All kinds of devices are inserted into his prose to slow down the skimming reader – similar words like ‘bulb’ and ‘blub’, or even identical ones in sequence like: ‘When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at on with one who once . . .’.

It felt to me while reading Ulysses that this was Joyce’s intention, therefore satisfying to read Declan Kiberd’s statement in Ulysses and Us. He goes on to say:

It was the fact that words were read at increasing speed – a speed far greater than that possible in oral delivery – which troubled Joyce and other moderns.