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Commentary on
“Menelaus Meets Proteus”

James Joaquin Brewer

Two early “events” in my life conspired to inspire the eventual composition of the first part of my Dublin Downs narrative. The first—literally the first of all such “events”—occurred on a certain June 16th when my mother, Lorena, gave birth in Eugene, Oregon. For nearly twenty years following, I was not aware that someone else named “James” had written a book about a man named Leopold Bloom who wanders the streets of Dublin on an earlier June 16th.. The second of the conspiring events was instigated several years after the first by my fellow-Gemini big sister (born June 15th) who insisted on reading to me—rather loudly and certainly earnestly—in the back seat of the Brewer family car during a day-long drive from Oregon to California to celebrate the birthday of Lorena’s father, Joaquin. The book from which Linda read continually that singular day was a “children’s condensation” of Homer’s The Odyssey.

I will never forget the enchanting effects of my sister’s voice as she proclaimed what happened to Odysseus during his dangerous encounters with Cyclopes, Sirens, Wild Winds, Multi-Mouthed Monsters, Deadly Whirlpools, Unruly Suitors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . . .

So . . . when, as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, I was introduced by Professor William J. Handy to James Joyce’s Ulysses . . . That is, when it began to sink into my nineteen-year-old brain that . . .

  • I was born on “Bloomsday,”
    and that
  • Ulysses was founded upon The Odyssey,

those two works were owed the honor of a lifetime of re-reading (often separately—as though the “other” had never existed; sometimes “simultaneously”—as though one could not exist without the other).

Then, a few years later, as a Ph.D. student at the State University of New York at Binghamton, when introduced by the Canadian novelist Robert Kroetsch to an Argentine writer of  ficciones that presented verbal labyrinths with anomalous mirrors and related representations of paradoxical plot points exhibiting logically reversed narrative signposts . . . well, here is the Borgesian question that began to haunt a Bloomsday-born apprentice:

  1. What if there had never been—or no-one had discovered—Homer’s Odyssey,
    but
  2. James Joyce had independently gone ahead and written Ulysses?
  3. Subsequently, might a writer who (a) was obsessed with ancient Greek epic poetry and (b) had stumbled upon (across, into) Joyce’s novel . . . decide to try an epic poem modeled on Leopold Bloom’s adventures of June 16, 1904?—a parodic reverse-mirrored verbal labyrinth inspired partly by meditations upon Jorges Luis Borges’ signature story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”?

I do not claim that this is what I have attempted. Perhaps more modestly, I suspect that my inspiration also owes much to Joyce’s compatriot Flann O’Brien, who, within certain pages of At Swim-To-Birds, gave me permission to note in the opening of Dublin Downs that a few of my fictional characters “escaped from my pen to commit—then commute—their own sentences.”

But back to Joyce-as-Homer: just as Ulysses has roots in The Odyssey, I decided my cartoon-opera-epic (aka “a graphic book without pictures”) should have a semblance of similar roots—and would need answers to the following story-telling questions.

  • Who will be my returning Hero?
  • What is he returning from?
  • Where has he been?
  • Why was he there?

I began with the “what.” It proved to be the easiest to answer. Homer wrote about the Trojan War. Respecting my childhood fascination with football, respecting my adulthood worrisome fascination with our culture’s ever-increasing obsession with play-for-pay pigskinners, I knew my epic warriors would be football players. What would be my Trojan War?  Wanting something grander than the National Football League’s Superbowl, I envisioned the Planetary Football League’s SupraBowl. Shifting to “who,” I nodded toward Leopold Bloom and called my Hero “Boom-Boom.” That simplified the starting point of the adventure greatly (“where”)—Dublin, obviously. (But of course that is, after all, only the starting point.) Regarding the “why,” my Hero is there because he is the Star Quarterback of the victorious Seattle Seahounds. The more important question, however, becomes why is Boom-Boom delayed getting home to wife and son following the SupraBowl? Well, no doubt he has made enemies.

So my project was soon well underway. I suspect it will take more than one book to see my Hero home to Seattle. The first is 90% complete, and “Menelaus Meets Proteus” is one of its chapters. While readers of that chapter will likely, justifiably, sense some “serious” thematic ruminations, I would like to leave this “author’s commentary” with a quotation from an earlier chapter, representing a notion that I am keeping in mind as I continue my work: “The ‘work’ you have just embarked upon is intended to be entertaining. For you, of course, it should be more ‘vacation holiday’ than ‘work.’ But conscience compels your Private Address Announcer to offer fair warning: I may need your help.”

▪ ▪ ▪

Raised on the rural coast of Oregon, James Joaquin Brewer currently shelters in West Hartford, Connecticut, while completing a “re-telling” of the Odyssey via the foggy lens of the modern world’s obsession with football. Among other places, his writing in a variety of genres has appeared in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Write Launch, LitBreak, The Hartford Courant, Aethlon, Jeopardy, Rosebud, The Poetry Society of New York, Closed Eye Open, The Manifest-Station, Quibble, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, BlazeVox, Madswirl.

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