Preliminaries

James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are the two most complex and most rewarding crossword puzzles ever composed.

Compared to FW, U is childsplay with training wheels, but the online resources are still unmanageably vast, and bandwidth is suddenly so cheap there's no longer any excuse for avoiding them all.

This blog will devote one post to each page of the first edition, attempting to bring together all the useful hints and clues from all those resources. (Comments and contributions are welcome.)  The first edition is favored because it's now unambiguously in the public domain. [Details on later editions: GJS, Klyn, Oxford]

Extra posts will mark milestones like new chapters, for whole-chapter resources. [*]

Each first-draft page-image will be reproduced at the top of its post in a small iframe, with highlighting to show where there are issues with the text.

[etexts: 1pg, 26pg, 732pg]

maps: GoogleMaps

A reading by Donal Donnelly and Miriam Healy-Louie will be synced via embedded mp3 players at the foot of each post. Ditto two informal group readings from LibriVox, and one from Iremonger.

There's an ongoing 5min/week podcast by  Frank Delaney with excellent readings. [#0]

We may imagine Joyce systematically experimenting with the vast-but-finite potentials of literary style: not just the best expression for each moment of his storyplot, but a grand unified theory of style that includes point of view, word order, sentence length and rhythm, vowel and consonant sounds, sensory modalities, cognitive modalities...

We also have a few hints that he had an idiosyncratic theory of symmetry. [FDV218]