An international cross-section of students representing 18 countries had to concede that after all, they had little to complain about. Compared with the levels of narrative complexity on offer at the Dunnes Payments Tribunal this week, Ulysses now appears to be a greatly simplified text - no matter who copy edited your particular edition. As for Finnegans Wake - it has been reduced to mere child's play.
Life seemed quite calm in the old Physics Theatre at Newman House in Dublin this week as various speakers at the James Joyce Summer School, not a Bloomsday eccentric among them, discussed the familiar themes and topics including Shakespeare in Joyce and Joyce in relation to Swift, in the watery sunlight passing through the imposing trio of mock-Gothic windows.
Calm, that is until yesterday, when academics as well as students and interested readers were presented with Prof Brian Caraher's laboured and unconvincing, determinedly theoretical reading of Joyce's story, `Eveline'.
Basing his arguments on the works of structuralist critics such as Seymour Chatman and Robert Scholes, Caraher of Queen's University Belfast, acting like an amateur detective intent on revealing the identity of a criminal long after the rest of us had figured it all out for ourselves, dismantled the story. Only to watch it re-assemble itself with alarming ease. "A critic discussing two other critics," sighed one Joycean. "This is literary criticism as maths," announced another.
Caraher neither made life easy for himself, nor for his listeners many of whom adopted poses of strained politeness. Nor did his inability to explain how the "Mrs Dunn" of the earliest version of the story became "Tizzie Dunn." Dismissing the question as if it had no importance, Caraher raised the temperature of another visitor who muttered "so infuriating". At the heart of the references and cross-references, lay the poignant story of a woman who after years of serving her family is given the chance of a new life with a man who wants her to accompany him to Buenos Aires.
Joyce might have been amused by semiotic approaches, just about. Although he would no doubt have preferred had the controversies discussed been contained in his text rather than the work of critics who see text as secondary.
Fritz Senn of the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich summed up the communal response with a question delivered with old world European courtesy: "But did you need to go through all of this to come up with the same reading of the story as we had before?"
Exuding equal measures of logic and imagination, Senn is precisely the kind of celebrant cum reader that Joyce or any writer must dream of. As he said yesterday, "If I speak about a text and you don't feel you want to sit down and read the story again, why then I have failed." Text is central to his readings of any work and for him no matter how many times one reads Joyce, the books remain "open ended".
EARLIER in the week, when commenting that it had started as a short story, Senn had asked "how do you teach Ulysses? Whatever he did is wrong, but nobody is doing any better". Referring to Joyce's attention to the small things, Senn asked: "What is Ulysses about?" he asked. "It's about buttons. And as you know, or may have discovered, buttons are only important when they are missing." On the subject of Danis Rose's new Ulysses: A Reader's Edition, Senn who is quoted on the jacket because he had reacted favourably to an early draft of Rose's introduction, without having read the text itself, admitted to being "saddened and disappointed" with the outcome.
Anxious not to settle scores, Senn expressed his fears about "textual interferences". According to Senn, "No, we haven't got the perfect Ulysses. But that is nobody's fault except Joyce's". Of the Rose edition, he added, "No crime has been committed".
But with much subtlety he commented on the unnecessary addition of hyphens and commas. "Joyce pays us the compliment of believing we are capable of understanding his book. Is it necessary to interfere? Joyce knew what he was doing. On the whole, he was pretty good." Case dismissed.
Inheriting the role of director of the James Joyce Summer School in this its 11th year, Dr Anne Fogarty of UCD, remarked with characteristic stoicism that the loss of major sponsorship had certainly affected the financial aspects of the school. "But this year we have the highest ever enrolment. A lack of funding is always awkward, but it has been heartening" she stressed, "to see how the English department of University College Dublin has stood by the school." Such is the continuing interest in Joyce, that she said they were confident they would find another major sponsor.
Next month, Fogarty whose specialist area is Spenser in his Irish context, will assume for the fourth time her other mantle, that of associate director of the Yeats summer school. When delivering the Joyce school's opening lecture, Fogarty explored his use of Shakespeare in his work in which the Elizabethan playwright becomes Patrick W. Shakespeare. More than half of the Shakespearean references included in Ulysses refer to Hamlet. "People complain about Joyce's repression of the tragedy of Hamlet," she said, pointing out that Joyce's re-writing of the closet scene gives us an insight into the character of Gertrude with Molly playing the part of Hamlet's mother. Despite her name Gertie MacDowell represents Ophelia, not Gertrude. "In re-inventing Shakespeare, Joyce succeeds in creating an Irish art capable of accommodating and partly lying to rest the ghosts of Irish history."
Biographer of Nora Barnacle, D.H. Lawrence and currently working on a study of Yeats, Brenda Maddox yesterday explained that she did not write her book about Nora as a way of either understanding herself or of getting inside Nora's head, "I wrote a book about her life," she said.
