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 be applied to 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 (but sorely lacking an index). Still more annotators, like Jeri Johnson and Declan Kiberd, have added some new insights in their annotated editions of the novel.

All of these annotators have adopted the generic model of the endnote. They track down references, briefly and objectively summarize contextual information, and leave it to readers to apply that knowledge to the text. The commentaries on this site, by contrast, look more like encyclopedia entries or articles of literary criticism. Freed from the severe length limitations imposed by print publication, they offer to guide the reading process, 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 it would be more accurate to call them “essays,” in the sense of that word originally intended by Montaigne: little open-ended “tries” at making sense of something 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. Experienced readers looking for fresh insights into Ulysses may be comfortable with long notes, but  first-timers may simply be trying to keep their heads above water, and for those readers too much information can be 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 later paragraphs frequently highlight bits of text with boldface type 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, become happily lost, or simply seek the nearest exit, will be up to the individual.

Print annotations must key notes to pages and/or line numbers in the books that readers use—an uncertain enterprise because there are many editions of Ulysses and their pagination varies. Thornton's notes are keyed to pages in two different books that were commonly used in the 1960s. Gifford's second edition from the 1980s is organized similarly, but with the new Gabler text included as one of two choices. Slote's 2022 annotations reference only line numbers in the Gabler text. (Apparently he assumes that all serious readers will be using this scholarly edition, an assumption that is coercive and unhelpful—to look something up, other readers must buy a Gabler book, find the passage, note its line number, and then consult the annotations.) The Joyce Project does not strictly require page numbers, since its notes can be accessed directly from passages in the chapters. But for users who prefer not to read on a screen, or who are already using a favorite book version, a pagination function allows them to divide the online text into pages corresponding to five different print editions and thereby jump back and forth between screen and book. If need be, more editions can be added in the future.

I hope that the notes here will take users deeper into this astonishing novel and also 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, visual art, architecture, music, language, philosophy, science, religion, mythology, technology, clothing, urban planning, commerce, psychology, sexuality, race, and every other conceivable 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 contains 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 2025