"These pots we have to wear": A Report on the Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 31 July-6 August 2022

Abstract

"These pots we have to wear":A Report on the Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 31 July-6 August 2022 Talia Abu After a two-year hiatus, brought on by the global Covid-19 pandemic, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation hosted once more its August Workshop. The Workshop has been sorely missed mostly for the unique academic experience it offers all participants, but especially for early-career researchers. While conferences often include parallel panels, the unique format of the Zurich Workshop, which gives every presentation the central stage, allows those in their early careers to receive the same consideration and attentive feedback as well-established academics. It is well known, and well documented, that Fritz Senn encourages participants to avoid reading papers and, instead, to adapt a more interactive approach between speaker and listeners. Speaking straight to the listeners privileges discourse and the exchange of ideas more than the eloquence of a written paper and provides grounds for a stimulating discussion that is less constricted than an unforgiving schedule of multiple sessions. [End Page 575] Clothing, this year's topic, was informed by the prominent presence of apparel in Joyce's texts throughout his career. Jolanta Warwzycka, who inaugurated the formal sessions of the Workshop, traced the beginning of Joyce's personal interest in clothes, and especially in women's attire, back to his years in Trieste. Looking into Giacomo Joyce, she argued that descriptions of ladies' ensembles became more detailed after his encounter with the sophisticated and emancipated style of Triestine women. And, as Emily Bell's attentive and productive inquiry into Joyce's library proved later that week, this interest is well documented in his note-taking from a variety of novels, historical accounts, and encyclopedic works about fashion and clothes. Sam Slote's engaging discussion of hats, which opened the second day of the Workshop, argued for Joyce's interest in the cultural codes associated with particular wearable items. Emphasizing the close affiliation between social status and appearance, Slote demonstrated that Ulysses represents the political downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell through social practices involving hats. He started his presentation, titled "The King Uncrowned (or Men Without Hats)," with iconographic images of Parnell depicted as shirtless and fearless, which illustrated the cultural perception of the Nationalist leader as a brave, strong, and hyper-masculine figure. Following his political downfall, Parnell's image was revised in the popular imagination, as he was depicted as ill-kempt and, crucially, as not wearing a hat, a sign of vanished respectability. According to Slote, however, Joyce does more than simply depict Parnell's transition from the uncrowned to the decrowned king of Ireland; he interferes with the historical record when Bloom brings Parnell his lost hat and, in a gesture of crowning, restores Parnell's kingship. The cultural function of items of clothing was also at the center of Stephanie Nelson's presentation. Discussing veils in Homer and Ulysses, Nelson related the function of the veil in separating an individual from either the shameful or the sacred. According to Nelson's fascinating reading of the "Circe" episode, the veil dramatizes the play between seeing and not seeing, shame and passion, the sacred and the obscene. She also pointed out that the veil, in Ulysses, signals an oscillation between the material and the metaphorical. Thus, when Martha Clifford appears in "Circe" wearing a veil, we are reminded that her identity has never been unveiled and that the mystery surrounding her has never resolved. Swaying from the metaphoric to the material, in relation to clothing, was the subject of other presentations as well. In my talk, I indicated that HCE's "dirty pantaloons" (FW 94.35) signal, on the one hand, his immoral character and, on the other, reflect the material reality of pants stained and tainted by bodily fluids or by soil. I claimed that [End Page 576] dirt on clothes, when not read allegorically, becomes a form of communication and that the incriminating message communicated by the dirt on HCE's pants requires the silencing mechanism of the washing machine. Fedya Daas's thought-provoking discussion of secondhand clothes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses showed...