'Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflictedon the documents or document' (FW 107)
It's a bad sign when you need to explain a joke, but my mum has no idea what I was going on about when I put together this picture, so here is the what, who and why of it and perhaps later I'll describe the how, because I have a nerdly interest in process.
The origin of this picture was my attempt to read the opening passage of Finnegans Wake to my daughter (16 months) in my excitement about receiving a copy of Finn Fordham's excellent new edition, published by Oxford World Classics. I've been a member of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group at the University of Glasgow for the past five years. I can't claim to understand the Wake very well, but discussing it with colleagues, students and interested parties from across Glasgow has been a real joy.
My daughter, however, had no patience with Joyce and I can't afford a copy of Stacey Herbert's unscrupulous and scandalous edition of The Cats of Copenhagen (a story Joyce wrote in a letter for his grandson). She demanded that we read Room on the Broom, a children's poem by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Perhaps I'll write a post about why Room on the Broom is so good at a later date, but Donaldson and Scheffler are best known for their collaboration on The Gruffalo. Since I now inhabit the twitterverse, I posted a tweet about my daughter's rejection of the Wake and couldn't help adding that Scheffler should now turn his attention to illustrating it.
In the way of things, I received a reply about this from @tombonnick at nosy crow books, who actually works with Scheffler and it started me thinking about what it would look like if Scheffler did illustrate Joyce. The obvious place to start, it seemed to me, would be one of the two tellings of fables that Joyce works into the Wake. Aesop's story about the Fox and Grapes makes its way into the Wake as the Mookse and the Gripes in Book 1 Chapter 6; and there is a version of the Ant and the Grasshopper (who become the Ondt and the Gracehoper) in Book 3 Chapter 1.
As it happens, we read the Mookse and the Gripes last year in the Reading Group and I have been mulling over the way in which Joyce presents it as an instructive lecture from a grumpy schoolmaster to a group of badly behaved boys ('and you, Bruno Nowlan, take your tongue out of your inkpot!') ever since. (I've been wondering about turning this into the subject of a lecture for my course on Joyce, but that's another story.) One characteristic of Joyce's writing in the Wake is the way in which he combines different languages, stories, and points of literary reference. He does this at the level of story-telling, within sentences and, punningly, within individual 'portmanteau' words too.
So, the elements floating around in the Mookse and the Gripes start with Aesop's story about a fox who first covets some grapes hanging from a tree and then consoles himself by declaring that they must be sour anyway. Into this Joyce folds a series of allusions to Pope Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear), who was not just the only English pope (so far), but also managed to grant Henry II rule over Ireland in his papal bull Laudabiliter (Joyce had made fun of this in Ulysses). And finally (for my purposes) he also used this section of Finnegans Wake to take a crack at P. Wyndham Lewis, who had criticised Joyce in Time and Western Man. Amongst other things, Lewis accused Joyce of having ‘painful preoccupation with the exact place of things’ and crowed mistakenly over what he thought were errors of style in Joyce's writing (see how Hugh Kenner debunks this in Joyce's Voices). In retaliation, Joyce built laboured puns about time and space into the pedantry of his narrator ('eins within a space' 'my spatial inexshellsis' etc.)
So those are the elements that I tried to combine in my version. I based the image upon the well-known encounter between the Gruffalo and the Mouse (I'm using this image from the internet which is poor resolution, because it's there on the net and I don't want to violate any copyright by scanning a fresh image directly from the book; I'm happy to replace this image or remove it.).
Then I used this image of Wyndham Lewis (publicly available through wikipedia), cross-referencing it with some other pictures:
And trawled the net for images of papal costumes (it's probably direly inaccurate).
This image of Joyce is widely available on the internet (again, I'm happy to take replace it, if it violates someone's copyright):
The idea of the final image was a tribute to both Scheffler and Joyce through a Wakean mashup of all these elements. Next post (when I get a chance) - how i dun it.
