Joycean Illustrations Abound

Shockingly, Ulysses has been in the news quite a bit lately, and not even just the Nerd News that I've been following to bring you these posts! The very cool and much read Apple news (which as I recently learned is completely dominating all tech news) has recently been featuring a story about Ulysses Seen, an online graphic novel version of Ulysses, drawn by Robert Berry. iPad was in the process of developing a Ulysses Seen app, but this picture:

was deemed inappropriate and Apple attempted to censor Berry's graphic novel - an outrageous throwback to when Ulysses was first taken to court for obscenity almost a century ago. Luckily, Berry and Ulysses Seen prevailed, and the image remains in the app. All this caused quite a fuss, though I will admit, much more in the iPad than the Joycean community!

The less-known but equally exciting Joyce imaging being produced right now is Stephen Crowe's illustration of Finnegans Wake at Wake in Progress. He is putting together some amazing work, choosing to highlight certain passages of the book in a true Joycean manner, utilizing different styles for each image. The opening line of the book evokes medieval manuscripts:

This is actually a very interesting choice, illuminating the "r" of "riverrun" - especially choosing to use the capital letter. If you only know one thing about Finnegans Wake (okay, two things, since everyone knows it's long and nearly incomprehensible!) it's that the book begins mid-sentence with a lowercase letter and ends mid-sentence with no punctuation, serving as an invitation to begin the story again, and reinforcing the idea of the textual rivverrun - the flow of words in a continually moving stream despite the book's being set in print. In recreating the medieval illuminated manuscript, Crowe is directly stepping away from this feature of the text, but is interestingly evoking the "Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses, where the history of the English language is recreated through the twinning of text and time: as the text flows from page to page, the language subtly shifts from the Old English ("deshil holles eamus") that begins the chapter, to Middle English ("rising with swire ywimpled"), through to modern slang ("who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds?"). Crowe then moves on to much more modern, industrial images, following the "Oxen of the Sun" language shift:

In another image, Crowe focuses on creative inking to intertwine text and image, as the words of Finnegans Wake morph into both poem and and visual art: the movement of text as seen in the English words, and the use of the non-Latin based characters to create the ground, smokestack and tree:

His blog has many more wonderful images, both for readers of the Wake and for any art enthusiast! A lot of these would look wonderful on a wall, I think, though he unfortunately doesn't have a store (yet). Not to worry - Postertext, which makes posters using the text of famous books (Pride and Prejudice, Metamorphosis, Peter Pan...) and featuring a silhouetted image, has just released a Ulysses poster:

Thanks, world, for making all of this wonderful art! But maybe put the brakes on a bit until I move into a house with more wall space. 

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner, along with Carol Schloss, is arguably one of the most famous Joyce critics of the 20th century. Now Carol Schloss' story is unbelievably exciting. Throughout the writing process and publication of her book on Joyce's daughter (Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake), she was constantly intimidated and threatened by Stephen Joyce, James Joyce's grandson. This is not at all unusual - my professor once told me that you couldn't consider yourself a Joyce scholar without having faced the wrath of this man. He himself had received an angry fax, which we all tried to encourage him to frame and put up in his office. But when Stephen Joyce insisted that Carol Schloss delete significant material from her book (pretty much anything that James or Lucia had written to each other), she fought back, took him to court, and won. To me, this is tops in Joycean thrills.

In comparison, I always found Hugh Kenner useful and interesting in his criticism (he alone could have gotten me through every single modernism class with his work on Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and so many more) but I always imagined a disappointingly boring professor who with his middle-class privilege and tenure, was able to churn out these books and be instantly well-received. Some parts of my image are depressingly true - he is a strong social conservative, against abortion, gay rights and feminism. Shockingly, I discovered today that not only does he look like this:

...but he has a pretty good story under his belt! As it turns out, even in the 40's, Kenner had to go to great lengths to even get a copy of the book he became so famous for writing on. Jeet Heer, in an article written just after Kenner's death, writes:

More contemporary books were not only disdained, they were often forbidden by the government...One modern masterpiece that Kenner did have access to was Joyce's Finnegans Wake, tolerated because it was deemed incomprehensible. 

Excited by Wake, Kenner discovered that Joyce's Ulysses, otherwise verboten in Canada, could be found in the restricted access section of the University of Toronto library. However, in order to take a look at the illicit text, Kenner needed to secure two letters of reference: one from a religious authority and one from a medical doctor. Kenner knew a priest who could vouch for his morals, but, unfortunately, was not able to find an MD who could attest that reading Joyce would not corrupt him. Ultimately, Kenner had a family friend, a Jesuit priest, smuggle into Canada a copy of the greatest novel of the 20th century. 

Looking at my bookshelf, with numerous copies of Ulysses and other Joyce materials (see the banner at the top of the page!), it's shocking to think that I probably couldn't have read this book had I been studying 50 years earlier (I would be done for when it came to the priest's recommendation). Every once in a while, banned books cases crop up in Canada, but those where a book is banned from a library branch, a private school, or a certain store. I can barely imagine what it would be like to so badly want to read a book and truly not be able to get a copy.

So good for you, Kenner. Not only did you have to read Finnegans Wake FIRST, but you cared enough about Joyce to really put in the effort. And you have awesome hair.