Come into the Pictures: James Joyce, Illustrated

July 12, 2017

by Peter O’Brien

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce invites us to “come into the pictures” (243.1). I’ve decided to play with his words by annotating / illustrating / disrupting the 628 pages of the book, a six-year project I call “Lots of Fun with Finnegans Wake.”

Each of us confronts this fantastical text in our own way. In all its linguistic, meandering richness, Finnegans Wake is commodious enough to accommodate a multitude of such confrontations, perhaps a limitless number of them.

The project is also a way for me to connect my twinning interests of the visual and the verbal, the intellectual and the illustrative.

This portfolio for World Literature Today is pages 201–208, from the “Anna Livia” chapter.

Welcome to the pictures.

New York / Dublin / Toronto

Finnegans Wake

James Joyce

Illustration

Peter O’Brien

Gallery

Peter O’Brien has published five books, including Introduction to Literature: British, American, Canadian (Harper & Row) and Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table: Why I Studied Latin with My Teenager and How I Discovered the Daughterland (Quattro). He attended Notre Dame (BA), McGill (MA), and the Banff School of Fine Arts. His writings on art and literature have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, and Journal of Canadian Art History, among others.