“Joycencore rearrived / or lots of fun again”: The Seventeenth Annual Trieste Joyce School Trieste, Italy, 30 June–6 July 2013

My arrival in Trieste by train revealed the city little by little, shade by shade, canal by run. It was a gradual introduction of what was to come, and it kept changing, as the pointillist effect dissolved into solid shapes, then back to striking images. The atmosphere offered an exciting palimpsest, a fruitful terrain for creative rethinking and discussions. Dublin soundscapes, Joycetrionics, Beckettiana, textual re-mappings, the Palazzo Gopievich, Giuseppe Verdi, Via Diaz, letters and the D in “Dear,” “fun at Finnegans,” and “the voice of Joyce” are just a few highlights of the experience of the seventeenth Trieste Joyce School. Its collegial and creative environment was exciting for this newcomer.

If a common symbol could be found for this year’s School, paths and patterns—already signaled by the program brochure’s design—would constitute one possibility. John McCourt’s opening lecture demonstrated overwritten and superimposed paths of the “Dublinic” Trieste. He explained how this European crossroad worked as a pseudo-canvas for Dublin and how it became “la mia seconda patria” for Joyce with its exuberant cultural heritage and rich intellectual hub. The amalgam of languages (the Triestine dialect echoes in the Wake), cultures, and religions here formed a congruence with Joyce’s aspiration to become a European writer. Another pathway, adding to this motif, was that of Erik Schneider’s walking tour on the fourth day of the event, with plentiful sights of and insights into Joyce’s Trieste. We were taken to key spots and heard many intriguing stories of his life there.

Clare Hutton was an early speaker at the School, and she discussed Joyce’s writing in the Little Review, reflecting on the problems and consequences of serialization, uncorrected errors (for Joyce was in Trieste at that point), and textual differences and concluding that serialization enabled Joyce to view himself as a writer dealing with the problems of censorship, his efforts toward revision propelled by a cultural antagonism. Other forms of breach of faith were tackled in Gerry Smith’s presentation that focused on Joyce’s early work. He connected Joyce’s idea of betrayal to Charles Stewart Parnell’s fate, explaining how traitorous behavior metamorphoses into a source of otherness. In Dubliners, for example, Parnell is compared to a betrayed Christ. Accordingly, Joyce was weary of the potential deceitfulness of language, and this dominated his view of the human condition.

Another speaker was Laura Pelaschiar who examined the female ghosts in Dubliners, where windows divide the private from the public sphere, incomplete sentences suggest the tension between horror and fascination, and witchcraft is mirrored in the physique and gestures of some female characters. These women have an ominous significance in Joyce, since their ghostliness is portrayed in a constant cycle of indetermination.

The following day, the “ghost of Joyce” was transposed into the dimensions of literary tradition. Giuliana Bendelli began by examining Joyce’s “funferal” and his “wrunes” to clarify the writer’s legacy and influence on other writers and to reveal the anxiety and, at the same time, ecstasy of that influence (FW 120.10, 19.36). After a break, Luke Thurston pursued the “legalization of the demonic” within a new kind of formation observed by Joyce. The demonic self rebels against the limits of the narrative, and there is a disjunction between different spaces of the text.

On Friday, other forms of transmission were featured. First, Fritz Senn’s illustration of Joyce’s verbal brilliance focused on the writer’s “histrionics of everyday life,” where every statement is turned into a linguistic event. All the action in Ulysses takes the reader somewhere else, yet it remains a non-dramatic form that defies its actual performance. According to Senn, stage routines, elaborate stage directions, gestures, and songs intruding upon the text create a battleground for conflicting discourses and competing words. It is only Bloom who does not fit in rhetorically; he is not listened to, and though he would like to perform, he is never given the chance.

Other speakers reflected a change...