Visual artist Eduardo Arroyo spent decades rendering scenes from James Joyce's masterpiece. Four years after his death comes the illustrated edition.
Maps illustrating the terrain of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and much more are on display at the Huntington Library.The seeming randomness of events, along with the free-flowing style , belies a structure that is literally classical — employing its source, Homer’s “Odyssey,” as a heroic template applied to a humdrum Irishman, and thereby bringing the epic into the everyday, poetry into prose.
Eduardo Arroyo died just as a lifelong project, an illustrated edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” was finally in the works. Of course there are graphic nudes, especially in later chapters — a penis writes the words “wet dream” — but also more abstract treatments of sex; bats and fireworks, motifs taken from the text, illustrate Bloom’s climax on the beach. And there are classical references mirroring Joyce’s, such as the full-page painting of a bull in the style of the ancients to illustrate a passage about a renowned bovine stud.
Arroyo’s illustration of a maternity ward scene in “Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition” compresses the stages of childhood within a surreal mirror.