JAMES JOYCE MEETS TANK GIRL

Abstract

This downward movement is also inherent in all forms of popular- festive merriment and grotesque realism. Down, inside out, vice versa, upside down, such is the direction of all these movements. All of them thrust down, turn over, push headfirst, transfer top to bottom, and bottom to top, both in the literal sense of space, and in the metaphorical meaning of the image.- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his WorldAs we all know, Joyce's Ulysses is comic novel that uses parallels with Homer's Odyssey significant element of its formal organization.1 In his famous 1923 review of the novel, T. S. Eliot called this mythical method, and identified it an especially modern way of achieving form in the chaos of contemporary life, distinguishing it from the familiar literary practice of adding form of enrichment to work that could be imagined to exist without them.2 Joyce and Eliot both extended the use of allusions to the point where there could be no articulate and coherent work without them, collapsing the opposition between work and allusion or text and supplement. Now, at the opposite end of the century, comes another fulfillment of Eliot's prediction that this was a method others must pursue after Joyce. Like Ulysses and The Waste Land, Tank Girl: The Odyssey is structured by manipulating continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. But this time the context is postmodern rather than modern, and Joyce himself has become part of that antiquity available for use. As the author who did most in the modern period to collapse the distinction between high art and popular culture, only to become elevated to the pinnacle of canonical twentiethcentury literature, it is only fair that another collapse of the distinction has been effected using Joyce's work, this time from below, one of the most popular international comic series of the twentieth-century has joined its eponymous heroine Tank Girl with Joyce and Homer to create four-part series.3 Also remarkable are the wit and skill with which the project is accomplished, especially in the verbal dimension, which is at times positively Joycean in its polysemous play with its poly tropic heroine.Tank Girl was nineteen years old at her birth on January 15, 1988, in run-down bedsit in Worthington, picturesque village on England's south coast where old-age pensioners go to die. Her parents were Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, who report that they consumed large amounts of cheap beer in an attempt to invent something radically different for the inaugural issue of new magazine. Finally, on Thursday night, around 3:00 a.m., they came up with the idea for female character, an aggro-skinhead woman from Australia (i.e. from down in sexual, geographical, national, political, socioeconomic and cultural senses). Tank Girl was born just in time for the first issue of magazine appropriately named Deadline, created by artists Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins to be forum for new comic talent, and to publish the wild, the wacky, and the hitherto unpublishable. Tank Girl fulfilled their desires in all areas.4 Her birth came little over year after the Prime Minister had posed for her famous photograph driving tank, and it coincided with momentous point in the Thatcherite era, with its relentless attempts to bring the press and media under tighter control.5Starting in 1981 with The Broadcasting Act (prohibiting as far possible anything that offends against good taste and decency), followed by the video nasties campaign that culminated in the Video Recordings Act of 1984, and the reactionary views of the Peacock Report on Television and the Government Green Paper on Radio (both supported by the Prime Minister), 1987 had already seen the Obscene Publications Bill (put forward by Tory MP Gerald Howarth in April) and the announcement by Home Secretary Hurd in October of plans to set up Broadcasting Standards Council, all strongly supported by the ever-vigilant Mary Whitehouse, President of the National Viewers ' and Listeners ' Association. …