“Obstructing the thoroughfare”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 3-9 July 2016

The Dublin James Joyce Summer School convened once more from 3-9 July 2016 in a city marking a significant anniversary. In its centenary year, there has been a tendency to make everything about the 1916 Easter Rising. The lectures that bookended the week, though dealing with the influence of 1916 on Ulysses, avoided this temptation, instead delivering skilled and learned readings of the events of Easter Week one hundred years ago alongside Joyce’s work. The Summer School opened with Director Anne Fogarty placing constructions of Irishness in “Cyclops” alongside Roger Casement. Fogarty noted that Casement is the only 1916 leader who is explicitly named in the text. Just as the novel does, Fogarty viewed Casement through both sides of a prism, looking to his past as well as his future through the focal point of his position in the text and, in turn, the Dublin of 1904. The trajectory of Casement’s life from British diplomat to Irish nationalist sees Leopold Bloom become both a double and an anti-Casement figure in the course of his exchanges with the Citizen. Fogarty positioned Casement as the invisible third person in the conversation between Bloom and the Citizen, the fulcrum and intersection around which they talk.

Luke Gibbons also explored the tacit influence the insurrection may have had on Ulysses and painted a picture of a city that, like its son and chronicler Joyce, was immersed in the popular culture of the day. During the Rising, there was an inversion of time and space that mirrored the narratives of modernist fiction, which Gibbons termed centrifugal movements. Elaborating on this, he illustrated how the tunnels between buildings used by the rebels shifted in a zigzag fashion much like the lateral shifts in modernist narrative. These lectures illustrated the prevalent theme of all the talks given in the course of the week, in effect, the movement of seemingly peripheral elements of Joyce’s texts to center stage in reading his body of work.

Frank Shovlin followed suit in that he was primarily concerned with the manner in which Joyce’s writings treat Irish history. Shovlin interrogated the significance of the Jacobite and Williamite wars, specifically accessing the symbolic nature of the role of the song “The Lass of Aughrim” in “The Dead.” Aughrim prompts memories of a defeated Catholic Ireland, since it hosted one of the bloodiest battles of the Williamite War. The song is an example of how Catholic Ireland recuperates and reclaims this site of defeat through the Aisling mode, which has serious implications for the way we interpret Gabriel Conroy’s epiphany as he looks out of the window of the Gresham Hotel. Later in the week, the Summer School attendees would stand under this very window, as part of a walking tour that traversed many of the same streets as some of the hopeless and helpless characters that populate Dubliners.

David Rando examined the manifold symbolic meanings of a song in Joyce’s work too. Moving to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Rando specifically analyzed the scene in which the Dedalus children communally sing Thomas Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night.” Citing Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope in regard to the novel as a Künstlerroman,¹ Rando asserted that the irony between the lyrical content of the song and the young voices singing it paints a fundamentally hopeful picture.

Valérie Bénéjam identified features in Joyce’s first novel that are largely considered absent, including the theatrical references and dramatic elements with which Stephen Hero is replete. She posed the question of why Joyce’s early obsession with theater did not manifest itself in A Portrait and proceeded to answer it by arguing that its presence is implicit, since many of the situations in the novel are inherently theatrical. The play in chapter 2 only has eleven lines about its performance and thus is elided, because it cannot be portrayed. Instead, the focus is on the crowd. The audience becomes the void, just as Stephen is during...