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Joyceans Wake at a Funferal in Dublin: The First International Joyce Seminar, 1967 Author(s): David Hayman Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Spring, 1968), pp. 214-217Published by: University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40122334Accessed: 13-05-2015 03:05 UTC

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214 BOOKS ABROAD

Gonzalez. It is the same problem which Berg- son diagnosed and which plagued Machado and Salinas, of how the poet can make words reflect the unique rather than the collective self. Unless the wages of political tyranny are to be silence, the poet must cleanse words. Valente writes:

Bajo la palabra insistente como una invitacion o una suplica debiamos hallarnos, debiamos hallar Una brizna de mundo.

In Brines' Palabras a la oscuridad there is evi- dence of an uncritical reading of Cernuda's poetry. Brines, a Valencian, a master of lovely diction, has taken over Cernuda's archness and his thematics, without the older poet's tough- mindedness and irony that made them palat- able to the reader. As a result, the Virgilian sadness that permeates the whole book cloys. Even so, there is originality in his reading of Cernuda, for Brines prefers the Andalusian hedonist to the anti-Establishment Cernuda.

Rodriguez, whose Alianza y condena also appeared in 1966, has been considered a young master since his first book in 1953. If Valente shares themes with Salinas, and Brines with Cernuda, this remarkable poet from Zamora is like no one so much as that "jubilant exis- tentialist," Jorge Guillen. Like several of the Generation of 1927, vision is Rodriguez's meta- phor for commerce with the world. In these poems we learn that covetousness is the great- est sin, and that it is more blessed to receive than to take. Hence expectation is the pass- word:

La misteriosa juventud constantc de lo que existe, su maravillosa eternidad, hoy llaman con sus nudillos muy heridos a esta pupila prisionera.

I have not meant, in pointing up similari- ties between the younger poets and those of 1927, to do more than suggest an appropriate context in which to view the new Spanish poetry. But there is also a lesson here for the young poet who can see beyond social poetry. He could learn, for one thing, that the Gen- eration of 1927 found useful answers to prob- lems of which the Generation of 1898 was scarcely aware. Oberlin College

Bibliography Francisco Brines. Palabras a la oscuridad. Madrid, In-

sula, 1966. Angel Gonzalez. Tratado de urbanismo. Barcelona, El

Bardo, 1967.

Claudio Rodriguez. Alianza y condena. Madrid, Re- vista de Occidente, 1966.

Luis Rosales. La casa encendida. Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1967.

Jose Angel Valente. La memoria y los signos. Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1966.

Joyceans Wa\e at a Funferd in Dublin: The First International Joyce Seminar, 1967

By David Hayman

For some time now June 16th has been a spe- cial day in Dublin, a day for organized tours to Glasnevin Cemetery, number 7 Eccles Street, the Martello Tower, and to other spots commemorated in James Joyce's Ulysses. The tour entrepreneurs have perhaps profited the most, but Joyce buffs seem intrigued by the idea of following no matter how incompletely the none-too-inspiring fictional itineraries of Joyce's larger-than-life protagonists. This year was in a sense no exception, though yet an- other of the landmarks, "Bloom's house" at 7 Eccles Street, is in the process of being de- stroyed. The property has been purchased by a Catholic order and all that remains standing is the skeleton of the outer walls. To commem- orate the date and the event, the door which had been taken from that building was dedi- cated as a permanent fixture in the Bailey pub (also mentioned in Ulysses) with much cere- mony after the tour on this June 16th: drinks on the house for a large group of notables. Bloom's day was also remarkable this year as the second day of the First International Joyce Seminar, an event whose title suggests a sequel.

The Seminar, held at University College, Joyce's Alma Mater, and at the Gresham Hotel on O'Connell Street, was a spectacular affair, part scholarly convention, part side show, and part sentiment, but fairly continu- ously diverting. It was organized with a re- markable amount of care (given the sponta- neity of its conception early last winter) by Bernard Benstock (Kent State University), Fritz Senn (of the Joyce Newslitter and Zu- rich), and Thomas Staley (of the James Joyce Quarterly and the University of Tulsa) and supported by the Irish Tourist Agency (Bord Failte) and the editors of the Dubliner Magazine. Things kept happening with very little time out for food and rest for two solid days of talk and trips (to the source of the Liffey as well as around Joyce's Dublin) and entertainment. Evenings were spent pleasantly

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JOYCE SEMINAR 215

in a private room of the Silver Swan pub. In- cluded in the entertainment was a dramatic reading by three buxom Mollys in light attire (light night attire in fact) of the "Penelope" sequence of Ulysses, an event calculated to amaze the attentive Irish waiters and to in- terest if not to amuse the after-dinner Joyce- ans. (Personally, I would have preferred to hear a more dramatic episode, one that is less obviously a set piece and a shocker.) The read- ing was directed by Harry Pollock who recent- ly produced Ulysses in Nighttown in Toronto.

Among the honored guests at the Seminar was Giorgio Joyce, the author's son, who has not been back to Dublin in forty-five years and seemed at first to have come there this year against his better judgment. As the days passed, he thawed some, though still com- plaining about the excessive attention he was getting from the Irish press and television. According to one account he is planning to write a book about his father "to help set things straight." A fine idea, it seems to me. More jovial and in fact quite delightful was Joyce's long-time friend and confidant, Frank Budgen, who played the old man and acted the the young.

Perhaps for the benefit of these gendemen Dublin turned out some ripe coincidences. There was, for example, a man drowned off the "Forty-foot Hole" (the sign reads "Forty- foot Men Only" calling to mind the giant hero of Finnegans Wa\e). As the tour bus ap- proached the Martello Tower, we could see the boats out in the harbor looking for the body. The Irish poet, famed for his sharp tongue and drinking capacity, Patrick Kava- nagh (t)5 after dedicating the door to 7 Eccles Street with appropriate testiness and an oc- casional stab at the American Joyce industry, put on a fair imitation of Joyce's anti-Semitic citizen-Cyclops before collapsing on one of the side benches of the pub. One of his re- marks is worth repeating: "The proper in- scription on this door . . . should be what the dead hand wrote: 'Bloom is a cod.' " A good postscript for any Joyce conference.

The Irish press of "twinsome twominds" about Joyce and Joyceans turned on its in- imitable and perhaps half-warranted venom and bile (released by a patented method and poured copiously over all and sundry) : "Well the Dublin of Joyce has become more real to foreign students than the actual Dublin of the present . . . Joyce it must be admitted with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment, has put us on the map." The admission, on the part of a true Shaun-the-post, no matter how tongue-in-cheek, represents a change from the

Dublin and the Irish attitude of years past when only a handful of enlightened Irishmen deigned to recognize the existence of their greatest novelist. This year, perhaps because of the publicity received by the film Ulysses, perhaps because of the Seminar, perhaps be- cause of a widening of Irish horizons, Joyce's Ulysses in the special movie dust jacket was fea- tured in the shop windows around town! It is recognizably a different Dublin today if no bet- ter than the one Joyce described (though thank God the Irish have not changed), a Dublin somewhat less grand and somewhat less squal- id. There were, it should be noted, several attentive Irish priests at the talks and not all of the press comment was completely unfavor- able. Besides, several of the speakers and many in the audience of between fifty and sixty people were Dubliners, and the first day's talks were wittily introduced in "Djoytsch" by Professor Roger McHugh of the English Department of University College.

The announced purpose of the Seminar was to give scholars a chance to communicate and commune in the place and at a time appropri- ate to the discussion of Joyce's work. There were far too many talks scheduled for this first gathering and doubtless the audience found it tedious to listen to all of them strung out in a line. Certainly, the committee would have been well advised to select the speakers more rigorously and to make the talks longer (fifteen-minute talks, though they inevitably turn into thirty-minute talks, are seldom more than extended footnotes). Three rather than six talks per session would have done nicely. This is not to downgrade the excellence of some of the papers and the value of the con- ference itself as a medium of exchange for ideas and information. It is seldom that a con- ference is as much fun as this one was for as many people.

Still, the business of the conference is not dinners, after-dinners, tours, but papers and dialogue. It is to the quality of these that the Seminar owes its success or failure. The papers read ranged from the polished and pondered to the crude and amateurish, from the foot- note to the truncated chapter, from discus- sions of a detail to the definition of mode. The first day opened with a treatment by Sidney Feshback (State University of New York at Stony Brook) of the early works in the light of Renaissance rhetorical practice and particu- larly of the rhetoric of Joyce's avowed favorite, Ben Jonson. Taken from the larger context of a book in preparation, this presentation seemed less than convincing. The same may well be true of my own attempt to explore

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216 BOOKS ABROAD

the implications of Joyce's systematic use of farce conventions and clown identities in Ulysses. On the other hand Professor Solo- mon's (University of Hawaii) paper on "The Phallic Tree in Finnegans Wa\e" seemed cal- culated to amuse the audience by the very incongruity of its presentation by a decorous lady before so decorous a gathering in so dec- orous a place. Her approach to the problem of Joyce's elevated obscenity was appropriately monolithic, but it was hardly evident from the paper that the writer (whose book is also forthcoming) was aware of the larger implica- tions of her subject, the role of sex in the total scheme of the Wa\e and the relevance to Joyce's mode. What are the many reasons why it was necessary that the famous crime in Phoenix Park be heavily and hilariously sex- ual ? What are the limits of that sexuality and sexual symbolism? If, as a reader of the Wa\e, I was frankly dismayed by the narrowness of this particular reading, I can't help admiring Miss Solomon's thoroughness. The other papers, given during the first afternoon, were less ambitious in scope and less provocative. One of them was a brief discussion of the obscene content of Ulysses; another (by Judge Donough MacDonough) a treatment of the sources of the ballad "The Lass of Aughrim"; a third, which should probably be passed over in silence, was a barely comprehensible musi- cal-biographical melange that drew upon some curiously inconsequential tapes and docu- ments.

The morning of the second day was sched- uled to begin with an hour and a half of talks over breakfast and to end with a panel dis- cussion of Joyce studies today. As it happened, the talks took up the whole morning (an hour was given to the panel discussion after lunch) and I must confess that I missed most of them. I am indebted to Kevin Sullivan (Co- lumbia) who chaired that meeting and to the perceptive account given by Jacques Aubert (in La Quinzaine, 15-31 juillet) for some of the details that follow. According to both ac- counts the best of these papers was given by James Atherton (Wigan, Surrey) one of the deans of Wa\e scholarship. Beginning with what should by this time be an obvious posi- tion (that each of us dreams the dream in Finnegans Wa\e), Professor Atherton showed with some brilliance the depth of Joyce's con- cern for humanity. The remaining papers with the exception of one on the Christ imagery in Synge's Playboy of the Western World (by Stanley Sultan of Clark University) all dealt in narrowly specialized matters. Norman Sil- verstein (Queens College) discussed the manu-

script version of the "Circe" chapter, a topic which unfortunately does not lend itself to this sort of presentation. The same may be said for the paper by Jacques Aubert (Univer- sity of Lyons) which, in addition to being given in French before a predominantly Eng- lish-speaking audience, dealt with an obscure problem in Joyce scholarship: the question of Joyce's notes in French for Finnegans Wa\e. Ben Collins (of Parsons College) gave a de- tailed and somewhat New Critical explication of the neglected story "A Mother." There are plans to collect these papers in a volume to be published by the Dolmen Press in Dublin. I have no doubt that some of them will make better reading than listening.

In addition to the papers there were several more or less off-the-cuff after-dinner talks and the presentation by Padraic Colum of a bronze copy of Joyce's death mask to Giorgio Joyce. Finally there was an amusing address in French by the spirited Italian critic Umberto Eco (Milan). The topic was a phrase from the Wa\e in which Joyce conflates Marcus Minu- cius Felix, the second-century Christian apolo- gist, and the comic-strip hero, Mandrake the Magician. Eco concluded with a plea for more linguistic analysis of the Wa\e.

Of greater potential value than even the talks themselves was the gathering together of so many Joyce enthusiasts and scholars from so many countries (by one count fourteen). In addition to the large American and Irish contingents, there were scholars from Holland (the translator of Ulysses), Belgium, Switzer- land, Denmark, Italy, France, Spain, Canada, England, and Poland. Perhaps in the seminar projected for 1969 there will be an even richer sampling of nationalities and interests, a dear- er focus for the papers, and more time given to serious discussion of problems Joycean. For my part, however, I had delightful con- versations with a variety of people I had long wished to meet, and particularly and unex- pectedly with the Polish translator of Ulysses, Maciej Slomczynski, who is now working on a translation of Finnegans Wa\e. Slomszyn- ski, a gifted linguist and a most courageous translator, believes that Polish of all languages is flexible enough to accommodate Joyce's ex- uberant punning. Whatever my reservations, I could not help but be impressed by the interest and awareness he demonstrated and the im- plications of a Polish version of a book that has yet to attract a large readership in the Eng- lish-speaking world. More starding perhaps were Slomczynski's sensible attitudes toward the book, his insistence on the Wage's funda- mental simplicity, and the account he grave of

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PUBLISHING IN AFGHANISTAN 217

the book's encyclopedic texture. This sort of attitude is rare even among Joyceans, who tend to forget the larger concerns in their pre- occupation with the minor ones.

Everything considered, the First Inter- national James Joyce Seminar was a success despite the all-too-evident flaws. For the first time and almost in spite of itself (though with the connivance of the tourist board), Dublin was the site of a confer- ence on Joyce. Among the more tangible by- ^i'^fl^S^ products is a new James H| ̂ M^^^1 Joyce Foundation based ^^wfl^^ in Tulsa and dedicated ~A' }J^^j to aiding and abetting @$t\ \ (tf^Slk *$$%> Joyce scholarship and t/V JIpHLJ^ the teaching of the mas- ^^^f^^^^^^^ ter's word. So be it.

University of Iowa

Boo\ Publishing in Afghanistan

By Paul B. Snider

With Afghanistan's rich historical background of literary figures dating from the tenth cen- tury, it is easy to understand why officials predict a bright future for the Afghanistan eighteen-month-old Book Publishing Insti- tute. "Perhaps," said Abdul Haq Waleh, presi- dent of the Institute, "we will introduce Af- ghan authors of the caliber of Menhajus Seraj (Jouzjani), historian-author of Taba\at-Nasiri in the tenth century; Firdausi who wrote Shah Nama for Muhammad Ghaznavi in the eleventh century; Khushal Khan Khatak, the Pashtu poet of the sixteenth-century authors."

While a recent unesco statement puts Af- ghanistan's literacy rate at only 5.4 per cent, annually more than 50,000 Afghans attain lit- eracy through the greatly expanded educa- tional programs of this rapidly developing nation. This fact, coupled with the love of the people for literary works - especially poetry - and the enthusiastic support of government officials, creates an optimistic attitude in the Institute.

Subscribing to the unesco definition of a book as "a non-periodical publication contain- ing 49 pages or more, not counting covers," Waleh said it was economically not feasible to publish a tide with fewer than 50 pages. He added that the Institute was designed to be financially self-sufficient and to make money for stockholders.

The Book Publishing Institute is a "state enterprise" registered with the Afghan Min-

istry of Justice. Such enterprises, established by governmental agencies in related areas as sub- sidiaries, are indirecdy financed through gov- ernmental funds. The Institute operates with capital provided by its three stockholders. The stockholders are the Government Printing House, and two of the three daily newspapers published by the government in Kabul, Anis and Islah. Abdul Majid Zaliuli, an Afghan with an interest in book publishing, has con- tributed a large sum to aid the burgeoning industry. Within a few years Waleh believes the financial base of the Institute will be broadened and stock will be sold to the general public.

While there are some financial aids avail- able to young book industries of developing nations in the form of grants from other coun- tries, Waleh says that the Institute prefers to attempt to gain monetary and technical assist- ance from UNEsoo. "Afghanistan maintains a rather strict program of neutrality in its politi- cal and other ventures. We prefer, therefore, to seek out unesco for help and thereby to maintain our neutral position. This policy does not rule out seeking a loan from national de- velopment banks and similar help from pub- lishing organizations from other countries, but unesco is not politically affiliated."

At present the Institute prints 3,000 copies of each title and realizes a profit of 30 per cent on all sales even when selling titles (such as a collection of 50 sonnets) at from 3 to 5 afghanis (4 to 6 cents). Dari and Pashtu, the two official languages of Afghanistan, are the major publication languages; eventually some titles will be published in English. Not all titles are published in both languages; the subject of the book determines the language.

The Institute now has 68 titles on sale. Twenty of these titles are their own ventures and the remainder were given them by other organizations for distribution. The books are promoted by newspaper and radio advertise- ments and also by personal letters to ministers and officials, calling attention to tides which might be of special interest and value to a par- ticular group or profession.

Being an "unofficial official organization," the Institute has quasi-governmental status. Office space and equipment are furnished by the Ministry of Information and Culture; dis- tribution of the books is free through the Government Printing House salesrooms and agents. Where there is no salesroom in the provinces, the provincial directors of the Gov- ernment Printing House will act as sales agents until the Institute has its own salesmen. In some areas, special agents will procure titles for

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