Trieste

A portrait of the artist as a young teacher: James Joyce's walking-talking classroom

“…… Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the eggs of experience”, Benjamin (1992c: 90) says, meaning that the impacts, impressions and influences that his early experiences in Istria had on Joyce were brooded over and incubated in his dreamwork before fledging and taking flight in his Art, while not necessarily appearing at all in his more conscious writing of the time, such as his letters. The psychoanalytic and historical forensic arts and sciences of Joyce's excellent biographers Ellmann (1959) McCourt (2000) and many others [including this present essay] must trace Joyce's assimilation of influences with scant evidence to work with -Bruni's and others’ recollections of Joyce from many years later; some brief letters home to his brother Stanislaus, complaining about the weather and the locals. Biographers writing the genealogy of Joyce's becoming a teacher and artist during his first months in Istria are like as Geertz (1993: 10) describes cultural anthropology “…trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript -foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations and tendentious commentaries”; or as Benjamin (1999a) reads the interwoven fabric of the city and the life of a subject as a palimpsest; or Lacan (2016), reading Joyce's life and work as ‘stuffed’, ‘garnished’, ‘over-determined’ with ambiguous and ambivalent significances, for nowhere is Joyce explicit about the metamorphosis taking place beneath his protective carapace of dignity, for such teaching and learning is not conscious cogitation in a stable state of being, but subconscious and unconscious liminal processes of becoming: mimetic assimilations of influences, accents and accidents, all the while writing, re-reading, and re-writing; Joyce re-gaining his composure, and re-composing his Portrait .…”

“…Joyce mimetically adjusted his clothing to the local style of a man in his position and Nora styled his hair, “I look a very pretty man!” he wrote to his brother (McCourt 2000: 12), and Joyce's language changed too as he quickly picked up Tuscan Italian from one-to-one classes and walking-talking tutorials with his new friend and colleague Bruni, as well as assimilating local accents, dialects, and idiom as he immersed himself in the life of the city and in the multicultural-multilingual theatre of the Berlitz school. The success of the Berlitz language school, a globally franchised American start-up of the time, was due to its new, patented, pedagogy of language teaching by ‘total immersion’.…”

“…In the evenings the Arco dei Sergi has a different and ever-changing ambience, including La Soiree dell Arco Romano, an open air salon, an urban scene of cultural, intellectual, political street theatre. Lectures and discussions of topics that may attract the attention of the Empire's secret police -on Italian irredentism and socialism for instance, are usually convened in the Theatro Ciscutti two doors down to the left of the Joyces’ flat, though in the open air public salon under the Arch these themes are raised too, more subtly and obliquely, such as, during Joyce's time in Pula, a lecture by a visiting French Professor on the Dreyfus Affair (McCourt 2000: 15); as well as musical performances and conversation.…”