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

Rhetoric and Tact in Annotations

An annotation can point out all kinds of details, including, as in the Throwaway passage, information that the book will reveal later on. But how much should it say? Should beginning readers, in a note to a passage at this early point in Ulysses, be told information that they will only learn later on in the book?

There is no clear answer to this question. People will respond according to their sense of the experience of reading a book like Ulysses, or what they think it should be - and this will affect their answers to questions of whether readers should or shouldn't be told things ahead of when they will encounter them in the book, or whether the task of guiding readers through the book sometimes involves violating some of Joyce's patterns of revealing information. My students tend to be divided, or, perhaps more accurately, conflicted: in the abstract, they say they don't think they should be told anything ahead of its appearance in the book, but, in practical terms, they welcome any information that gives them a sense of how this bewildering and mystifying book (which is how Ulysses appears to most of them as they read chapter 5) actually works.

Thus, even if annotators agree on an assumed reader who is experiencing Ulysses for the first time, they won't necessarily agree about how much information should be included in a note. The audience might be constant, but the annotators' sense of how Ulysses works will crucially affect how they construct the note.

And what if the presumed audience changes? For second-time or more experienced readers, there is no need to maintain the secret of Throwaway. For these readers, the questions annotators have to ask themselves involve such issues as how much to say, in what order, and whether anything should be left out.

Thus, we are talking about a rhetoric and even an ethics of annotation - how to present information effectively, what order to present it in, how much to say and to omit, how to distinguish indisputable fact from interpretation. This is a matter both of accuracy and also of tact. How does the medium involved – print or screen – affect the way annotators might think about accuracy and tact?