"The Macro and Microcosms of the Twenty-Third Trieste Joyce School," Universita degli Studi di Trieste, Trieste, Italy, 23-29 June 2019

"founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void"

On the macro scale, the participants of the Twenty-Third Trieste Joyce School arrived from all over the world. Three of us—Fritz Senn, Casey Lawrence, and I—traveled from the Zurich Joyce Foundation to Trieste by train. We passed through the Alps, under tunnels, finally reaching the sea. Though our journey differed slightly, I imagined that I was seeing the same sights Joyce and Nora did as they traveled a similar path from Zurich to Trieste. Luckily for Casey and me, Fritz did not drop us off at the park near the train station to go and get himself arrested, as Joyce did back in 1904.

On the micro scale, we traversed daily from the Residence del Mare, down Via di Cavana, past the statue of Italo Svevo, to the Museo Revoltella, "the building with a man standing on the corner of the roof," as it was explained to me. The Museo Revoltella was the main site for the 2019 Trieste Joyce School, where on Sunday afternoon one of the school directors, Laura Pelaschiar, welcomed Joyceans of "all shapes and kinds and ages" to the school that "exceeds any traditional academic framework." She mentioned that, at the end of each year's summer school, the participants leave having "refound [their] purposes."

After the official opening, a dozen participants read different translations of a passage from Giacomo Joyce in their respective languages. When the last translation (in Triestine) was finished, John McCourt, another of the School's directors, invited all the translators back to the stage to read their passages in unison and summed up the effect by exclaiming "this is what Finnegans Wake is like!" Noel O'Grady then sang us into the reception with "Love's Old Sweet Song," inviting the audience to join in during each chorus. McCourt later informed us that, during the reception, we drank fifteen bottles of wine more than he and Laura had anticipated and sixteen bottles of water less. The evening's atmosphere of warm inclusivity and merriment continued throughout the week, as we settled into the routine of lectures (the macrocosm) and seminars (the microcosm).

On Monday morning, Fritz Senn started the lectures with a presentation entitled "Joyce's Sense of Rumour." He touched on everything "not related to truth" from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, from "The Sisters" (which has "everything in Joyce right in the first paragraph") to "The Boarding House" ("I am the only one in the Joycean universe who does not know what happened between Doran and Polly") to the "gossiple" in Finnegans Wake. Pelaschiar followed with a talk about the gothic elements of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man entitled "Stephen's Creepy Crawlies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Goth." She focused on the ambiguity created through sins without discernible crimes (why will the eagles come to pull out Stephen's eyes?) and the way the gothic elements of the text begin to fall away after Stephen fastens a crime to his reality. For the third lecture of the day, Fintan O'Toole gave a presentation called "In the Cave of the Cyclops: Reading Joyce in Times of Brexit," in which he discussed the importance of Joyce's internationality, a theme that continued throughout the week. As O'Toole suggested, Joyce came to understand the significance of internationality while living in Trieste, where he experienced, counter to the "universality of the imperial," the "universality of the mundane" among the cultures of Trieste.

During the latter half of the day, participants broke off into their respective seminars, the cornerstone of the Joyce School. Each afternoon, groups met to discuss one particular text in depth—an experience of great import for Joyce scholars of all levels. The Dubliners seminar was taught by Caroline Elbay, A Portrait by Paul Devine, Ulysses by Fritz Senn, and Finnegans Wake by Ron Ewart. At night, we met at the Piazza Venezia for a bus ride up to...