Introduction: Dandy Paradoxes

Abstract

In the late spring of 1927, Joyce took his family on vacation to the Netherlands. Between 21 May and 20 June, he, Nora, and Lucia based themselves in The Hague (or, as Joyce preferred to call it, La Haye) staying at the Grand Hotel Victoria there, but also spending a few days in Amsterdam, at the Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square. He had brought with him some work: the page proofs of Pomes Penyeach for correction and also those of Continuation of Work in Progress for transition 4 (a section which would eventually become Finnegans Wake 75-103), to which he added some choice Dutch words collected on his holidays.Notwithstanding the high quality of the accommodation, his fondness for the restful (Letters 1 256) nature of Holland, and the expansion of his Dutch vocabulary, the trip seems only to have been a qualified success. Though the Dutch were civil and obliging and not rapacious (Letters ill 159), the currency exchange rate was disadvantageous to tourists from France, so that the cost of living, and eating out, proved to be prohibitive.In addition to such money matters, the weather was unseasonably cold and unsettled for the whole month of the Joyces' stay, and he later reported to Michael Healy that the family had been driven out of Holland by cyclones in the north and those impressive exhibitions of celestial intemperance known as thunderstorms (Letters i 256), the apotheosis of which was when lightning struck the Nieuwe Kerk, which a terrified Joyce claimed to have seen from the window of his hotel room in Amsterdam. There were other, more serious, misfortunes. One afternoon, alone on the wild and endless(Letters iii 159) beach at Scheveningen, reading his Baedeker and trying to locate the Hook of Holland, Joyce was subjected to a prolonged attack by a red mastiff, with the result that his glasses were broken and he had to grope about in the sand to locate the missing lens.Thankfully the dogs were under stricter control, and the weather was rather less inclement, when, in June 2014, the James Joyce Symposium took place in Utrecht. This ancient Dutch city stands on a tributary of the Rhine, the Kromme Rijn, whose very name gave rise to the title of the Symposium, A long the KROMMERUN, and under whose aegis the content of this, volume of European Joyce Studies first emerged. Joyce seems not to have visited Utrecht, but he may well have passed through it on his travels around the country, since it is the hub of the Netherlands, the crossing point for road and railway. Indeed, its name is derived from Traiectum, the Roman fortress on which the city is built (the remains of which lie under the cathedral's precincts), the Latin term simply denoting its location at a possible Rhine crossing, contracting to become Trecht, the U from the Old Dutch uut (meaning downriver) being added at some point later.Since Utrecht is a crossroads, it's entirely appropriate that the following articles - a selection of the papers given at the Symposium - all respond in different ways to the conjunctions and intersections which lie beneath the edifices of Joyce's work. However, the opening essays, by David Spurr and Catherine Flynn, take the matter further and examine the very local associations between Joyce and De Stijl, the movement which gave the title to the Dutch review founded and published by Theo van Doesburg, in collaboration with the painter Piet Mondrian, the architects J.J. Oud, Gerrit Rietveld, and other artists during the years 1917-1931. At the periphery of the De Stijl movement were the composer George Antheil and Constantin Brancusi, both of whom Joyce knew well in Paris. Indeed, in 1929, after several attempts at sketching Joyce, Brancusi finally produced a symbol for the frontispiece of the Black Sun edition of Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, a design, Spurr suggests, conformed to the geometrical abstraction of De Stijl. Using this as a personal point of connection, Spurr proposes that Joyce understood that the movement's collaborators perceived an inherently aesthetic value in the forms of industrial production, a view which paralleled his own careful depiction of the dialogic relation between human bodies and machines in Ulysses, one which focused on the point of tensions between psychologies of desire and technological complexities. …