Jacob Drachler. Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs: A Typographic Confabulation with Finnegans Wake

"Primero sentimos. Entonces caemos"

Mucho antes de la era de citas visuales en Tumblr, mucho antes de la omnipresencia de ese darle tratamiento tipográfico a frases famosas, mucho antes de la era de proyectos artisticos de diseño inspirados en clásicos de la literatura, en 1978, para ser precisos, el artista nacido en Brooklyn y poeta Jacob Drachler (1909-1998) publicó Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs: A Typographic Confabulation with Finnegans Wake - una suite visual de 44 gráficos que captura, de manera muy abstracta y etérea pero tangiblemente coherente la esencia del denso clásico de James Joyce.

'He extraído el inmenso "Unterwealth" de Finnegans Wake, no con el objetivo de ilustrar la narrativa mítica de Joyce, sino más bien de aprovechar las energías de su verdadero lenguaje proteico, y por lo tanto lograr nuevos contextos en la palabra y la imagen'...

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Drachler (in the foreword)

I have mined the immense “Unterwealth” of Finnegans Wake,not with the aim of illustrating Joyce’s mythic narrative, but rather to tap into the energies of his truly protean language, and thus to bring about new contexts of word and image. Having been for many years a spellbound delver in the Wake, I began, for this project, a systematic culling out of hundreds of brief texts that spoke to me with particular resonance. I would then comb back and forth through these texts somewhat the way a water-douser follows his forked branch. Texts would call forth forms and forms would find their texts. The new contexts which were thus given shape are, to be sure, merely one man’s response to Joycean insights — a confabulation with a fabled work.