Joyce in the International Symposium

ELT 41 : 4 1998 Joyce in the International Symposium Morris Beja and David Norris, eds. Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1996. xx + 312 pp. $59.95 THERE IS SOMETHING immediately compelling about a collection of essays that comes out of a conference on Joyce held in Dublin, if only because one anticipates an added thrill of the aura of the author in an age where we, for better and worse, know too much to indulge that aura. The expected extra dollop of excitement does infuse the mood of the proceedings, which opened with a transcript of the Welcome Address by Mary Robinson, the then-president of Ireland. Yet, in reading David Norris's preface to this collection of essays drawn from the 1992 International James Joyce Symposium, one is reminded that the palpable mode of the majority of scholars and friends who come together for these annual Joyce festivals is less an indulgence in authorial divinity than a consistent determination, sometimes with the ghost of a sigh, to take unabashed joy in Joyce scholarship. As Norris laments, there is today, at least for him, an "absence of joy, celebration, and humanity from much of the academic diet." Just so, one of the delights of Joyce conferences, and something that manages to surface also in this collection, is the unrelenting refusal to give way to the somber self-loathing that has been donned as a kind of obligatory hair shirt in many wings of the humanities today. A healthy self-reflective, self-critical temperament still reigns, but a determination to take pleasure in Joyce and criticism, as well as in one another's company, buoyantly refuses to surrender. This celebration is not unalloyed. Norris links his sense of lost joy and humanity rather directly to what he suggests is contemporary criticism 's embrace of the collapse of meaning and distaste with notions of artistic control. It should not be surprising, then, that his and Morris Beja 's selection of 27 essays for this collection leans more in the direction of how Joyce brilliantly uses language than, as we've come to expect from many corners, how language uses Joyce. In this respect it is perhaps worth noting that, rather than expressing any hostility toward Joyce, a panel section of three essays collectively titled "Hostile Responses to Joyce" discusses (not without appropriate qualifications) the general wrongheadedness of past writers who have indulged in hostility toward Joyce. Throughout the volume, Joyce remains the artist in charge. This is not to say that the collection is uninformed by the theoretical developments of the last thirty-five years. Rather, the effect of the whole is to ex502 BOOK REVIEWS pose but contain a quiet tension between traditional literary scholarship and the work of contemporary theory and cultural criticism. The most striking attention to that tension comes in one panel's playful but also cautious post-structuralist approaches to the "Aeolus" chapter of Ulysses, in a particularly compelling section titled "'Aeolus' without Wind." The published selections, by Jennifer Levine, Daniel Ferrer, and Maud Ellmann, each explore ways to read "Aeolus" without privileging the obvious thematic of wind. But, more pointedly, the papers seem to be exploring ways to return to such traditional literary features as character and authorial intention (along with the significance to be attributed to authorial revisions) while still respecting certain post-structuralist theoretical principles that reject simple claims of authorial control. In his brief introductory remarks to this panel of papers, Derek Attridge openly embraces the playful spirit in which this panel was formed as a tribute and follow-up to an earlier (1982) panel on "Sirens without Music." At the same time (and as if in response to Norris's remarks and to disgruntled allusions, made in an essay by the late Robert Adams Day, to "these days of grand theory") he acknowledges that the panel members ' purpose is as much to critique their own previous assumptions as to play the game all over again. At least one gesture in Ferrer's essay surfaces like a respectful response to an implicit challenge made by Day in his own essay. In what comes across on paper as a...