Bloomsday's centenary party is almost over, but the pleasure of reading and discussing 'Ulysses' goes on, reports Eileen Battersby from the 19th International James Joyce Symposium.
'Rejoyce' is the battle-cry of the moment and the message appears to be that even if you have yet to read Ulysses, it doesn't mean you are excluded from the fun. Here, have a kidney, have two. There is a catch though: the surest route to the best of the fun is to have read all of Joyce's books. Reading Ulysses, the densely sacred text of his city epic, offers the most amusement, the most thought, the most connections, the most topicality, the most facts.
Of all of Joyce's writings, Ulysses is composed of and constructed upon the stuff he most loved: details, cross-references, literary allusions, word play, puns, political barbs and physical sensation. So if you have decided to take to the Dublin streets in pursuit of the celebration, why not read the book? Better still, why not talk the book, for this is a novel that talks and talks and talks.
Meanwhile, a communal gathering of those who have read the book far more than several times each, and are prepared for much talk, discussion, listening and attention, is meeting in Dublin this week. The 19th International James Joyce Symposium which began formally on Saturday and opened on Sunday is continuing at The National College of Ireland today and tomorrow. More than 800 delegates from 40 countries are in attendance and, of these, 430 are presenting papers, papers that are as diverse as is Joyce's work.
It all began back in 1967, also in Dublin, when seventy five Joycean pilgrims registered for a two-day conference. Scholarship, then as now, was no doubt uppermost in the minds of those who had gathered. There was also an awareness that while this group of scholars prepared to absorb the sense of the city that had inspired a book that for many readers lives off the page, the Dublin population at large remained indifferent to the novel. Those pilgrims back in 1967, then only 45 years after the famous publication day, Joyce's 40th birthday present to himself - and arguably the world - would have been conscious of sharing a secret adventure.
Oblivious to all these Joyce scholars was the Dublin population at large. Only a small number would have been that aware of Ulysses, or of Joyce himself, other than as another renegade son who took himself off to "some place foreign". It would be difficult to be in Dublin at present and remain unconscious of Joyce, that book and the hype. Perhaps it is as well that Leopold Bloom worked in advertising.
The world and Joyce have both since changed radically. That first tentative weekend conference became an international event, taking place in various locations, including Joyce's other city homes: Trieste, Paris and Zurich, where he died. So is the symposium full of eccentrics and odd characters in fancy dress? No. The Joyceans are not intimidating, are far less tribally identifiable than football supporters or chess masters, are uniformly normal-looking, and include specialist scholars who have made their careers, even their lives, out of their work on Joyce.
Also in attendance are philosophers, linguists, historians, cultural commentators and, most positively for all concerned, not least James Joyce himself, the growing number of young academics and undergraduates. Translators, those heroes to whom readers owe so much, are well represented. Best of all is the energy and attention being put into looking at Joyce in the context of the work of other writers and other literature.
The first glance at the programme led to the exciting discovery of a group of four speakers delivering papers on Shandyan Joyce - Tristram Shandy and Ulysses, now there's a fun pairing. Then there's a European line-up on 'Joycean Thermodynamics: Metabolism, Temperature, Energy'. Any paper with a title such as 'The Man in the Macintosh' would have to generate standing-room-only interest. That's why this symposium works: topics range from the broadest to the most particular.
The problem is, of course, how to attend everything. Firstly, you must accept that it is not possible. You have to select. As expected with such a large number of papers, some are very good, others more ordinary; some speakers are outstanding, others more workmanlike. But the symposium is not about point-scoring. Its object is a simple one, to bring the Joycean community together to discuss theories, themes and the texts.
The atmosphere is relaxed, the major stress being the need to be in two places at once. The onlooker need not feel like an alien. There is an awareness among Joyceans that the media have set out to dumb down Joyce. Some are concerned about the anti- intellectualism and the new trend of giving the book to the people. The book, it will be argued, was always there for anyone who wanted to read it. In ways the many vivid set-pieces contained within Ulysses have proved both the novel's strength and its weakness. The wealth of familiar cross-references both open and close the door. In short, Ulysses has a way of making people who have not read it believe they have; therein lies a dilemma for the novel and the non-reader.
Back to the symposium. Comments made about wanting new readers to experience the book come from generosity rather than campaigning zeal. It is easy to sympathise with the young American girl, who does not want her name mentioned, who says: "I'm not trying to prove I'm some kind of genius or something, or weirdo Joyce fanatic. I'm not. Yeah, I've gone to college and I've read lots of other books, but it kind of annoys me when I speak to Irish people of my age and ask them what they think of Ulysses and they seem to enjoying telling me that 'the book's crap' and they never bothered reading it. That sort of arrogant smugness really gets me. But you know, Joyce saw that stuff in the Irish; it's right there, in Ulysses."
She seems pleased to be getting a chance to say this. A couple of us agree with her, and while we're being honest, allow us to put it on the record: US academics and critics, for all their famous politeness, are sick of being laughed at for creating the Joyce industry - it's time readers showed some gratitude.
The scholarship has also, by the way, become more international. Of the many editions available it appears that the Garland edition of 1984, edited by the German scholar, Hans Walter Gabler, and attacked by US academic John Kidd - who is now more isolated than ever - remains the accepted text, although no serious scholar would limit themselves to one edition.
Readers at the symposium take their texts seriously. It is a bit competitive, but there's fun to be had in spotting the reference. Any reader will identify with the difficulties of reading a text in translation. You may feel you have read all the major 19th-century Russian writers, albeit in English translations, but have you really? Ponder that one. The same applies to those encountering Ulysses through the medium of another language. This sounds strange, considering the number of languages represented in the text. Joyce claimed some skill in 17 of these and considering his book must present a challenge for any translator, it is fair to suggest that the most careful Joycean readers of all must be the translators. Fritz Senn summed it up when recalling a comment he had first heard years ago: "What's the use of a translation if it's not the same thing as the original?" This is exactly what the reader of a translation wants to know, they they are reading the same thing as the original.
US academic Spurgeon "Skip" Thompson of Cyprus College, Nicosia, referred to Seamus Deane's remarks about the Joyce of Finnegans Wake fighting against English; Joyce may have begun this battle in Ulysses.
The atmosphere at the symposium is far less reverential than expected and it must be stressed, even for readers such as myself who believe in text over theory, Joyce criticism is benefiting greatly from the amount of cultural and historical criticism applied to Ulysses. Stephen's "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake", an apparently exasperated remark made to the bigoted Mr Deasy, means that history, particularly "the trace of Irish history", is impossible to avoid.
Morris Beja, of Ohio University, and Anne Fogarty, of University College Dublin, are the academic coordinators of the symposium. For Beja, Joyce is a lifelong experience. At first, it was Stephen.
"I was a Jewish kid from the Bronx. Stephen was so sensitive, like me," he says. Now he identifies more with Bloom, "the single most convincing fictional character I have ever encountered".
Beja, who founded the International Virginia Woolf Society in 1976, has attended every Joyce symposium "except the first and the third. I remember my life according to them, like 'oh, 1984, that was the year Derrida gave that paper on deconstruction' ". For Beja, who brings to mind novelist Philip Roth but without the angst, the main function of the symposium is simple: "It brings us all together and gets us talking. The papers are fine, but I'd like to see more talking, more panel discussions."
Because of the number of papers, each limited to about 200 minutes, there is little time for questions and answers. Anne Fogarty, originally from Cork and a Renaissance specialist who came to Joyce through UCD and her work for the past seven years as director of the UCD James Joyce Summer School (not to be held this year because of the symposium), agrees that the subject of Joyce pushed Irish writers away.
"The influence was too intimidating.He was seen as some kind of icon of Irishness," she says. As for the quality of the papers presented, none of which are vetted in advance, she says: "It is exciting to hear this new work and to find out about how research is coming along." For her, Joyce is an interest, not a religion, and she stresses the new critical trend of studying Joyce not in isolation but in the context of other writers.
Beja has no doubts as to the translators being the "real readers" and explains that "the translator has to understand every word, because he's going on into another language - he can't make a guess or just allow the text to carry him on".
Aside from the fellowship aspect, has the symposium contributed to Joyce scholarship? Beja is quick.
"Absolutely yes, particularly in the area of feminist studies on Joyce," he says. "And also on these translation issues."
Text and theory remain central. But it was fascinating to hear Emer Nolan from Maynooth explain modernism in the context of the impact made by the first World War on an island community. Wreckage from a sinking ship made its way towards the Blasket Islands and a strange assortment of objects appeared as a sequence of wonders to intrigue the islanders. Nolan was referring to Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Fiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing, 1933). More surrealism than modernism, it nevertheless served as a vivid metaphor for the strange new things that modernism offered.
Fogarty, having exchanged her coordinator's hat for that of lecturer, looked to the historical in her talk about the post-colonial side of the Joyce debate, focusing on the Phoenix Park Murders in 1882, the year of Joyce's birth.
It was a very good paper, delivered in a relaxed style. It tied up the loose ends created by looking at text and then considering cross-references, allusions - and history. Fascinatingly, in Joyce, as in so much else, the topical and the historical walk hand in hand.
Nothing, however, looked quite as topical as Bloom's outrage when countering the Citizen: "And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted." While the true smallness of Mr Deasy's nasty comment about Ireland having the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews - "She never let them in" - earned a hollow little resonance in the wake of the hideous referendum result.
For all the talk, the discussion, the debate, the theory, the history, Ulysses appears to work best for scholar and reader alike through Joyce's creation of a kindly sensual outsider possessed of a lively mind full of thoughts and memories as well as a healthy grasp of justice and human rights. Whatever about the future of the Joyce industry, Ulysses appears set to live, talk, sigh, shout, scratch, sing, and even yawn from time to time, forever.
