“Touring the No Timelike Absolent”: A Report on the Anniversary 2015 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, Zurich, Switzerland, 3-9 August 2015

Abstract

“Touring the No Timelike Absolent”:A Report on the Anniversary 2015 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, Zurich, Switzerland, 3-9 August 2015 Halila Bayramova Time was, time is, time will always be one of the quintessential subjects that draws scholars’ attention to its timeless features. It can function in various ways in a literary work: as a theme, method, compound element, factor, or even a character. James Joyce’s exploration and masterful interpretation of time was the thirtieth-anniversary topic at the annual Zurich James Joyce Workshop. Participants touched upon almost all of the different aspects of time in Joyce’s writing: universal, physical, historical, absolute, mathematical, philosophical, substantial, existential, genetic, hyperbolic, subjective, prehistoric, deeply imaginary, and so on. Symbolically enough, the workshop started with the distribution to participants of Joyce-themed calendars made exclusively for the occasion by Sabrina Alonso and Bill Brockman. The calendars featured important events in Joyce’s life as well as in his career and works. [End Page 15] Jolanta Wawrzycka inaugurated the workshop talks with her provocative presentation titled, less provocatively, “Markers of Time in Chamber Music.” With the help of her own translation of Chamber Music into Polish, Wawrzycka demonstrated how Joyce’s tense usage and choice of words were analogical to his later literary deviations. This revelation implicitly answered the question: “Would we read Joyce’s poetry if the book did not have his name on it?” Wawrzycka also revealed apparent parallels, sometimes word-for-word “metarepetitions” (a new word for plagiarism?), between Chamber Music and W. B. Yeats’s poetry that left another question open: “Was it a deliberate tribute to the poet or a series of unconscious borrowings?” The theme of parallels continued in Stephanie Nelson’s talk on time and narrative sequence in Homer and Joyce. Among many subjects that Joyce borrowed from Homer was time, and Nelson paid special attention to time, the identity of memory, and narrative gaps. One of the focal questions for Homer, as well as for Joyce, seemed to be: “Is a person different in now and then?” (in effect, “I, I and I. I.”—U 9.212). Through the use of many examples from Ulysses, Nelson convincingly compared its narrative to that of the Odyssey with the thesis in mind that both Homer and Joyce established a narrative pattern in order to break it. [#WorkshopQuotables1: [Naive students]: “‘Of course Odysseus wants to go back to his wife.’ but immortality, eternally beautiful nymph?”] Fritz Senn’s miniature linguistic explorations through Homer’s and Joyce’s texts offered the audience new perspectives on narrative speed and simultaneity, syntax arrangement, textual melody, and portmanteau words. He masterfully demonstrated the authors’ ability to condense and/or expand time in a narrative sequence. Whether it was Homer destroying Odysseus’s eleven of twelve ships in a single hexameter or Joyce condensing Bloom’s long reflections into a breath between song lines, both authors’ works exhibited an exquisite mastery over the linguistic apprehension of time. [#WorkshopQuotables: (Senn on the “Ithaca” pissing contest): “Have you ever thought what I thought: what exactly happened at this Dublin High School??”] Titled quite eloquently “Endlessnessness,” Tim Conley’s discussion targeted the subject of prehistoric time in Joyce’s oeuvre. Having touched upon various kinds of time—subjective or the time one feels, the time one measures, deep time, and imaginative time—Conley focused on inhuman time or time out of perception. He effectively showed Joyce’s fascination with time outside of history in excerpts from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, asserting that Joyce was among the [End Page 16] very few modernists (if not the only one) interested in this kind of temporality. [#WorkshopQuotables: “Is there an epiphany in ‘Nausicaa’? … I’m seeing a therapist later.” (Conley)] Using hindsight, Alonso took an explorative look at Joyce’s future-in-the-past. Curious examples from his texts (beginning with Dubliners and ending with Finnegans Wake) that depict various characters’ look backward at their former selves looking toward the future stimulated an exciting discussion among the participants. Anne Fogarty’s focus was on historiographic metafiction in Ulysses and more precisely on the Phoenix Park Murders as a representation—or rather misrepresentation—of nineteenth-century Irish...