Joyce and Yeats, Yes: A Report on the VIII James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference in Rome, Italy, 2-3 February 2015

In this one-hundred-fiftieth-year commemoration of W. B. Yeats’s birthday, the James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference in Rome appropriately chose as its theme “Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival.” The tensions between these two giants were obvious in the “Call for Papers,” where the first suggested topic included suggestive alternatives of “Joyce and/vs. Yeats.” I was interested to see how much of the discussion would indeed fall into the “and” or the “versus” side of things.

After spending some time lost in the Università Roma Tre campus (more signs in English at the Via de Ostiense entrance would have been helpful), I was happy to find that, as part of my membership in the James Joyce Italian Foundation (in lieu of a conference fee), I was given the choice of two volumes published by its press. As someone from a non-European-Union university, I am always interested in helping populate our libraries, so this was greatly appreciated.

Following the official welcome from university dignitaries and the President of the JJIF, Franca Ruggieri, the Conference opened with a keynote lecture by Matthew Campbell who, not surprisingly, given his current position as a Director of the Yeats Summer School, spoke engagingly about an important point of contact between Joyce and Yeats. In his paper, he brilliantly demonstrated how the concept of the epiphany, so crucial to much of Joyce’s fiction and theory of composition, can also be illuminating when used to address certain aspects of Yeats’s poetry (especially in poems like “The Magi” and “The Cold Heaven”) and also how it contributed to the power a painting such as Jack B. Yeats’s Memory Harbour had over his older brother’s imagination. Because it focused on the “and” part of the “Yeats and Joyce” relationship, the lecture also highlighted other shared concerns and revealed that the two writers had more in common than Joyce and many critics were willing to consider—as demonstrated by the parallel readings of “Gas from a Burner” and “The Realists.”

The first panel of the day featured Barry McCrea, Richard Barlow, John McCourt, and Enrico Terrinoni, and they addressed issues concerning the Irish language, “Celtic” forms of philosophy that go against the binaries of Matthew Arnold to include a school of skepticism in the figures of both David Hume and George Berkeley, the difficulties in inscribing Joyce in the westward-looking tradition of John Millington Synge and Yeats, and research notes from Terrinoni’s ongoing work at the Marsh’s Library in Dublin, which point to a previously overlooked relationship with the Stoker brothers.

After the lunch break, participants were introduced to the works of the Italian artist Paolo Colombo, whose paintings, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, although tenuously connected to the theme of the conference, had the potential of creating interesting inter-art bridges. Often too literally, the various pieces were presented in a video that highlighted through insistent close-ups certain details as they related to the passages read by Paul Scofield.

It is often the case that Yeats’s A Vision attracts examinations that are even harder to follow than its original text; in a perceptive description by the leading scholar on this and other related works, Margaret Mills Harper, A Vision was said to be “part cosmology, part apocalypse, part psychoanalysis, part poetry, and part confusion.” There were certainly some confused looks among audience members during the second panel when Neslihan Ekmekçioglu and Tamar Gelashvili presented their papers on the mystical confluence of ideas of both Yeats and Joyce.

These panel sessions were followed by a plenary talk that discussed communications designed for and intelligible to only a selected few. In his lecture, Ronan Crowley examined Joyce as an heir to George Moore, among others, through the practice of retelling stories of the Revivalists that inscribed these figures in a sort of local (and mostly urban) folklore. Wittily described by the speaker as “Revivalism sans clef,” anecdotes were circulated as a form of cultural capital, whose...