Between thermal baths, those attending the 20th Joyce symposium in Budapest heard news of a legal action, writes Terence Killeen.
The funeral of Charles Haughey had no discernible effect on the Bloomsday festivities in Szombathely, Hungary. The Irish contingent, including the Ambassador, Brendan McMahon, maintained an air of cheerful decorum that would probably have been approved by Leopold Bloom.
We were in Szombathely, a town of some 400,000 people close to the Austrian border, because it was from there that Bloom's father, Rudolf Virag ("virag" means flower or bloom in Hungarian) set forth on his odyssey through central Europe that brought him to Dublin and to a change of name. Understandably, there were occasional claims, both in the official literature and in speeches, that Leopold Bloom himself came from Szombathely, but he was in fact, as he memorably mentions in Barney Kiernan's pub and elsewhere, a Dub.
Szombathely has been celebrating Bloomsday since the early 1990s (there's a fine statue of Joyce in the main square) but this year's festivity was rather special since the 20th International James Joyce Symposium was being held in the capital, Budapest, whence we had come to Virag's town for the day. The fact that the symposium was being held for the first time in an eastern European city was very significant: the interest in Joyce's work and life among eastern European scholars and students is intense, and there is a definite affinity for an Irishman who was so insistently and irrefutably a European artist and a European citizen.
There is, moreover, a certain shared history of oppression, by more than one empire, to form a link between the Irish and Hungarian experience. This was one of the themes explored in the course of the week-long event.
All of this helped to make the Budapest symposium, "Joycean Unions", a special one. There was also the city itself: famously divided by the not-so-blue Danube, it is a fascinating blend of history and modernity, with some faded relics of the Austro-Hungarian empire jostling beside the brutalism of the communist era and more recent attempts at recuperation. Nowhere is this sense of faded elegance more evident than in the city's thermal baths, where many a Joycean recovered from the higher intellectual and other demands of the symposium.
Although some of the proceedings had links with the context of the location, there was also a good deal of internal Joycean business. The trend of recent years was, I felt, even more pronounced here: namely that the really active areas in Joyce studies are not in higher theory or even so much in history, but rather in the perhaps more banal realms of texts and the law.
The interest in texts is fuelled by the new discoveries that continue to be made. The primary focus of this symposium was on the Finnegans Wake manuscripts recently acquired by the National Library of Ireland. These were the subject of a very useful plenary session (if I may say so, writing as its chairman) in which a number of leading scholars discussed the place of these very early manuscripts in the composition of the book and how they may alter our view of Joyce's initial intentions. There was also very considerable interest in the source of these manuscripts and the means by which they came into the library's possession (Joyceans do not live entirely in an ivory tower).
The prominence of the law in this symposium is due to a number of factors: it is an important topic in Joyce's own writings, as we were recently reminded by Adrian Hardiman in these pages, but it is also very much a live issue for the Joyce world because of its fraught relations with the James Joyce estate, as personified in Stephen Joyce, the writer's grandson. News that a legal action was being taken against the estate by Carol Shloss, author of a biography of Lucia Joyce, over material she had wished to include which the estate had prevented her from using, was prominently displayed at the symposium. (Indeed, the announcement of the action, in which she is being supported by Stanford University, California, was obviously timed to coincide with the symposium.) If the case is successful, it could have important implications for internet usage rights, since the plan is to make the banned material available on a website.
Also prominently displayed was an informative but distinctly unflattering New Yorker profile of Stephen Joyce, written by someone who never met him, but who clearly did not consider that a hindrance. And the emphasis on legal matters continued with the decision by the members of the International James Joyce Foundation that the body should be incorporated by law with limited liability - though it should be stressed that this decision was not linked to the Shloss case, in which the foundation has no involvement.
James Joyce was determined to fly by the nets of nationality and religion, but he has become a net, within which many are caught. However, it is a capacious and comfortable net. That sense of comfort and warmth was evident in Budapest, ably fostered by the host committee, led by Ferenc Takacs and Tekla Mecsobner. They ensured the Joycean web now spread even wider.
