Introducing Robert Berry and ULYSSES “seen”

I first met Rob Berry in the fall of 2007. I was in the last few weeks of my job at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, where, among many other roles, I was the unofficial “resident Joycean.” This meant that when people called with ideas for strange Joyce projects, they were forwarded to me. And I spoke to pretty much all of them, because you never know . . .

Rob pitched me on the idea of adapting Ulysses into a comic—not for print, but for people to read on their phones. I told him he was crazy. It was one of the weirdest ideas I had heard. There were many reasons it was a bad idea, just starting with the fact that I had never heard of people reading comics on phones, not to mention the sheer scale of the project, not to mention the fact that it seemed completely unmarketable and unfundable.

Then I looked at his drawings for “Telemachus.” It gave me something new. I saw Stephen and Mulligan moving around the top of the Martello Tower, and the high wall of the parapet was drawn to make the scene look a little like gladiators in an arena. And as we talked about the full scope of the project, the possibilities of comics as a way to represent Ulysses seemed enormous. “How else could you represent ‘Circe,’” I remember thinking.

I had some misgivings. My own reading of Ulysses turns upon Joyce’s undermining of the literary concept of “character”—that his characters are not stable, discrete, airtight vessels of thoughts and experiences, and their individual discreteness or “integrity” is always eroding before your eyes. Characters think each others’ thoughts, share each others’ dreams, and bleed into the narrative voice. The visual conventions of comics dictate clear distinctions between narration, dialogue, and internal thought—distinctions that Joyce gleefully confounds. I also had come of age as a Joycean with the idea that he was not a “visual” author—so how could you use this visual format?

And yet. ULYSSES “seen” has given thousands of people a way in to Joyce’s masterpiece. It has created many new readers, emboldened people who felt they could never make it through, and provoked others into clarifying what they think is really happening (if such ideas are even possible) in the passages we have adapted.

With these new drawings, based on the “Penelope” episode, Rob is (again) taking some surprising and counter-intuitive risks. Molly Bloom has always been a provocateur (provocateuse?), a flashpoint for readers, who have read her in wildly different ways—a toxic and retrograde amalgam of gender stereotypes, or a feminist hero, or somewhere in between.

Rob’s Molly captures this ambivalence, I think, in ways that are at the same time hilarious and unsettling. Molly is a pin-up, a giantess, a woman comfortable in her body and its power, simultaneously posed and un-posed, self-consciously performing for a male gaze (think of the photograph Bloom shows off in the cabman’s shelter), but also “natural,” as you might imagine Molly Bloom in the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street. Like ULYSSES “seen,” it is not intended as a translation, but rather as a provocation, that can bring some of the issues at the heart of the great book into view.