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Themen:

107
Marcel Dzama, Ulysses, 2009

Chapter: Ulysses - Narration and Identity

Information

Daydreams and obsessions
At first glance, the drawings by Canadian artist Marcel Dzama often resemble illustrations from children's books, daydreams in which anything seems possible: talking trees, cowboys encountering bears playing music, people with animal heads. Yet on closer inspection, the fascination with violence and the obsessions that animate this cosmos become apparent.

A Day in Dublin
This is also true of his interpretation of one of the most celebrated novels of modernism: James Joyce’s Ulysses. The nearly 6.5-meter-long work is inspired by the experiences of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s main character. As in the book, the sequence of images follows the hero through a single day in early twentieth-century Dublin. Bloom becomes entangled in a series of spontaneous, absurd, and erotic scenes. The viewer traces his path along a blue dotted line that runs across the entire work.

The actors
As in a stage production, Dzama brings the various protagonists of Dublin society to life: citizens, soldiers, workers, dancers, prostitutes, and racecourse guests. Dzama’s idol Joyce and the sailor Odysseus, whose wanderings inspired the Irish author to write his epic novel, also appear.

Burlesque and Beckett-like staging
With his book, published in 1922, Joyce ushered literature into the modern age. He employs the narrative technique of stream of consciousness, in which the inner world of the characters is reflected against contemporary history. Nearly a century later, Dzama retells Joyce’s story as a blend of burlesque and Beckett-like staging, in which the ghost of fascism also lingers, an ideology closely associated with the megalomaniacal utopias of modernism.

Dzama develops a highly idiosyncratic form of storytelling in which epic and existential theater, literature, poetry, and cartoons merge. By realizing his version of Joyce’s epic on punched music-roll paper, familiar from barrel organs and fairground organs at festivals and folk events, the artist emphasizes the ballad-like, raw character of the narrative, as well as the eternal, almost mechanical repetition of history.

Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Marcel Dzama, Ulysses, 2009
Graphite, ink, watercolor, and tracing paper on piano scroll
© Marcel Dzama, Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Sammlung Deutsche Bank

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