“Shortest Way Home”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, Dublin, Ireland. 2-8 July 2017

Sunday, 2 July, was the start of a major event in the Joycean calendar: the Dublin James Joyce Summer School. Organized by Anne Fogarty and Luca Crispi of University College Dublin, the School traditionally offers a scholarly-experiential foray into Joyce’s life and work in the context of the city that sustains his fiction. The School is known for its deliberate blend of rigor and sociability. After one spirited mid-week debate about the archival origins of Leopold Bloom’s Jewishness, participants moved from the lecture hall to lunch, where a discussion of Joycean minutia evolved into more personal and monosyllabic commentary since it was wedged in-between bites of sandwiches. Within this erudite but inclusive space, connections were forged and strengthened; specific questions about Joyce and his manuscripts were answered within seconds; students were introduced to scholars; and inspiration energized attendees to become more astute commentators on the author.

Two morning plenary lectures served as linchpins during the School’s eventful days. Anne Fogarty began with an examination of J. M. Synge’s influence on Joyce’s work. She argued that their 1903 meeting in Paris exposed Joyce to much of the playwright’s texts and that, despite Joyce’s dismissal of “Riders to the Sea” because of its failed tragic ending, Synge and his plays remain spectral influences in Joyce’s own work. She pointed to the ending of “The Dead,” whose universalizing tone distinctly echoes that of “Riders” and to “Scylla and Charybdis,” where Synge becomes the figure of an Irish Shakespeare with whom Stephen can grapple. Contending with authors was also the theme of Marc A. Mamigonian’s talk, which thoughtfully broached the problems inherent in the practice of annotation. Mamigonian, who recently co-annotated Alma Classics versions of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,¹ began with a simple question: “Who is the reader of Ulysses and what does he or she need in order to read it?” He argued for annotative brevity and for the presentation of noninterpretive factual guidance. He gave as an example the concept of Leopold and Molly Bloom’s complete sexual abstinence in terms of each other—a notion unsupported by the text of Ulysses—and argued that the dissemination of such factual inaccuracies cripples a reader’s ability to interpret the work’s themes. Linking his argument with post-truth politics and its troubling legitimation of so-called alternative facts, Mamigonian recommended a slow reading of Joyce with only enough factual assistance for orientation.

Wim Van Mierlo began the second day by offering a sustained psycho-geographical reading of Joyce. He noted how receptive Ulysses and A Portrait are to Guy Debord’s idea of the dérive, which values an aimless urban peregrination as a means of considering connections between time, space, and memory.² Van Mierlo highlighted Joyce’s sentimental, as opposed to modernist, qualities by summoning an array of examples in which characters ruminate on and relive past events. He provided food for thought by suggesting that, while Stephen may be trying to awake from history, this hoped-for ahistorical self might be just as painful as the nightmare. Following Van Mierlo was the Joycean mainstay Fritz Senn, whose perceptive close reading was on display throughout a lecture on Joyce’s use of conversation within his polyvalent narrative styles. Senn gave numerous examples of narrators misrepresenting the words actually spoken by characters—“Eumaeus” being the clearest example—and showed how conversation for Joyce serves many functions, including questioning authorial integrity and diverting attention from troubling topics, such as when Molly distracts Bloom from Blazes Boylan’s letter.

On Wednesday, Chrissie Van Mierlo brought our attention to chapter III.2 of Finnegans Wake, especially as it connects to Joyce’s interest in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Her talk began with the question of how one can approach the study of characterization in such a text. She suggested that one way to do so is to examine the numerous real-world referents for...