Ulysses, Annotation, and the Literature of Information Overload

Encyclopedic form is radically different from every other kind. Encyclopedias organize more information than any single, coherent form could contain, so they present readers with multiple, overlapping formal structures, mainly using paratext, and refer them to libraries of other texts. They are, then, not books a reader finishes in the usual way. The expansive, variously traversable textual networks they construct are endlessly open to exploration. This essay shows how, with Ulysses, Joyce brings that kind of encyclopedism to the novel. It focuses on Joycean annotation because paratexts such as Joyce's schemata and Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman's "Ulysses" Annotated are, in many respects, better indices to the formal overdetermination and intertextual extension that define the novel's encyclopedism than the text between its covers. But Joyce's rendering of the world Stephen and Bloom wander through on 16 June is ultimately the essay's subject. By availing himself of the encyclopedia's unique formal repertoire, Joyce makes Ulysses as inexhaustibly full of everything and open to divagation as the modern city.