Annotating Ulysses: Indulging Joyce’s enigmas and puzzles

It might seem that annotating Ulysses is an exercise in indulging Joyce’s most-quoted line, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality”.

There are various reasons to doubt the authenticity of this quote since it would be the only time Joyce ever supposedly said anything about writing for an academic audience. Despite his reputation for obscurity, Joyce always sought a wide audience. In any case, the “enigmas and puzzles” line does a disservice to Joyce (and even to academics) since it implies that Ulysses is just an elaborate literary Sudoku to be parsed ruthlessly. Rather, annotating Joyce’s book has purposes beyond puzzle-solving. Joyce is a writer of small details, minute particularities, “local colour”, as Stephen phrases it in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode right before he sets forth his theory about Shakespeare in a disquisition that is filled with Shakespearean arcana. The task of annotating Ulysses is primarily of elucidating all the different hues of this local colour that populate the text of Ulysses.

The phrase that Stephen uses, “local colour”, is itself an example of the local colour that Joyce used in constructing his text. While researching and writing “Scylla”, Joyce relied on the Danish critic Georg Brandes’s book William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, as well as other studies. The phrase “local colour” is lifted directly from Brandes, who writes of Hamlet: “And it quite certain that when, in the first and fifth acts, he makes trumpet-blasts and the firing of the cannon accompany the healths which are drunk, he must have known that this was a specifically Danish custom, and have tried to give his play local colour by introducing it”. So, in writing this passage, Joyce, like Stephen, “worked in all he knows”, that is, he assembled the text out of all sorts of different little snippets and memes. Annotating the pedigree of this phrase – showing that it was lifted from Brandes – thus indicates one aspect of Joyce’s process of composition, one component of his aesthetics.

Unexceptional passage

To take another example, let us look at a seemingly unexceptional passage in “Lestrygonians” where Bloom walks by Trinity College: He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates and Son, pricing the fieldglasses. Or will I drop into old Harris’s and have a chat with young Sinclair?

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As Joyce plotted out his characters’ movements within Dublin he relied not just on his memory, but on Thom’s Official Directory for Dublin. And so the details of these two commercial establishments can be confirmed by Thom’s: Yeates and Son: opticians and manufacturers of mathematical instruments, 2 Grafton Street, at the corner with Nassau Street; and Morris Harris’s jewellery shop down the street at 30 Nassau Street. So, one level of annotation would simply demonstrate Joyce’s verisimilitude in his representation of Dublin.

Bloom thinks about talking with a “young Sinclair’ at Harris’s shop. This suggests that there is more going on than merely names plucked from a street directory. The “young Sinclair” is either one of Harris’s two grandsons, William Sinclair or his twin brother Henry Morris Sinclair. Their mother, one of Harris’s daughters, had married a Protestant named John Sinclair, but Harris insisted that his grandsons be raised Jewish. This is hardly a trivial detail and now makes Bloom’s contemplation of a quick chat all the more interesting because Bloom is a lapsed Jew. Furthermore, this is something that Joyce would have known since he met one of the Sinclair brothers in late 1903 through his friend Padraic Colum as part of an unrealised scheme to launch a newspaper. Sinclair even loaned Joyce money for this project.

Jewish culture

Joyce’s interest in Jewish culture really only emerged after he moved to Trieste and his knowledge of Dublin Jewry was acquired primarily in a second-hand manner. The Sinclair brother Joyce met (whichever one) might well be the only Irish Jew with whom he had significant personal contact before he began writing Ulysses. And so, on the one hand, this mention of “young Sinclair” adds a suggestive detail to the character of Leopold Bloom and, on the other hand, adds a point on the trajectory of the evolution of Joyce’s attitude towards Jewish culture.

There is a further wrinkle. William Sinclair’s wife, Cissie Beckett, was Samuel Beckett’s aunt and the Sinclair family was a forceful presence in young Beckett’s life. Furthermore, the Sinclairs and Harris also appear in Oliver St John Gogarty’s As I Was Going down Sackville Street, and in a much less flattering light than their brief appearance in Ulysses. Gogarty accused Harris of being a paedophile and of grooming his grandsons to follow in his footsteps. Although he never used their names, they would be sufficiently identifiable based on the information given in the book. Outraged at this, William Sinclair insisted on suing Gogarty. As he was on his deathbed, the duty of litigation fell upon Henry Morris and Beckett was enlisted as a witness. Sinclair won his case against Gogarty and the offending references were omitted from subsequent editions of Gogarty’s book.

Personal link

And so this one tiny passage shows what riches Ulysses has by scratching its surface. Among other things, these two sentences enable a personal link between Joyce and Beckett as well as a possible comparative study of Joyce’s philo-semitism over and against Gogarty’s anti-semitism, or, more generally, a comparative study of how Joyce and Gogarty differ in their representations of Dublin and its denizens. Our annotations try to briefly collate and concatenate relevant information with the aim of revealing the different dimensions suggested through Joyce’s text (the topographic, the personal, the religious, the cultural, etc.). The aim of the annotations is to explain vague and confusing features of the text as well as to elucidate small details that can enrich one’s understanding and enjoyment of Ulysses in manifold ways.

Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Sam Slote, Marc A Mamigonian and John Turner has just been published by OUP Oxford, available in late February.