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Re-Joyce: It's Bloomsday
Published: 6/16/2012 12:00 AM
Last Modified: 6/15/2012 5:07 PM


A first-edition copy of James Joyce's "Ulysses" can cost as much as $65,000. Cheaper editions are, fortunately, also available.....

Today is the day that James Joyce fans and scholars have been anticipating for years.

It’s not simply because it’s June 16 – or, as Joyceans prefer to call it, “Bloomsday,” in honor of Leopold Bloom, one of the main characters in Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which takes place over the course of June 16, 1904 – a date chosen to commemorate the author’s first date with the woman he was marry.

No, this year’s celebration is likely to be a little more festive than previous ones because as of Jan. 1, the copyright on Joyce’s published works in the European Union expired.

The reason this is a cause for rejoicing and re-Joyce-ing (!) is because the estate of James Joyce, primarily in the person of the author’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, is notorious for its extremely adversarial approach to defending what it perceives as any abuse of its copyright.

The estate has objected to everything from public readings from Joyce’s “Ulysses” during Bloomsday to the publication of a biography of Joyce’s daughter Lucia, which would have quoted from her letters.
The Joyce estate’s stance has been aimed primarily at the academic community – the “professors” whom James Joyce promised would be kept busy for centuries sussing out all the linguistic tricks and metaphorical meanings that fill “Ulysses” and overwhelm “Finnegans Wake.”

It’s that reputation for difficulty that put a lot of non-academics off from ever considering opening up a copy of “Ulysses” and reading much farther than the description of Stately, plump Buck Mulligan carrying his shaving utensils.

In the New Yorker magazine’s Book Blog, Sean Latham, a Professor of English at the University of Tulsa who edits the James Joyce Quarterly, said, “I already know there are several projects that are planning to produce editions of (Joyce’s) letters. We have three volumes of letters right now. Once these projects are complete, it’s going to increase to something like seven. These are letters that Stephen had adamantly refused to publish, so their publication is going to be really important for Joyce scholarship. We’ll have all kinds of stories that we can finally tell about Joyce and his life that we couldn’t tell before.”

Latham, who will be in Dublin for Bloomsday, also said that the adversarial attitude of the Joyce estate might not have deterred scholars from pursuing their researches, but added, “I know of projects that have had to change because of (the estate’s) intervention. But this is something that, if you want to do this with your life, and you believe passionately in it, you’re going to find a way to do it, even if its not exactly the way you intended.”

One person who has been finding a way of exploring Joyce’s most famous work in his own way is Robert Berry, an artist who is turning “Ulysses” into a graphic novel, portions of which can be read at the website “Ulysses Seen.”

“Ulysses” is the first project of a company Berry and his colleague formed called “Throwaway Horse,” that seeks to turn modernist literature into somewhat more accessible formats.

“Ulysses” was chosen at the lead project because, according to the website:

“The Throwaway Horse members love 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 scatological, 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.”

But the undertaking itself is epic. Berry has completed about 125 pages and told Publishers Weekly he expects it will take a decade to produce a complete “Ulysses” in graphic novel form.

Right now, two of book’s chapters, or “Episodes,” as Joyce called them, are done – the first, “Telemachus,” and the fourth, “Calypso,” which introduces Bloom. Each chapter also comes with a reader’s guide.

And Berry’s work does help get one into what is going on in “Ulysses,” turning dense pages of Joyce’s prose into clear evocative images. It won’t replace actually reading the book in all its enthralling and maddening glory. But it may give readers enough of a taste of the whole to want immerse themselves in Joyce’s world and Bloom’s day.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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