The James Joyce Summer School entered its 12th year this summer "in undiminished personality", as Stephen Dedalus said of Shakespeare. The school, founded by the late Augustine Martin, is by now a Dublin institution, a state symbolised by its formal opening in Newman House each year by the city's Lord Mayor. This year Cllr Mary Freehill did the honours, and took care to mention the frequent references to her mayoral predecessors throughout Joyce's works. (Indeed, they form a major and still not thoroughly explored component of Finnegans Wake.)
There followed a marathon two-week intellectual odyssey, with Joyce and his writings being considered from a multitude of angles by speakers from a multitude of countries. One of the most striking contributions came from Prof Terry Eagleton, Warton professor of English at Oxford University, but now based in Dublin.
Eagleton, a leading left-wing critic and theorist, made three very clear points. First, that Joyce was highly unusual among the generally aristocratic Modernist writers in his valuing of the commonplace, the ordinary, his "pedantry of the prosaic". He cared neither for the aristocrats nor the primitive folk societies that obsessed many of his contemporaries, rejecting the "mandarin tone of high Modernism" and being quite content to make the hero of Ulysses an unpretentious advertising canvasser.
Second, Joyce was not a fascist, also a rare situation for a Modernist writer. His universality, his tendency to incorporate everything, whether its source was high or low, was inherently anti-fascist, Eagleton argued. Joyce, with his Irish background, saw the dangers inherent in notions of purity, whether racial, political or moral. He was opposed to hierarchy, being happy to bring the heroic world of Homeric epic "down" to the overtly unheroic one of Leopold Bloom.
And thirdly, Joyce was non-tragic, differing in this, too, from his Modernist associates. His cyclical view of history, where everything came around over and over again, militated against a tragic view of destiny as leading to irreversible disaster. In the later Joyce, everything is reversible, a vision essentially comic in its implications. Prof Eagleton's lecture was as notable for its clarity and elegance as for its penetration.
Another highlight was the lecture by Prof T.P. Dolan of UCD on Hiberno-English in Joyce's writing, Is There Girlic On You? This was a wide-ranging and very informative account of the very special Irish idiom in which Joyce's work was written. The mysteries of "Na bacleis" and "flahoolagh entertainment" were clearly and entertainingly elucidated for the particular benefit of the many foreign students at the school.
Other moments to remember include lectures by the UCD school's director, Dr Anne Fogarty, on statues and monuments in Joyce's work, and by Dr Anthony Roche on the importance of Synge and Ibsen. There was a quite inimitable lecture by the school's patron, Dr Fritz Senn, on intentionally random patterns (if such a thing can be conceived) in Joyce's work.
"Intentionally random" is also a term that could be applied to the social aspects of the school, which aims to provide an education for foreign students in more ways than even the excellent Cardinal Newman envisaged. In this goal the school fully succeeded, thanks largely to the stamina and resilience of a group of young UCD graduate students who have always aided its work, and to the unobtrusive organisational skills of its administrator, Helen Gallagher. Among those to profit thereby was Australian novelist Liam Davison, who was present as part of the Suspended Sentence programme sponsored by the Sydney James Joyce Foundation - an excellent example of the work of the great exile bringing it all back home.
