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  • Along the Krommerun:The Twenty-Fourth International James Joyce Symposium, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 15-20 June 2014
  • Andrew Ferguson

The Dutch language is said to be one of English’s nearest relatives, poised halfway between that tongue and German, possessed of its own separate colonial history, yet with historical footholds in both England and the United States. It is close enough to sound familiar when spoken but distant enough to alienate when seen. It is thus not entirely unlike the language of Finnegans Wake, so near and yet so far from the English of everyday life, wherever that day may be. Such is my conceit, anyway; whether or not there is anything to it, the Wake seemed to be everywhere at the Utrecht Joyce Symposium. Aside from ten dedicated panels, other assorted papers, and several dramatic readings, there was also a well-attended lunchtime reading group led by Finn Fordham, Brian Fox, and Chrissie Van Mierlo, concentrating on the most overtly Dutch passage in Finnegans Wake: FW 532.06, beginning with HCE’s expostulation “Amtsadam, sir, to you!”

This is not to downplay Ulysses or the excellent papers examining it at the Symposium (or, indeed, all the brilliant talks I was unable to attend). At present, Ulysses is, and is likely to remain, the fulcrum of Joyce scholarship, positioned between the early works on one side and the Wake’s yawning abyss on the other. Thus, the increased attention to the latter must come at the expense of the former, in particular, Dubliners and A Portrait—or so it would seem.

This mushrooming interest in Wake criticism follows the publication of many new editions after Joyce’s works went into the public domain in the European Union in 2012. Some of these volumes, in particular, the Oxford World Classics version edited by Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Fordham, represent substantial improvements over what was previously available.1 But the editions, in turn, build on decades of genetic criticism—an editorial practice whose development has been intertwined with Joycean criticism since the Hans Walter Gabler Ulysses; the editors of the volume Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, which introduced the practice to Anglophone audiences, were themselves Joyceans.2 In an essay for Genetic Joyce Studies, one of these editors, Jed Deppman, writes that “[i]f, as a group, we geneticists have been conscientious about the [End Page 586] author, text, avant-texte, and socio-historical circumstances, then we have not been very good about integrating the reader’s experience into our study.”3

What I saw at the Symposium at Utrecht were scholars working to close the gap between the multifaceted complexity of the text and the vastly greater complexity of the readers experiencing it. This was on display as early as the first panel on Bloomsday Monday, with Leila Baradaran providing background information about Joyce’s use of Persian en route to developing, amid the raucous noise of the Wake, a structure of peace and silence as narrated by Scheherazade of The Thousand and One Nights. Paul Fagan, meanwhile, spoke on the Wake as, in the eyes of many of the readers of Work in Progress, a hoax and demonstrated how Joyce folded such remarks into later versions.

This trend continued on later days: Sean Latham drew on video-game theory and the quiz in I.6 to show how Finnegans Wake functions as a game. Katherine O’Callaghan spoke of the experience of a Wake reading group as being like the performance of music, dependent on how the collective brings together various components. Van Mierlo, in a panel on III.3, considered Issy’s strategies for preserving space for her own voice amid the interrogations of the Four and the ventriloquism of brother Yawn by looking back on Mariological images in A Portrait—one of several papers to mine Joyce’s earliest works for analytical frameworks, providing overdue complements to the (still relevant and necessary) studies bridging between FW and Ulysses.

Perhaps most striking was the discussion of the Wake notebooks, in which Mikio Fuse demonstrated features of his digital Genetic Research Archive project. As with many other digitization projects, the preparation involves marking up the text in...

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