James Joyce Quarterly

The rising popularity of graphic novels and their wide acceptance as literature have led to a glorious explosion of sequential art. The hybrid, deviant, collaborative nature of comics, combined with their crossover appeal, makes them an ideal genre for Joyceans, as is reflected in the growing collection of graphic James Joyce adaptations, including David Lasky’s Boom Boom, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alfonso Zapico’s Dublinés and La ruta Joyce, Tim Ahern’s Illnesstraited Colossick Idition of “Finnegans Wake,” and Robert Barry and Josh Levitas’s Ulysses “Seen.”¹ The latest collaboration to join the fray is Mary M. and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes. Rather than creating a biography or strict adaptation of Joyce’s work, Mary Talbot focuses on the story of Lucia Joyce to explore her own life growing up as the daughter of Joyce scholar James S. Atherton, author of The Books at the “Wake.”²

Like the award-winning 2006 graphic novel Fun Home, Dotter examines Joyce’s bittersweet success that came at the expense of his family to parallel the author’s own fractured relationship with her father. If there is a consistent message among the graphic novels about Joyce, it is this: male Joyceans should be careful in raising daughters. Lucia Joyce, Bechdel, and Talbot all suffered under the harsh intellectualism of their driven fathers.

Dotter is a slim hardback that quickly blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Its inside covers and endpapers are reproductions of Atherton’s personal copy of Finnegans Wake, complete with handwritten notes in different colored inks, page numbers, and pressed snowdrops. The notes are immediately recognizable to [End Page 907] any Joycean—a key to the sigla, chapter titles, and page references for “Huckleberry Finn” and “Cinderella”—the personalized details that each reader of the Wake adds to the text. The reproduced pages of Atherton’s copy, with its yellowed tape and frayed spine placed neatly over Dotter’s brand-new and intact binding, are among many examples of the playful overlapping of the real and the imagined that characterizes the story. To open Dotter’s unfortunately unappealing cover and to discover Atherton’s copy of the Wake inside is to experience the thrill of manuscript research—to peek into someone else’s books and papers and interpret his or her personality through marginalia. Indeed, the photographs and reproductions of Atherton’s actual papers bookend the story: his ration book from 1952-1953, his social-security card, and various identification cards. They are pieces of paper tucked inside a book that is then reproduced and tucked inside another book, a tale within a tale within a tale, an exquisite set of Italian-Anglo-Irish nesting dolls painted in the likenesses of Lucia Joyce, Milly Bloom, Issy, and Talbot.

The story opens appropriately enough on 2 February, Joyce’s birthday and the publication anniversary of Ulysses, with Talbot digging through a packed junk drawer looking for a rail pass. She stumbles across the I.D. card belonging to her “cold mad feary father,” setting the day’s ruminations in motion (3, FW 628.02). Her memories are narrated in first person, and it is easy to confuse them with what very well could be those of Lucia Joyce.

Talbot’s father provides for his family on a “teacher’s salary,” echoing the meager offerings Joyce earned as an English language teacher (5). She has an early memory as a child of “being left alone in hospital,” one of several hints about Lucia Joyce’s ultimate fate (10). At times, the parallels between the two women’s lives are heavy-handed, but there are also delightful coincidences that Joyce would have appreciated, such as the fact that Talbot’s parents were named Jim and Nora (15). During her morning commute, she reads Carol Loeb Shloss’s groundbreaking 2003 biography, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the “Wake.”³ Behind her, the fighting children on the...