Rawdogging 'Ulysses'

Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated is 694 pages long and retails for $35 on Amazon. The paperback edition is a doorstop, bulging with more ink than Ulysses itself, indexing the thousands of oblique references to classical literature, continental philosophy, and Irish republicanism that fleck every page of James Joyce’s infamously rugged masterpiece. You don’t use it to read Ulysses so much as you do to translate it—Gifford’s guide is meant to lie open next to its source material while the reader cross-checks each line of prose—word by word—decoding meaning from Joyce’s metatextual innuendos, portmanteaus, and allusions. It is, if you ask some scholars, a mandatory tool for authentic exploration of the jungle of Ulysses. I’m halfway through the book and have found Ulysses Annotated to be an invaluable resource. It’s also singularly responsible for one of the most unpleasant reading experiences of my life.