Right on the heels of fractured Proust, today’s Zippy brings us fractured Joyce:
The title, “You, Lizzie”, is a play on Ulysses, the title of James Joyce’s most famous work, a gigantic stream of consciousness re-working of the Odyssey (published in 1922) on the streets of Dublin in a single day (June 16th, 1904). The novel’s central character, Leopold Bloom, appears in the strip as Neapolitan Gloom, and James Joyce (caricatured here, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu) has become Jimmy Joust.
Each panel is a complex riff on a passage from Ulysses, ornamented with pop culture figues (Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber in the first panel), foods not in the original (gizzards, curly fries, pea soup, sushi, and piccalilli in the second panel, where the original is in fact about food), and television and the History Channel (in the third panel, where the original is about history). The first panel is based on a passage from Bloom’s wife, Molly; the second on a passage about Bloom himself; and the third on a quotation from the character Stephen Dedalus (who appears in the strip as Melvin).
Panel 1 riffs on Molly’s famous, intensely erotic, soliloquy:
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Panel 2 riffs on this food encounter of Bloom’s:
Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.
And panel 3 takes off from this quotation from Stephen Dedalus:
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
On Dedalus, from Wikipedia:
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce’s literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an important character in Joyce’s Ulysses.
… Stephen Dedalus appears in Ulysses as the character who corresponds to Telemachus; less overtly, he embodies aspects of Hamlet. He is the protagonist of the first three chapters. Subsequently Leopold Bloom is introduced, and Stephen’s interactions with Bloom and his wife, Molly, form much of the final chapters’ substance.
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