"It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world": The Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 5-12 August 2018

On 5 August 2018, a walk from Zurich's Hauptbanhof, past the Limmat river, through narrow woven streets and around cobbled corners, brought me to a seafoam-green door with a sign reading "This our Funnaminal World." I had arrived at the right place. Throughout the week, during my morning walks to the Foundation, after crossing the Limmat, I would make a point to say good morning to the swans. Some returned my gaze through one eye; most continued to preen with one black foot wedged up between their tail feathers. These encounters became a fitting ritual for a participant in the animal-themed scholarly gathering.

As a first-timer, I was impressed by everything about the Foundation: the startlingly automatic door slowly opening to creaking stairs, bookshelves, and cases full of Joycean artifacts, and Fritz Senn's packed study, complete with two enormous and wildly colorful paintings of cows which hung from his overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. I remember unfamiliar faces mingling in the kitchen, and fans gently rustling the well-worn and well-annotated pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. During the Sunday night welcoming dinner, introductions were made over Fritz's famous potato salad. Thanks to Sabrina Alonso, each guest was presented with a unique gift: a papier-mâché egg that read, "The animal jangs again!" and was filled with tiny animal figures and a folded note with a corresponding passage from the Wake. Once the dinner was over and each animal was placed neatly back inside the shells, the participants disbanded, eager to begin the week's worth of sessions.

On Monday morning, with coffee cups filled, the group settled in along the walls of books and rows of open windows in the Foundation. Workshop participants hailed from across the globe, representing Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, India, China, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The range of ages spanned from 22 to 90 (and young ones struggled to keep up when the eldest would sprint effortlessly to catch a tram). One of the daily rituals was taking a break to give the daily 11 o'clock church bells their time "to quiet us all," as Tim Conley put it—a fitting phrase, as we later discussed the symbolism of death and repetition in Stephen's fox riddle, "The bells of Heaven were striking eleven."

Jolanta Wawrzycka, presenting at her seventeenth workshop, started us off with her meticulously researched study, "'Silly fish,' 'fishy flesh,' 'filthy shells.'" Wawrzycka, and many others after her, followed the unique format for presentations at the workshop: referencing quotes and photos projected on a screen and giving detailed analysis but never reading from a paper (the Workshop sessions favor lively discussions and impromptu exchanges). As I discovered, there are two rules to follow at the Foundation: no reading from papers, and no standing in the way. To quote Senn, "You are allowed to do anything you want here, except stand in the way." I learned very quickly about his theory of ochlokinetics during one of the post-workshop dinners.¹

The presenters discussed topics from cockles to creatures of the night, translation to feline phonetics, bestiality to bacteria. Christine O'Neill reminded us all of how truly terrifying the hellfire sermons in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are by projecting some of the grotesque paintings of Hieronymus Bosch that glowed in the darkened workshop room. Sophie Corser investigated a punctuational mystery in the "Wandering Rocks" episode in the line "eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder," which left us wondering, "Are cockles sentient…?" Flavie Epié concluded the day by explaining how new animals have appeared in Ulysses in two French translations ("a roasted fart" became un pet de lapin, the tiny fart of a rabbit—U 12.1386).²

The theme of new animals continued the following morning with Yaeli Greenblatt's talk on mythical beasts in the Wake: we are familiar with hippogriffs, dragons, and sphinxes, but might the gnarlybird enter mythical lore as a new Wakean...