About the Notes
When Joyce was writing Ulysses he called it, among
other things, "a sort of encyclopedia." The novel's greatest
challenge to readers––its practice of constantly alluding to
things outside its own pages––can also be a source of great
pleasure, because these external contexts richly reward study.
They are interesting in their own right. 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.
This site's notes add to the work of scholars who have produced
print collections of Ulysses notes over the last six
decades, but their format is different. Exegetes like Weldon
Thornton (1961, 1968), Don Gifford (1974, 1988), Sam Slote
(2012, 2022), and others have imitated the style of footnotes or
endnotes, usually supplying contextual information in the
briefest and most objective way possible and leaving it up to
readers to imagine how the information might affect a reading of
the novel. The commentaries on this site are more like
encyclopedia entries or short literary essays. Freed from the
limitations of print publication, and intended to guide the
reading process rather than simply to give it raw material, they
can explore contexts in greater detail (within the limits of
what seems relevant to the novel), show how these contexts may
shape readings of the fictive text, elaborate on issues more
discursively, and illustrate verbal content with visual (and
aural, and cinematic) images.
"Notes," then, is something of a misnomer for all but the
shortest essays on this site. While I hope that the expanded
scope will provide an attractive alternative to the minimalism
of other collections, I am also aware that length comes with a
cost: it may appal people new to the novel. The readers that
literary critic Margot Norris calls "veterans" may be looking
for new, fresh insights to add to all the others they hold in
their heads, but "virgin" readers are simply trying to keep
their heads above water. For them, 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 who have an appetite for more can
click on “Read More” to find further contextual details, close
readings of Joyce's prose, mentions of related passages
elsewhere in the novel, discussions of relevant scholarly
studies, and considerations of rival interpretations and textual
variants. These later paragraphs will sometimes contain
"spoilers"––though nothing can really spoil the reading of Ulysses.
All notes quote from the passages they are glossing, often in
boldface type, to save users from having to go back and forth
between note and novel and to help them quickly locate
commentary on passages that interest them. When notes are keyed
to passages in different chapters of the novel, as happens
frequently, 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.
The notes do not attempt any global interpretations or
readings of the novel; they simply elucidate passages ranging
from one word to a few sentences long. But by pointing out
connections to other passages, and sending the reader to other
notes through additional hyperlinks, they may 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 the
individual.
All notes conclude with authors and years of posting. Although minor changes are sometimes made without changing the year, substantial revisions receive new dates. 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.
These notes will, I hope, take users farther into Joyce's great
novel and at the same time farther outside it. The implications
of Joyce's allusions are often subtler and more far-reaching
than may readily appear, so brief summaries often fail to
adequately plumb their depths. But the book that Joyce wrote is
not only something to mine for buried meanings. It also opens
windows onto countless external landscapes: 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. The title index here
and the subject index here will give some sense of the range
of topics.