welcome harbor of freshly appreciative readers, both on-line and off.