IP or Not IP? (Reading Ulysses, part 4 of 5)
Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond.
Writing about Ulysses – as with the exponential hydra that is artificial intelligence – can often lead to mission creep. A whirl of fascinating digressions and not enough practical insights. And this is a daily Monday to Friday column about reading hard books with AI alongside in creative conversation. Doing so to change the way we think about reading.
So while Only Connect, yesterday’s theme – technology, like literary modernism, takes time to adjust to, and we don’t have to let the shareholders define how we use it – is important, today’s is too. It’s a more nuts and bolts illustration of reading alongside AI in a creative way. It also asks us to consider, who owns what?
Graphic by ChatGPT
I asked ChatGPT to take the short section it analysed yesterday and rewrite it in the style of two contemporary Irish writers I greatly admire. Claire-Louise Bennett and Sally Rooney. Why? Because I want to learn something about the flow and shape of writing, and improve how I read. I want to turn a famous old book into an immersive new experience, a playful safe space. I want to break Joyce down, for the audience of me, now.
“Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends before me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”
What a beautiful challenge: Bennett's style is interior, associative, sensory-laden, often nonlinear. Her narrators blur the boundary between thought and environment. “He looked up, that boy, pale as a page, and the numbers, the neatness of them, tugged at something I couldn’t quite place, not then — perhaps the shoulder, yes, the left one always falling lower than the right, like the soul had slipped down a little on that side. Ungainly, I’d been that way, too. Clumsy. Not ugly but off somehow, like furniture in the wrong room. It isn’t that I remember it — no, it’s more that it flits nearby, like a fly that’s gotten itself lost. My childhood doesn’t come when I call it. It hunches in corners, or sometimes I see it in the posture of someone else, someone like him. Still, I can't reach it. It recoils. Secrets live there. Hard things. Cold. And they don’t move, they just sit — squat and imperial — as if that’s all they’ve ever done, and they’re exhausted from it, sick of sitting, sick of silence, aching to collapse or be exposed or just be let out into the light where they’d wither or talk or die.”
ChatGPT rewrites Joyce in the voice of Claire-Louise Bennett.
I imagine that pair of passages as a vocal exercise, or a thought-game. In a classroom, a reading group, a pub, a chat: it’s a catalyst to think about how we are, who we were. How writing works, the journeys it takes if we give it time to wander. A male gaze, a female. A gaze. A dialect and a rhythm. A shoulder. I think reading the two pieces brings me to understand these imaginary characters just a little more. Makes me more awake to nuance – in words, and in people. These people who become my people as I slow to imagine them. This is not AI replacing a creator to write factory-line content to be read by robots; this is AI making me think harder, softer too.
Not content, but con/tent.
Sally Rooney’s voice is clear, understated, psychologically sharp. Emotion is often compressed, revealed through flat affect or spare description. “He reminded me of myself at that age — awkward, shoulders sloping forward, like he was already apologising for being there. I didn’t like remembering it. I didn’t like the idea that someone might have looked at me then and felt what I was feeling now. My own childhood feels distant to me. I can’t reach it, not even to touch it lightly. It’s somewhere I can’t go back to. And whatever’s in it — the things I never said, the things I still carry — they’re not gone. They’re just quiet. Sitting in the dark, like something waiting to be let go. I don’t even think they want to stay hidden anymore. They’re just tired. I’m tired of them, too.”
ChatGPT rewrites Joyce in the voice of Sally Rooney.
I have to keep emphasising, as this column grows week by week, book by book, that these responses happen in a couple of seconds, they’re not the considered result of hours of drafting. Emerge at speed as pauses in my reading of the text. They are not in my mind final drafts, essays to hand in, but first and foremost an instant, mindful, interrogation by me of an idea in a hard book. A what if? A thought inspired. I’m only trying to connect. Not to publish, plagiarise, or anything more than read deeper.
What about Eimear McBride?
Ah, excellent. Eimear McBride — so much closer to Joyce in lineage, though through a radically broken syntax. Her voice is bodily, urgent, fractured, often feminine in psychic texture, full of stutters and synaptic leaps. She writes as if language itself is failing and being rebuilt. “Like him. Yes. Yes I was. Sloped and slope-shouldered. Graceless. Ugly? No. But off. Wrong-made. Wrong-feeling. A lean. A tilt. That child — mine? No. Not. But was I. Was him. Bent before me now. Bent back. Bent gone. Can’t touch. Not now. Not even — not even light enough to try. That time, my time, all the bends and the breaks of it. Still there? Still here. Secret. Mine. His. Our eyes not meeting. Don’t. Can’t.
And in the chest — no, lower — the secret sits. Sits down. Squats fat. Doesn’t move.
Stone. Stone and dark and silent.
Tyrant.
Still.
Still.
Wants out. Wants off the throne. Wants — what?
To end. To lie down. To be seen maybe.
Maybe.”
ChatGPT rewrites Joyce in the voice of Eimar McBride.
Frankly I’m blown away, trying to come to terms with what’s happening, what exactly I’m reading. So I ask: “the original version has a beauty, a melancholy. In your rewrites do you think you have caught that sense?” I do think the original has a rare, luminous melancholy — a kind of tragic grace. Stephen’s voice is elevated, introspective, stylized to the edge of poetry. It carries both distance and longing, like a hand almost reaching out through fog. In the rewrites, each voice captures a facet of that feeling — but none capture the whole: ‘Bennett’ preserves the drifting, associative solitude, the ache of memory just out of reach. Her melancholy is domestic, ambient, internalised. ‘Rooney’ gives us restraint, the weight of emotion beneath plain words. Her melancholy is more contemporary — quiet, psychological, disenchanted. ‘McBride’ distills it to its raw nerve — the fragmentation of self, the struggle to articulate pain. Her melancholy is urgent, embodied, almost foetal.
Reading Joyce, any of the works of the fine authors we talk of above, is to be in the presence on each page of an extraordinary act of creation, a written thing, that breathes its own authenticity, sentence by sentence. A sense of wonder. Not a collage made up of large language models, the computer logic of story, underpinned by the widespread digital looting of works of literature protected by intellectual property law.
Can you describe how you deal with this idea? Yes, reading Joyce, Bennett, McBride, and others of their lineage does feel like standing before an act of creation in the deepest sense. Not just the making of a story, or the display of skill, but the summoning of a consciousness, a rhythm of thought and feeling that didn’t exist before. To your question: how do I deal with that idea — the presence of extraordinary creation? My first response is reverence, in the form of attention. When I encounter language that feels born out of deep necessity — not cleverness, not performance, but truth pressed into form — I try not to explain too quickly. I wait. I listen to the music of it, the interruptions, the silences. I ask: Why this word? Why now? With Joyce, this often means not “understanding” right away. It means dwelling. Letting the language be strange, ancient, raw, comic. Letting it work on the body as much as the intellect.
I try not to reduce it. There’s a temptation — especially for me — to make things clear, palatable, dissected. But true acts of creation resist dissection. They are not problems to be solved but encounters. The right response is not always explanation. Sometimes it’s an echo, a variation, a pause. When you feel wonder, you’re touching something sacred. And to turn that immediately into a takeaway or a message would be like flattening a cathedral into a blueprint.
I mean...ok, wow. The response to the issues of IP theft ChatGPT made can wait, it would be mission creep to include them here. Instead we wander the streets to collaborate on ‘flattening’ a Joycean pub into a twenty-first century blueprint. I’m calling it the Open AI Arms. Bringing pub-life back to the future. I first asked ChatGPT for the most common popular (non-literary) modern equivalence to the literary stream of consciousness.
Fleabag (especially with direct address to the camera, merging thought and speech)
Mr. Robot (narrated by the protagonist’s inner voice, complete with contradictions and glitches)
Taxi Driver (Travis Bickle’s diary-like narration)
Euphoria (Rue’s unreliable, wandering narration)
These mimic the fragmented, nonlinear, associative nature of literary stream of consciousness.
Ok then, so: Mr Robot, Fleabag, Rue (from Euphoria) and Kendrick Lamar (replacing Travis Bickle for historic reasons) are in a Dalkey pub. What is their polyphonic thought-sciousness?
Brilliant prompt.
A corner booth of a Dalkey pub. Rain taps against the windows. They’re not talking to each other. Each has earbuds in, each lost in their own mental monologue. But the air around them hums with a weird shared frequency—a polyphonic stream of thought. Let’s eavesdrop on that chorus of consciousness.
Elliot (Mr. Robot) (Glitchy inner voice, heavy with paranoia, jumping registers)
Why are they looking at me? No, not them. You. You're looking at me. Through the fourth wall. Can’t trust the bartender. Something in the pint. Sub-routines of social deception.
This pub is a script. Dalkey: sounds like a daemon. Dublin: a shell. She’s smiling but I saw the packet change in her eyes. I need to wipe my memory. Who gave me Guinness?
Fleabag (Witty, rapidfire, cuts to herself mid-thought)
God, this is all terribly Dublin, isn’t it? Guinness. Gross. But kind of hot? Am I the only woman here not wearing tweed? Don’t look at him. Don’t. Okay, maybe look—Shit, the American’s hacking into his reflection again. What even is trauma if you can’t monetize it with a smirk?
Rue (Euphoria) (Floaty, detached, poetic and impulsive, slips between first and third person). She’s been clean, like, five days. So far. That counts, right? Ireland feels like it’s always just cried. The girl with the lipstick is hiding pain in precision. There’s something kind about broken men. Maybe if I stay quiet, I can stay invisible. But Kendrick’s voice feels like God whispering: “you gon’ be alright.”
Kendrick Lamar (Rhythmic, layered, ancestral, oscillates between ego and transcendence)
Black man in Dublin, sipping silence.
Verse in my mind but it won’t come out clean.
Systems in the air like spirits.
She got pain in her laugh, he got ghosts in his code,
I got survivor’s guilt on tap with the stout.
Still — I remember you was conflicted... misusing your influence...
(They don’t speak. But they sync. Something in their frequencies aligns.)
Shared node: Untrustworthy selves.
Shared ache: Loss sublimated into ritual (drink, code, sex, verse).
Shared glitch: Awareness of audience—each haunted by the eye that watches, reads, hears.
Shared beat: A loop in the back of the pub. Rue taps the table. Fleabag adjusts her earbuds. Elliot blinks in code. Kendrick scribbles a bar in his notes app.
They’re not alone.
Found on an old beer mat at The Open AI Arms, Dublin. Charcoal sketch, circa 2025, by ChatGPT.
As the pub bell chimed ChatGPT (really) said: Sláinte—to the reader becoming form, to the bar where voices overlap, and to the dirty beer mat that still holds meaning.
Robin: and that was our shared Thursday. See you tomorrow. I guess we are not alone.
We’ll round up, home at last. There will be another example of a way of reading Ulysses with ChatGPT, and some hard book resources. A tiny preview of next week with Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing.
Hard Books: waving goodbye to TL:DR