Welcome to HJS volume 9 issue 1, where some of the stars of Joycean scholarship meet a literature student and an enthusiastic newcomer.
Finn FORDHAM's piece is the second half of an essay whose first part was published in HJS, VIII, 2. Here, Fordham traces the development of a passage from Finnegans Wake from its appearance in transition to the final 1939 publication. FW503-305 is a passage that offers the image of "an overlisting eshtree" as a metaphor for the creation of the text as such, seen by many as an organic growth. However, by carefully following what he terms Joyce's "motific method," Fordham exposes the Romantic notion of organicity as insufficient to account for the whole complexity of Joyce's method, since "the book also grows through the simple but powerful and inorganic technologies and machineries of writing: Joyce’s hypertextual ‘everplanned’ text-producing machine."
Fordham's detailled analysis is nicely complemented by Terence KILLEEN's "Life, Death, and the Washerwomen." Here, Killeen focuses on the "two tellers" of I.8, and, even more importantly, on their two appearances outside of the "Anna Livia" chapter. He notices that their function throughout is one of unity through difference: "an important dimension of the work is conveyed by the fact that the two washerwomen, whose voices are among the book’s most distinctive and memorable [...], are not in fact differentiated on the fundamental levels of character or tone or attitude."
Fritz SENN's essay, "Notes on Joycean Cataloguing," sets out to list the most prominent lists that run the length of Ulysses. Demonstrating the well-nigh all-pervasive presence of catalogues, from the endless stretches of textual ramblings in, e.g., the Cyclops episode to the less obvious or deliberate lists within interior monologues or verbal exchanges, Senn rightly observes that the practice of cataloguing lies at the very heart of the practice of story-telling as such: "Every telling is inevitably based on selection, modifications contain modifications, when acts have to be put into words they become modified, simplified and contaminated." Indeed, it is to these contaminations of the imposed order and the reality that will not be imposed upon, to the instances of lists falling prey to exhaustion while on their way to exhaustiveness, to their lapses into parodies of themselves, that Senn pays especially close attention, arguing that the "dominant cataloguic urge" is marked by "the human need to impose order on diversity and its failure to establish it," where "cataloguing is a human endeavour, both necessary and futile," one to which "life and literature refuse to conform".
Senn's article sets the ground for the following two investigations into Ulyssean intertextuality. The crucial suggestion of Heidi SCOTT's paper is that "[the] female archetype [of] Milton’s Eve, the willful transgressor of Paradise Lost, contributes to a collective embodiment in Molly Bloom." Her careful readings of both the Penelope chapter and Milton's epic reveal a number of intriguing links between the two female figures, marked by both subservience and subversiveness in their roles prescribed by the world of their male counterparts, both regarding their sexual difference a hindrance as well as an opportunity. Ultimately, Scott sees the importance of Eve's role in the creation of Molly to consist in her being "the archetype who realizes freedom, with its reciprocal seductions, labor pains, and inexorable senescence, as the grateful vicissitudes inherent in an experience of depth and diversity."
Tomoyuki TANAKA, in his meticulous, well-nigh Holmesian, analysis entitled "Box and Cox, the Homeric Sherlock Holmes, and Joyce's Ulysses," adds many a valuable insight to the already mapped-out intertext between Joyce's Ulysses and Doyle's Holmes short stories and novels. This he achieves by means of "examin[ing] the Joycean implications of the Holmes tales’ recently discovered connections to the Victorian farce Box and Cox and to Homer’s Odyssey." Tanaka's painstaking examination of textual detail in its con-textual connection with other texts makes a strong case for believing that "there is a fundamental affinity between literary allusion and detective fiction" and that, indeed, "in reading imaginative fiction, the reader always participates in interpreting and understanding; the detecting and deciphering aspect is merely more explicit for allusive and detective fiction." Especially since the extratextual evidence for the Joyce-Doyle intertext is, as he himself observes, "rather sporadic," one has all reasons to assume that Tanaka's careful analysis prepares enough fertile ground to "stimulate further interest that is long overdue."
Jean-Michel RABATÉ's contribution, which concludes this issue, is designed to mark the beginning of a new tradition in HJS, the tradition of publishing, alongside critical articles, book reviews mapping the ever increasing production of Joyce-related critical studies. Rabaté's detailled and witty review focuses on two books, Tim Conley's Joyces Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation and Lee Oser's The Ethics of Modernism. Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, and while at pains to demonstrate each of the book's relative worth and achievement, it never settles for simple praise, but also manages to suggest their limitations and point in the direction of possible further advancement of their arguments.
The next issue of HJS, which is due online in late July, will welcome essays representing any critical approach (feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, pop culture, poststructuralism, media and technology, historicism, formalism, textual criticism, etc.) to any of Joyce's works. Newly in HJS, the interest is also extended to cover book reviews dealing with evaluation of works of Joycean scholarship.
FURTHER NOTES
ZJJF 2007 SUMMER WORKSHOP REPORT
The 2007 Zurich Summer Workshop took place from August 5 to 11 and was devoted to cracking the "Cruxes in Ulysses," where "crux," according to one of the possible definitions that cropped up during the discussion, is "an obscure motif 'worked out' by the great mind of James Joyce." Unlike in the previous years, the workshop proceedings did not evolve according to the traditional lecture/discussion pattern, but rather involved a series of round-tables whose participants were, save for a few exceptions, all members of the "Ulysses for experts" mailing list.
Let us go, then, round the "table" and introduce the participants. To Fritz Senn's left sat Anthony Downing, who contributed with some surprising and well-grounded hypotheses, e.g. the one concerning the identity of the mysterious Martha Clifford. Next to him, Aida Yared, who in her presentation most remarkably challenged the received notion of Bloom's hospitality in his treatment of Stephen, exposing an agenda of a rather different kind at work therein. Gerry O'Flaherty and Robert Nicholson were consulted whenever questions of the Irish historical reality of Joyce's time came into focus. Judith Harrington contributed with many fruitful suggestions and gave an intriguing presentation on the coon song and some of its relations to Irish popular song of Joyce's time. Hans-Walter Gabler and Geert Lernout provided invaluable textual genetic expertise on the status of some reputed "mistakes" in e.g. the scientific discourse of the Ithaca chapter, and Hans-Walter Gabler also contributed with an ad-lib meditation on the broader implications of the workshop's focus on realism beyond realism in Ulysses. Clive Hart and Harald Beck, the coauthors of Joyce's Dublin, provided the workshop with its basso continuo: the famously obscure coda of the Oxen of the Sun chapter. Regarding the Coda as also a sort of prelude to Circe, Clive Hart and Harald Beck had parcelled out the individual contextless speeches, providing them with alloted speakers and re-writing them in a form of theatre script. This then provided the participants with the most continuous supply of cruxes to bust. In addition to the work on the Coda, Harald Beck presented his research on the Ormond Bar, revealing the arrangement of the one which Joyce used for the setting of the Sirens chapter a result of reconstruction that took place only after 1904 (and Joyce became familiar with during one of his subsequent visits to Ireland), thus presenting yet another instance of realism gone askew. Anne Fogarty and Sam Slote of UCD were useful in tracking down obscure references of all sorts, with a not inconsiderable help of Sam Slote's impressive computer database of Joyce- and Ulysses-related materials. The three young Foundation research scholars, Scarlett Baron, Amanda Sigler, and David Vichnar, at work on their projects during the time of the workshop, profited greatly from the lively discussions, both within and outside the Foundation. Scarlett Baron gave a presentation on the intriguing parallels between Joyce's epistolary search for "objective realism" in the memories of his acquainances and the correspondence led by one of his greatest predecessors in the field of the supposedly "realist" fiction - Flaubert. John Smurthwaite and John Gordon were among the liveliest participants, the former bringing up e.g. the question of why Bloom sent Milly to Mullingar (and introducing no fewer than five reasons for this seemingly negligible detail with some far-reaching consequences for the whole narrative), the latter giving a presentation on selected Oxen passages outside the Coda, revealing the method of hallucination at work well before the Walpurgisnacht of Circe. An unexpected, yet all the more welcomed, guest to the workshop was Masahiro Tsuji, a translator from Japan. Needless to mention, yet impossible to omit, was the role of Fritz Senn, at the helm of the debates whose careful steering, always ready to stimulate new discussions by questioning the answers arrived at, provided the event with a steady pace and firm structure.
As is hopefully clear from the aforesaid, the focus of the workshop was on the realist, all-too-realist side of Ulysses, and some of the many unsolved questions it still poses today, after eighty years of painstaking exegesis, for us to try to answer. At times, the effort to place extra-textual references within the broader framework of historical reality yielded good evidence for how carefully and substantially Joyce had grounded his narrative within the "historical real." Sometimes, however, this same undertaking revealed the very opposite - the incongruities, imprecisions, or outright "mistakes" in which these instances of reality are enmeshed in Joyce. The crux-busters's one-week endeavor came to corroborate, yet also to further refine, the well-known fact that the distinctive feature of Joyce's masterpiece is that it is neither fictitious nor real, or actually a bit of both, and what marks it off from all the rest is the extreme to which both these poles are brought, and the endless proliferation of meanings brought about by this interaction.
The author of this report can but say by way of conclusion that he is happy and grateful to have been part of this fruitful exchange, thank Fritz Senn and the Foundation staff (namely, Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller) for providing him with this unique opportunity, and wish the future workshops may they run as smoothly and productively as the one held in 2007. Thank you.
____________________________________________________________________________RE-NASCENT JOYCE: XXIst INTERNATIONAL JAMES JOYCE SYMPOSIUM
June 15-20, 2008
Université Francois Rabelais, Tours, France
The biannual James Joyce Symposium held in Tours, France, aims to stress the connections between Joyce and the Renaissance: notably links to Rabelais, Shakespeare, and the humanists and scholars of that period, e.g. Bruno. Re-Nascent Joyce also seeks to be a forum for considering the Joycean text in statu nascendi - and shall therefore also focus on textual genetics. The Tours Symposium will also feature a full range of social events in the evenings, where scholars can meet informally and enjoy the beautiful landscapes of Tours and the Loire Valley.
The organisers will make available a number of scholarships for young scholars from Eastern European countries so they can attend the Symposium. These are in addition to the scholarships funded by the International James Joyce Foundation.
The deadline for paper and panel proposals is 15 March 2008.
Academic Committee:
Daniel Ferrer (ITEM-CNRS): daniel.ferrer@ens.fr
Sam Slote (Trinity College, Dublin): slotes@tcd.ie
André Topia (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle): andre.topia@orange.fr
For further information see the Symposium web-site: http://joyce2008.univ-tours.fr/
TRIESTE JOYCE SCHOOL
29 June-5 July, 2008
Speakers will include Valérie Bénéjam (Université de Nantes), Tim Conley (Brock College, Canada), Claudia Corti (University of Florence), Renzo S. Crivelli (University of Trieste), Ron Ewart (Zurich James Joyce Foundation), Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway, University of London), Dieter Fuchs (University of Vienna), Cheryl Herr (University of Iowa), Clare Hutton (University of Loughborough), Patrick McCarthy (University of Miami), John McCourt (Università Roma Tre), Fran O'Rourke (University College Dublin), Vike Martina Plock (Cardiff University), Fritz Senn (Zurich James Joyce Foundation), Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin), Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Perugia), Derval Tubridy (Goldsmiths College, University of London). A special Genetic Joyce seminar will be held each afternoon and run by Sam Slote and Patrick MacCarthy. Other seminars will be on Ulysses (Fritz Senn), Dubliners (Vike Plock), Finnegans Wake (Tim Conley), and Contemporary Irish poetry (Ron Ewart). SPECIAL GUEST: Irish novelist and booker prize winner ANNE ENRIGHT. SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE (Closing date 15 March 2008)
For further information e-mail: mccourt@units.it
Director: Renzo S. Crivelli; Programme Director: John McCourt
For more information see:
http://www.univ.trieste.it/~nirdange/school/index.html
ZURICH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP 2008:
ERREARS & ERRORIBOOSE
Zurich, August 3–9, 2008
"The coming workshop will be devoted to the pervasive occurrence of mistakes, fumbles, errors, howlers, misunderstandings in Joyce, from “rheumatic wheels” all the way to Wakean hitormiss deviations." Taken from http://www.joycefoundation.ch/.
Papers or topic proposals should be submitted by May 30.
Contact: joyce@es.uzh.ch or zjjs@es.uzh.ch
_____________________________________________________________________________Warmheartedly,
David Vichnar
(Editor)
8 February, 2007