Second Annual James Joyce Research Colloquium, 16-18 April 2009

For three days in April, postgraduate students convened in Dublin from across the globe - and from across Ireland - in order to hear the latest research of Joycean experts at the second annual James Joyce Research Colloquium, organized by Professor Anne Fogarty and Dr Luca Crispi of the University College Dublin James Joyce Research Centre. Geographically, the event spanned the city, talks taking place in the UCD Global Irish Institute and at the National Library of Ireland, with a private dinner at the James Joyce Centre in North Great Georges Street in between; intellectually, the colloquium spanned key methodological approaches to Joyce: historical, nationalist, genetic, and theoretical, several of which talks appear as essays in this volume of the Dublin James Joyce Journal. In 'Proteus', the episode of Ulysses that was the focus of the second day, Stephen Dedalus muses idly that perhaps the dog on Sandymount Strand is 'looking for something lost in a past life'. The phrase is an apt one to summarize the colloquium, where all the talks focused, in one way or another, on the ebb and flow of origins and genealogies.

The event began on the evening of 16 April, Dirk Van Hulle leading the proceedings with his discussion of layers of sedimentation in the 'grey canon'. His presentation celebrated the centenary of Darwin in its title, 'Paper Fossils: Joyce and Beckett's "Origin of Spices" and the Imperfections of the Archival Record', and proposed that Darwin's metaphor of the fossil as a book 'imperfectly kept' be extended towards the archival record. The evolution of language was compared to the evolution of the species, taking the use of Darwin by Joyce and Beckett to discuss the archive as a source for a richer linguistic biodiversity of the text, and of genetic approaches comparable to those of the fossil record; the paper concluded that while empiricism is important to manuscript work, 'interpretation is always necessary'. A reception followed, to allow participants to meet socially for the first time and discuss that original beginning, before events and the genetic theme continued the next day, appropriately enough in the heart of the Dublin archive - the National Library of Ireland - and with the shape-shifting theme of altered texts.

Luca Crispi's talk on working with the NLI's Ulysses manuscripts focused on the new manuscript of 'Proteus' fragments and their import for Ulyssean stylistics, showing as they do the early evolution of the episode - perhaps, it was suggested, as early as the writing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - and the 'creative labour' of the novel, elucidating Joyce's modernism as a process rather than a programme. The theme of 'Proteus' continued to evolve in Andrew Gibson's discussion of the episode as historically saturated, tracing the silt of history through manuscript changes in Stephen's language that pointed towards a double movement within the episode between entrapment and release into colonized language, offering a potential for resistance on Stephen's part. The perception of Stephen in that episode was also Sam Slote's topic, whose title, 'Aufhebung Baby: Protean Phenomenology and Genealogy' presaged the sublation of highbrow and low in a musical interlude at that night's dinner, when he and Michelle Witen adapted The Beatles' 'Help!' for a Joycean audience. Before that, however, Slote's paper concentrated on the being of Stephen, in the world and on Sandymount Strand, as a figure wishing his own ontogenetic authority but inhabited by the antecedents who create him in turn; his writing, it was argued, is both an attempt to escape those descendants, especially the mother, and the mark of his inhabitation by them, so that even when killed off, the mother remained as the 'maternity' which cannot be destroyed and must be circumvented if he is to become his own God, his own author. The double bind was discussed through a Nietzschean ressentiment, where the multiple genealogies symbolized by the world around him could be used by Stephen to create himself as a work of art, the traces of history recreated in his...