Information about several topics discussed at the 2008 Dublin James Joyce Summer School Program is presented. Topic includes the speech of Anne Fogarty, Director of University College Dublin's Center for Research for James Joyce Studies, wherein she stresses the contentious issue of paralysis. The program featured several speakers including Morris Beja, Philip Kitcher and Maria McGarrity

Witen, Michelle

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“This one time, at Joyce Camp…” -  A Report on the 2008 Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 6-13 July 2008   The term “Joyce Camp” originated as a joke, an explanation to my uncomprehending colleagues at my college about the week I planned to spend in Trieste (2007) with fellow Joyceans and would-be Joyceans, doing all things Joyce.  Little did I realize how apt (or contagious) the term would become, for both Trieste and Dublin: the week really is like an intensive academic “camp,” complete with sing-a-longs, dramatic performances, Joycean charades, and, most importantly, academic saturation.  Having attended the Trieste school first, I had been warned by veterans to expect more of the same in Dublin, but without the gelati or the sun.  This particular summary certainly didn’t do Dublin justice: I vaguely recall at least one day of sun.  The Dublin Summer School opened fittingly with Professor Anne Fogarty’s talk “Dusty Cretonne – Rereading ‘Eveline.’” As Academic Director of the school (in collaboration with Boston College – Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, and the James Joyce Centre, Dublin) in addition to being UCD’s Professor of James Joyce Studies and Director of the UCD Centre for Research for James Joyce Studies, Fogarty was the perfect starting point for the school.  In her talk, she addressed the contentious issue of paralysis in “Eveline,” rereading the text as a representation of Eveline’s inner conflict between the image of the modern, urban woman and the domestic female who regenerates the private sphere.  She layered this with the added complexity of “Cathleen’s conundrum” – where staying at home is lazy but emigration is a betrayal.  With this in mind, Fogarty glossed the “dusty cretonne” in “Eveline” through the contemporary “household hints” debate in The Irish Homestead, drawing upon research from March 1899 onward (recipes, cleaning tips, the debate between living vs. cleaning, etc).  Fogarty also drew upon the arguments of Katy Mullin in “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” and David Pierce’s “Saying Goodbye to Eveline,” adding a biographical and historical context to her paper (the Dresden scandal and Joyce’s own leaving of Ireland).  This fantastic talk and the ensuing discussion set the academic calibre for the week’s subsequent papers.  Professor Philip Kitcher (Columbia University) was next to present with a paper on Finnegans Wake titled “Collideorscape”: Finnegans Wake in the Large and in the Small.”  Using the collideorscape passage (FW 143:3-28) as his reference point, Kitcher attempted to provide his listeners with a tour of Joyce’s dreamscape, approaching the metaphor of shaking a kaleidoscope to find a satisfying configuration as a method of reading.  His in-depth analysis of the passage made Finnegans Wake accessible to audience members at all levels of scholarship, even emboldening those who had never read the text to participate in discussion.   In fact, Kitcher’s talk became the opening discussion at the Finnegans Wake reading group, as we problematized the notion of the dreamer being inside or outside of the text.  We were a small group of five, but since all of us were writing on Finnegans Wake, we were able to explore the text in relation to other sections and its genesis rather than unpacking words.  The seminar was led by Terence Killeen, whose expertise helped us to negotiate the difficult and winding roads of FW 1.6.  Afternoon seminars were held on all of Joyce’s key works: Peter van de Kamp headed the racy discussion on Dubliners; Christine O’Neill delved the secrets of Portrait; and Tom Halpin and Fritz Senn tackled the legions that wanted to deal with Ulysses.    Other highlights of the week included Zurich James Joyce Foundation’s Dr Fritz Senn on “The Constructs of Circumstantial Not-Quite Evidence.”  Senn’s talk resembled a scat solo, choosing as his topic things that a reader could have noticed but didn’t (in his words, the obviam), and extemporizing on temporal and linguistic dislocation by showing his listeners how events occur in our absence, leading to the afterlife of the text (or Joyce’s offstageness): i.e. how did Bloom not know Molly’s planned repertoire?  And where were Dignam’s boots?  This talk was followed by Dr Maria McGarrity (Long Island University) who presented us with a nuanced renegotiation of the language associated with colonialism, the Modern primitive, the Romantic primitive, and the primitive Irish through the reference to Roger Casement in “Cyclops” in her talk “James Joyce and Roger Casement: Imagining the Primitive.”  The next day, Conor Wyer (University College Dublin) provided a comical, yet poignant, glimpse into the Irish perception of James Joyce in “The Reception of Joyce in Ireland 1941-2004;” and Professor Ellen Carol Jones (United States), in “Symposium of the Dead,” complemented Wyer’s imaging of Joyce with a virtual tour of the monuments and statues referenced by Joyce, demonstrating the anxiety of recall and the symbolic reworking of history through collective memory as represented by its recording through monuments.    Dr Jennifer Fraser (Canada) in “Grieving Children in Finnegans Wake” performed an exegesis of the references to children, infants, and grief (adult and infantile), demonstrating the nuances of grief: the narcissistic tears of children representing powerlessness versus the burden of mourning evidenced by the female voice to create the hydrologic cycle of the text.  In “The Bloomsday Haggadah: Exodus and National Memory in Ulysses,” Professor Abby Bender (New York University) fascinated us with a negotiation through the complexities of Judaic Seders, Passover, and the parallels between Exodus as a story of great national/cultural/territorial remembrance and the Irish representation of the fleshpots from which the Jews escaped.  Dr Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway and Bedford University) in Joyce’s Mobs: “The Voices of all the Blessed and the Voices of all the Damned” performed some crowd control in his new figuring of multitude, demonstrating that the vision of the individual disappears amid the rabblement.  Using genetics as a layering process, Fordham showed the limits of the individual and the crowding of the writing process, where the emergence of language is populating even as it is popularized as a creative thing within the crowd.   In “‘Pale Phantoms of Desire’: Joyce and the Spectral,” Professor Luke Gibbons (Notre Dame University) presented us first with a binary opposition between Fraser and Wittgenstein as the starting point for the savage in modernity and the understanding of the past through superstition, religion, and the spectral before examining the significance of the ghostly ‘visitations’ of Rudy and Stephen’s mother in Ulysses.   Finally, Professor Morris Beja (Ohio State University) capped off the week beautifully with a multimedia journey of Joyce as iconoclast to icon in “Iconic and Filmic Joyce,” set in Belevedere College.  Complete with film clips, Beja contextualized Joycean reinterpretations by other authors (ie: Coetzee, Amanda Cross, McKinty?, Flann O’Brien, Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu, Stoppard’s Travesties, Brecht), hollywood-ization of Joyce in film (ie: The Young Lions, Back to School, Crimson Tides, The Departed, The Good Shepherd).  This last morning was completed by a tour of Belvedere College which brought to our attention some interesting attempts on the part of those who taught Joyce to reinsert him into the College’s history.  This was followed by an informative and rousing walking tour of Joycean Dublin, provided by Nicholas Morris (from the James Joyce Centre).  In addition to the planned lectures, the organizers also offered three afternoon workshops focusing on Print history, and Genetic approaches to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, allowing those interested in the genesis of Joyce’s texts to take advantage of the unique holdings at the National Library of Ireland, where the 2002 manuscripts are housed.  The set began with Dr Stacey Herbert’s “Introduction to Ulysses in Print: 1918-2008,” which was a detailed overview of the publication history of Ulysses as well as a bibliophile’s paradisial display of first editions (and noteworthy editions of Joyce’s works) provided courtesy of the NLI.  This was followed later in the week by Dr Luca Crispi’s inspiring talk on the “Sirens” manuscripts in “Genetic Approaches to Ulysses,” where he equipped the novices in the audience with the tools and terminology required to understand the complexities of Genetic criticism.  These supplemental workshops were rounded off perfectly by a joint presentation between Dr Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway and Bedford University) and Dr Sam Slote (Trinity College, Dublin) on “Genetic Approaches to Finnegans Wake,” specifically the “Here Comes Everybody” drafts from FW 1.2.  Although the academic program is vital to the school, the true Joyce Camp stories come from the vivid extracurricular program…  like the opening reception in the Joly Café, NLI – which followed the tour of “The Life and Works of W.B. Yeats” – and the witty address of Caroline Walsh (Literary Editor of The Irish Times) welcoming the Joyceans to Dublin, land of Joyce.  Not to be forgotten from that evening were the amazing hors d’oeuvres: in typical grad student style, I stocked up, then regretted it when I later found myself at a great Indian restaurant with some fellow campers.  Or the interesting production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (directed by Brian Friel) at The Abbey, where somehow all three sisters managed to grow up with different accents!  Then there was the upscale reception hosted by the Swiss Embassy (long standing tradition thanks to Fritz Senn), where I managed to make a meal out of Thai hors d’oeuvres (again), while wondering where they were storing the Gruyere and Sprungli reserves.  And of course, the best part of Joyce Camp is meeting new people who are similarly obsessed with Joyce, which usually culminated in an unofficial social program on the lawns outside Roebuck Hall (generally hosted by Peter van de Kamp) with the usual suspects: somehow even if you just wanted to say hello, you would end up chilling on the bench until 3am.   By the end of the week, you can imagine that we were all flagging a bit, but not so much that we weren’t in high spirits for the closing banquet at the James Joyce Centre.  Midway through the week, Professor Fogarty surprised me by asking me to sing a couple of pieces at the banquet.  I tried to think of arias that had Joycean resonance and which would be acceptable a cappella, so chose “Marble Halls,” “Habanera,” and “O mio babbino,” and, of course, “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”  Then, just for fun, I prepared a Joycean reworking of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (substituting differently pronounced words: Ulysses, Dedalus, Conroy, Circe, Aelous, Nausicaa, etc).  I hadn’t really planned it properly beyond writing down some of the words (and enlisting the help of many to create this list), so it wasn’t until after the appetizer that I realized I didn’t have anyone to sing it with me.  The first person I thought to approach was Sam Slote – after his rousing performance of “Volare” in Trieste, I figured he’d be perfect – but he seemed worried that his fiancé (Ivana), who was present that night, might “call the whole thing off” if he got up and sang.  My next victim was Finn Fordham.  Luckily, he agreed, and amused us all with his unexpected talent as a Louis Armstrong impresario!   All in all, it was a lovely week with true Joycean flavour, giving rise to many stories of this one time at Joyce Camp…   Michelle Witen (St John’s College, University of Oxford)  

The 2008 Dublin James Joyce Summer School: "This One Time, at Joyce Camp…"

http://edoc.unibas.ch/49865/1/20140106125138_52ca98ca83512.pdf

The 2008 Dublin James Joyce Summer School: "This One Time, at Joyce Camp…"

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