Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 2

Here's your establishing shot for the first episode of Ulysses.


The first scene takes place in a tower by the sea. The tower is a Martello Tower. It's a real place, and Joyce really lived there for about a week in September of 1904. They were built by the British early in the 19th century, when they feared a French invasion of Ireland. It's now the James Joyce Museum, run by a wonderful guy named Robert (never Bob!) Nicholson. [By the way, if you go to Dublin and ask for the Martello tower, you will get blank stares. There are many Martello towers on the coast of Ireland, especially the southeast coast.][Also, do not confuse the James Joyce Museum with the James Joyce Centre.] The museum is the tower. The Centre is in downtown Dublin & has more going on in terms of programs & activity.]


When I first saw a picture of the tower I was surprised by how stubby it was. Less phallic than you'd think, but not beyond the realm of physiological phenomena.


If you are lucky enough to go to the Joyce Museum and see the view from the top, you'll notice that you have a great view of Dun Laoghaire (pron. "Dunleary") , the primary ferry terminal for Dublin, the primary departure point for voyages from (and to) Ireland. So--a castle overlooking the sea: Hamlet. A castle with a view a port for leaving the island: the Odyssey. And it ties out to a moment Joyce's life, and a moment in Irish history as well. A perfect "overdetermined" multiple overlaying of the personal, the literary, the historical... and we haven't even talked about the religious elements... and we're just getting started!

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 1

If you know anything about Ulysses, you might know that it bears a strong family resemblance to Homer's Odyssey. Joyce transposes elements of the ancient story to one day in the life of Dublin, a warm June day in 1904. Telemachus is the son of Odysseus (that's Ulysses to you, if you're Roman), and when you meet him, he is desperate to do something about the horde of suitors that is waiting to marry his mother and despoiling his home. He doesn't remember his father, who's been gone for a very long time.

But if you just pick up Joyce's novel, you have no idea that the first episode is called "Telemachus." [Nor, for that matter, do you know that it's June 16, 1904, 8:00 a.m., or a Thursday. It takes hundreds of pages to figure this out. But we bring it to you on a platter!]

"Telemachus" appears nowhere in the book. Joyce had Homeric titles for all of the 18 episodes, however, and he used them regularly when talking about the book with his friends. In 1920, he created a "schema" for his friend (and writer and critic) Carlo Linati, which would quickly become the first of many tools for reading the book.

So why, if Joyce used these titles when writing the book & talking about it with friends, did he not include them? Does he just like messing with us?

Ulysses, Telemachus, Preliminary

And so, gentle reader, we begin. First, some words on procedure. Every few days, we will post one of Rob's drawings here. I'm going to mark up his drawings a little to point out the things I'm going to talk about in my commentary. (If you like the drawings, they'll be available for purchase! Rob will explain how that's going to work.)

For today, I'm talking about the introductory panel for the first episode, Telemachus. Rob's original work looks like this:

And my markup looks like this:


So just so we're clear, the crude spraypainty defacings are mine.

We invite, we encourage, we downright urge you to comment. Your participation is crucial to the success or failure of the project, so please ask questions, give opinions, make funny puns, etc. Stay tuned for the first post!

Mike Introscuses Himself!

Hello. This is Mike Barsanti, yr humble interlocutor & sometime Joyce scholar, the Father Cowley of Joyce Scholars, defrocked and voluble. I come to this project dishonestly, having been, at the time it was introduced to me, the Associate Director and "resident Joycean" of the Rosenbach Museum & Library. I am now no longer there, working for a Very Large Philanthropic Organization that will not be named. Yet.


I came to Joyce dishonestly too, not out of any dignified need to experience great art, but rather because I have a competitive streak and I heard it was the hardest book to read in the English language and that my father had started it and never finished. And it was written by an Irishman, and I was much more interested in my Irish heritage (Momma was an O'Rourke) than in my Italian or (Heaven Forfend!) my English heritage. I would later realize that the blend of Irish, Italian, and English was actually an excellent combination to bring to the Joycean altar... but save that for later.

My bona fides, such as they are: First read Ulysses with the great Ed Germain at Andover. Took a class with Don Gifford at Williams, then went to U. Miami (Go 'Canes!) & got an M.A. with Zack Bowen & Pat McCarthy & an amazing rag-tag fleet of Joycan grad students. Very smart people. Took Bernie Benstock's last Finnegans Wake seminar there. Joined the IJJF and went to the best literary academic conferences ever in Seville and Rome and London. Went to U. of Penn. & did my Ph.D. with Vicki Mahaffey (my dissertation adviser) and Jean-Michel Rabate, as well as a great crew of colleagues and friends. Worked at the Rosenbach Museum & Library for 11 years, first as an intern, then a consulting curator, then associate curator, then Director of Special Projects, the Associate Director. Curated the 2000 exhibition *Ulysses in Hand*, which opened at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Curated a traveling exhibition about Joyce and his work for the Irish government that travelled all over the world in 2004. blah-de-blah.


So know, gentle reader, that you are in the hands of a true Joyce Trekkie. Haines says in "Wandering Rocks" that Shakespeare is "the happy hunting ground of minds that have lost their balance." It's not just Shakespeare any more. I'm glad you're joining us for a very strange journey.

Okay, we're back...

So, a couple of months have gone by.

Sorry.

The thing is that BloomsDay '08 was the premier and test for this project and, I'm happy to say, it went very, very well. There's been terrific response for the potential of this adaptation and some support offered and we've been taking some time to structure things according to that.

You may notice that I'm saying "we" here instead of "I." In the coming weeks I'll be turning over the majority of this blog to Mike Barsanti, my friend and partner in the project. It's our intention to move this blog into a kind of a production model for annotation of the text through each panel of the comic in the hope that it will make some of the more obscure references a bit more clear. It will also serve that way as a conduit for other Joyce fans to tell me exactly what it is I'm doing wrong (I'm still trying to convince myself that this is a good idea).

I'll leave to Mike to introduce himself, but what you'll be seeing here now is the the black&white drawings of each of the images in my adaptation but with his corrections and comments on subtext; the color commentary, if you will.

In the meantime we'll be starting extra little mailing lists to provide readers with web-blasts for when new material is added to the comic. We've been busy setting up our business end of things and, while there is plenty of new material for another installment, I've been focusing my efforts on scripting (or, in comic parlance, "thumbnailing") through the first three chapters of the novel. As many people have warned me, "'Proteus' is a big hurdle." I knew this going in of course, but I didn't think I'd be forced to prove I can jump it in the time trials. I think I can.

One of the things that makes "Proteus" so difficult is the density and specificity of Stephen's references. Trying to understand them and then relate that understanding to others using visual keys is, let's face it, the lynch-pin of how this project works. It brings up a topic Mike, Josh and I have been discussing for awhile now; whether or not the visual interpretation of the novel we're attempting here can serve as a "roadmap for a hypertext," something that allows annotation to coexist with content. We'll be discussing this more and more with Mike involved, but I'm about thirty pages into "Proteus" now, and I haven't left out a single word of the original text. It makes the production seem dauntingly large, but more and more possible.