Introducing Robert Berry's "Aeolus"

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• Introducing Robert Berry's "Aeolus"
• Paul K. Saint-Amour (bio)

A diurnal city epic written in multiple styles and assembled by many hands: the daily newspaper is one of Ulysses's great sponsors, as important to the form of Joyce's book as the Odyssey is to its narrative architecture. In both its form and its setting, "Aeolus" is where Ulysses most openly acknowledges its debt to the daily news. Yet for all the episode's variety—its headings and set pieces in different idioms, its encyclopedic range of rhetorical devices—"Aeolus" can't compete with the sheer number of forms and microgenres found in your typical early-twentieth-century metropolitan paper. Leopold Bloom half acknowledges this fact when he thinks, under the heading "HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT," "It's the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the official gazette"; he goes on to supply a mental list of the kinds of side features that are mostly missing from "Aeolus": "Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story" (U 7.84, 89-90, 94).

Like a lot of kids, I started reading the newspaper at the comics page and rarely got much farther. Faced with "Aeolus," my child self would have wondered what good a newspaper was without cartoons. As an adult reader of Ulysses, though, I find it hard to imagine the text of Joyce's episode suddenly making way for Phil Blake's art nouveau political cartoons as they appeared in the Weekly Freeman from 1898 to 1905. "Aeolus" is a hat-tip to the newspaper, not a scrapbook of it.

But now my friend and fellow Joyce instructor, Rob Berry, the artist behind ULYSSES "seen," is offering readers of this journal something better than "Aeolus" with comics. It's "Aeolus" as comic, starting with a set of six black-and-white strips (corresponding to Monday thru Saturday) and culminating in a full-color Sunday funnies page. In the sets of "Aeolus" comics that begin with the present issue, you'll find Berry's drawings beautifully echoing the wood-engraved technique used in late-nineteenth-century cartoons. The strip uses familiar comics conventions—speech balloons, thought bubbles, and rectangular narratorial captions—that developed in the early twentieth century. As "Aeolus" progresses, you'll notice Berry stretching and tweaking these conventions to accommodate the ambiguous zones of discourse in the text. You'll notice, too, how his style changes for the Sunday strip, swapping out the wood-engraving look for the raised-metal style that prevailed in comic strips after 1910. Berry's project, like Joyce's, is alive to how subtle anachronisms invite us to re-engage with history, whether it be the history of a medium or of the community whose life it documents. [End Page 143]

Paul K. Saint-Amour University of Pennsylvania Paul K. Saint-Amour

PAUL K. SAINT-AMOUR is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. He has served as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. He edited the collection Modernism and Copyright and co-edits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes series at the Columbia University Press.

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