James Joyce can never have seemed more Jewish than he did earlier this month at the Frankel Léo synagogue in Budapest. At the end of their lively concert, the youthful Pannomia Klezmer Band gave a signal and the assembled throng of international Joyceans leapt from their seats. Hands clapping and hips swaying to the merry Eastern music, they followed the tuba, clarinet, violin and saxophone band in a spontaneous horah dance up and down the aisles and out into the night.
The occasion was the Twentieth International James Joyce Symposium. Ever since the first, in Dublin in 1967, these gatherings have been held every other year in various cities relevant to James Joyce, always centred on Bloomsday, June 16, the high holiday of the Joycean year. But none before has been held as far east as Hungary, in the city that Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, dubbed “Judapest”.
Not one of the 200 or more Joyce scholars and students assembled from around the world (including twenty-three Eastern Europeans on scholarships) had to ask “Why Hungary?”. Ulysses is built around the fictional fact that Leopold Bloom, the Irish Jew who wanders through Dublin on June 16, 1904, is the son of a Hungarian immigrant to Ireland. Even without reading the “Virag” signs on the brightly stocked flower shops scattered around Budapest, all at the conference knew that Bloom’s father Rudolf, settling in Dublin, had simply translated his surname from “Virag” to “Bloom”.
Nor was there any need to ask why Szombathely was chosen as the location for the post-conference tour, although many people did have to ask how to pronounce it. “Sombattay” is a rough rendering of the sound of the name of the western Hungarian town Joyce made the birthplace of his Rudolf Virag. But why Joyce should have picked Szombathely is the subject of much scholarly endeavour. Perhaps, the Hungarian scholar Endre Toth argues in the conference pamphlet, “The Joyce of Szombathely”, the town’s name appealed to Joyce because it was also the name of a Jewish scholar in Trieste, Marino de Szombathely, who was producing an Italian translation of the Odyssey. Or perhaps, others speculate, the pun-loving Joyce liked the word because it sounds like “somebody”. Or perhaps he had both reasons. In any event, Szombathely is well aware of its prominence on the Joycean world map.
Celebrations in Dublin itself were muted this year due to the funeral of the former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, but those symposiasts who travelled to Szombathely found the town happily celebrating Bloomsday. The Irish Ambassador to Hungary and the Hungarian Ambassador to Ireland joined the festivities, which included a reception decorated by elaborate designs on Joycean themes and a concert including two specially composed pieces by Matyas Seiber, one called “Three Fragments from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. As usual, at the academic symposium there were so many papers inspired by the myriad aspects of Joyce that four or five sessions had to be squeezed simultaneously into each time slot. The many on Jewish themes such as “the Hebrew vocabulary of Finnegans Wake” and “Bloom’s Cultural Jewishness and Irish Nationalism” were a strong reminder that Joyce began writing Ulysses while he was himself living in Austria-Hungary, in the cosmopolitan, polyglot port of Trieste.
In Trieste Joyce had many Jewish friends. An exile himself, he captured in his great book the ambiguous position, in Ireland and in Trieste, of the immigrant and of the Jew. Much quoted in Budapest last week was the famous exchange in Ulysses that takes place in Barney Kiernan’s pub as the drinkers discuss Bloom’s surprising claim that “Ireland is my nation”: “And after all, says John Wyse, why can’t a Jew love his country like the next fellow? Why not? says J. J. when he’s quite sure which country it is”. To Joyce, who lived with his family in Trieste from 1904 until 1915 and returned briefly after the end of the First World War, there were strong parallels between the Irish and the Hungarian struggle against imperial domination. In Budapest, the Irish scholar John McCourt, now of the University of Trieste and organizer of the annual James Joyce Summer School there, analysed the lecture Joyce gave (in Italian) in 1907 at the Università Popolare. What Joyce gave his Triestine audience under the title of “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages”, said McCourt, was a rough guide to Irish history in a way relevant to Trieste’s predicament. Joyce criticized the Catholic Church in Ireland for supporting both Irish nationalism and British imperialism – a stance of “having it both ways” which led to Ireland’s paralysis (a key word in the first story of Dubliners).
Dominating Joycean Budapest, however, were two events in the United States, both pegged to Bloomsday. First was the appearance in the New Yorker of a long profile of Joyce’s only surviving direct descendant, his grandson Stephen James Joyce, the effective controller of the Joyce Estate. Under the title of “The Injustice Collector”, the profile detailed the obstacles the Estate has placed in the way of Joyce scholarship, by refusing requests for permission to quote, perform, or broadcast from Joyce’s work, published and unpublished. (At the centenary Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin in 2004, for example, the Abbey Theatre was forced to cancel its performance of Joyce’s Exiles on copyright grounds.) The second, related, development was the filing in the federal court of the Northern District of California of a legal challenge to the Joyce Estate by Carol Loeb Shloss, a Joycean scholar from Stanford University and the biographer of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia (I reviewed her book Lucia Joyce: To dance in the wake in the TLS, July 2, 2004).
In her suit, Shloss, represented by the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, is pleading that the Joyce Estate is impeding academic progress by its allegations of infringement of copyright. She wants the right to use quotations from published and unpublished material relating to Joyce on her website, created in 2005. Among this material are passages deleted, at the Joyce Estate’s insistence, from her biography of Lucia. The Estate has threatened legal action if this website (now available only in the United States and protected by password) is made public. The outcome of the case will be watched eagerly by many, not only Joyceans, whose work has been restricted by zealous literary estates forbidding quotation, performance and adaptation.
Many symposiasts had been bruised by encounters with the Joyce Estate. Michael Groden, an eminent Joyce scholar from the University of Western Ontario, became one of the casualties in 2003, after assembling a “multi-media Ulysses”. When the estate demanded a prohibitive permissions fee – said to have been $1.5 million – Groden had to drop the project. “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again”, the New Yorker quotes Stephen Joyce as telling him. Groden is now excited by the six pages of a draft of Finnegans Wake bought by the National Library of Ireland (from a French bookseller, who apparently acquired the pages from an auction of belongings the Joyces left behind in their Paris apartment when fleeing the Nazis in 1940). These pages “have transformed my life”, Groden said. But it is hard to discuss them without quoting, and quoting from unpublished material is forbidden under the Estate’s restrictions.
Another whose work has been impeded is Hans Walter Gabler of the University of Munich, with whom the Estate holds joint copyright in Ulysses: A critical and synoptic edition (1984). Gabler told me that, from declared personal animosity, Stephen James Joyce, on behalf of the Estate, has refused to join him in giving the publisher the go-ahead for a reprinting. Stephen Joyce has little use for academics: “like rats and lice – they should be exterminated”, he is quoted as saying. This category perhaps includes me (although I am not and never have been an academic). When in 1996 Carol Shloss proposed her biography of Lucia, Stephen wrote to her (according to the New Yorker), “Our experience with Brenda Maddox has taught us not to work with anybody doing a book about, or on, any member of the immediate Joyce family. We have learned our lesson well!”. What the lesson was is hard to know. When I was working on my biography of Joyce’s wife Nora in the early 1980s, I submitted quotations from published and unpublished material that I wished to use to the Joyce Estate as I went along. Stephen Joyce had recently acquired authority over the Estate (following Lucia’s death in 1982). Permission was given in every instance but the agreements had not yet been formally signed when, in 1988, the Estate learned that I had appended to my text an epilogue on Lucia, and threatened to withdraw the permissions already given; the book was by then in second proof and weeks away from publication. The grounds were that the subject of Lucia Joyce was new territory, and Stephen Joyce was determined to protect his family from further invasion of its privacy.
In response, I volunteered to drop the epilogue (a short, bland presentation of information I had gathered about Lucia’s life and visitors at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton) in exchange for permissions already given. The offer was accepted and the book published on schedule, without the epilogue. (A copy of the proofs of the American edition, with the epilogue intact, found its way to the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, where it has been read by later biographers, including Shloss.)
What tantalizes Joyce scholars today is that new Joyce material keeps emerging. Stephen Joyce’s stepbrother, Hans E. Jahnke, a professor of international development in Berlin, has donated a trunkload of materials to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. The Foundation is presided over by the patriarch of the Joycean world, Fritz Senn, who will willingly make it available. One interesting item described in Budapest is a previously unseen letter of condolence to Nora Joyce written by Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, from Trieste. At the time of Joyce’s death in Zurich in January 1941, the brothers had been estranged for many years.
One consequence of the legal wrangling is that the International James Joyce Foundation, sponsor of the biennial symposia, last week voted to incorporate itself as a US non-profit organization. Not, insists Margot Norris, the president of the IJJF, to act in defence against copyright disputes, but rather to become formally the focus of Joycean activity. The Foundation already offers a fascinating website containing Frequently Asked Questions which give much information (but little consolation) to people seeking to quote from Joyce’s unpublished work or to re-edit his published works. According to one answer about the duration of Joyce copyrights, the Random House edition of Ulysses will not be out of copyright until 2030. The complex situation is compounded by the internationalism of the Joyce world and the discrepancies between various national copyright laws.
A greater worry for the ordinary lover of the works of James Joyce is whether interest in them can be sustained now that the old Ireland has vanished. But the consensus at the symposium, from those teaching Joyce around the world (including the many from Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Hungary), was that Joyce continues to fascinate. Some questions, in the new enlarged Europe, seem more pertinent than ever. Who, for example, introduced the error in the telegram received by Stephen Dedalus in Paris in Ulysses: “Nother dying come home father”? Was it the telegraph operator in France or Ireland? Was it Stephen’s father, misspelling as he scribbled the word? Was the error originally in the Morse Code transmission or its transcription? “Nother” was what Joyce wrote, but the French typesetter who first set Ulysses in late 1921 knew enough English to correct it to “Mother”. Not until the Gabler edition in 1984 was Joyce’s intended “Nother” restored.
The big question of “Whither Joyce?” was answered in the symposium’s session on “Joyce, Irish Studies and the Celtic Tiger”, where the assembled panel of Irish and American scholars planted Joyce firmly in the twenty-first century. It acknowledged that Joyce’s Dublin is dead and gone, along with Ireland’s homogeneity, isolation and deep Catholic devotion. Polish has replaced Irish as Ireland’s second language. “It may be”, said Luke Gibbons of Dublin and Notre Dame University, “that the Irish will have to read James Joyce to learn what Catholicism was like.” Barry McCrea of Yale eloquently declared that the new Ireland had discovered Ulysses as a saleable brand name. He called Joyce “one of the flagship products of the Celtic Tiger”; in him the Irish realized they had something to sell. Not that reading Ulysses has become popular; it hasn’t. Like the Book of Kells, Ulysses is a symbol of Ireland itself.
