The Personal Note: The Eighteenth Annual Trieste Joyce School, Trieste, Italy, 29 June–5 July 2014

Stirred by the accounts of the annual urban pilgrimage honoring James Joyce’s Trieste exile, I arrived in the Adriatic city on a kind of summer tour, determined to shed thoughts of my day job and to satisfy my curiosity about why Joyce is still important. As a neophyte, so far, I had only interacted with publications confirming that my exciting research ideas were tenable but had already been discussed extensively. In this sense, the School’s traditional opening gesture of inviting newcomers to translate a Giacomo Joyce passage came as huge encouragement. We novices could sit with dignity on the Piazza dell’Unità after having contributed our ant’s share of knowledge to the field, basking in the chorus of the uncommon (and common) languages we spoke.

What followed that week exceeded my expectations, with lectures performative, informative, exploratory, and revelatory (in any combination) on the anxieties of influence, memory and reimaginings, style and other tricks of the trade, ecology, and newspaper advertisements, along with an irresistible peek into the area of sexuality.

Maria Kager’s polyglot take on the imaginations of Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov revealed the advantages (and writerly frustrations) of being multilingual. Nabokov’s intricate ideas on the superior polyphonic display of Finnegans Wake came as no surprise to Kager’s audience. Though he denied Joycean influence, she provided evidence about how, as soon as he began to write in English, he indulged in the excesses of multilingual wordplay that he found in Joyce’s works.

The subject of the anxiety of influence continues to be relevant in the relationship between Joyce and George Moore as well. Paul Devine convincingly compared A Portrait and The Lake, mentioning musicality, leitmotifs, and the uses of interior monologue. Despite the similarities between the two authors, there are anecdotes about their enmity, and Devine established that Joyce respected Moore (although not necessarily vice versa) and postulated that Moore could well have been influenced by Joyce in writing about matters of imagination, impulse, and interiority.

Linked to the same topic, Ronan Crowley’s presentation took the solitary, unique, and recherché biscuit. Digging for routes instead of roots (an important difference, since Crowley defends himself against the label of source-hunter), his quest concerned the topic of interbibliography (networks of books circulating in a reading public). Tracing, with the help of the notesheets, the literature available to and reshaped by Joyce in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he discovered recoverable textual overlaps from (among others) Beatrice Harraden’s The Guiding Thread, Mrs. Alexander’s A Life Interest, and the novel Woman’s Temptation.¹ In Crowley’s view, Joyce’s process of selecting and rewriting word fragments is a form of “transposed gendered writing.”

The issue of memory and reimaginings was also raised, first in John Coyle’s piece on metanoia. Aided by observations and examples from chapter 5 of A Portrait and the ending of “The Dead,” he noted how well and how often both Stephen and Gabriel turn back on their own poetic language, rethinking earlier visions and words. Derek Hand threw realism and desire into the mix, placing Stephen and Bloom between past and possible futures, with Bloom choosing life and Stephen opting for anticipation within a setting of paralysis, “where everything is the problem” in the Ireland of the 1900s. He warned about the dangers of nostalgia as opposed to moments of reimagination, such as the creative retellings of the kiss between Molly and Bloom.

Laura Pelaschiar devoted her whole lecture to embraces in Joyce’s works, and she analyzed kisses in their various nuances in Dubliners, A Portrait, and Ulysses. Throughout Dubliners, misunderstandings combine with failures in order to form a dreary situation represented by the younger Stephen’s disappointing encounters both with his mother and with prostitutes. Only in Ulysses is there something positive at last, as Bloom and Molly mix fertility with food through sharing their seedcake in happy anticipation of a new life.

John McCourt was even more daring, having ventured into the slippery zone of talking about Joyce’s female...