Alfonso Zapico, James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner
the uncreated comics of my race
A now eight-year-old tradition at johnpistelli.com has been my annual Bloomsday post. Previous entries include my appreciation of Mina Loy’s extraordinary poem, “Joyce’s Ulysses”; my consideration of literary theorist Leo Bersani’s iconoclastic essay, “Against Ulysses”; my look at Carl Jung’s exasperated psychoanalysis of Ulysses; my comparison of Ulysses to modernism’s other great day-in-the-life novel, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; my review of Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography, James Joyce; an essay on Dubliners, an essay on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, finally, my centenary essay of last year on Ulysses itself.
This year, I have been too busy with other projects to do any original Joycean research, unfortunately, but I do have in reserve a book review that has before today only appeared in the Summer 2016 print edition of Rain Taxi. It’s not only a review of a comics biography of Joyce but also includes some thoughts about Joyce’s relation to comics—about the intersection of high modernism and popular culture that may amuse readers of my serialized novel Major Arcana. Please enjoy!
What would James Joyce have thought about comics? Despite his highbrow reputation, Joyce was not hostile to popular culture; on the contrary, he drew on its vitality for his own literary experiments and even attempted to participate in its spread, as when he opened Ireland’s first cinema in 1909. Joyce’s own comics reading is in evidence in Finnegans Wake, for several sequences of which he borrowed the personae of the comic strip Mutt and Jeff to dramatize the conflict between the brothers Shaun and Shem.
And comics in its turn has embraced Joyce to a perhaps surprising extent. Some of the most important recent innovators of the comics medium have cited Joyce as an influence (e.g., Chris Ware and Alan Moore), while Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home borrows structures, rhythms, and motifs from both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Joyce even appears as a character in Peter Milligan’s surreal 1990s Vertigo series Shade the Changing Man; the eponymous hero brings Joyce, along with Hemingway, into the present, where Milligan poignantly shows him as he reads the last pages of Richard Ellmann’s landmark 1959 biography James Joyce in a bookstore and quietly thanks his wife Nora for not subjecting him to a priest’s attendance on his deathbed.
That particular detail is not found in this comics biography of Joyce by the Spanish cartoonist Alfonso Zapico, a book that won Spain’s National Prize for Comics and that was well-received in Ireland before being published in the U.S. in May 2016 in advance of Bloomsday. The cover copy touts Zapico’s experiential style of historical inquiry: “He spent months in Dublin and Joyce’s other home cities researching this book.” The cartoonist’s sensory immersion in the landscapes of Joyce’s life lends this Portrait of a Dubliner its visual authority: the sordid charm of turn-of-the-century Dublin, the civilized cosmopolitanism of Trieste at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the modernist ebullience of interwar Paris are all portrayed vividly in Zapico’s lively gestural style of freehand drawing and ink-wash shading.
The biography’s overall visual mode is on the cartoonish side of realism, with enough verisimilitude to be historically convincing and enough exaggeration to lend speed and comedy to his narrative. Joyce’s life—a stubborn flight from all restriction that led him into bankruptcy and alcoholism even as it allowed him to create extraordinarily original literary works—is well-served by Zapico’s almost caricatural art, since Joyce’s own outsize personality had something of the cartoonish about it.
Zapico follows Joyce from his downwardly-mobile family in Dublin to his wanderings across Europe with his beloved Nora Barnacle, not hesitating to show Joyce’s incorrigible irresponsibility, as he sponges from his family, wastes his scant funds on alcoholic binges, and fails at one zany money-making scheme after another. But Zapico also makes clear that Joyce’s intransigent individualism, so destructive in some areas of his life (finances, health, family), also enabled him to maintain his artistic integrity during long years of poverty, neglect, and censorship.
Joyce spent nearly a decade trying to get the relatively tame Dubliners into print, and Ulysses—many orders of magnitude more difficult and, by the standards of the time, more obscene than the early story collection—likewise proved an ordeal. In the end, Joyce was rescued by a series of benefactors, most notably Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach—the latter of whom Joyce repaid with disregard and ingratitude, which Zapico characterizes forthrightly as “unfair, selfish behavior” (196).
All in all, Zapico offers a nuanced portrayal of Joyce, one that declines to moralize even as it shows the author at his worst. James Joyce ultimately suggests that the man’s faults were inseparable from his virtues: had he been less selfish toward his family and friends, he might not have given the world Ulysses.
What are this graphic biography’s own faults and virtues? Zapico’s readers will get very little sense of Joyce’s literary achievement from this book. While such concepts as stream-of-consciousness narration are mentioned, the exact nature of Joyce’s departures from tradition goes mostly undiscussed. Literary criticism is a difficult genre for comics to handle, but Zapico’s neglect of literature is an odd choice—Joyce’s writing is surely the only reason anyone would be interested in his life. Zapico’s comics storytelling is occasionally staid and almost textbook-like, with his panels serving to illustrate verbose informative captions.
By contrast, the best moments in James Joyce come when Zapico stops narrating and lets dialogue and pictures tell the story: in one brief scene, Joyce, toward the end of his life and the start of World War II, joins a group of French soldiers in singing La Marseillaise. This simple page should save us reams of analysis of Joyce’s complicated politics, as it shows in one gesture the apparently aloof and apolitical modernist for the disappointed Romantic liberal he was at heart. Other such moments of dialogue and action—most of them retelling the anecdotal highlights of Ellmann’s biography, Zapico’s main source—make this book a vibrant introduction to Joyce and his times. Perhaps because of the similarities between Spain and Ireland as countries subject to clerical repression, Zapico is especially good on Joyce’s political and historical context.
While Zapico neglects the specifics of Joyce’s art, and cannot be said to innovate artistically himself, the story he tells is a model of artistic independence in times of crisis. For that reason alone, Joyce might well have admired this particular comic book.