Centenary Readings of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Conference, 5–6 May 2016

There are few places finer to participate in one's first Joyce conference, or indeed better equipped to host a centenary reappraisal of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, than the James Joyce Centre. Located at the very epicentre of the city forever immortalized by the author's magnum opus, its neighbouring shopfronts offer a poignant snapshot of the ever-increasing impact made by the global upon local. Stretching either side of the Parnell monument, the amalgamation of Oriental food stores, multi-million dollar fast food chains and overseas supermarket conglomerates provide a stirring contrast to the elegant Georgian architecture that to this day still dignifies the hill of North Great George's Street. Once inside the Centre's Kenmare Room, the time-warping illusion is finally complete: on all sides one is surrounded by reproductions of portraits of the author and his family, while the great ceiling showcases the skilfully restored vision of master stuccodore, Michael Stapleton, which had all but disappeared by 1982. How fitting, then, that these conference proceedings should have begun on Thursday evening with a key note lecture that so effectively re-emphasised the importance of the localised Irish context within the overlapping contexts of Joyce's modernist Bildungsroman.

First thing Friday morning, the vistas to the global were thrust open by Patrick Bixby and his exploration of late-nineteenth century European influences on Joyce's work. At this stage in the proceedings, a name was mentioned for the first time that would be heard repeatedly through the day: Friedrich Nietzsche. Set against the philosophical backdrop engendered by On the Genealogy of Morals, this paper demonstrated that, in the character of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's novel presents a figure haunted by what Nietzsche described as 'slave morality' and indeed by the ressentiment and bad conscience inevitably spawned by such an inauthentic mode of existence. For Bixby, then, Stephen's resolution to forge 'the uncreated conscience of [his] race (P V.2790) represents the culmination of a psychological struggle which ultimately gives rise to the emergence of an artist determined to create new, nobler values for both himself and for his people. Just as swiftly as Bixby had opened up this vista to European intellectual history, however, so did Ronan Crowley reposition Joyce's Bildungsroman in the genre of the Revival roman à clef. Rather than trying to explain away the many references to the Irish Literary Revival that permeate Stephen Hero, A Portrait, and Ulysses, Crowley suggested that it may prove pertinent to add Joyce's name to a list of writers, which includes the likes of George Moore, Eimear O'Duffy, and Flann O'Brien, whose works incorporate private jokes, and various subtle nods and winks, with a view to situating themselves in relation to established figures within the Irish literary tradition.

The morning session was concluded by a panel of PhD students who offered what the conference programme called a 'Myriad of Perspectives on A Portrait'. Following on from what was a detailed and highly informative account of Joyce's Cork connections, Flicka Small pointed out that the disgust Stephen Dedalus associates with the pubescent epiphany he experiences in Cork correlates to the ailing political climate of early twentieth-century Ireland, and that a resolution for the fortunes of both the protagonist and his homeland would not materialize until Stephen encounters his more mature literary alter-ego in Ulysses, and of course the transnational possibilities that this figure of Leopold Bloom embodies. For her part, Charlotte Fiehn placed great weight on the extent to which Stephen's spiritual experiences were mediated through an intensely sensory and sensual language. While paying particular attention to the poetry of John Donne, Fiehn concluded that these allusions to Donne's brand of metaphysical poetry speak to a certain willingness to address the disjunction that exists between religious practice and the realities of life in the modern age. To conclude the panel, my own paper once again focused on the correspondences between the work of Joyce and that of Friedrich Nietzsche...