Methods

The Joyce Project, an annotated hypertext edition of Ulysses, seeks to aid and enrich the process of reading this incomparably great, incredibly dense modern novel. Hyperlinks in the eighteen chapters connect passages of Joyce’s text to short essays that supply contextualizing information and suggest how that information may shape the reading experience. Further hyperlinks within the notes lead to still other notes, and references to other parts of the novel cultivate nonlinear ways of understanding it. Images and recordings add a multimedia dimension, and summaries of relevant scholarship add critical insight.

Ulysses is a challenging read not only because of its endlessly experimental approach to the craft of fiction, but also because of its unparalleled allusiveness. Joyce once called it "a sort of encyclopedia." The need always to be looking outside the pages of the novel for some relevant context, which for people new to the book perpetually threatens to sabotage the reading experience, can also be a source of great pleasure. These external contexts are interesting in their own right. They richly reward study, they create a universe of meaning around the narrative of events, and they inform the narrative far more subtly and variously than may appear on a first (or second, or third, or fourth) reading.

Over the course of more than half a century scholars have responded to the need for context by publishing collections of annotations that come closer and closer to a sense of comprehensive completeness, without ever arriving at that beckoning will-of-the-wisp. In two editions (1961, 1968), Weldon Thornton sought to identify “allusions” of the sort that can be located in literary, historical, philosophical, and religious texts. Don Gifford (1974, 1988), aided in his second edition by Robert Seidman, threw a wider net to take in things like “Dublin street furniture,” songs, and sayings. Sam Slote (2012, 2022), joined the second time around by Marc Mamigonian and John Turner, has produced the fullest collection yet, bolstered by an impressive array of bibliographical citations. Still more annotators, like Jeri Johnson and Declan Kiberd, have added some original insights in their annotated editions of the novel.

All of these annotators have adopted the format of footnotes or endnotes. They typically supply contextual information in the briefest and most objective way possible and leave it to readers to imagine how that information might affect a reading of the novel. They seldom discuss what is going on in textual passages apart from some reference that can be definitively tracked down. The commentaries on this site, by contrast, look more like encyclopedia entries. Freed from the severe length limitations imposed by print publication, they aim to guide the reading process rather than simply to give it raw material, exploring contexts in greater detail, showing how those contexts may shape readings of the text, and discursively elaborating on the issues involved. I call my commentaries "notes" to locate them within the tradition followed by Thornton, Gifford, Slote, and others, but that term is probably a misnomer. It would be more accurate to call them “essays,” in the sense of that word originally intended by Michel de Montaigne: little open-ended “tries” at making sense of a subject whose length may vary, as the material dictates, from several sentences to many paragraphs.

While I hope that the expanded scope of my notes will provide an attractive alternative to the minimalism of other collections, I am aware that length comes with a cost. Longtime readers of the novel, looking for fresh insights to add to all the others they hold in their heads, may be comfortable with long notes, but for first-timers simply trying to keep their heads above water too much information is worse than too little. Therefore, each note here starts with an opening paragraph that offers new readers what they need and no more. After taking in these brief summaries of essential context and its significance, people whose appetite has been whetted can forge ahead to learn more about the context, explore the finer implications of Joyce's prose, jump to related passages elsewhere in the novel, learn about relevant scholarly studies, and consider rival interpretations and textual variants. These later paragraphs will sometimes contain "spoilers"––but nothing can really spoil the reading of Ulysses.

All notes on the site quote from the passages they are glossing to save users from having to go back and forth between note and novel, and to help them quickly locate commentary on the passages that they are considering. Sometimes, in notes comprising many paragraphs and discussing many different passages, it may be difficult for users to find what they are looking for, so boldface type may be used in later paragraphs to help catch the eye. When notes are keyed to passages in different chapters of the novel, as happens quite often, at least one colored hyperlink is supplied in the text of each chapter, on the assumption that a user may be reading only that chapter or may have forgotten something learned in an earlier one.

Far from attempting global interpretations or readings of the novel, the notes here simply elucidate brief passages––as little as one word, or as much as a few sentences. But by suggesting how a passage might be read, pointing out connections to other passages, and sending the reader to other notes through additional hyperlinks, they will readily assist larger readings. Nearly every detail in Ulysses has relevance, not only to details immediately before and after it in the order of the narrative, but also to ones that may lie hundreds of pages off. The notes supply threads to begin multi-directional navigation of the labyrinth that Joyce constructed—whether to pursue perfect comprehension, or become happily lost, or simply seek the nearest exit, will be up to the individual.

I hope that the notes here will take users at once farther into this astonishing novel and farther outside it. Ulysses is a book to mine for buried meanings, and since the implications of Joyce's allusions are often subtler and more far-reaching than may readily appear, longer notes may help to plumb its depths. But the notes also open windows onto topics in poetry, fiction, drama, people, places, history, music, language, philosophy, science, religion, mythology, technology, clothing, commerce, psychology, sexuality, race, and every other imaginable aspect of human culture. Even people who decide not to come back to Ulysses––it is a book that gets better with every subsequent reading, but it is not for everyone––will, I hope, find their intellectual curiosity nourished by some of the topics discussed here.

This not-for-profit educational website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works United States License. Content may be freely copied and distributed if it is not altered in any way or used for commercial purposes, and if full attribution with a URL or link to the site is provided. For citation purposes, each note lists a title at the beginning and an author and year of publication at the end. (Minor changes are sometimes made without altering the year, but when a note is substantially revised it receives a new date. When additional material is tacked on to an existing note, there is sometimes a bracketed date––e.g., [2018]––at the start of the new text.) Most images and videos on the site are in the public domain, but some may enjoy copyright protection. I attempt to identify creators, owners, and online or print sources in the captions. Please include that information when reproducing an image or video.

John Hunt