Exhibit Blooms with a Joycean spirit

By Julie Weise

As I watched the Australian outback rush past through a bus window, and the driver tried desperately to avoid causing kangaroo roadkill, my friend and travel partner, Amanda, could do only one thing: read James Joyce's Ulysses. For weeks, the book never left her side. What, I wondered, could possibly be so enthralling about Ulysses?

Heather Landers, SM '97, provides an answer to that question as she captures the sights and sounds of Joyce's novel in a multimedia exhibit that is sure to appeal to a range of Ulysses aficionados. Her "multimedia walk" through the novel, in the Maya's Room gallery on the fourth floor of Byers Hall in Silliman, closes Sat., Apr. 19. Gallery hours are noon to 2 p.m. Landers recently discussed with the Herald both her work and Joyce's.

Yale Herald: Why Ulysses?

Heather Landers: I really liked Portrait of an Artist when I read it in high school. I've always wanted to read Ulysses, and I got the opportunity last semester in English class. I can't say that I loved Ulysses itself--I really loved Portrait of an Artist--but I really liked the way that it was written: it isn't normal narrative. Some episodes have newspaper headlines for paragraphs, some are `question and answer.' I found myself visualizing it a lot as I was reading it.

I was talking to my roommate about how I was really sad that I was interested in it, but I kept falling asleep while I was reading it. She said, "It's really funny how you can be reading a magazine all night, but if you're reading a novel, you'll fall asleep." And I thought, "Hey, it would be so cool to make a magazine out of Ulysses!" I got money from the Banes and Richter fellowships to go to Ireland to research the book--to follow the footsteps of Stephen Bloom, the main character, and collect visual stuff that I was going to eventually use for my magazine.

YH: How did you decide to make the magazine into an exhibit?

HL: I just loved all this stuff that I found, I thought it was really fun. There's no way that a magazine could get that sort of feeling. I love the touch and feel of the exhibit; that you can go over and smell the soap. There's this one postcard that changes: it's a black-and-white picture, but you hold it up to the light and you see colors.

YH: Can you explain a little about the exhibit?

HL: The first thing you see is the yellow poster of stairs--the stairs that go down the Martello Tower, which is the opening scene of the book. There are five large posters for ambience, they put you in the setting, but they're a little abstract. There are groupings of postcards and memorabilia that I've collected. Each of the photos in the exhibit is a place that's actually mentioned in the book, and I've tried to include the quotes that say `this is where you are.' The postcards are from the time period, approximately 1904. That's what the guy in the antique store said, so I'll believe him.

I like that it's an interactive kind of thing. As you walk and there are shells on the side, I want you to step on the shells and here the `crackling of the rack.' I want you to get into it just like I did. I want you to say, "I remember that part!" or "Oh, so that's what that was about."

YH: When you were in Dublin, you witnessed Bloomsday. Could you tell us more about the event?

HL: Bloomsday is June 16, 1904, and it's the day on which the book takes place--600 pages in one day! It has actually turned into Bloomsweek now because it's become so popular.

YH: How did the Dublin that you visited compare with the Dublin of the book?

HL: It's an interesting city, but not what I expected it to be. When you're reading a book, you don't really get all the outside atmosphere. When I saw it, it all made sense. I feel like I understand more of what Joyce is talking about. For example, he does a lot of things with onomatopoeia. I didn't really understand why, but when I was there, I could actually hear--he's walking down the street, and it's a busy street, so there are going to be lots of trams going by.

YH: Are you worried that your exhibit will be inaccessible to people to who haven't read the book?

HL: That was one of my concerns. I asked my roommate, "Would you think this was interesting if you hadn't read the book?" And she said, "Yeah." Other people have said, "Now I want to go read it" after seeing the exhibit. There are some places where I probably could have made things more clear, but then, that's not what Ulysses is about. It's not about clarity at all. I want people to come out with a good impression and be interested in what they saw, whether or not they totally understood the concept of the story.

YH: What's been the most interesting part of Ulysses for you to explore?

HL: I guess the whole exploring part of it is what I really like. I like that I can take a part and go off with it in one direction. Every time I look at it, I encounter something new, and I think that's really what the book is about. You're not supposed to understand everything the first time you read it. You're supposed to travel on your own journey.

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