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Reviewed by:
  • The Echo is Where by Peter O’Brien
  • Kaitlin Thurlow (bio)
THE ECHO IS WHERE, by Peter O’Brien. Canada: Carbon Publishers, 2019. 104 pp. See <https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/62455581/the-echo-is-where-peter-obrien-2019>.

In The Echo Is Where, Peter O’Brien assembles an eclectic group of Joycean enthusiasts and non-Joyceans to compose essays to accompany a number of his textual illustrations of Finnegans Wake. This collection of forty-three catalog texts was produced “in honour and celebration of the 80th anniversary” of the publication of the novel (4). Joyce’s text is overlaid with O’Brien’s handwritten felt pen markings, watercolor brushwork, and carefully rendered ink drawings and brought together in one unified volume, subtitled LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE. O’Brien started with the intention to create “a form of intellectual folk art” (6), and this ambitious project takes many forms to fulfill his ambition. Parsing through the selection of pages included in the catalog (126–68), it becomes at times marginalia, illuminated manuscript, a text-image collage, or a portmanteau. For each essay, participants were invited to offer their personal expertise and sometimes participate in the creation of the page. Responders, who range in age “from 22 to 105” (5) and hail from around the world are academics, artists, writers, professors, students, and some just “innocent bystanders” (104). The author, who has “nine brothers and sisters and twelve step-brothers and–sisters, and an almost limitless number of nieces, nephews, cousins” is a man accustomed to crowd-sourcing, adding for good measure—“There are a lot of ill shaped, meandering and conflicting stories in a family that size” (101).

Many commentators are more attuned to the visual or plastic nature of the work and liken it to other historical art forms such as Akram Pedramnia who compares it to Persian miniature painting (74). O’Brien does take a cue from narrative art genres when he plays with the way text contrasts with floating shapes, layers of space, and contrasting scale (such as the carefully rendered bowler hat) and when he keeps to the enclosed frame of the page (11). Alice Adelkind offers another rich image, describing O’Brien’s work as “glossing and [End Page 218] embroidering upon Finnegans Wake” (8), which calls to mind medieval artisans attending to vellum and parchment manuscripts or embellishing a fine piece of Irish linen with gilded thread.

At times, O’Brien parses through Joyce’s text with a magnifying lens and veers into the margins with meta-commentary. This is where his work most resembles marginalia. In the essay, “Annotate This: On Marginalia,” Ed Simon describes how marginalia “exist(s) as the material result of a reader having grappled with literature.”1 It can be the private musings and personal notations or “the inscrutable cipher known only to its creator,” he comments. In The Echo Is Where, however, the notes and illustrations are not a private conversation hidden within the pages of an enclosed book; instead they are laid bare for the viewer to see. This materiality becomes a new personal statement like the one Simon describes. Marginalia, Simon notes, “is artifact, evidence, and detritus, the remainder of what’s left over after a fiery mind has immolated the candle of the text.”

Some essays in this collection call attention to Joyce’s linguistic puzzles lurking within each page. It is indeed, as Bob Shantz describes, a “word saturated project” (80). Peter Quadrino, who hosts the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, Texas, is attuned to close reading a text when he observes, “[T]o read a page is to jot Joyce’s polyglot puns in the margins” (76). This is the spirit of curiosity that invites Wake enthusiasts to trudge forth and continue reading and re-reading Joyce’s oeuvre in search of linguistic treasures.

Denis Boyles reminds us that many have been “preoccupied and moved to discover meaning in the 1939 book” (20) and have been inspired to do so in various genres such as film, graphic design, and hypertextual digital projects. O’Brien, as an artist and writer, ventures to straddle multiple disciplines. Some...

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