It is interesting to imagine what James Joyce would have made of recent digital developments in the publishing world. Would Ulysses have incorporated tweets and texts and status updates into its grab-all texture? Would Finnegans Wake be riddled with hypertexts to make the riddles of its dreamscape less mysterious? At the very least, Joyce would probably have been grateful to have an ereader: the backlit screen would have been kinder to his failing eyes than the printed page was.
June is the month to celebrate Joyce, and if you have been putting off reading the writer's famously obscure work, there are various digital publications that promise to make the books more accessible. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Guide (iTunes Store, €7.99) is an interactive app for the iPad. It is published by Naxos, which is best known for classical music recordings and audiobooks, and there is an impressive auditory emphasis to the app. There is an abridged audio recording delivered by Dubliners Jim Norton and Marcella Plunkett, and a section devoted to the use of music in Joyce's book, complete with an extensive list of recordings. The John McCormack version of There Is a Flower That Bloometh is especially good, as well as apt: Joyce once shared a stage with the singer when he too hoped to make his a life as a musician.
There is a short recording of Joyce himself reading the "Aeolus" section of Ulysses too. Recorded in 1924, its quality is poor enough to warrant the printing of a transcript beneath, but the susurrus shush of the static adds atmosphere to the scene, and you can imagine the river Liffey rushing by as Joyce turns his prose into a mesmeric incantation.
There are visual aids as well, although these are fairly token offerings. It would be more apposite to have historic photos of Joyce’s native city than of modern Dublin.
The text of Ulysses itself, meanwhile, is delivered unabridged to the reader, and the Naxos annotations are terrific, both in content and format. The fact that they appear in the margin without interfering with the text is a particular boon. There is also tons of contextual content: a chronology of Joyce's life and work; a history of the book's publication and many controversies; and a schema charting the progress of Bloom's day and its echoes of the Odyssey. The full text of Homer's Odyssey is also made available for anyone interested in the labyrinth of intertextual references.
There are dozens of free versions of Ulysses available in eformat, but Naxos has compiled a one-stop app that will be invaluable to the first-time serious reader or any student of Joyce.
James Joyce: The Dead (iTunes store, free) takes a similar approach to that of the Naxos app. Curated by Joyce scholar Geraldine Meany, it is published by the UCD Humanities Institute and is a great academic introduction to Joyce's most famous story, which John Huston filmed in 1987. The full text of The Dead is included without annotations, though there is audio commentary on all aspects of the story from an impressive variety of contributors. Archivist Catriona Crowe, for example, uses the 1901 census to expose the autobiographical origins of the story, while architect Sean O'Laoire shares the history of the house on Usher's Island where the story is set.
Barry McGovern's reading of The Dead brings evocative life to the muted celebrations of the last day of Christmas and Gabriel Conroy's epiphany. There is a recording of the seminal song The Lass of Aughrim, by Noel O'Grady, but, compared to Naxos's offerings, it is fairly poor. Music, and this traditional air in particular, are vital to the story, so it is a pity that there wasn't room to develop this audio aspect of the app more fully. Still, elsewhere the production values are excellent. A highly recommended eversion of Joyce's story, and free.
If you are still finding Joyce difficult to get into, Finnegans Wake in Fifteen Minutes, by Bill Cole Cliett (Kindle Singles, £1.99), promises to enlighten the defeated reader on his most difficult work. Over 18 pages, Cole Cliett exposes "The What, When, Where, Who, Why and How of James Joyce's Classic of Complexity" with impressive brevity. The concept might be gimmicky, but the academic resources Cole Cliett uses to support his condensed reading of Joyce's novel are sound and his compression of key ideas is effective. As Gertrude Stein wrote of Joyce, "People like him because he is incomprehensible and anyone can understand him." A contradiction, perhaps, but one that makes perfect sense to Cole Cliett, who delivers his analysis with wry simplicity. Finnegans Wake, he reminds us, using Joyce's own words, is a "nocturnal comedy" that is "meant to make you laugh." The Kindle Single is no substitute for reading the book itself, of course, but will you ever, really, get around to it?
He Liked Thick Word Soup, an app for Androids, iPads and smartphones (free), is more in the spirit of Joyce's literary experimentation. It is a piece of chronotext, a collection of software experiments that explore the relationship between time, space and text. The idea behind it is to pose a literal digital challenge to the reader, who has to unravel the text of Ulysses with their fingers. You won't really get to read the book – if you complete the app, you will have read four pages/100 lines chosen at random – but the experience is mesmeric.
Pulling words from the jumbled-up alphabet soup, you paint a kind of typographical picture with your fingers, and, as you swirl the lines of letters around the screen, time slows down, allowing you to pay attention to each word in a way you never would if you were reading in normal left-to-right mode. The effect is perhaps as close to the stream-of-consciousness experience as an ebook can provide.
