FRITZ SENN’S voice choked with emotion. The 84-year-old director of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation stood at the podium, trembling, inarticulate but thereby voicing more of his distress than any spoken words could do. The last audible word he uttered, before recovering himself somewhat, was “trust”. And only feet away, sitting impassively, was Danis Rose, a director of the publishing company that had been the source of this pain. As Senn left the platform, the hall resounded to prolonged applause.
The biennial International James Joyce Symposium has known plenty of dramatic moments over the years. But for sheer raw emotion, nothing quite equalled the scene at the Dublin symposium this June as the panel, which I chaired, discussing the publication of “The Cats of Copenhagen”, the letter by Joyce to his grandson that is held by the Zürich Foundation and was published without the Foundation’s knowledge by the Dublin-based Ithys Press earlier this year. (The question of whether the foundation’s consent was needed is a matter of contention between the parties.)
Rose’s reaction to Senn was muted indeed. He indicated that the “Cats” issue was a matter for another person and when it was pointed out that he was himself a director of Ithys Press he made no comment. A meeting of the members of the International James Joyce Foundation later unanimously endorsed the statement by the Zürich institution condemning the “Cats of Copenhagen” publication at the time of its appearance last February.
Copyright issues inevitably dominated the Dublin event, the first to be held here since 2004. This was not surprising, given that this is the year when the Joyce estate’s grip on copyright was finally released. This may sound like the arrival of the chosen people at the Promised Land; however, as Joyce’s own works teach us, the Promised Land is, in this world, always an illusory state. And indeed, the new situation has been marked by a number of interventions which have certainly caused considerable distress and dismay (and not only to the Zürich foundation), whatever their exact legal status.
Some of these questions were addressed in a plenary lecture by Robert Spoo, a US specialist in copyright law who is also a member of the board of the National Library of Ireland. Spoo’s lecture discussed some of the confusions and difficulties caused by differing copyright regimes in different countries, even within the EU, where the transfer of an overall EU directive into national laws led to widely differing interpretations.
He showed, for instance, how the apparent intentions of legislators can in fact be completely contradicted by the actual working of the law as drafted. All this may seem rather dry and abstract; the pain etched on the face and heard in the voiceless voice of Senn reminds one of the human cost of these developments.
Happily, the Dublin Symposium, held jointly by TCD and UCD, was not just about these matters. Naturally, when this event takes place in Ireland, an effort is made to highlight the Irish contribution. The historian Diarmaid Ferriter gave an outline of the development of the Irish State which stressed how unlikely it was that Joyce would ever have found a home in the “new Ireland”, how conservative was the “revolution” to which Joyce’s work is sometimes assimilated.
A panel involving Irish Joyceans Gerard O’Flaherty, Robert Nicholson, Vincent Deane and me explored, from our different angles and backgrounds, how the Irish experience and reception of Joyce evolved from almost complete indifference, at best, and Stalinist air-brushing (as in the memorials to Limerick’s murdered mayor George Clancy, a friend of Joyce), to his current enshrinement as an ironic icon of Irishness in its celebratory, emancipated, linguistically untrammelled aspects (with, of course, an eye on the tourist market).
A cold eye was also cast on the somewhat underwhelming performance of Irish academics in Joyce studies up to the 1990s (the first book on Joyce by an Irish academic based in Ireland appeared in 1995). O’Flaherty, who attended TCD in the late 1950s, recalled being told by a professor that “Joyce is a bore”.
The Irish contribution was not confined to the academic programme. The organisers, Anne Fogarty of UCD and Sam Slote of TCD, invited Irish writers – Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and Patrick McCabe – to read to the participants, many of whom came from abroad. As well as reading from their works, they made illuminating comments about their own sense of their relation to Joyce.
The most important aspect of events like these, however, is the sense of partnership and camaraderie that they generate. There are interesting and relevant questions of inside and outside hanging around all this: those who feel they are excluded can feel very excluded, and it is certainly incumbent on organisations such as the International James Joyce Foundation to make all those with an interest in and love for the writer feel as welcome as possible. But the phrase “the Joyce community” does have real meaning. That meaning was very evident in Mulligan’s pub, most appropriately, on the evening of the traumatic events narrated at the beginning of this report.
With a highly multinational group of Joyceans almost colonising one of the bars, there was a sense of sharing something – a gift to the whole world, really, namely the writing of James Joyce – that was, in spite of the difficulties, the turbulence and the traumas, an incredibly powerful means of bringing people together.