|
"What's
this here, Guv'nor?" Robert
H. Bell "In spite of careful and repeated reading of
certain classical passages, aided by a glossary, he had
derived imperfect conviction from the text, the answers not
bearing in all points" (Ulysses, 17.389-391) When my four-year-old daughter finished D'Aulier's Greek Myths, she tried her own hand at myth-making—writing, illustrating and putting together with coloured pipe cleaners a story she called Zoo-Bear. Before reading me her story, she asked me, "Um, do you know about Zeus?" "Yeah, some stuff about Zeus, yes." (I'm a professor and I'm paid to know stuff like that.) "Good. 'Cause Zoo-Bear is based on Zeus, and it helps if you know the myths." As my daughter apparently realized but was too discreet to say, annotation is always "a testimony to alienation from a text, always represents a prior culture from which one believes oneself (and consequently, nearly everyone else) distanced."[1] We strive to bridge the gap, get back, go home, make up the distance. But readers of Joyce never know enough about anything, not Greek myths nor Irish history nor music nor etymologies nor theologies. Over and over we learn that there are no Ithacas. Still we persevere, and collectively we have made great progress, even if the individual annotation can never suffice, can only cease, or abandon what cannot be finished. Joyce was a notable self-annotator and enabler of annotation, an author who (conspicuously) provided numerous summaries, schemata, correspondences, hints and footnotes to his own text; he was also (notoriously) an avatar of red herrings, chimera, will o'the wisps, whimsy, and blarney. Joyce famously boasted of insuring his immortality by keeping the professors busy forever. Some of Joyce's annotations, such as the episode titles, are effectively canonical. Some Joycean text, such as pages 260-268 of Finnegans Wake, includes marginalia or annotations. Though Joyce once remarked that he could respond to any reader asking of any passage in Ulysses, "Eh, what's this here, Guv'nor?" we must remember that Joyce the masterbuilder, the giver of correspondences, is also the bringer of plurabilities—and a notable mock-annotator, in the tradition of Pope's Dunciad, Eliot's The Waste Land, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Let the reader enjoy—and beware! Though the word annotate, meaning "to add notes to a work or an author", only enters the English language in 1733, the practice of annotation had been going on for centuries, by priests and rabbis, clerks and apprentices, scholars and schoolmasters. From time immemorial, or at least since texts were inscribed, professional and learned readers have provided subsequent and ignorant readers with identifications, denotations, clarifications, anticipations, connotations. To be a Joycean is to be, if not a priest of the eternal imagination, always at work annotating the word, and disputing the annotations of others. In Talmudic tradition, the commentary upon Torah becomes sacred, like the inspired text itself. But the mere annotator must also remember the tried-and-true method of Talmudic discourse, answering every question with another question. Even when the word seems lucidly clear, it may dazzle and confound. When Micah defines "what is good" and "what the Lord [doth] require of thee," and implores us "to do justly, and love mercy, / And to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8), one commentator has commented, "All the rest is commentary." There's been a lot of commentary. As editor of the "Hades" episode for the Joyce's Ulysses Hyper-Media Project, I brought some basic assumptions about the process of annotation. I knew that the task was endless, that life is short, and that I better walk humbly. Still, nearly all my premises have been greatly complicated and many of my specific annotations rendered problematic by my participation in the Annotation Workshop at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in July 1999. Herewith some rules of thumb, theoretical issues, and Joycean complications with which one working editor/annotator emerged. I began with a broad distinction between two kinds of annotation, denotation and connotation. Denotation provides information, explains the verifiable, consensual meaning; for instance, in Dignam's funeral cortege, what is a "craped knocker" (6.27)? I set out to gloss slang, archaic words, idiom, foreign words, hard words, and neologisms, such as "huggermugger" (6.15) or "slipperslappers" (6.28), and “fidus Achates” (6.49), to draw from the first fifty lines of Hades. Connotation I conceived as everything beyond denotation, including evaluation, critical, interpretive, disputable questions, and cruxes: Who was M'Intosh, what did Bloom intend to write in the sand, and does Bloom request eggs for breakfast? The distinction between connotation and denotation seemed fine in theory, or at least easy enough to define and justify. But as James Mill taught his son John, whatever makes a difference in theory must make a difference in fact. And in practice, it is very difficult and often impossible to distinguish my neat categories. The HyperMedia Ulysses plans to take advantage of the layering opportunities of hypertext: a novice is given basic material for a first-time study, more experienced readers can pursue more complex or obscure lines of inquiry, and the veritable Joycean can compare interpretations and arguments. But in practice editors confront the Joycean distrust of categories, that instinct not to separate but amalgamate, or an urge not to settle but muddle the hash. Here are some vexing problems contemplated in our Annotation Workshop that complicated my comfortable assumptions.[2] First, the timing of a note. Not only what we say but what we tell may spill the beans and spoil the fun. One perpetually risks saying too much, too soon. Bloom, intending to pass on a used newspaper, is understood by Bantam Lyons to be giving a hot tip on the Gold Cup race: "I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said" (5.534). Fritz Senn objected vehemently to notes which anticipate information subsequently provided or reasonably inferred; but a teacher might use this passage to show that the reader can eventually, gradually hope to make sense of much apparently meaningless flux. Yet such annotations or interventions do rob the reader of her just inheritance, the delight of discovery. A variation of untimely annotation is to spoil the fun by spelling out the joke. Humour depends on something being left unsaid, inviting or requiring another step in the mind of the perceiver or audience. If you have to ask what's so funny, it's too late to be amused. Even something as apparently straightforward as cross-referencing phrases or reiterated elements turns out to be fussier work than I'd thought. Characters in Ulysses regularly remember words of other characters and the text frequently quotes itself, without specifying or using quotation marks. Everybody recalls "I paid the rent" (1.631) or "Before my patience are exhausted" (6.170). But who (besides Fritz) recognizes Simon Dedalus's question, "Do you follow me?" (6.93-94) as Simon imitating Corny Kelleher, who indeed and apparently often says those words (as he does in Nighttown). I like to know, and certainly want to tell people, that an innocuous utterance I might never have glossed, like "Do you follow me?" has a tone, an effect, significance.
A related issue is the scope or comprehensiveness of the note. Ulysses is full of lyrics, tidbits, bricolage. Do we identify everything we can? How much context does one provide to a passing reference: do we give the lyrics of the whole song or the entire "Last act of Lucia" (6.852)? It's tempting to put forth everything you have, even if it is not your best foot or longest and strongest suit. Fritz Senn, reviewing Gifford's Ulysses Annotated, warns against the common practice of "reading certain passages as though they belonged to a context different from the apparent one."[3] What about errors in the text, Bloomers on the Liffey? It's not so clear that the editor must always flag and correct a mistake. Critics have frequently been eager to correct and patronize Mr Bloom, perhaps because displaying their own knowledge "[m]akes them feel more important" (6.602). Such condescension can be downright misleading. In the cemetery, Bloom, vaguely remembering Gray's "," thinks of "that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell" (6.941). Though he mistakes the poet, he wittily revises the title: "Eulogy in a country churchyard." That's not simply an error, as many annotators assume and proclaim; it's a joke, funny and telling, as Bloom knows: "Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be" (6.940-41; my emphasis, Bloom's jest). Another example of over-zealous corrective annotation is Bloom's supposed boner, "Shakespeare has no rhymes" (11.63). Teachers leap to contradict and correct Bloom. But it's perfectly true that "Shakespeare has no rhymes," meaning he has rhymes and he also has no rhymes, speeches of unrhymed blank verse and prose. The intonation is everything. Joyce leaves thousands of references vague or merely implicit, sometimes because they are meant to be ambiguous or indecidable, like "Could never like it again after Rudy" (8.610). And what about the countless textual lacunae? Does the annotator fill in the blank for a thought like "Just that moment I was thinking" (6.197) to underscore Bloom's dread and hate of Blazes Boylan? How heavy-handed should one be? After all, vague or indirect references may be nearly self-evident. Only a very pedantic or hyperactive annotator would footnote Simon Dedalus's "Her grave is over there" (6.645). Joyce often withholds annotations earlier or simpler writers provide; he once complained about a character in a George Moore novel consulting a timetable for the local train, to give the reader what any local resident would surely know. Which brings us to the question of the imagined audience or reader of the annotations. Ralph Hanna suggests that not only does an annotator create his audience, he also creates his own author; Hanna sees annotation as "necessary aggression."[4] For whom are we annotating: a novice reader, a doctoral candidate, a fellow Joycean? What is necessary, helpful, or enriching for a reader especially interested in, say, Irish political history, will differ from the material aimed at a reader passionately curious about music or mythology. How educated, alert, persistent, and retentive is our Imagined Reader? Smart ones may not appreciate or enjoy being patronized or schooled every sentence. One can't assume "They love reading about it" (6.479), no matter what it is, Lacan or George Bernard Shaw or "Elvis" spottings in the Wake. When does annotation become smothering, gratuitous, counter-productive, the word which killeth rather than the spirit which giveth life? Ultimately annotation is a form of rhetoric, whose success depends in part on the annotator's conception of the audience. But should we note what the typical Dubliner probably knew on June 16, 1904, or what an Irish reader might have known in 1922, or what an American college student doesn't recognize in 2000? Layering via hypertext is one means of responding, but one can't personalize the notes for a given reader: what's obvious to one person may be news to the next. For the annotator, ordinarily a harmless drudge, it is difficult to know where to start or stop. So annotating is forever making mountains out of molehills. As Michael Groden, our editor-in-chief, put it, "One person's necessary annotation is someone else's superfluous one & Whatever preoccupation the annotator brings to the passage or episode (what it means, how it works) will affect the annotation at every stage." Or, as it is written, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thy own eye" (Luke, 6.41). Identifying what Gifford terms "Dublin street-furniture" is almost endless and only sometimes pertinent or interesting. How much does a reader want or need about the Tritonville Road or the real Moses Herzog? Except that a given detail just might be significantly used or misused, as in Wandering Rocks, when the text gets something wrong that any Dubliner worth his bitter would certainly know, or even significance in the fact that something like a gate, now renamed, is indicated by its previous name.[5] Who knows what one might make of "that small act, trivial in itself" (7.764), apparently random or gratuitous but possibly vitalizing or vibrant. There are needles in haystacks, as readers have always found and will continue to discover. An assiduous reader of street maps might discover that Stephen has located the Archdiocese right in the middle of the red light district. So, much as I'd like to maintain it, my putative line between intrinsic and extrinsic doesn't hold for Ulysses, which blurs the distinction between inside and outside the text. Not only are "surface and symbol" confounded, as Robert Adams has demonstrated so tellingly, but basic ignorance of Dublin dailiness can lead us astray. Arguing for a degree of prophetic power in that holy fool Buck Mulligan, I wondered how Mulligan could know his "long slow whistle of call" would imminently provoke "two strong whistles answer[ing] through the calm" (1.24, 26-27). But Buck isn't supernaturally endowed; he simply expects that at this time every morning he will hear the whistle of "the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown" (1. 83-84). It's right there on the second page: should the eager annotator tell us it's the mailboat before the book reveals it? And what about material that doesn't come clear in the text? Another way Joyce confounds theorists and discombobulates annotators is to include some private or autobiographical allusions, such as "A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella . . . Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these" (9.974). What intrigues me is that there is no other mention of a Dedalus brother in Ulysses; Stanislaus Joyce, working temporarily as a pharmacist, never survived the revisions of Stephen Hero. Perhaps it's fair enough for Joyce to expect his readers to know his previous publications very well indeed— but are we supposed to remember details he edited out of his unpublished writings? A valuable contributor to our Zurich workshop was Harald Beck, who has for a decade been translating Ulysses into German. Constantly we were reminded not only of the difficulty of saying it in German but of the pervasive strangeness of our text, its remarkable specificity and generalizability, its protean inglossabilities, as Fritz Senn has it. Beck notes that a reference to "adelite" in 6.308 is for Joyce a very current reference, technical information published in a Swedish scientific paper in 1891 and not generally in use at the turn of the century. We learned to recognize the ever-present danger that the annotator will become an interpreter, impose his presence on the text and on the reader. Ralph Hanna[6] stresses that the annotator is always creating himself as reader, becoming an exaggerated version of a reader, viewing what he half perceives and half creates or enveloping the text, always invading it, or defining its meaning, and hence restricting possibility. If annotation is as subjective as Hanna insists, equal parts aggression and self-defence, it is always crucial to query the apparent finality of annotations, lest an inquiry or possibility become in anyone's mind an identification, an answer, the last word, the meaning. Inevitably, and no matter how scrupulously the editor tries to distinguish denotation from connotation, or first, second, and third-level annotation, whatever one says or does not say biases the reader. That I noticed and commented on something may or not be a "Pure fluke of mine" (6.1011-12) but it is certainly "the bias" (6.1011-12) of my sense of what's there and what's important. No matter how objective or factual I try to be, any note I make gives stress to a text which doesn't necessarily distinguish the essential from the marginal, the central from the peripheral. As so often, Fritz Senn makes this point forcefully and cogently: "Notes by nature look resultative, not explorative. They pretend that the goal has somehow been reached, when, usually and Joyceanly, the goal itself is in question."[7] Annotation, the most pedantic as well as pedagogic of subjects, turns out under scrutiny to be the most fundamental and crucial of concerns: how we read and make sense. ——— [1] Ralph Hanna III, "Annotation as Social Practice," in Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 178.
[2] I am leaving aside the problem of manuscripts, original and corrected versions, visions and revisions, that morass and slough of despond, that bourne from which no man returns. I will blithely pretend for the present that everybody's text is Ulysses: the Corrected Text, at least for the purposes of worrying about annotations to the hypermedia Ulysses. [3] Fritz Senn, reviewing Gifford's Annotations in JJQ , p. 185. [4] Hanna III, pp. 183, 180. [5] See Clive Hart, "Wandering Rocks," in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman [6] Hanna, 182. The introduction to this collection includes a list of very useful issues and questions posed by the editor, Stephen A. Barney, including "How do we distinguish a scholiast from an exegete from an editor from a critic? Do texts require repair" and "How does a computer annotate?" While we're asking big questions, "Do fish get seasick?" perhaps we should refer the problem to Robert H. Boyle, the compleat angler of Finnegans Wake and president of the Hudson River keeper fund: "I have reread some pages 40 times, trying to decipher them for fish, and I am overwhelmed," says Boyle. "There are more than 200 references to fishing, not just words but phrases that have never been listed before in annotations . . . Each time you go back, you find more." [7] Senn, review of Gifford, JJQ. |