"Joyce Without Borders": A Report on the North American James Joyce Symposium, Mexico City, Mexico, 12-16 June 2019

Abstract

"Joyce Without Borders":A Report on the North American James Joyce Symposium, Mexico City, Mexico, 12-16 June 2019 Tiffany L. Fajardo Mexico City may seem the least likely destination for a Joyce conference, but 2019's "Joyce Without Borders" makes a strong case for situating symposia in new and exciting locales outside [End Page 17] the Anglosphere. With its historic Roma backdrop, Mexico City's Universidad Nacional Autónoma offered Joyceans an invigorating conference venue that brought scholars the world over together for five days of performances, panels, and fun. A conference unlike any other, in addition to the serious scholarship on display, this year's events included a Ulysses-themed tarot reading by the artist Penelope K. Wade and a Finnegans Wake yoga class led by James Shaw, ensuring a delightful and unforgettable experience for all attendees. The conference kicked off on Wednesday, 12 June, with Carol Wade's "Art of the Wake," a witty exploration of Finnegans Wake through painting and illustration. In the words of Wade, "I just love it when art causes a conversation"—and that she did! By turns elegant and playful, Wade's art is a visual smorgasbord that set the pace for the conference as an intellectual endeavor, which, however ambitious, illuminated Joyce for a broad audience and beckoned him from the ivory tower and into the dear, dirty streets. Next, composer Neal Kosaly-Meyer's "Finnegans Wake, fragment performed from memory" was a tour-de-force feat in which he performed eight pages of the Wake entirely from memory. The acute attention to musical detail and quasi-liturgical staging, including his pausing to pour water and whiskey which he then ceremonially drank, was wholly unique. Gavan Kennedy's "Finnegan Wakes Film Project" followed, democratizing Joyce's most experimental work by choosing volunteers to read randomly selected passages set to any tune that had impacted them in a meaningful way. The scope of the project is massive, seeking to set all of the Wake to film, and Kennedy shot several clips with conference-goers throughout the week's events. Thursday, 13 June, saw the beginning of panel sessions proper, with veteran and virgin researchers convening to present fresh perspectives on Joyce's oeuvre. Chaired by Kiron Ward, the morning session's "Joyce in Africa, Africa in Joyce," was very much in the spirit of the conference theme. Teresa Valentini's "Comparative Modernisms: Olive Schreiner's African Farm and Joyce's A Portrait," raised issues of identity, gender, and nation. Michael Wood then delivered the first keynote on "Melodies of Underdevelopment," stressing the relationship between music and class in Joyce's work. The Joycean events continued well into lunch with a Finnegans Wake reading group led by Rodney Sharkey and Peter Quadrino, showcasing a delicious prix fixe menu that highlighted traditional Mexican dishes and made for a crossing of linguistic and culinary borders. The return to the conference marked presentations by my panel, "Nes Yo: Living with the Irresolvable in Joyce's Fiction." For my part, "'The He and the She of It': Embracing Indeterminacy in Joyce" attempted to shift the focus from HCE to ALP and interrogate the uncertainty surrounding the Phoenix Park incident, as well as raise [End Page 18] discussions about the contemporary significance of this "crime" in the wake of #metoo. Shifting gears, Tim Conley's "Don't you know he's dead?" offered a Wittgensteinian spin on Joyce's texts, reminding us that nothing—not even the ostensibly obvious difference between life and death—is ever beyond critique, and that the simplest of premises becomes questionable in the hands of Joyce. Austin Briggs followed this with the Empson-inflected "Seven Types of Joycean Ambiguity and What to Do with Them," highlighting the multiple and contradictory valences in Joyce's work from Dubliners through Ulysses. The afternoon then closed with a panel chaired by conference organizer James Ramey, "Joyce and Posthumanism," which was one of the day's most provocative. Given the typical antipathy to theory in Joyce and lack of scholarship by women on the Wake, graduate students Maisie Ridgeway's "Joyce the Technician: Algorithms and Autopoiesis in Finnegans Wake" and Brenna MacDougall's "Posthuman Joyce? The Becomings...