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  • “Dolce Far Molto”:The Seventeenth Annual Trieste Joyce School, Trieste, Italy, 30 June–6 July 2013
  • Stella Tan

Although the participants of the 2013 Trieste Joyce School were treated to a week-long visit from the “sun that makes men into butter” (LettersII 109), this year’s experience was hardly one of languid “dolce far niente” (U 5.32)—dolce certainly, but if anything, far molto, as we found ourselves with innumerable elements to explore in the Adriatic city that sheltered Joyce for more than a decade. Each day brought a series of lectures, seminars, and evening programs attended by scholars from, among other countries, France, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Throughout the week, enough “musical and artistic conversaziones” (U 16.1835) were sustained deep into the night to surpass Bloom’s wildest utopian fantasies, and, as a result, more than once I had to wonder whether it was Trieste or I who seemed to be “waking rawly” the next morning (GJ 8).

Fortunately, we were invigorated in our Joycean undertakings by our speakers’ impressive displays of what Fritz Senn might call “logodaedalia” or the skillful or cunning use of language. Senn introduced this word in a lecture entitled “Joyce’s Histrionics of Everyday Life,” in which he examined, with characteristic eagle-eyed attention to detail, the methods by which Joyce harnesses the play of rhetorical forms and tonal registers in Ulysses to add linguistic glamour to the story of ordinary lives, and particularly the life of Bloom, who is disadvantaged in the culture of verbal dexterity that surrounds him. Of course, the logodaedalia on-show for us at the lectern each morning only served to supplement the richness and depth of the research presented, which encompassed a broad array of topics. John McCourt, the [End Page 430] Director of the School, kicked things off with an introduction to the Joycean Trieste and the Triestine Joyce. As McCourt noted, the central square of Trieste offers not a duomo, as in other Italian cities, but an economic institution, a feature that points to Trieste’s history as an Austro-Hungarian port city whose pulsing mix of cultures, religions, and languages would help to add dimension to Joyce’s portrait of the hybridized Bloom family and would partially inspire the confluence of dialects in Finnegans Wake. Later in the week, on a walking tour that doubled as a lecture, Erik Schneider illuminated a different side of Joyce’s life in Trieste as he led us to several of the family’s (many, as usual) addresses in the city, discussing Joyce’s possible patronage of the Triestine Nighttown and severe bouts of illness that Schneider was inclined to attribute to the afflictions of syphilis.

In her astute analysis of Joyce’s literary relationship with W. B. Yeats, Edna Longley resisted the tendency in Joyce studies to regard Irish Revivalism as a force to be struggled against and conquered by Joyce. “Modernism is a critical, rather than an aesthetic, category,” Longley pointed out, arguing that the label is too often invoked to discount Yeats’s positive influence on Joyce; Joyce’s engagement with the Yeatsian tradition might instead be seen as a productive and necessary step in his growth as a writer. If Longley looked back toward the 1890s, Giuliana Bendelli turned forward to John Banville and Patrick McCabe, Irish successors—or “survivors,” to use Banville’s own term1—of Joycean experimentalism, both of whom appear to waver between anxieties and ecstasies of influence. Ron Ewart called up Joyce’s most immediate Irish successor, Samuel Beckett, to compare the two authors’ representations of food in a highly entertaining talk, by the end of which most of us agreed that it was vastly more appetizing to read Joyce (even “Lestrygonians”) than Beckett before lunchtime.

Gerry Smyth examined the motif of betrayal—political, personal, sexual, and discursive—that consistently haunts Joyce’s work, while Laura Pelaschiar, the School’s Program Director, drew our focus to a more literal form of haunting as she traced the appearance of Gothic elements throughout Dubliners. Pelaschiar noted inflections of the genre in Joyce’s depictions of menacing houses, Jekyll-and-Hyde doubles...

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