Michael Groden
"James Joyce's Ulysses in Hypermedia": Problems of Annotation

A Print-Based Work in Hypermedia: Incomplete

In the decentered writing that is hypertext, there is nevertheless a kind of center to a structure built around a preexisting text like Ulysses. Reading this kind of hypertext, you move out from and back to the central text. You might stay away from that text for quite a while: you might even read all of the Odyssey or follow several newspapers for June 16, 1904 or watch a slide show of photographs from the Dublin of that day. But most likely you will eventually go back to Ulysses, to wherever you were in it.

Ulysses on the screen, and Ulysses as part of an electronic hypertextual network, can never be the same as Ulysses in the pages of a book. The digital text loses all sense of the book's physical pages and also of the bulk that makes the printed versions so distinctive and also so imposing. More important, the text can't exist in isolation, separated by its covers from other books on the shelf. The book on the shelf is like a house in a neighborhood. The digital text is more like an apartment in a high-rise complex.

If it is part of a hypertext system, the words of Ulysses (or of any other work) will be linked to all kinds of other material, including to other parts of itself. George Landow* has characterized a print-based work like Ulysses as "incomplete" in a digital environment, which for Landow also means an intertextual network. On one level, of course, Ulysses is as complete as any literary work; it is even what Richard Ellmann* has called "one of the most concluded books ever written." But it is problematical whether a book called Ulysses, which uses Homer's Odyssey as a structural grid, can ever be considered "complete" in itself. Readers hardly ever approach it that way: they almost always accompany their reading with secondary books such as Gifford's "Ulysses" Annotated or the other available annotations or any of the hundreds of books of criticism and analysis. They bring their previous reading and cultural experiences with them; they store information about Ulysses in their heads or in notes; they annotate the page margins of their books. If Ulysses can be called "complete" in print form, that largely means that its pages can exist within covers that contain no other works. A digital hypermedia Ulysses has to dispense with the covers and the boundaries they provide and with the physicality of the pages, but as compensation it can provide a great deal of flexibility and openness in the way it can present secondary information.

The remarks in the Introduction section, while related to annotation in general and not specifically related to hypermedia, are all relevant to the specific problem of annotating in hypermedia. To discuss the specific issue of annotation in the hypermedia Ulysses, I want to begin by referring to a specific passage from the book.