First encounters of the Joycean kind

JOYCEANS confessed "the first time they did it" yesterday. In the style of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, participants at the Baileys James Joyce Summer School divulged the circumstances of their initiatory readings of Joyce works.

"Nineteen. I had just broken up with my boyfriend and I had no idea what to do with my life," said one woman. "Pubescent. Dirty bits of Ulysses in the library. They wouldn't let me take it out" said a man. "London building site. Portrait of the Artist I was 18," said the school's director Prof Terence Dolan.

This group confessional session was initiated by playwright Gerry Stembridge who entertained participants at the UCD run school in Newman House with a jocular account of his first time" - reading Ulysses at the age of 16 in his bedroom in Limerick.

Stembridge, who is currently working on a screenplay on Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle, punctuated his amusing account of his untutored personal odyssey through the book with readings from his favourite chapters.

For the teenage reader, the six month journey through the "greatest novel ever written" was often tortuous. But his persistence paid off, he actually enjoyed certain chapters and came to recognise that it was a great novel "not because I was told that it was, but because I recognised and believed it". He praised the "extra ordinary delights of a book where you can miss out on so many significant elements and still fall completely under its spell".

Earlier, Dr Alan Roughley abandoned his "radical theoretical" approach and donned "somewhat ironically" the more traditional approaches to literature favoured by the school's late director, Prof Augustine Martin, to whom he dedicated his talk.

Dr Roughley, research fellow at the University of York, set out to clarify the effect of Joyce's subversive "blast" on the canon of western literature. Reactionary critics such as F.R. Leavis excluded Joyce from the canon of English literature on the grounds that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake lacked organic form. But Northrop Frye maintained that the principles and structures of literature were produced by writers themselves and that what Leavis saw as the canon of the "Great Tradition" was only a small part of the much larger canon of western literature as a whole.

Frye believed that the primary function of literature was aesthetic, not moral, Dr Roughley explained. He used examples from Joyce's work to illustrate how he had skillfully incorporated into it the five "modes of literature" identified by Frye.

These were ironic, where the reader has a sense of looking down on the characters who are in some form of bondage; low mimetic, where characters share the readers' sins; high mimetic where characters are capable of greater actions than readers; romance where they are capable of super natural action; and myth where they are gods or can commune with God.

In both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these modes co existed. In "Sisters", from Dubliners, the boy moved from the ironic mode, restrained the power exerted over him by the priest, to the low mimetic when the priest died and he experienced freedom.

On Tuesday Irish Times arts journalist, Eileen Battersby, high lighted stylistic and thematic similarities between Joyce and other authors including Andrei Bely, Alfred Doblin, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Georges Perec.

Battersby, who is a past pupil of Prof Martin, cautioned against absolutism in literary criticism. Modernism, the rebellion heralded by Joyce, was, she said, perceived as "the beginning of a wilful and inventive pushing of the form to its limits".

Yet, she asked, had not Herman Melville "like a coach driving on a gifted if tentative athlete", already pushed narrative as early as Moby Dick, published in 1851?

"The limitless possibilities were already being detected. Voice becoming louder, more persistent. Narrator was more and more frequently taking over from author. But Defoe the author had already deferred to his characters. Moll tells her story, her way. Nope there are no absolutes, only impressions. No theory is definitive, nor is any one reading," she said.

In 1916, before Ulysses was published, the Russian symbolist writer, Andrei Bely, had published his cubist masterpiece, Petersburg, which was the story of a city told over several days. Both works were comic and both had used the theme of a strained father/son relationship.

TEN years after Ulysses was published, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin was published. There are similarities between the heroes of both books and, just as Ulysses painted a street plan of Dublin, Berlin Alexanderplatz created one of Berlin.

Joyce's influence also surfaced dramatically in America and his love of lists, categories and inventories became central to the technologically charged work of his "most obvious disciple", Thomas Pynchon. The first novel of American writer, William Gaddis, The Recognitions, in 1955, led some critics to hail him as the American Joyce.

Battersby pointed out that as the end of the century approaches, it is interesting that experimentalism, modernism, post modernism, and magic realism have fallen away as the "traditional narrative reasserts itself".

"Joyce was right," she added. "The quotidian offers life at its most fascinating and most novelists are now dispensing with the special effects."