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  • “Reading newspaper, eating meals, pleasure, etcetera” (FW 127.20-22):The 2013 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, Zurich, Switzerland, 4-10 August, 2013
  • Tamara Radak

This year’s workshop on “Joyce and Newspapers” started with a traditional Lestrygonian degustation of Fritz Senn’s famous potato salad and other culinary delights on the first evening at the Foundation. At this early point of the workshop, its unique atmosphere of collegiality, regardless of prior experience or academic vocation, became apparent. Such an enjoyable level of familiarity can seldom be achieved at large-scale conferences, where the number of participants necessarily calls for different ways of communication. This year’s workshop was a great opportunity to make the acquaintance of pioneers in Joyce studies such as Clive Hart, who introduced himself with charming modesty by remarking that he had “done a couple of things on Joyce.” One of the elements that make this workshop unique is the fact that there are no “onlookers,” so to speak, since every participant contributes to the workshop by giving a talk. The highly effective “no-reading” policy facilitates discussion and ensures that presenters communicate their research in plain words rather than reading from prefabricated texts. This practice results in lively contributions, rather than what Senn calls “a series of monologues,” and, as a positive side-effect, increases the attention span of audience members. The fact that no fixed time slots are assigned to individual speakers encouraged interruptions from the audience in the form of Senn’s suggested “short remarks, not long rambles” and allowed a thorough engagement with the topic at hand.

Oops!

Senn’s introductory remarks on the first day concluded with speculations about how Joyce might have acquired 16 June 1904 newspapers several years later while working on Ulysses and how much chance played an important role in Joyce’s texts.1 Jesse Meyers, a retired journalist and member of the “pressgang” (U 7.625), also touched upon this aspect in the first presentation. His talk focused on what he called the “oops moments” in fiction and popular culture—errors, misspellings, and oversights. Tracing Joyce’s cultural impact and legacy across newspapers and other mass media, Meyers introduced us, among other things, to the (questionable) pleasures of Black 47’s 2005 song “I Got Laid on James Joyce’s Grave.” His talk reintroduced Joyce’s idea of mistakes as “portals of discovery” and pointed out his almost obsessive corrections in manuscripts and typescripts (U 9.225).2 Meyers also pointed out the (intentional or accidental) comic [End Page 434] effect inherent in the multifaceted “ambiguities of language,” which Joyce exploited in many ways. Jolanta Wawrzycka’s contribution, “Neatly Distributing Type,” explored linguistic uncertainties as well, albeit in a different context: she focused on newspapers as a source of (occasionally unreliable) information and their inherent potential for manipulation. Wawrzycka commented on the discrepancy between information and (deliberate) misinformation in Ulysses in the context of steganography, the practice of “hiding codes in the open” or in plain sight. This idea arose again in David Spurr’s formidable exploration of “Classified Joyce.” Spurr analyzed the discrepancy between displayed respectability and codes as “alibis for real intentions.” Taking a closer look at the classified advertisement for a “lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work” (U 8.110), he introduced the idea of newspapers “as a means of concealment.”

Ineluctable Modality of the Visible

Amanda Sigler’s perceptive exploration of “Parallax in Serializations” concluded the first day of the workshop. Sigler proposed the idea that the serialization of Ulysses in the Little Review and Two Worlds Monthly offered more possibilities for reader participation than the novel itself; readers could, for instance, discuss the “obscenity debate” surrounding some of the more salacious bits of Ulysses through the medium of the newspaper.3 As Sigler pointed out, Ulysses became more visual as a result and thus “more problematic.”

Dedalus Claims: “History a Nightmare”

The second day was characterized by several (tit)bits of historical information on “Aeolus” and its immediate context: Harald Beck, the co-creator of the formidable “James Joyce Online Notes” (JJON) took us on a “guided tour” through “Aeolus” and 1904 Dublin. He sketched Bloom’s exact whereabouts...

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