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.

My book club has fearlessly conquered some of the most daunting literature. We have macheted our way through both Infinite Jest and The Power Broker, two books famous for breaking the wills of readers with their elliptical asides and towering page-counts. But Ulysses, and its harrowing reputation, had historically scared us off. The conventional wisdom states that Joyce’s prose is almost unintelligible, and in order to parse it, you must purchase one (or several) ancillary Ulysses guidebooks and references. It’s not hard to understand why. Though the plot is relatively straightforward—the action takes place over a single summer day and follows a few down-on-their-luck misfits around Dublin—the language with which Joyce tells that story is both mind-bendingly idiosyncratic and overflowing with incisive digressions, all filtered through the author’s stunt-man approach toward composition. For instance: In one notoriously nodulous chapter, Joyce satirizes the entire evolutionary history of the English written word—pagan chants, Arthurian legends, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens—across 32 distinct subsections. (It’s about as majestic as it is incomprehensible.)

So it’s no surprise that the moment Ulysses was published in 1922, scholars started to build a cottage industry out of breaking down the book’s thorny mystique for pedestrian readers. Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study, advertised as an “analytical and systematic guide” to the novel, made landfall in 1932, the landmark Bloomsday Book, by literary critic Harry Blamires, popped up in 1966, and today, even the lyric-annotation database Genius is home to group-sourced interpretations of Joyce’s many discursive trapdoors. Joyce scholars could spend entire seminars debating the virtues of their preferred handbooks, but when my group embarked on our own Ulysses endeavor last month, I was surprised to hear that many of my compatriots were bucking this trend entirely. They desired no hand-holding, no plot summaries, and certainly no $35 companion indexes. In other words, they intended to rawdog the book, allowing Joyce’s cascading passages to wash over their heads, and into the ether.

As someone who is reading Ulysses like I am prepping for Armageddon—Annotations splayed wide on my coffee table, pen in hand, bewitched by every wrinkle in the prose—this process seemed flatly insane. To my mind, reading Joyce without a guide was like trying to play Super Mario Bros. without the jump button. Think of all the subtext that will whoosh by your head! The puns that will remain permanently uncracked! The wormholes never explored! And yet, the deeper I’ve gotten into Ulysses, the more I’m beginning to wonder if a single-minded desire to understand this book—on a trenchant, academic level, with all the bait and tackle, transforming my quiet nights of reading into tedious study sessions—negates some of its more fundamental joys. Were my friends right? Would I be enjoying this experience much more if I, too, threw caution to the wind and dove into the pages completely blind? Have all of these eggheaded Joyce-Knowers led us astray?

“There’s definitely some sentiment that the scholars are overanalyzing Joyce, that they’re gatekeeping Joyce, or taking the fun out of Joyce,” said Zoe Patterson, a Ph.D. candidate at Trinity College who is writing her thesis on nonacademic readings of the author. Patterson has focused much of her research on Ulysses book clubs who, like mine, have internalized the idea that purchasing a companion text was compulsory for understanding the novel. Patterson told me that this creates a strange feedback loop among casual readers who are curious about such a canonical work of fiction, but become overwhelmed by the sheer number of guidebooks available to escort them on the journey.

“They catch readers at a vulnerable moment, because they’re afraid of a book they’ve been told to be afraid of,” she said. “And they’ll end up taking whatever the guide says as gospel.”

But Patterson argues that there’s no such thing as an objective interpretation of Ulysses, and that even some of the novel’s more esteemed guidebooks are pockmarked with their own blind spots. Case in point: The pioneering James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study was overseen by Joyce himself and is subject to his authorial biases, while The Bloomsday Book, in its original printing, was riddled with flat-out inaccuracies about the narrative. (Patterson also notes a wave of latter-day Ulysses guides that encourage readers to skip over some of the book’s knottier chapters, which she regards as a crime against literature.) This is the nature of the beast. Literary analysis is more art than science, and any companion text, no matter how studious or comprehensive, will be slanted toward the writer’s own assessments of the novel. So in general, Patterson believes Ulysses is best consumed when a variety of readers are approaching it from as many angles as possible. The folks agonizing over the Aeneid references should mingle with the folks marveling at all the pretty sentences, creating a wondrous composite of Joycian intrigue.

“I picked up that Bloomsday Guide and thought, ‘I don’t have time to read this and Ulysses!’ and I threw it away,” said Rachel Greer, one of my friends and someone who has dutifully rawdogged her journey through the novel thus far. “I really value the reading experience of a book. And I’ve read a lot of modernist literature. So I don’t find Ulysses that different or hard. It’s in my wheelhouse, even if I’m not getting everything.”

Still, there is definitely some merit in an outside force stepping in and answering some of the basic questions a novice Ulysses reader might have. Namely, what the fuck is going on? This is where I’ve found my diet of guidebooks most valuable, and it’s also the prime directive of Patrick Hastings, a former high school teacher who runs the website UlyssesGuide.com. Hastings started the website in 2011 as a study aid for his students, and he distills both the novel’s point-to-point plot details and major thematic swings into bright, chatty, digestible language—illuminating the prose just enough so the reader has something to chew on. Hastings said he didn’t compose UlyssesGuide with any overarching editorial agenda. He just wants to get the rest of us through Joyce as painlessly as possible. In that sense, the website is meant to be a jumping-off point toward a more personal relationship with the novel—a tad less doctrinaire than the other guides on the market.

“This novel, more than any other novel you might read on its own, presents such an opportunity for confusion, and that confusion, for most people trying to rawdog it, results in an abandoned effort,” said Hastings. He cites the third chapter of Ulysses—Proteus—which takes place entirely in the mind of a character named Stephen Dedalus, who wanders along a beach while the narrative becomes progressively unglued. “Readers get there and decide the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” continued Hastings. “That’s where an external source saying ‘This is really hard,’ and also offering a perspective of where to home in, can mitigate some of that confusion and frustration.”

I think Hastings is touching on the tension that has separated me from some of the other members in my book club. There is an undeniable social anxiety, and perhaps even a sense of shame, about not getting a work of art, no matter how baffling its design might be. That alone might be a symptom of the post-internet age. There is such an obsession to solve fiction—to settle on an ironclad interpretation that functions like a skeleton key, unlocking all the mysteries of whatever we’ve just consumed. There isn’t much currency in embracing the void anymore. I think of the videos on YouTube examining the symbology of Mulholland Drive, one of the most joyfully inscrutable films ever made, that are almost as long as the movie itself. Last week I watched Aftersun, a beautiful meditation on fatherhood that requires no further decryption. And yet, when the credits rolled, I still found myself on a few buried Reddit threads, digesting interpretations of its enigmatic ending. Ulysses was not born into this culture, but it certainly has inherited it.

So maybe it is of some relief that not getting Ulysses—feeling adrift in its haze—might be a critical element of appreciating the novel. While I was writing this story, a tweet went viral wondering out loud how James Joyce seemed to be so well-versed in everything. The allusions in Ulysses touch on medicine, epistemology, early film, color theory, and Egyptian mythology, creating an “infinite network across the book.” Sure, some learned readers will be able to follow a few of those threads. (One chapter contains a Shakesperian reference in almost every line, undoubtedly thrilling for the English majors in the room.) But Sam Slote, another Trinity scholar, correctly notes that huge swaths of Ulysses are meant to be alien and unknowable. The book billows with hyperlocal Dublin gossip—centered around the bars, apothecaries, and salons that did, indeed, line the streets of the city at the turn of the 20^th century, and in practice, only Joyce’s direct contemporaries would ever be privy to that information. Those intimations can be tracked down with the help of the Annotations, but Slote wonders if such an effort misses the forest for the trees.

“Ulysses is an artistic work aimed at eliciting a response in its readers. This response can be enhanced or deepened through supplementary research, but that is not necessary,” said Slote.
“The point of these is not for the reader to get the reference, but rather that not understanding something is a part of the overall aesthetic experience.”

Maybe that’s the ideal vision for a Ulysses guidebook. Ground me in the story, fill in some of the details, equip me with the right questions to consider at my weekly book club meetings, but never be afraid to admit when one of its diatribes befuddles us all—casuals and scholars alike.

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