This post was contributed by Anita Butler, a Doctoral candidate in English (King’s College London). Her thesis, ‘The Shakespearean Blush: Body, Colour, and Emotion on the Early Modern Stage’ was recently submitted. She completed her BA English at Birkbeck where her final year dissertation on Hely’s of Dame Street consolidated a passion for Joyce that she hopes to revisit for future early modern/modernist work.

31 October – 1 November 2014, Senate House, London

I recently attended a two-day conference organised by Birkbeck’s Joe Brooker where a cornucopia of papers vivified the world’s largest centenary celebration of James Joyce’s Dubliners. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ Joyce conveyed simultaneous time disallowed to panel conferences: apart from plenary (‘complete’) panels, choices must be made, and an attendee/speaker/blogger can’t be in two places at once. My account captures snapshots from papers I did experience, with a Joycean ‘meanwhile’ for those I didn’t.

DAY ONE: FRIDAY 31 OCTOBER

The first plenary: ‘Publishing Dubliners’. In Steven Morrison’s ‘James Joyce, Dubliners and the Irish Homestead’, we found ‘The Sisters’, ‘Eveline’ and ‘After the Race’ vying with stories such as ‘Monica’s Twin Sister’ – revealing titular denouement; and ‘After the Race’, excluded from the Homestead Christmas edition, but published after, may be ‘the pig’s paper’ reference in Ulysses’ ‘Scylla’. Next, Bernard McGinley’s ‘Grant Richards’ Other Dubliner, 1914’ informed the audience that Richards published Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, with traces in Dubliners palpable. Did Richards’ 1906 refusal stimulate a new story about Mr. Hunter – the embryonic Ulysses? Katherine Ebury’s ‘Tweeting Dubliners: Research, Outreach and Public Engagement’ showed possibilities for Joyce beyond the academy at a time of competitive memorial: her @Dubliners100 produced a top five: [5] ‘Grace’, [4] ‘Two Gallants’, [3] ‘A Little Cloud’, [2] ‘Ivy Day’, [1] ‘The Dead’. Would Joyce have tweeted? Probably no on world events, but probably yes on sandwiches.

Aside: why giving a paper is a bit like a staircase.

The Woburn Suite and G37 (our homes for two days) are in a corridor to the right of Senate House’s Ceremonial Staircase – starry steps (á la Astaire and Rogers) that share affinities with paper giving. You hope for stardust; ‘climb’ to be seen/heard. Climb is harder than descent. After, you may want to ‘slide down the banister’ – glad it’s over, or wanting to do it again (better: slower!)

In ‘Precursors 1’, Cóilín Owens’s ‘Gnomon and Lozenge: Joyce, Euclid, and The Book of Kells’, showed Joyce’s use of the gnomon, symbolising incompleteness and imperfection. Joyce knew the lozenge (rhombus) from The Book of Kells, and its geometric counterpart, a three-cornered rhombus (shape ‘L’) begins and ends Dubliners. Aki Turan’s ‘“Sent To The Devil”: Infernal Circulation on the Streets of Dublin’ used an audio clip – Thomas Moore’s song ‘Silent, O Moyle’ – to enhance his talk on the reader’s willingness to fill in the gaps of Joyce’s sometimes salacious narrative, using Dante as a foil for ‘Two Gallants’. My ‘In standing water between boy and man: James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” and Lost Boys Through Time’ posited the late-Elizabethan gallant as a prototype for the Joyce boys.

[Meanwhile] in ‘East’ I missed Zachary Kell’s: ‘Miscengenations on miscegenations”: Joyce’s Anti-Orientalist Narratives’; and Kuğu Tekin’s ‘Dublin and Istanbul: The Two Formative Forces in the Fiction of James Joyce and Orban Pamuk’

For ‘In the City’, Joseph Kelly’s ‘Dubliners and Urban Sociology’ – a work in progress – applied urban sociology and Google Earth to ‘An Encounter’. Kelly argued that in this story the middle classes invade the poorer districts; and that our ‘dark side’ belongs in the “other” parts of Dublin. David Bradshaw’s ‘Perished Alive: The Material Culture of Dubliners’ highlighted nine galoshes-mentions in ‘The Dead’ and rubber’s ‘dark’ side, with colonial brutality rendering the Congo Free State anything but free. Galoshes signified white cultural superiority. Multiple cross-tale examples were tempered with the caveat that you can find something in everything; but those ‘somethings’ could be more than harmless incidentals. Helen Saunders’ ‘Sartorial Exchange in Dubliners’ viewed clothing through Georg Simmel’s ‘Fashion’ and ‘Adornment’. The dichotomy: fashion relies on imitation and differentiation, on difference and social integration. If the two gallants ‘talk’ through hats, are they the least necessary accessory, as Simmel suggests; when is a hat ‘properly’ worn; and what is Joyce doing with those ‘lavender’ trousers in ‘Grace’?

[Meanwhile] in ‘Out of Ireland’ I missed Tony Jordan’s ‘Dubliners and Arthur Griffith’; Pauric Havlin’s ‘Dublin Inc. – Joyce’s Dublin and the World Literary Space’; and Rafael Oliven’s ‘Paralysis Here & There: a Brazilian Reading of Dubliners’

Next, ‘Experience 1’: Oliver Neto’s ‘“The Boredom Effect”: Tedium as Technique in Dubliners and Ulysses’ showed how the word ‘boredom’ rarely features in Dubliners yet the idea engages us, as for Ulysses’ ‘draymen […] barrels dullthudding’ and James Duffy’s epiphany in ‘A Painful Case’ where eight short sentences all begin with ‘he’. In ‘“All the living and the dead”: Social Minds in Dubliners’, Maximilian Alders examined the extent to which fictional and social minds coalesce: Dubliners- titles indicate shared experience, promoting (intra-narrative) collective entanglements, thwarted love, and social opinion. Tom Miles’s ‘“An Encounter” with the New: Anticlimax as a Modernist Sensibility’ argued that the anti-climactic becomes a mode in itself and that life is fundamentally so. In this vein, the influence of Dubliners can only be read back from Ulysses.

[Meanwhile] in ‘Precursors 2’ I missed Michael Mayo’s ‘Jesuitical Joyce: Reading Dubliners with the Spiritual Exercises’; Dominik Wallerius’s ‘Joyce, Chopin and the Question of Modernism’; and Paul Devine’s ‘Joyce’s Realism’.

Together for keynote speaker 1: Clair Wills’ ‘On Clay’ took 1960s realist Irish prose and Auerbach’s art to show how clay represents the cusp between the living and the dead; that God chose clay to make mankind; and that Maria’s negative fertility can be countered by her eventual return to earth/clay as part of life’s cycle.

DAY TWO: SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER

In ‘Photography & Film’, Richard Brown’s ‘Dubliners, Atget and the Modernist Crime Scene’ showed prose can be photographic when aligned with Eugene Atget’s Parisian street scenes. Brown’s cogent photographic choices proved the possibility for a centenary edition of Dubliners – illustrated! Georgina Binnie’s ‘“This city is suffering from hemiplegia of the will […] I’m not afraid to live”: Photography and Paralysis in Dubliners’ used burgeoning commercial/professional photography to show how photographs affected how people saw others. Photos capture juxtapositions: paralysis/action; modernity/stasis; liberation/entrapment – while making the familiar, strange. Cleo Hanaway’s ‘“having one good look at themselves”: Pre-cinematic Perception in Dubliners’ brought early visual entertainments – the limelight lantern, the magic-lantern (surely a ‘prototype’ for Powerpoint!), the stereoscope, and the kinescope – to reconsider ‘Araby’ and ‘The Dead’ (Gretta perched atop the stairs). The development of 3D allowed protean perspectives.

[Meanwhile] in ‘Intertexts’, I missed Brian Fox on ‘Joyce and the American Short Story in the Age of Roosevelt, 1901-09’; Maureen McVeigh’s ‘“Scrupulous Meanness” Reflected in Creative Works of Other Authors After Dubliners; and Paul Fagan’s ‘The Celibate Lives of James Joyce and Brian O’Nolan, Dubliners’.

In ‘Experience: 2’, Onno Kosters’s ‘Paralysis Betrayed’ argued that stasis is often agency, not inertia: Joyce’s exile frees him while his Dubliners remain ‘Little Chandlers’. But choosing stasis is an act: paralysis gives into liberation. Kaori Hirashige’s ‘Artistes on the Scene: Joyce’s “A Mother” and the Rhetoric of Silence’, showed the narrator’s controlling Mrs Kearney’s voice: first active then progressively passive; an expected musical performance is only hinted at; and the style of a music review reflects contemporary complicity between journalists and music society members, with artistes denied a true voice. Amber Zawada’s ‘Wonder Moments in Dubliners’, argued that epiphanies are moments of wonder and awe minus the romantics: the cycle of awe can paralyse if we over-think the moment, fail to move, and spiral downwards.

[Meanwhile…] For ‘Reception & Adaptation’ I missed Lise Jaillant’s ‘Cheap Modernism: Dubliners in the Travellers’ Library and the Modern Library Series’; John Vanderheide’s ‘The Mechanics of the Labyrinth, or, John Huston’s Wakening of The Dead’; and Joseph Nugent’s ‘Dubliners: New Ways of Reading, Novel Ways of Knowing’.

We came together for an address from the Irish Ambassador, His Excellency, Daniel Mulhall, for whom writers’ lives and works provide purchase on Irish history – with Joyce’s era his ‘go to’ or ‘default’. Leaving Dublin allowed Joyce to scrutinize his homeland from afar, with Gabriel Conroy a version of Joyce had he stayed. New (wary) Ulysses readers should be tempted with ‘Cyclops’.

In the second plenary panel, ‘Dubliners into Joyce’, Clare Hutton’s ‘Joyce at Work on Ulysses: From Dubliners to “Hades” and the “Wandering Rocks”’ compared the fourteen episodes in Ulysses published in The Little Review. Joyce’s mode of revision was to add, never to cut. He redeploys in Ulysses 27 Dubliners from 9 stories, excluding ‘The Sisters’, ‘An Encounter’, ‘Araby’, ‘Eveline’, ‘After the Race’, and ‘Clay’. Serial Ulysses dialogue hardly changes, but comparisons in narrative style between ‘Grace’ and ‘Hades’ are striking. Jim Le Blanc’s ‘After the Grace’ focused on Shem the Penman’s narrative to consider reused lines and inter-textual correspondences between Dubliners and Finnegans Wake. Kevin Dettmar’s ‘Grant Richards’ “Mistake” as a Portal of Discovery’ asked: if Dubliners had been published in the bitter, Ibsen-inspired realist culture of 1906 instead of 1914, would reception have been stronger? The Joyce-Richards correspondence, seemingly negative, did invaluable advance work for Dubliners.

A short panel – ‘Reflections on 100 Dubliners’ – allowed Finn Fordham to consolidate the breadth of papers heard. Cleo Hanaway‘s informal question to attendees throughout the conference (where & how did they first encounter Joyce?) prompted Kaori Hirashige’s Joycean Tokyo tales; and my discovering Ulysses in Joe Brooker’s class (2006) – the happiest hour of my week.

We ended on a high with the second keynote speaker, Andrew Gibson, whose ‘Dubliners and Irish Melancholic Tradition’ revisited a historic Gaelic culture dedicated to poetry, music, story-telling, art; and its Bards (poets: satirists: minor nobility). The 1601 battle of Kinsale instilled melancholy and capitulation – for James Clarence Mangan, a vastation of the soul. Stephen Dedalus doesn’t learn Gaelic and neither does Joyce: both move on by assuming the coloniser’s language.

And finally…we began in October-sunshine with coffee and ended in November-rain with wine (two cases – thank you, Irish Embassy!) Reflections on a past event can be flawed: like a photograph – an image that remembers but is always in reverse.