“Ça se voit aussi à Paris”: A Report on “Optical Errors,” The 2013 James Joyce Colloquium, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France, 8 June 2013

High walls frame the courtyard of what was once a medical school in the fifth arrondissement, now the location of the Sorbonne Nouvelle’s English Department, where guest speakers, scholars, students, and various Joyce aficionados commingled on 8 June 2013 to put James Joyce’s words into effect—reading optical errors as “portals of discovery” (U 9.229). A hint of summer was anticipated, which toyed with the irony that, on a day purposefully fraught with errors, the weather forecast might accidentally get it right.

As with most events, some errors were intentional, some unpredicted, and others unavoidable. A few minor difficulties with the acoustics of the room had attendees humorously quipping that at a colloquium on aural errors we might have had trouble seeing. At the last minute, a decision was made to deviate from the set program and include an additional talk that re-examined the myths surrounding Joyce’s eyesight. In the afternoon, the unerring logic of computer technology had Sam Slote facing the prospect of discussing the Venus effect in the visual arts without the aid of visual media. All in all, errors served their purpose as a proper component for a memorable and enlightening colloquium.

Carle Bonafous-Murat, the Sorbonne Nouvelle Vice-President, gave the opening address and introduced the morning talks. He commented on how consistently the blind spots of the Joycean text yield new insights. The topic testifies to the Sorbonne Nouvelle’s interest in neurosciences, already manifested in a 2011 colloquium focusing on “Cognitive Joyce: The Neuronal Text” as part of the university’s research unit PRISMES’s brief to address the interactions of the senses in the English-speaking world. The subject equally stems from the research group VORTEX’s investigations of error in nineteenth-to-twentieth-century literature and arts.

André Topia, one of the main instigators of the event, was the first to shed light on the elusive dynamics of optical space. His talk revealed the workings of those optical distortions born from the overlap of two discrete dimensions of Joyce’s text: the optical and the scopic. Such a reading was striking in that it reinscribed blindness within the optical scheme: encompassed by the gaze, the multifarious pockets of darkness in Joyce’s texts express the interplay between visual access and frontier and thus lead beyond the realm of the purely visual to encroach upon invisible spaces. Topia spoke of the eye as a “point of passage between the outer and inner world,” a circuitous and unstable optical system that nonetheless bears the potential to reach that momentary elimination of all optical distortion—the epiphany.

Jan L. van Velze, University of Antwerp, then contributed an analysis of optical errors extending beyond the text to the biographical, including Joyce’s own eyesight. He offered medical evidence about Joyce’s far-sightedness and investigated both the origins of his perceived myopia and the hermeneutic difficulties that enter the text as a result of this misapprehension.

Daniel Ferrer responded with a different reading of Joyce’s alleged myopia in light of its implications for the creative process. His paper explored the perception of the writer’s myopic or—as Ezra Pound put it—“microscopic” eye, analyzing the superimposition of gazes at work in Joyce’s manuscripts through a geneticist lens.¹ He convincingly argued that either optical ailment—myopia or hyperopia—provides only a limited representation of Joyce’s method, because both conceptual prisms fail to convey the condensed nature at work in Joyce’s linguistic creations.

After a lunch break during which all were invited to roam the busy city streets, walking a fine line between errancy and Parisian flânerie, Valérie Bénéjam introduced the afternoon speakers. David Spurr did ample justice to the poetic potency of Joyce’s aesthetics of the dark and discussed how, in the interplay between light and shadow, nascent attempts to see the object-world in the tyrannical light of day are discouraged. Weaving his way through significant chiaroscuro effects in the Joycean...