ULYSSES "SEEN" blog

Moving Day

2009-06-01T19:12:00.001-07:00

Annnnd, here we go! The brand new interface for ULYSSES "SEEN" is ready (well, mostly) to go. There's still other features we'll be building into it, and a lot more pages of new content to put up there but, finally, things are contained on the one site allowing you to move freely back and forth between the comic and easy-to-use Readers' Guide that helps people solve some of the novel's mysterious and ask direct question. Heck, no you can even help me get the damn thing done right by including links, suggesting casting for character and telling me just what Stephen's hat is supposed to look like (I really mean that last one, by the way. I haven't found a conclusive answer there yet...).

Make sure you check out the "How to Use This Comic" on the way in. There's some new features to how the comic is presented that we're all pretty proud of, but they're pretty unexpected at first. I'm not going to say any more here because, well, I want you to read it, don't I?

-Rob

http://www.ulyssesseen.com/

Making and managing the "Twitter Schema"

2009-05-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

Everybody getting read for Bloomsday '09? Good. Because the changes start here tomorrow night.

We've got a brand-new web interface for following and interacting with the novel while reading the comic adaptation. There's a lot of bright, shiny new features there for people to play and, frankly, a lot of ways to help us get this thing done right.

But we can't show it to you yet. Not until tomorrow night.

To get people jazzed up for the new interface and get prepped for Bloomsday, we've been playing around with another nifty new application over on Twitter (to join us there just look for UlyssesSeen in your twitter search).

I've taken my general "schema" for how the novel's events and actions unfold, with some quotes, explanation of themes and links to historical figures, and created a "tweet-file" for getting your ULYSSES on 140 characters at a time. Starting on June 9th and running through the 15th, we'll be tweeting these tidbits for a few hours a day. Two or three chapters a day is a lot of Joyce of course, but hopefully this will help new readers get a little deeper into the novel before its celebration on the 16th. Reading ULYSSES for the first time is not an easy task, as anyone can tell you, but we hope this opens up some of the mysteries and cuts through to some of the reasons why this novel is so beautiful, funny, sad and really an experience you'll want to have again and again.

Then on Bloomsday itself, June 16th, an abbreviated and rather comical update of the day's events will come your way through twitter. Twenty hours of "what's Mr Bloom is doing now" in all its dirty detail. Pretty funny stuff when you break it all down.

So time to empty the cache on your browser, open yourself to the craziness of twitter and get ready for our new user interface tomorrow. Brand new ways to look at and enjoy a timeless and beautiful novel and some help getting through the harder bits of its earthiness to the gems of language and liveliness that form its center.

-Rob

Yes, well, things do change you know...

2009-05-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

Soon, very, very soon in fact, we are moving. Things are happening. The world is shifting and, somehow, when you least reason why, you are a part of that foot-stirring jag to the left.

But you can join us over there. It's an easy hop beneath the doorjam on a rickety California morning.

Got your Twitter going? If so, go to UlyssesSeen on Twitter and, definitely definitely same some storage space for Bloomsday.

No Twitter? Then find us on facebook for your latest updates and images.

Or stand by your subscription here for up-coming information (tease, tease....).

Something is coming for Bloomsday, Joyce fans, something that we've been planning for a long time. I really hope that those of you who've put their time in following this project are ready to take it to the next level. Otherwise Josh and I have been losing a lot of sleep over nothing...

-Rob

James Joyce's Ulysses, "Telemachus" episode, No. 29

2009-03-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

[Cf. 1922 6:7-28; Gabler 1:112-134]

One thing that strikes me on reading this passage is Mulligan's none-too-subtle playing of "the class card" with Stephen. "Dogsbody" has all kinds of associations, and will gather even more in the "Proteus" episode, but at the very least it refers to an underling or a "gofer." Mulligan also teases Stephen for his "second leg" trousers, his improper etiquette, and even offers his own old clothes to him. We'll soon learn he's wearing Mulligan's boots already. ["Poxy Bowsy" is glossed in Gifford, but basically means vd-ridden lout.]

Stephen's insistence that he can't wear grey is pretty extreme. Gifford's gloss is very useful--like many other entries, it "reminds" us of things we don't yet know, that Stephen's mother died on June 23, 1903, and so it's been almost a full year... though we actually won't find out it's June 16, 2004 for a few hundred pages yet. Gifford observes that under the strictest standards of Victorian mourning, a son would wear only black for a full year after his mother's death, so Stephen's within that period. Mulligan catches the irony of Stephen's assiduous sartorial etiquette and his cruel treatment of his mother, but we don't necessarily feel better about Mulligan for this.

Point of trivia: if you're following along in your Gabler edition, you'll see that several of Mulligan's lines here end with exclamation points [Dogsbody! Insane! Bard!]. He's quite an exclaimer. The exclamation points appear in the Rosenbach manuscript, but not in the 1922. Because we're following the '22 here, they're not used. Write them in if you like.

Point of admiration: I love how Rob has Mulligan using the mirror here.

so, riddle me this:

1. We've been wondering what the mirror should look like. Anyone have a good sense of what the cracked lookingglass of a servant should look like? Please post a picture.

2. About that dogsbody. What difference does it make, given the trends and themes of this chapter, that Mulligan is talking about Stephen's body and his appearance?

3. Why is it important that Stephen is so hyper-observant of the etiquette of mourning? Can you answer this question by going through Hamlet or the Odyssey?

James Joyce's Ulysses, "Telemachus" Episode, No. 28

2009-03-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

(cf. 1922, 5.31 - 6.6; Gabler, 1.100-11)

Stephen has just been accused by Mulligan of performing more than feeling his grief, of being the "loveliest mummer of them all" who prominently wears his mourning for his mother, but who refused to honor her final wish before she died. Stephen doesn't rise to the bait, but continues acting the part.

This is one of the first pages where we see Stephen's internal monologue placed in the context of external events. He remembers a dream he had shortly after his mother's death, in which she appears as a ghost (remember Hamlet? we finally have our ghost!). We will see this dream in different variations throughout the novel. For now, a few things jumped out at me... first, note the emphasis placed on smells. Joyce is one of the great smell writers... "wetted ashes" has always struck me as an amazingly precise and familiar smell. Also the green of the bile and the green of the bay... just moments ago, Mulligan suggested that 'snotgreen' be a new color for Irish art. We get a sense of what Stephen thinks of that idea here.

Finally, note how Rob has drawn Stephen's pose here. Joyce writes that Stephen has his palm on his brow, but Rob has focused on how Stephen is looking at the bay "beyond the threadbare cuffedge," a marvelous bit of framing.

hopes for further discussion from you, gentle reader:

--the color green

--parallax and visual framing

--ghosts

--motherhood

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus Episode, No. 27

2009-02-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

[cf. 1922, 5:26-30; Gabler 1:94-99]

Art? Art Brockway? Are you out there Art? I will always think of you with this passage. When Art and I were grad students at the University of Miami, he wrote what I'm sure is the definitive article on Joyce and mummery. There is little else to say, or rather, there would be little else to say were your correspondent not writing from Philadelphia, mummery capital of the world.

(image from gophila.com, taken by R. Kennedy)

Again, I'm hoping Art will chip in at some point, but on the most basic level, when Mulligan calls Stephen a "mummer," he's saying that he's disguised, he's pretending to be something he's not.

The tradition of mumming came to Philadelphia from many places, but the strongest thread runs from Ireland & the other Celtic countries. By tradition, around the holidays, a gang of costumed men would go from house to house and basically trick or treat for booze. There might be a play or a performance involved, but there's a costume and some kind of entertainment and probably "something sinister" in having them come into your home... as Mulligan suggests.

And as for sinister... here's another question for the masses. Was Joyce left-handed? Stephen, based on a number of references in this book, seems to be a leftie. And Joyce's corresponding figure in Finnegans Wake, Shem the Penman, is left-handed. Of course, even if Joyce were left-inclined, no school in Ireland would have let him actually write that way...

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus No. 26

2009-02-11T18:52:00.000-08:00

[Cf. 1922 5:20-27, Gabler 1:86-94]

We get an important glimpse of Stephen here, as we learn that he refused to pray for his mother at her deathbed. What kind of a**hole doesn't obey his dying mother's wish to pray with her? Discuss.

I mean, yes, Stephen is an Artist of Profound Integrity, who cannot compromise his belief in his unbelief. And yes, we are meant to think of him as kin with Hamlet, with Telemachus, with those who fight to leave behind their lives as boys to become men. And I even think that we are meant to pity Stephen more than a little, who has become so alienated through his extremism.

Mulligan refers to himself and Stephen as "hyperborean." What does this mean? Gifford gives us the basics--it's a classical allusion, to a kind of perfectly youthful master race who lived at the far ends of the earth. More specifically, Gifford pegs the reference to Nietzsche & a passage in The Will to Power, wherein the Ubermensch were described as hyperborean, as beyond the constraints of conventional morality, especially Christian morality.

Anyone out there have more to say about hyperborean? About Stephen's refusal to submit and what we're supposed to think about it?

I love the bottom panel here... Mulligan looking stately and plump indeed, beautifully framed and posed like he's about to start shooting lasers out of his hands. Which would make things interesting. His pose, his position, his framing, all speak together with the authority of Mulligan's perfectly reasonable criticism of Stephen. And Stephen knows it, but he doesn't care.

James Joyce's Ulysses, "Telemachus" No. 25

2009-02-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

[cf. 1922 5.18, Gabler 1.85]

First of all, have you found us on Facebook yet? Yet another in our growing arsenal of tools to bring this strange project to the world.

As I write it's the old man's birthday in Ireland. An auspicious day for a man who tended to be superstitious about the calendar. And as our subject we have a rather glorious image, and we're talking about mothers. What's could be more appropriate?

A moment ago, Mulligan was quoting Swinburne when he referred to the sea as our "great sweet mother." He's modulated into George William Russell a/k/a AE, who often referred to nature as the Mighty Mother. Russell was a preeminent literary figure in turn of the century Dublin, and in 1904 he became the first person to publish a short story by Joyce--in a newspaper he edited called The Irish Homestead. Russell has a prominent part in Episode 9--"Scylla and Charybdis"--and we'll certainly talk more about him then.

Back here in "Telemachus, Mulligan's comment will lead, a moment from now, into a discussion of Stephen's mother's death. There's a lot to be said about the different roles of mothers and fathers in Joyce's world--especially in Episode 9. Very briefly--mothers are associated with ultimate, undeniable truth--truth beyond language. They may be the one true thing in life (a paraphrase). Paternity, however--especially in the days before genetic testing--was uncertain. This uncertainty creates an intolerable vacuum, that has to be cemented over with legal, verbal certainties. In "Scylla," Stephen talks about paternity as a "legal fiction," (and you should put as much emphasis on the fiction as on the legal here). You should also be thinking about Hamlet again, and always!

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus No. 24

2009-01-15T18:57:00.000-08:00

[Cf. 1922: 5:2-15; Gabler 1:67-80]

Much to look at here. Stephen has just been complaining about Haines and his nightmare. Mulligan is changing the topic, staying on his tear about "Hellenization."

In the second panel, Rob has drawn Mulligan and Stephen in an odd pose. Stephen seems to be surprised in mid-phrase, and Mulligan is reaching into his pocket. Specifically he "thrust his hand into Stephen's upper pocket." It's an interesting moment, one that the comic allows us to show the body language for. Mulligan is intruding, being forward, in Stephen's space. "Thalatta thalatta" means, unsurprisingly, "The sea, the sea!" It's from Xenophon. You can look it up...

A small textual point--there's an omission in this early draft--Mulligan says "Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor" --we left out the "your." Also, in the Rosenbach manuscript, Mulligan's first mention of the sea in this moment is "she is our "great" sweet mother." That's in Joyce's handwriting, and it's quite clear. It's repeated a few lines later. But in his errata for the first edition, Joyce specified that he wanted this to be "grey" sweet mother. A nice allusion to grey-eyed Athena, Odysseus' protector, but otherwise obscure.

And as for the Greek-- "Epi Oinopa Ponton" means (according to Gifford) "upon the winedark sea," a common epithet in Homer's Odyssey. This is another moment when I wonder if Joyce was raising another flag to his readers... "Hey! The Odyssey! It's important!" We know the Odyssey is important now, eighty years after it was published... but this might have been a more useful to early readers.

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 23

2009-01-04T18:25:00.001-08:00

[cf. 1922; 4: 23-35; Gabler 1:50-66]

Stephen and Mulligan are discussing their visitor, Haines, who woke in the middle of the night, apparently screaming about a black panther. Presumably not this kind of black panther.

Many years ago at a Joyce conference in Rome I heard a scholar give a paper that argued that Haines is, at least in part, based upon William Bulfin, an Englishman who wrote a book about his bicycle tours in Ireland at the turn of the century. The book, Rambles in Eirinn, was very popular & reprinted many times. In a passage about Dalkey & Sandycove, Bulfin describes a visit to an old military tower where some young men were staying. I'll steal the excerpted passage from a great RTE website about Ulysses:

On a lovely Sunday morning in the early autumn two of us pulled out along the road to Bray for a day's cycling in Dublin and Wicklow. We intended riding to Glendalough and back, but we were obliged to modify this programme before we reached Dalkey, owing to a certain pleasant circumstance which may be termed a morning call. As we were leaving the suburbs behind us my comrade, who knows many different types of Irish people, said casually that there were two men living in a tower down somewhere to the left who were creating a sensation in the neighbourhood. They had, he said, assumed a hostile attitude towards the conventions of denationalisation, and were, thereby, outraging the feeling of the seoinini.One of them had lately returned from a canoeing tour of hundreds of miles through the lakes, rivers, and canals of Ireland, another was reading for a Trinity degree, and assiduously wooing the muses, and another was a singer of songs which spring from the deepest currents of life. The returned marine of the canoe was an Oxford student, whose button-hole was adorned with the badge of the Gaelic League-a most strenuous Nationalist he was, with a patriotism, stronger than circumstances, which moved him to pour forth fluent Irish upon every Gael he encountered, in accents blent from the characteristic speech of his alma mater and the rolling blas of Connacht. The poet was a wayward kind of genius, who talked with a captivating manner, with a keen, grim humour, which cut and pierced through a topic in bright, strong flashes worthy of the rapier of Swift. The other poet listened in silence, and when we went on the roof he disposed himself restlessly to drink in the glory of the morning. It was very pleasant up there in the glad sunshine and the sweet breath of the sea. We looked out across to Ben Edair of the heroic legends, now called Howth, and wondered how many of the dwellers in the "Sunnyville Lodges" and "Elmgrove Villas" and other respectable homes along the hillside knew aught of Finn and Oisín and Oscar. We looked northwards to where the lazy smoke lay on the Liffey's bank, and southwards, over the roofs and gardens and parks to the grey peak of Killiney, and then westwards and inland to the blue mountains

That was longer than it needed to be, but you get the point. Throughout the book, Bulfin approaches Irish people with the same mystification about how he knows more about the history and the language than they, the natives, do. Ironically, back at the Rome Joyce conference, the scholar who was giving the paper was not aware (nor was I) that Bulfin's book, and the coincidence of his visiting during Joyce's very brief stay at the tower in September of 1904, was well known among the senior Joyceans. I didn't know about it and was glad to learn, but the moral was to be careful you're not teaching your audience something they already know.

The black panther is still a mystery to me. I don't know if there is a particular symbolic referent here, or if it's one of the red herrings Joyce throws into this book. It's certainly odd that Stephen says "black panther" two times in close proximity. Even without a clear allusion, (and I'm looking to you all, helpful readers, to tell me what you know about black panthers), the panther dream suggests that there is something a little unhinged about Haines. Maybe he, with Bulfin as his prototype, is to be seen as approaching his travels in Ireland as a kind of exotic safari (I picture him with his guncase and a pith helmet), and the black panther is the symbol of the exotic otherness of the Irish. You tell me.

James Joyce's Ulysses; Telemachus, No. 22

2008-12-21T19:31:00.000-08:00

[Cf. (1922, 4:1-21), (Gabler 1:34 -49)]

As promised, we move forward a little faster by doing a full page at a time.

We've talked already about Stephen as "Daedalus", master builder and what not, but Rob's first drawing on this page is a great reminder that Stephen is in a labyrinth.

Mulligan points the way to the association with his riffing on Stephen's absurd Greek name. Why is Mulligan talking about the Greeks, anyway? I'm sure part of what's going on is Joyce signalling to the reader that we are both in Homer's Greece and and in Joyce's Ireland at the same time. Mulligan's interest in Greek also marks his superior education, and for a few brave interpreters, suggests that he may be gay.

Stephen is an artist, and he's looking for direction. For many Dublin artists, the logical place to go was London--that's where the publishers and readers were, that was where the roots of English literature were planted, that was where the money was. In 1904, with a great Celtic awakening in full swing in Ireland, many artists were looking instead to the island's native culture--think of John Millington Synge, or of Miss Ivors' cutting remarks to Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead." Mulligan proposes a third way--looking to the traditions of the ancient world, and past the less-culturally-stimulating history of the Roman empire to the world of the Greeks.

Many articles have and will continue to be written on this subject, but for now, let me put in a small placeholder to indicate that that the concept of the classical world was very important for all kinds of "modern" artists--advances in archaeology in the late nineteenth century made that world suddenly far more real, and many artists of the period looked to the classical world for a purity and humanism in art that would get them past what was seen as the decadence and chauvinism of the late Victorian period. This trend is the very place Ulysses comes from, after all. [Tho' on this, another brief note--Joyce himself did not know much ancient or modern Greek. He sure knew his Latin, though!]

One would expect that Stephen would be more sympathetic to Mulligan's invitation, then. But Mulligan's invitation, we will see, is utterly insincere. And also, Telemachus doesn't go back to Troy to find his father...

James Joyce's Ulysses, No. 21

2008-12-10T19:13:00.000-08:00

[Cf. 1922, 3:26-27; Gabler 3:28-29]

And so, patient readers, we arrive at the bottom of the first page of the 1922 Ulysses. I promise we will pick up the speed a little bit as we move ahead--we're just getting used to this way of working!

Since we are moving at such a stately, plump pace, however, I get to notice a few things I would normally pass over. Like Mulligan switching off the current here. Over the last few weeks I've said a lot about the little transubstantiation magic trick that Mulligan is doing here. But this time, Mulligan's electricity reference struck me... I've always read this as Mulligan making a reference to some kind of medical experiment he would have seen as a student, a la Frankenstein

Looking around the web, I found a nice piece of trivia--the Pigeon House, the famous unreached destination of Joyce's short story "An Encounter," began it's long life as an electricity power station in 1903, only a year before the events in the tower are supposed to happen. The Poolbeg Station now surrounds the original Pigeon House, and is easily visible from the top of the Joyce tower [It also plays a starring role in U2's "Pride (in the name of love)" video.]

The first power station in Dublin was opened in 1892. Clearly the tower doesn't have electricity. A gas lamp gets a speaking part later on in the book, and Stephen and Bloom eventually have a conversation about electric vs. gas streetlams--I'll look forward to tracking electricity references from here...

A Word from the Artist

2008-12-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

A word from the artist himself. Take it away, Mr. Berry:

=========

Okay, well, I get to pop in here on this one since this panel represents a difference of opinion between Mike and myself. I love when that happens.

Mike's referring to the noise heard here as a Mulligan's whistle bouncing off the nearby Wicklow hills, as if this is a staged joke he's made for us and Steven to witness. I think there's a joke being made here of course, but one that's a bit more elaborate, and I've used this whistle noise to indicate it.

it terms of staging and actions throughout the novel, Joyce makes great use of the "noises off" that effective the central events in his story. The roar of thunder in "Oxen of the Sun" unites the destinies of the two central characters. Stephen, upon hearing the boys in the "Nestor" chapter, refers God as "a shout in the street." These outside messages are a very important part of the mystical intrusions to the internal struggles and dialogues within the novel and there's always a kind of transformative moment surrounding them. We see it here for the first time in just the right framework; a joke of transubstantiation.

What I've tried to set up here in adapting the first chapter is barren landscape divided by sea and sky where we get a chance to understand Stephen in contrast to his foil, Mulligan. Stephen is a hugely introspective character and Mulligan, well, not so much. Mulligan is worldly, but glib by contrast. He hears the the noises of the world around him, but responds to them as if they're "all a mockery and beastly."

So the whistle noise we're seeing repeated here, the same one we saw opening the scene on page four of the adaptation and that we'll see again on page twenty-seven, isn't a sound that Mulligan made himself, but an intrusion from the outside world that he's chosen to make light of. It's the whistle from the "mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown," the sound of a message coming in.

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus No. 20

2008-11-30T19:55:00.000-08:00

Cf. 1922, 3:24-25; Gabler, 3:26-27

Finally, we get the point of Mulligan's joke. He's using the echo of the surrounding mountains* to add to his travesty of the mass, as we've said several different ways and times already.

In responding to this picture, I started to think about ways in which Mulligan's performance is a mini-model of the book as a whole... but I don't really buy that.

We haven't talked much about textual issues yet, but it's interesting here that the Rosenbach manuscript does not have the sentence on which this image is based: ["Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm."] I have no intention of subjecting you to the full textual history--there's plenty of that on the web already. Suffice it to say that the Rosenbach Manuscript, which is part of the collection of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, is an early handwritten draft of Ulysses.

Why add this sentence? The skill of 'placing' the echo or the whistling mailboat says something about Mulligan's cleverness and awareness of his surroundings. It's likely also something that Joyce saw happen while he was writing, so he decided to stick it into the book--the man liked to add new material to the book whenever he got a chance. This is a small, but useful example.

*Many readers believe the whistle is the call of a boat departing Kingstown harbor, perhaps the mailboat at 5:83 (Gabler). This also seems logical to me, and probably would better explain why the returning whistles are "strong" and "shrill." But if we go this way, we have to explain how Mulligan knows when the whistle will sound. I note above that the "strong shrill whistles" are not in the Rosenbach Manuscript. Neither is the mailboat reference. So that makes it likely that the whistles are the boat... oops!

Ulysses "Seen" - Telemachus, Episode Two!

2008-11-26T18:08:00.000-08:00

"He's the only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse." Like Bloom we're a bunch of bloody dark horses ourselves, and so it is that Ulysses Seen henceforward is a creation of Throwaway Horse LLC. Who are we? Rob Berry the artist of course, and Mike Barsanti, your faithful guide, and Josh Levitas, breathing life into these lumps of clay, and Chad Rutkowski, the lawyer lurking in the shadows. But why an LLC? Because we really like this format. We hope you will really like this format. And we hope that Ulysses, the first hyper-text novel, will prove a catalyst for presenting other magnificent works of intimidating literature in the same kind of explicatory, direct-to-your-mind style as what we are doing with Ulysses Seen.

Art by Gabe Ostley

Each of us loves this book, and it kills us that it has gotten the reputation for being inaccessible to everyone besides the English professors who make their careers teaching the book to future English professors who will make their careers doing the same. 'Tweren't supposed to be that way. It is a funny, sometimes obscene (but not in the legal sense), book about the triumphs and failures of hum drum, every day life. It makes heroes out of schlubs and cuts the epic down to size. And its elitist reputation has placed it well on its way to being as relevant to our cultural currency as conjugating Latin.

What these guys have done is remove the unnecessary obstacles. Rob eases us into turn of the (20th) century Ireland through the familiar language of comic books. And Mike uses the infinite resources of the web (not to mention his own estimable insight) to tame the million and one references and allusions in the book to the point where they'll fetch your slippers and the morning paper. You're going to see the increasing importance and the increasing integration (what's that?) of the blog posts with the text, you're going to see the format evolve into something interactive, and you're going to see the format leap from your desktop and onto your cell phone and beyond. So stick with us. Your patience will be rewarded.

But we can make more irrationally exuberant promises at a later time. Let's move on to why you came here in the first place.

And what a change in tempo this next installment offers, divorced from exuberance of any kind. We leave Mulligan and his clowning and get a taste for what makes the jejune jesuit so fearful. Stephen's overwrought musings about the past heartless bullying of a fellow student soon turn darker, and we find ourselves as trapped by the specter of the agonizing death of Stephen's mother as Stephen himself. And it is here that Rob's talent asserts itself, focusing the narrative punch for our movie-addled minds on the foreboding visions that plague Stephen, gripping us with the same images that are gripping Stephen.

Mike will take you more thoroughly through this segment, please make sure you've signed up for the blog posts.

And remember, should shimmering bowls of black bile be something you find happens to match your dining room drapes, original artwork is available here.

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 19

2008-11-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

[Cf. 1922; 3:24, Gabler; 3:26]

So Mulligan is doing his staged transubstantiation joke, waiting for the sound of his whistling to bounce off the nearby Wicklow hills. The word "chrysostomos" just sits in the middle of a small paragraph describing Mulligan's face and the scene. Note how Rob has given it a different style to set it apart from the other dialogue, internal or external. We spent some time talking about this.

People reading Ulysses for the first time are so eager to get to the difficult stuff, the allusions, or just the smutty bits, that this odd and completely symptomatic moment on the first page gets passed over. When I teach Ulysses, I like to dwell on this word for an uncomfortably long time, because the more you look at it, the weirder it gets.

Key question: who says it? It's not dialogue, because it doesn't have one of the dashes that Joyce preferred to set off actual spoken words (as opposed to pedestrian quotation marks). It seems to be the narrator, but it's pretty elliptical for a narrator--a normal narrator would say something like: "his teeth had gold caps, and they shone in the sun and made him golden-mouthed like St. John Chrysostomos." So it's abrupt, and if you ask me, it's a chain of logic that sounds much more like Stephen than any impartial narrator. This the next of many examples of the Uncle Charles Principle .

But who is Chrysostomos anyway? I've never found a really satisfactory connection to this allusion. On some level, it's just that Mulligan as noticeable gold in his teeth. He's also a clever talker. So he's golden-mouthed. Gifford is a good souce for going deeper into this kind of thing. He suggests a couple of possible suspects, one being the Greek rhetorician Dion Chrysostomos, another being the early church father St. John Chrysostomos .

These are perfectly legit and all, but I don't really feel they add much to what we know about Mulligan. If anything. Gifford's third candidate, Pope Gregory I, is a more likely match. Called by the Irish "Gregory Goldenmouthed," he was a Roman pope who took on the project of converting the Britons to Roman Christianity ( as opposed to the strange Irish brand being practiced next door). If you have better candiates, please let me know!

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 18

2008-11-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

[Cf. 1922 3:22-23; Gabler3:25]

We're waiting for Mulligan to finish up with his whistling echo trick, a high point of the little parody of the mass that begins episode 1 of Ulysses. Here he cocks his head to the left, waiting for the echo that's going to come in a minute.

We haven't talked about the Odyssey in a while, so let's revisit that frame of reference while the echo takes its time getting back to the tower. Stephen is Telemachus. A young man, Telemachus is just old enough to understand the insult that Antinoos and the rest of the suitors are visiting upon his house, and just young enough to not really be able to do anything about it. The suitors live off the wealth Odysseus and his people have hoarded for years, and make a mockery out of the traditions and customs of the city. Telemachus wants to rid his house of them, but he doesn't have the people or the will to do it. So Athena comes to him and tells him to learn what he can about his father's fate, and possibly raise an army to take his home back. So Buck would seem to be Antinoos, and he's certainly making fun of the traditions of Stephen's people... but Stephen doesn't have much faith in those traditions himself. I suppose one could say that Telemachus needs to find out what happened to his father before he can really judge Antinoos--if Odysseus were dead, it might become his duty to follow Antinoos like a father, and then to look back on the desecrations of Penelope's courtship as a necessary cost of the "leadership transition." And voila! We arrived at Hamlet without even knowing we left the station. We're even conveniently situated at the top of a tower. I bet we're going to see a ghost soon!

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus No. 17

2008-11-13T20:33:00.001-08:00

Cf. 1922 3:22-23; Gabler3:25]

Mulligan has given his "long slow whistle of call" and now pauses "awhile in rapt attention," turning his head back and forth as he listens for the natural echo that's the punchline to his joke.

Though we've been moving through these opening lines at our own rather stately, plump pace, I think you can still notice that there's rather a lot of attention given to this scene by Joyce. There aren't many such scenes in the novel, and Mulligan quickly becomes a peripheral figure. It suggests to me that the scene retains a number of vestigial clues, styles, and storylines--perhaps when it was written in 1913 and 1914, Joyce had a very different idea of the struggle that Stephen was going to face during the day, and Mulligan was more involved.

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 16

2008-11-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

[Cf. 1922; 3:22; Gabler; 3:24]

Mulligan is performing a little trick here at a critical moment in his parody of the mass. He knows that there's an echo from the top of the tower (never checked this out myself), so he's putting it to work at a moment that parallels the epiclesis, the moment when the presence of God is summoned into the communion wine and bread.

Joyce doesn't give a sound for Mulligan's whistle--only that it's a "long slow whistle of call," like the way you'd whistle to a dog, or the hot dog guy. There's something a little lascivious about the way Rob has drawn Mulligan's face and fingers here, which is all part of the picture too...

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 15

2008-11-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

[Cf. 1922, 3:19-21; Gabler 3:21-23]

Another thing I've learned from Wikipedia. The black mass is not a Satanic ritual per se, but rather just kind of a fun "extra," a parody of the regular mass that's a morale-builder for the troops.

Why all this talk of a black mass? Are we just trying to build readership? No, gentle reader... Mulligan's been parodying the mass for the last 20 lines or so. Gifford parses "Christine" as referring to the black mass "tradition" of having a naked woman serve as an altar.

If this all seems farfetched, there's an lascivious and fascinating (forgive the redundancy) story in Ellmann's biography (and elsewhere) about Joyce's encounters with a young woman in Zurich named Marthe Fleischmann. In 1919, on his 37th birthday, Joyce made arrangements with his friend Frank Budgen to entertain Ms. Fleischmann in Budgen's studio. [ Fleischmann also may have served as the model for Bloom's correspondend Martha Clifford, and Gerty Macdowell...] We don't know much about what happened... Joyce later claimed to have explored the "hottest and coldest" parts of a woman's body. Very unsexy. Apparently he also brought a menorah (!) to the occasion, telling the man he bought it from that it was intended for a "black mass." this was two years after he wrote these lines. Interpret as you will...

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 14

2008-10-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

[Cf. 1922; 3:17, Gabler 3:19]

Rob and I had a long conversation about this passage and what Buck means when he says "back to barracks." I see it as a garden-variety transubstantiation joke--wherein Mulligan is trying to keep the genie in the bottle, the spirit of Christ (or "christine," as Mulligan will say in a moment) from escaping the shaving bowl before it can be [insert precise verb here] into the shaving lather.

I'm bracketing the verb here because as I have been reading the above-linked Wikipedia post about transubstantiation, I see that the choices I was about to make (mixed, infused, combined, blended) are all wrong and invoke heresies. [side-side point. I am glad I am not a proper academic, because if I was, I would have to scorn Wikipedia. It's a little lazy for me to link to Wikipedia so many times, but it's good information, in most cases better than what you get in Gifford & Seidman (forgive me, Don & Robert. You would love Wikipedia.).

Reading through the entry, I can't help but think of Stephen's little aesthetic dissertation on perception and essence in Portrait, and the whole Aristotelian Fugue-state he enters in Proteus. [as long as I'm making these little side notes, a little David Foster Wallace homage, the fugue state idea reminds me that Proteus would be a good place to talk about Stephen as an Aspie avant-la-lettre. {OK. one more. I swear. If you followed the Aspie link, you saw that one of the "you may be an aspie" jokes was if you know the historical derivation of the word "trivia." Famous Joyce quote: when asked if he was worried that people would consider some of the puns in Finnegans Wake "trivial" he said "yes, and some are quadrivial." There you go.}]

But I trigress. or quadgress.

About the barracks. It's important to know that in the Dublin mind, a "barracks" is not an abstract or alien thing at all. In 1904, as at many times in Irish history, British troops were garrisonned in barracks that were cheek and jowl with densely populated urban neighborhoods. Because their function was to control the people living in those neighborhoods. Think Baghdad's Green Zone. Despite the comparison, this is not the way US citizens tend to think of military bases. The presence of British troops on the street, their movements, their leisure entertainments, their interactions with the "natives," are all an important part of the atmosphere of Joyce's Dublin in June of 1904. These days, the old barracks have been appropriated for various purposes... the now-called "Collins Barracks" is a stunning museum, part of the National Museum of Ireland, with exhibitions relating to decorative arts and Irish history. The barracks at "Beggars Bush" has a national printing museum.

Ulysses,Telemachus, No. 13

2008-10-18T20:03:00.001-07:00

Rob has caught an exact, if difficult to define, expresison here. It's open, sad, skeptical, perceptive, but not without warmth. Here's a famous picture of Joyce from the summer of 1904--the same time in which (in the world of fiction) Ulysses takes place:

This picture was taken by Joyce's friend Constantine Curran. The original print is part of the C. P. Curran papers at University College, Dublin. According to legend (or Ellmann), Joyce was once asked what he was thinking when Curran took the picture. Joyce said: "I was wondering would he lend me five shillings."

Ulyssess "Seen" Project Update 10-18-08

2008-10-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

So its now four months since Bloomsday and you've probably been saying to yourselves, "hey, I thought this ULYSSES webcomic was supposed to be monthly!"

Well, yes, hrrmmn...

The premier of ULYSSES "SEEN" in connection with the Rosenbach Museum and Library's annual Bloomsday event was a great success by all means, and I want to thank everyone involved. We've spent a hectic couple of months since then trying to organize some ideas generated around the premier into a tangible plan and clear course for the project's future. I apologize for those of you who've been waiting for the next update to the comic, but we needed to get some of the business stuff cleared up first before moving forward. ULYSSES "SEEN" will be a production of Throwaway Horse LLC.That work is almost complete now and we'll have the next installment ready to go as soon as the ink is dry.

I thought it might be good to use this e-mail to bring people up to date on all the changes and new features we've got coming your way next month. We'll be using this kind of subscription e-mail to update readers in the future (as well as offer some added features) so please take a moment to sign on to the mailing list. Here are some of the things going on:

-For those of you who were at the event in Philadelphia and saw some of the artwork for the project, you'll be glad to know we've finally set up the system for purchasing original art from ULYSSES "SEEN" on- line. There are black&white as well as full color versions for almost each and every one of these panels, so feel free to visit the site and help support the project the old-fashioned way.

-For people who maybe encountering the book for the first time through this adaptation, or for those looking for a deeper understanding of Joyce than my drawing might allow, I think you'll be glad to see what's happening on our production blog. Mike Barsanti, resident Joycean and stalwart drinking partner, is taking us from the adaptation and through the book one panel at a time. There's exciting links to obscure references, notes on major themes throughout the novel and quite a few good stories along the way. Its a great example of how this is one of the hardest books you'll ever want to read over and over again.

-There's quite a lot of talk around here about the direction of this project right at the moment, and it's kept us from posting new material since the premier last June. It definitely hasn't kept us from working on that new material. I've been busy working out the storyboards for the first three chapters of the novel and I'm really quite pleased with some of the results. We'll be showing off little bits of those storyboards on these web-blast from time to time but, for those who've been wondering, yes, the "Proteus' chapter looks great told in the language of comics.

I wish there was more I could say about some of the things going on with the project these days but, for now, thanks for all your interest and patience so far. We're coming back with new material next month and a lot plans for enjoying this novel together as the adaptation continues.

Thanks for reading,
Rob

On staging the first chapter of ULYSSES

2008-10-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

Well, now that Mike's rolling along with the commentary, I figure this might be a good time to add some reflections about the staging of this first chapter.

Comics and cartooning have a language uniquely there own of course, but adaptation of material from another art form, in this case a prose novel, into that language of comics sets up a different kind of challenge. Particularly when dealing with original material that is so visually rich as Joyce's ULYSSES. The goal here is not to just make static illustrations of the moments shown in the novel but to "see" it in the language of comics.

Adaptation of the novel into comics means imaging it, particularly in this first chapter, a little closer to the stage than to a film. At least in my mind. The dialogue and repartee here in these opening sequences really showcases the charm of language Joyce uses to invigorate all the later verbal exchanges between Stephen, Buck and all the other intriguing characters of that Dublin day. Language is Joyce's toy as a writer and my goal as a cartoonist is to move that to the forefront of the experience in reading this first chapter of the adaptation. So, since I personally feel stage plays are the great and weather-worn bastion for experiencing the richness of dialogue, I tried to see this chapter as a play and draw it accordingly.

There are things you can do as a comic artist that you could never accomplish in film or on the stage. But there are great lessons to be found in thinking of your entire environment with the clarity and specificity of an actor. When you think about it, the whole environment of this chapter, and certainly this scene, can be reduced to very few props and very few details. They,Stephen and Buck, are standing at the edge of the world (the world being Dublin), divided by sea and sky on the tower which jutting up like a phallus (or omphalos). There is a bowl, a razor and a mirror for the actors to handle. There is a flagpole (existent on the tower at the time, though not mentioned by Joyce) and, painted in Ireland's kelly green, it divides the two characters now and again. The walls of their encounter, Mike talks about them like the ring of a bull-fighter's arena, are round; no hard-edged architecture to establish them. The actors exist in relation to each other and, occasionally, that flagpole, the thing that separates them. The stage, the environment of left to right, is plastic except for sea and sky while the up-and-down is determined through perspective (father=up, mother=down) or some symbolic relationship to country. A malleable stage to maximize and accentuate the dialogue between the two men, the two actors. We'll see more of this plasticity again in the next two scenes of this chapter, but for now its about these two men on a nebulous and rounded playing field divide by the hash horizontals of sea and sky and the harsh vertical, though yet un-decorated, flagpole of country. How do those small props, a razor, a bowl and a mirror, fit into the relationship of these giant and determining environments?

One of the things that makes this novel so inviting to me as a cartoonist is the idea that each of the chapters (and even some of the very sentences) have such varying viewpoints. Mike touched on this before with his comments on the "Uncle Charles Principle." The expressionistic theatre moments I'd like to exploit in this first chapter that allow the environment of Martello Tower to seem so fluid will be completely missing from chapter two. If I'm thinking about plays for illustrating these chapters, if I'm thinking about Samuel Beckett in chapter one, then chapter two is all Noel Coward.

-Rob

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 12

2008-10-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

Cf. 1922, 3:10-11; Gabler 3:11-12

At last, we meet Stephen. Mulligan approaches him like he’s the antichrist. He is not amused.

As the two men carry on their conversation at the top of the tower, these drawings make the contrast between them much more apparent. I love, too, how the top of the tower looks like a bull ring. Stephen will soon be called the “bullock-befriending bard,” though his pose is more that of the toreador here. I also can’t help but think of Spy vs. Spy, the old Alexander Prohais comic from Mad Magazine.

The Secret Advantages of Subscribing to E-mail

2008-10-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

"So," you ask yourselves, "why would I want more stuff in my inbox rather than just use Google Reader or any of the other less intrusive ways to keep track of a blog?"

Excellent question. I hate getting more e-mail than necessary myself. After all, if most of the fans of this blog are busy reading Joyce, how much time can you have for junk-mail?

Well, here's the thing. We've been kind of quiet around here lately as we get things formalized for a big push next month; new content on the comic, a live on-line sales site for original art, models for different applications and delivery methods (yes, that was intentionally vague), and a finished script for the next two chapters (well, okay, we're not entirely finished with "Proteus" yet, but most of you will understand how that one can be tricky...).

Mike's doing such a terrific job with the tutorial element of this blog that we've decided to keep that a bit separate from all this other news and updates. To that purpose we're forming a mailing list that will let people know exactly where the project stands and take them, through a link, directly into the updated material on the comic. This mailer, or web-blast, will also include some re-capping of previous passages of the adaptation and show exactly where that corresponds to the 1922 text.

Oh, and there will be unique artwork on these web-blasts not found in the comic. Some of it by me, some of it done exclusively for the project by others.

Oh, and we're sending the first of these web-blast out later this week.

I think its well worth cluttering your inbox to get more of the "inside scoop" and it leaves Mike plenty of room to talk about things like the "Uncle Charles Principle." This way we keep the current events off to the side.

-Rob

Subscibe to The Ulysses "Seen" Blog!

2008-10-12T05:06:00.000-07:00

You'll notice that there are now two new boxes on the right side of the top of the page, each of which allows for different methods of subscription to this blog. Now you can keep up with each of Mike's updates through email or RSS feed.

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 11

2008-10-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

[Cf. 1922, 3:10; Gabler, 3:11]

A few quick points:

-- In case you were wondering, Portrait fans, this is the same Stephen Dedalus we last saw vowing to "forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race." Joyce used the name as a nom de plume early in his career, in addition to giving it to his fictional alter ego. But you'll see that Stephen is a little older, a little more jaded, and more than a little depressed.

-- I know it's basic, but it doesn't hurt to have a little refresher on Daedalus. A master builder and creater of labyrinths.

-- Interesting that as Rob has drawn it, we're getting Stephen's POV here. One of Joyce's signature moves is to give his narrating voice elements of the vocabulary or stylistic tics or perceptions of a character in the scene. Where it might first seem that the narrator is your usual omniscient, once you really start to parse who's doing the talking, it can sound like the narrator's voice and style are flavored by a particular character (often described as the character "infecting" the narrator's voice). I have a perverse theory that the narrator of Portrait is actually Stephen himself, talking about himself in the third person. [Hugh Kenner called this style the "Uncle Charles Principle." in his classic Joyce's Voices]. The text here doesn't show UCP (as the Joyceans call it) so much, but this medium requires choices of perspective that can help illustrate the phenomenon.

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 10

2008-10-06T19:05:00.001-07:00

[Cf. 1922 3:9-10, Gabler 3:10-11]

The mountains in question here are the Wicklow Hills, beautiful (if perhaps worn and stubby) mountainlets to the south & west of Dublin.

I should note there's another error here--Joyce deliberately writes "awaking" mountains, not "awakening" as we have it above. Awaking is an anachronism, rather, Joyce simply prefers it to it's more standard descendant. It's last cited use in the OED is 1870. Prior to that, is a use in 1620, and prior to that, 1611: Shakespeare, in The Winter's Tale. Follow the wikipedia link if you dare. We will be hearing more about this play in Chapter 9, but for now, suffice it to say that it involves fathers trying to return home, lost sons and daughters, changes of identity, etc.

Is Joyce deliberately invoking the Shakespeare play? or does he just like the condensed, archaic version of the word? Why choose!

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 9

2008-09-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Cf. 1922 3:9; Gabler3:10

Mulligan's priestly charade continues. I linked to this page before to illustrate the "Introibo," but I didn't see the video the first time around. It will stun you.

Robert carefully gives Mulligan a classic blessing gesture. It's exactly the hand you'd see on a medieval saint. I'd go trolling through my art history books to find just the right one, but I've packed them, and Google Images isn't giving me what I need, so I leave it to you gentle reader to give me a good image in the comments. In the meantime, I give you this fascinating tradition of the eastern church, where a priest's hand uses a gesture that is also a Christogram. I had no idea.

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 8

2008-09-25T19:30:00.001-07:00

[Cf. 1922 3:7, Gabler 3:8]

Mulligan calls down to Stephen (whom Mulligan has nicknamed "Kinch") to join him at the top of the tower. Why does he call Stephen "fearful"? Probably because of an incident that happened during the night with a house visitor--we'll be hearing about that soon. But also because of Mulligan's blasphemy, which we've been chatting about over the last few frames. Stephen isn't a believer, but he's not above hedging his bets.

Oliver St. John Gogarty, the person on whom the character of Mulligan is based, once referred to Joyce as an "inverted Jesuit." Joyce identified closely with the Jesuit order--he was educated in Jesuit schools as a boy, and in one famous anecdote, said "you allude to me as a Catholic; you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit" (see Kevin Sullivan's Joyce among the Jesuits for an exhaustive discussion). The Society of Jesus, then and now, has been closely associated with education based on rigorous and independent scholarship. Mulligan's 'fearful Jesuit' may also pick up on the dreaded reputation of Jesuits as interlocutors.

Correction/Interjection

2008-09-21T09:16:00.001-07:00

-Just needed to jump in here for a minute on Mike's comments. In coming up with a form for this production blog, we thought it would be interesting to use some of my original black&white cartoons with Mike's red ink circles to indicate talking points. These earlier drawings are pretty much how Josh and Mike see them before second edits and re-adjustments to the font size, but I think it gives blog-readers a taste of how the thing is made.

The latin text in this balloon bears a typo and should read "introibo ad altare dei." We've caught it since, but some of these scans from the original art will still hold evidence of earlier mistakes. I'm not a practicing catholic, but all I can think of adding here is, "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

-Rob

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 7

2008-09-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

[cf. Gabler 3:5, 1922 3:5]

Let's get right to what you need. Mulligan is tawkin' Latin. What he's saying translates as: "I will go up to God's altar." More pertinently, it was one of the first things the priest said at the beginning of the Catholic mass, back when the Catholic mass was said in Latin.

So yes, Mulligan's giving a little parody of the mass, and yes, this is a wicked and kinda funny thing to do.

I think it's worth noting a few points of cultural context. 1) the "introibo" would not have been an obscure phrase to any Catholic reader of Ulysses in 1922, or up to the end of the Latin mass in the 1960's. This would have been as familiar as "play ball!" to a baseball fan. 2) to a Catholic audience, in 1904 or 1922, this is sacrilege. And what follows is much worse.

What we're supposed to think of this is a little hard to say. What Joyce thinks of it we don't know, but (within the fourth wall) what Stephen thinks of it, we'll see later. Joyce was an unbeliever, but the Catholicism was so deeply dyed into him, that he was really more Catholic than the Catholics. The groundwork is all so elaborately laid out in *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* that it seems superfluous to talk any more about it, but I'll say for the first time of many times, that Joyce was not Stephen. it can be useful to forget that Joyce was not Stephen, but still and forever, they are not the same.

Finally, remember Mulligan is the usurper. How does this bit of mockery add to that reputation?

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 6

2008-09-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

[cf. Gabler 3:2; 1922 3:2]

Having had the bird's eye view in the last frame, we pull in to see what Mulligan is carrying: "a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." On one level, a man is simply about to shave. But Joyce's careful syntax invites a deeper dive. Mulligan is about to begin chanting the opening prayer of the Catholic mass, and the visual cues Robert's been giving us have primed us to see him as a kind of priest. But here, for the moment, we get to look at Mulligan's tools: a mirror, and a razor. The razor cuts and makes distinctions--hair from skin, mostly (analysis?). The mirror reflects an image, sends back to its viewer the appearance of a person where before there had only been a disembodied experience of impressions and thoughts (synthesis?). [And yes, I'm thinking about Jacques Lacan and his "mirror stage" here.] Neither the mirror nor the razor creates anything really new. This is the opposite of what is supposed to happen during a real mass, when the priest uses his tools and the magic of transubstantiation to bring the body and blood of Christ to the table.

Yeah, I'm pushing it a little hard here, but I do think we're meant to see Mulligan as energetic and vital, but also as bankrupt, as barren, as a parasite. Dedalus is weak and ineffectual, but he has the creative vitality and inner strength that Mulligan lacks.

PS: It's really hard for me to see this book the way new readers see it. It's impossible to 'unlearn' everything I know about these characters and their fictional city. I will try to be careful to respect the virginity of new readers and not give too much away or base readings on things a new reader can't possibly know (because they haven't come up in the book yet). ... but I'm going to fail. I know that already.

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 5

2008-09-11T18:17:00.003-07:00

Rob's drawing gives us an intriguing birds-eye view that conveys at least two important pieces of information: a) we're out in the middle of nowhere, and b) Mulligan is putting on a show without an audience. Not having an audience is intolerable for Mulligan, so he will shortly summon Stephen Dedalus to serve as an altar boy to his perverse shaving mass.

Let us say something obvious. Living in an unheated Napoleonic fortification, 7 1/2 miles from the center of town as the crow flies, is not a practical decision.
It's exactly the sort of decision that a bunch of 20-something guys make. Before they get girlfriends. Or boyfriends. And Mulligan is totally living the dream, making the most of his tower by the sea--or he's trying to.

And one more obvious thing--there's a practical reason Mulligan comes to the top of the tower to shave. It's very dark and smoky in the living quarters below, not to mention the heady aroma of one rather unclean Dedalus (more on that later) and a sleeping Englishman.

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 4

2008-09-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

Mulligan has emerged from the staircase, and we spend a few moments, a few images, getting our bearings on the top of the tower. I'll say more about the little doorway in a future post, but for now, I'm spending a moment on Mulligan's robe. You can't tell from this black & white, but he's wearing a yellow robe--a yellow dressinggown.

Why yellow? Don Gifford & Bob Seidman's Ulysses Annotated might be useful here (as it is throughout the journey. Professor Gifford cites a volume on Christian symbolism: "Yellow is sometimes used to suggest infernal light, degradation, jealousy, treason, and deceit. Thus, the traitor Judas is frequently painted in a garment of dingy yellow (I've been trying to get that picture--which is an image of "The Kiss of Judas" by Giotto-- see below.

I've always thought Mulligan gets a bad rap... and I identify with him in a way. Rather, that whatever it is that makes him so repellent to Stephen must happen "off camera"... in this chapter, he seems a little glib, but more sensible than Stephen. And he's funny...

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 3

2008-09-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

[cf. Gabler 3:1]

What if Joyce started off with "Buck Mulligan was stately and plump. He came from the stairhead, bearing..."? It sounds a little simpler that way, more American, a little more Dashiell Hammett or Hemingway. But he didn't.

We'll see that Joyce almost always values sound and associative nuance over simplicity. [And by "associative nuance" I mean that jamming the adjectives "stately" & "plump" directly up against their referent, Buck, he's invoking the old Homeric epithet style, like "gray-eyed Athena" or "resourceful Odysseus."]

Another effect of this not-so-strange-but-still-distinctive beginning is that, compared to the Americanish alternative, the narrator is in a less visible position. To say "Buck Mulligan was..." is to put a narrating storyteller clearly on the stage; it draws a frame around the events. Putting "stately" first puts us more inside the frame.

And about "stately." It's not a strange word, not an unapproachable word, not an unfamiliar word... but it calls just enough attention to itself to stand off the page a little bit. Joyce's narration always seems normal at first glance in these early chapters, but the more weight you put on it, the more you see how it presages the big weirdness that comes later. The question of "who's talking" is never as cut & dry as it seems.

So Mulligan is stately and plump. We'll meet Stephen in a minute, who is skinny and nervous. If we were casting Mulligan, we'd need someone a little officious, with a touch of wickedness and a sharp wit, a little aristocratic, a little paunchy, someone not entirely in control of their appetites but who's comfortable with that.... a young John Malkovitch, perhaps?

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 2

2008-08-28T18:27:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-25T18:47:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-08-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-08-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

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.

What's the real beginning?

2008-06-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

So the big underlying question here with an established text released in serialized form is, "where to start?"

There are really huge debates to be had here in regard to the definitive text but, according to my assessment it's the 1922 edition of Joyce's work that is most clearly now a part f the public domain and so that was the place to go for my sources.

I'm treading lightly on subjects like this, for obvious reasons, but it seems clear to me that one of the points of current public domain and fair usage laws has something to do with allowing artists to respond to earlier works of art that have, through history and reader involvement, wormed their way into the public consciousness. Joyce's work is iconic. Hans Gabler's is wonderfully, richly-researched and academically exhaustive, a great boon to the readers wishing to understand a text that has had many disturbing permutations, some of them cased by the author himself. But Gabler did not reinvent the novel and it has lived as an iconic piece of fiction for many, many decades before he took up the task of "correcting" it. I'm happy for the things his research has taught me about the novel, but, looking at his contribution as a uniquely new work of art, and therefore re-packaging the existing public domain laws so that the copyright starts over again in 1984 with this "corrected" text completely ignores the life this book has already enjoyed as an individual artistic statement.

There are numerous problems with the 1922 text. That's clear. But this is how the work came into the world, "warts and all," and this seems the best text to represent it's effects on us all as readers.

To what end?

2008-06-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

So from that first conversation in The Bards' Irish Pub two years ago the idea grew into a series of layout sketches for how the novel could be presented visually in a form like comics. The idea of webcomics was still off of my artistic radar then, so the question, after doing some pages and concluding that such an adaptation might be possible, hell, even challenging and exciting to do was, of course, to what end?

Here's some of the major strikes against such a project;

1)It is an impossibly over-sized graphic novel.

2)The skips and irregular page count of it's narrative makes chapter-based monthly release impossible in print.

3)I had decided against funny animals, so syndicated newspapers were out of the question.

Discussing it with a friend, determining for myself that it might be indeed possible, and going through the time of trying to see how it could look on paper left me with no clear outlet for such a project. I couldn't think of any way in which it could be something other than a series of drawings in my sketchbook.

Until Bloomsday last year.

I was looking at webcomics for the first time last year and the idea of alternative distribution methods through cellphones and other hand-held devices. Stuff that was completely new to me at the time, and I was just kind of dragging my toe in the end of the pool wondering if the water was warm enough to jump into. I took a couple of project ideas I had going on at the time and started to re-design them for the web and the cellphone.

Then the local alt-paper in town, Philadelphia's CityPaper, had ads up for an "all comics issue" that my wife insisted I participate in. ULYSSES "SEEN" appeared there, almost as a joke, and received some good attention. Enough to make me try to figure out a way to package the project.

"The Mockery of It..."

2008-06-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

On the surface it seems a fairly frivolous idea, I suppose. Make a comics version of a novel instantly recognizable but, to most people, completely oblique and difficult to read.

Hell, maybe even use funny animals to make the character types more distinctive. People love funny animals, right?

But I take Joyce, and comics, pretty seriously and it became clear that any respectable adaptation of that one thing I love into that other form which I love equally was, in fact, serious business.

So Bloom would not be a bunny.

On a Dare...

2008-06-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

The first time I tried to read ULYSSES I was struck by how comical the dialogue was and how very distinct, yet still very hidden the narrative voice could be from chapter to chapter. This is years ago mind you, well before I had any thoughts of making something like this into a comic and well before comics as an art form could ever accommodate such a peculiar thing. Joyce's text, for Joyce lovers at least, can not be abridged nor turned into some two hour block-buster movie (some have tried this, of course, and some of them might well disagree with me on this point, but it seems, or seemed to me then, that people read Joyce for the language and are immediately and justifiably insulted by anyone, no matter how well-intending, who might come off as making a Reader's Digest version of the novel).

So for a while there we played with the idea of film. Hell, nobody want to actually do all that drawing and neither my friend nor I were filmmakers, so this was relatively safe territory. i started to wonder what the novel might look like if one took the time to separate the spoken dialogues from the internal ones and used this to construct a screenplay. Certainly that's a big enough task on it's own, but the charming and engaging quality of Joyce's character's sparkles in the dialogue. The idea was that, "yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but if the director, actors and cinematographer of such a film were fans of the novel, could they find ways to evidence some of the subtleties of the work into the nuances of film through lighting expression, camera angle and emotional expression?"

I played with this idea for a least another beer or two (it was a good one, frankly. Imagine making a film that doesn't so much interpret the novel as use "real time" to support it's factual nature and allow the actors to search for and eventually decided subtext through small action) and, eventually, said no. I brought it back to the table for my cartoonist friend and I by claiming, "comics are the only medium capable of rendering the plasticity of time and weight of visual symbol that would make the novel work in ant other form."

We do actually talk like that in bars. I know, it's kinda pathetic, but we're each married these days, so acting like a geek in front of people isn't such a dilemma, and somehow talking this way over beers is much less geeky than over coffee at a Starbucks'.

So we ordered a couple more beers and he dared me to make it work in comics.

Shit.

Getting Started...

2008-06-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

While I've kept many working journals over the years, this is the first one I've ever thought about doing in an on-line environment. Blogs, like typing, are relatively new to my working method, so I hope people will bare with me as try keeping track of what could very well be the next ten years of studio production.
The idea for doing a webcomic of James Joyce's ULYSSES, like many other ideas in personal and professional life, was born in a bar. Two years ago I and another cartoonist attended the Rosenbach Museum's Bloomsday reading here in Philadelphia and, just around the corner, was my own neighborhood bar of the time, The Bards' Irish Pub. I'd been a fan of the novel for years and, like most people I know, tried reading it five or six ties before finally making it through. It is, without exception, the most difficult novel to read the first time that you'll ever want to read again and again. My friend, a fan of the book who had sheepishly admitted to not having made through his first time reading yet, started talking about how difficult, how intentionally oblique, Joyce was in the text and claimed that he got a much more pleasurable, and easier, experience of the novel from hearing it read aloud than he did by doing it on his own.
I had to agree. ULYSSES is, quite intentionally, a monster.
If hearing the inflection of other voices in this text does in fact make the reading any easier than, I started to wonder with my cartoonist friend, what would it be like to see the events of the novel acted out?
So, deciding that the day was too hot to go back and listen reading as elliptical or difficult as those from "Circe" or "Oxen of the Sun," we decided to order a couple of more beers and sit in a nice dark, air-conditioned bar and talk about how ULYSSES might look as a comicbook.