“ Lux upon Lux ”: A Report on the 2006 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 6-12 August 2006

The 2006 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, on the theme of "Cinematographic Joyce," got off to a hairy, if highly entertaining, start when, with the opening dinner barely over, a lively discussion sprang up in one of the Foundation's darkening rooms as to whether or not Leopold Bloom wears a moustache on 16 June 1904. The question arose from the casual observation that Milo O'Shea gives a moustacheless rendition of Bloom in Joseph Strick's 1967 adaptation of Ulysses, while Stephen Rea's Leopold wears an ample sculpted moustache in Sean Walsh's 2003 adaptation, bl,.m. The moustache cup on display in one of the Foundation's exhibition windows shed little light on the matter, and, as the mystery thickened and personal preferences surfaced, participants rushed to the surrounding bookshelves in search of copies of Ulysses, handlists, and illustrations in attempts to find out the truth about Bloom. But as references were checked in the growing penumbra, all that could be established was that the text itself, as so often happens, allows the moustache to hover or not hover equally legitimately in the mind of the reader.

This lively, Fendant de Sion-fueled opening set the tone for a week of the free-style debating for which Zurich Foundation gatherings are famous. Workshop discussions, participants had been reminded a few weeks previously, were to be thought of as jam sessions. Solo parts would be scheduled but mainly to provide pretexts for other players to join in at any point. The set-up lent itself particularly well to the most passionate and controversial discussions of the week, such as the one that saw the room split in animated discussion of the value of Werner Nekes's 1982 film, partly inspired by Ulysses (as well as by Homer's Odyssey and Neil Oram's The Warp): Uli iss es. After a collective viewing of this dizzyingly noisy, fast, and narratively resistant movie, Jörg Drews defended the movie (which has failed to attract significant critical interest for over two decades) as an attempt to replicate in film some of the stylistic and technical innovations of Ulysses, and to offer, as Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" does for the English language, an anthology of cinematic techniques developed since the medium's inception. As the discussion progressed, many in the room were uncomfortably compelled to recognize that the objections they were bringing against the film were identical to charges which have long been leveled against Joyce's own work: incomprehensibility, meaninglessness, lack of aesthetic value, lack of emotional appeal, even obscenity. The debate, spirited though it was, left the question wide open, but for an hour or so of this particular jam session, the minds in the room seemed to be moving to the breathless pace of Uli iss es itself.

The question of the value of cinematographic adaptation was to be at the heart of many of the week's debates. At the other end of the spectrum from Nekes's Uli iss es was the film adaptation of A Painful Case (1992) presented by Jolanta Wawrzycka. It seemed to some that the film was far too traditional to convey anything of the complexity and subtlety of Joyce's writing—though it appealed to others, perhaps all the more so in the aftermath of Uli iss es, by featuring characters that a viewer might relate to emotionally. A protracted costume drama filmed in sepia colors and running to over fifty minutes, the film vastly expanded the content and the virtually nonexistent dialogue of the Joycean original. Discussion of the film brought up questions echoing the week's recurring attempts to arrive at some kind of consensus regarding cinematic adaptations of Joyce's works. The group, mirroring Joyce's own changing attitude to the idea of an adaptation of Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, oscillated between two conflicting positions. On the one hand, film was hailed as a medium perhaps uniquely suited to produce effects comparable to Joyce's own. On the other, the translation of Ulysses...