"Almighty Dirt": A Report on "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium," Trinity College Dublin, 5-7 May 2022

Abstract

For the first time in around three years, I attended an in-person conference. Instead of an abrupt transition from the world of online symposia, this move into the reality of dear dirty Dublin felt, thankfully, smooth and natural. The first thing to say about “Caliban’s Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium” is that the conference could easily not have happened at all. Obstacles facing speakers included visa problems and an ongoing global pandemic, and panels as advertised on the website had to be changed as and when needs arose, calling for altruism from one attendee, Jinan Ashraf, who volunteered to move her paper on Joyce’s influence on Indian modernism to one of the final panels. That the conference went ahead at all is due to the heroic efforts of its organizers, Casey Lawrence and Graham Price, with assistance from Sam Slote, who managed to put it together while not being in the country, for example, and even picked up a dislocated knee right on the eve of the conference. The second thing to note is that, despite being the first conference to focus specifically on the connections between Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, it felt entirely right that such a comparison be made. In fact, multiple attendees noted almost immediately that it is surprising such a conference had not happened sooner. Joyce treated the topic of Wilde in his Trieste lecture “La Poetà di Salome” and his A Portrait echoes, at least in title, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. The two cultivated a dandyish public persona and foregrounded questions of aesthetics in their work. In light of the difficulties raised by the conference gods, all who attended remain grateful to the organizers and fate itself to allow us to talk about this subject at length. The conference also was marred by the shocking loss of John Paul Riquelme, who was due to give a fascinating paper on Wilde’s use of Platonic dialogues in his critical essays, echoed in Joyce’s “Scylla and Charybdis.” The abstract he submitted is available to view on the conference website, making it likely his final published work. Noting his generosity and enthusiasm, Graham and Casey fondly dedicated the conference to his memory. But his paper showed the richness and queerness of the comparisons to be made between these two bodies of work. On the first day, there was a panel on such queer comparisons: Michael F. Davis queered the complex genealogy of “The Dead” by looking at Wilde’s and Anatole France’s depictions of Judea in Salomé and The Procurator of Judea, Maureen de Leo considered Wilde’s and Joyce’s shared silences over homosexuality, while Tim Ziaukas and