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  • The Energy of Modernity:The 2016 Boston Joyce Forum, Boston College, 12 November 2016
  • Fabrizio Ciccone

On Saturday, 12 November 2016, the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College sponsored a conference entitled "The Energy of Modernity" organized by Joe Nugent of the Boston College Department of English. The conference opened with an introduction by Vice-Consul General of Ireland Aoife Budd. Enda Duffy (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Michael Wood (Princeton University) each gave a keynote address. These talks were followed by a conversation between Duffy and Wood (moderated by Nugent), a performance of "Ithaca: A Stage Adaptation" by the Here Comes Everybody Players (a staple of Nugent's annual Joyce conferences), and a group reading of a page from Finnegans Wake. The event concluded with a book-launch address by Marjorie Howes (Boston College) for Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Paige Reynolds (Holy Cross University). Throughout the packed, day-long event, attendees were invited to test a demo of Nugent's latest project "JoyceStick: A Gamifiction of Ulysses."

Duffy's talk offered a Bergsonian reading of Joyce. For Duffy, Finnegans Wake, which he characterized as the "most astounding vitalist work by any modernist," is not only "a book about the energy crisis" but is, in fact, "the greatest book on energy ever written."1 He made the compelling argument that the Wake might even be seen as a kind of "petrolfiction," for its concern with energy resources (such as oil) is anxiously prescient. Duffy reached this conclusion by way of a reevaluation of the Crimean War's persistent presence in the Wake, as well as the infamous "sod of turf" (turf is a common source of fuel in "fireland"—FW 21.16-17) that features in the story of "How Buckley Shot the Russian General" (FW 338.05-355.07). The energy source, however, at the heart of modernity's energy crisis is, for Joyce, human energy. To illustrate this point, Duffy briefly returned to Ulysses to note the almost "medical" descriptions of Bloom's responses to the shocks of his environment. Joyce does not register Bloom's thoughts or feelings in moments of extreme duress but, as Duffy pointed out, instead records his somatic responses. Indeed, underlying Duffy's discussion of Joyce's concerns with the political ramifications of energy (Russia and Ireland becoming twins in the Wake) was an argument about Joyce's conception of character. It might even be argued that Joyce replaces what used to be called the soul with (nervous) energy. Towards the conclusion of his talk, Duffy stressed the Wake's seemingly [End Page 489] inexhaustible ability to "convert the vital into raucousness." As any reader of the Wake can confirm, the élan vital of the book is its humor. If one follows Duffy's reading, the Wake's Dionysian energy reserves might even be its most politically potent feature. Not only is it a book "about the energy resources of the world," but, moreover, it is itself a kind of reservoir of human energy—the human energy in question being, in effect, laughter.

The glue that held the two keynotes together was revealed to be their mutual interest in the same driving question: if laughter is an expenditure of human energy, how can that expenditure be made productive? Wood's keynote continued to discuss the energy of laughter, specifically the subversive laughter of the subaltern in Ulysses in the "Cyclops" episode. His talk began with an attempt to answer the question "Why do the subalterns tell the same jokes [the jokes of the "dominant culture"] about themselves?" When the subaltern retells the oppressor's jokes, it is usually the oppressor, the "supposedly sophisticated person," who "makes a mistake" while the "supposedly unsophisticated person is not surprised." In essence, the oppressor's joke is turned on its head. Although a "joke doesn't improve the situation, it does make you feel better." The oppressed individual is granted access to a momentary (and fragmentary) human freedom through the joke. Perhaps, then, the truly explosive energy of laughter lies in its ability to disrupt hierarchies and thereby "free [the] mind from [the] mind's bondage" (U 9.1016...

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