In the geography of the Wunderkammer, the Limited Editions Club (1935) edition of Ulysses occupies a place of tacit discord. From the outset, as soon as you open it, Henri Matisse’s illustrations create dissonance with the dirty noise of Dublin’s taverns and Leopold Bloom’s mental cacophony. Furthermore, the text imposes a visual authority, flowing in two columns—with the sole exceptions of the prologue and the first page of each of the three parts—with a typographical gravity reserved for encyclopaedias or secular Bibles.
Born of what could be called a sublime scam, the history of this edition is lost in the twists and turns of a moral fable. Publisher George Macy offered Matisse five thousand dollars to illustrate the novel. The painter accepted the commission with the pragmatism of a craftsman, but with a secret condition that the publisher would discover too late: Matisse had no intention of reading the book. ‘A work too long and confusing for my Mediterranean sensibility,’ he confessed in a letter to his son Pierre.
Instead of immersing himself in the text, Matisse bought a French translation of the Odyssey and returned to Homer. Paradoxically, the edition opens with a prologue by Stuart Gilbert—the great Joycean exegete—who fervently defends the novel’s classical structure. Without knowing it, Gilbert validates Matisse’s ‘heresy’; that is, if the text is a mental Odyssey, the painter had the right to dream of its physical antiquity.
While Joyce dynamited the nineteenth-century novel with his stream of consciousness, Matisse went back millennia to archaic simplicity. The twenty-six full-page illustrations accompanying the text—including six etchings reproducing sketches on blue and yellow paper—do not show gentlemen in bowler hats in 1904 Ireland, but naked cyclops and nymphs, drawn with his characteristic curved, continuous line of deceptive purity, which seems never to lift the pencil from the paper. In the Calypso plate, for example, instead of depicting the domestic Bloom, he paints a tangle of bodies undulating in a perpetual return, evoking the nymph’s erotic suffocation. And in Circe, far from the hallucinatory theatre of Nighttown, Matisse traces an orgy of lines where human flesh seems to dissolve, capturing animal metamorphosis with an elegance that Joyce never sought. These are images that possess the stillness of bas-reliefs, indifferent to the drama of ink and the agitation of Joyce’s prose.
Critics were quick to point out this fracture, oscillating between artistic reverence and literary perplexity. Although Alfred H. Barr Jr. — the famous director of MoMA — canonised these plates, stating that they constituted Matisse’s ‘only important work’ in the technique of soft-ground etching, he did not fail to note their autonomous character. For purists, the book strayed from a visual reading of Joyce, offering a deliberate evasion. For his part, Hugh Kenner weighed this edition as a ‘pastoral counterpoint, a bound schism where images function as escape windows from the suffocation of modern text.’
This copy harbours a deliberate anachronism, an irresolvable tension, as the text travels towards the future of literature, while the images anchor the ship in a mythical past. Joyce provided the noise of the city; Matisse, the silence of marble. Like those display case objects that outlive their owners, the book inhabits the Wunderkammer with the arrogance of beautiful things that do not need to be understood to exert their dominance.
For the collector, owning this volume transcends mere bibliography, because it makes him the guardian of the physical evidence of a dialogue between deaf people. The very justification for the print run reveals a choreography of egos: the first 250 copies were signed by James Joyce in pen and Henri Matisse in pencil, coexisting on the final page; however, copies 256 to 1500 are signed only by Matisse. In the latter, the solitary signature at the colophon certifies the appropriation; that is, this is no longer just James Joyce’s book. The Wunderkammer holds copy 271. As you turn the pages, the reading experience is transformed. The illustrations act as a sedative filter, reminding us of the invisible scaffolding that the writer wanted to hide and reveal at the same time. Instead of illustrating what Joyce wrote, Matisse illustrated that eternal myth that Joyce perhaps dreamed of writing.
There is an anecdote that sums up this misunderstanding better than any other. Macy panicked when he received the sketches for the chapter ‘Nausicaa’. Matisse had drawn a robust Homeric princess playing ball, unaware that in Ulyssesthe corresponding character is Gerty MacDowell, a lame girl who shows off to Bloom on a beach in Dublin. Desperate, the publisher tried to explain to the painter: ‘Nausicaa is Gerty.’ Unperturbed, Matisse refused to change a single line. When consulted by telephone, far from being indignant, Joyce let out a dry laugh and said to Macy: ‘Leave it. He’s right. Nausicaa was never lame.’
I like to imagine that this copy conjures up two solitudes that brush against each other without touching. Joyce in his labyrinth of voices, blind in Zurich; Matisse in his greenhouse, dreaming of branches. A geography of the impossible, the book inhabits the upper part of the Wunderkammer. Inside its pages, Nausicaa runs along the beach with two strong, immortal legs, like a Greek goddess.
This copy appeared in San Francisco, on the shelves of Brick Row. The transaction had the dryness of the inevitable; in that city of fog and hills, paying for a mistake seemed like the logical outcome of a comedy. I acquired the volume as one might buy a settled dispute, without bargains or ceremonies. As I left, I realised that I was taking away material proof of an irony: two simultaneous monologues bound together by contract, which now coexist in my library under a stricta pax inventarii.
