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

“Chance furnishes me what I need. I am like a man who stumbles along; my foot strikes something, I bend over, and it is exactly what I want” (James Joyce) ¹

There is a deep affinity between teaching and learning, talking and walking. This affinity runs as a red thread from the Greeks walking to Delphi to converse with the Oracle; to Walter Benjamin’s (1992a) flâneur, the urban stroller in Paris and Berlin as a model epistemic subject for critical thinking; to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) celebration of New York's ‘sidewalk ballet’ and the pedestrian life of the city; to Simmel’s (1971) reflexive-recursive discussion of the metropolis, mental life, and modernity's zeitgeist; to the Chicago and Birmingham schools’ participant-observer ethnographies of street scenes and subcultures by Park and Burgess (1925) and Hebdige (1979); to Maggie O’Neill’s (2018) O’Neill and Roberts 2019) use of ‘walking methods’ as a way into the fragile, precarious, liminal worlds of migrants, refugees, and sex-workers: whilst walking through streets and spaces and talking about how and why such scenes are meaningful and memorable to them, O’Neill and other pioneers of the new sociological walking methods co-create a shared cosmos with the most voiceless and vulnerable and hard-to-reach people. O’Neill's renaissance of a deep tradition of walking-talking sociological methods resonates very well also with James Joyce's artistic, moral, political, and pedagogical method, whereby the author and his protagonists, (who are mostly people who have been crushed down and pushed to the margins by overwhelming global historical forces) and his readers (a literate, middle-class, cosmopolitan, general public) participate in and co-create a transformative walking-talking classroom convened and conducted through city streets, as exemplified in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Walking is a method. In fact ‘method’ actually means ‘walking’ -the etymological root of method is hodos, which means a road/ a way / a pathway; a way of doing / a way of going about something. Walking is the quiet, tacit, taken-for-granted method of Sociology; a reliable and robust empirical method, because walking and talking together is anthropologically universal: we walk and we talk, and while walking and talking we are laying down trails, making tracks, telling stories, creatively and patiently weaving webs of meaning and interpretation, reiterating and retracing our steps and our words, gradually establishing solid grounds and shared horizons; and between these grounds and horizons we painstakingly and carefully build the relations and institutions that constitute the shared worlds of community and society. In an old fashioned romantic language, a language that (one hopes) still has some resonance, ‘courting’ meant to ‘walk out’ together, and by walking out and talking together, thereby coming to know one another, learning how to attend with care and with thought to one another, building a world of mutual understanding, establishing the trustworthy grounds of affection and friendship on which to [re]-turn towards building a home together. Walking and talking together is a way by which we may become transformed from being merely strangers to one another, into people who become interested in one another, into people who get along with one another, into friends who understand one another, into people who care for, and who are cared for by one another; eventually even into people who love one another. Walking and talking together is a hodos, a path, a way that may lead us towards the many and various flourishing forms of eros, philia, and agape that constitute the human family's collective household.

To be human is to dwell, Heidegger (1977) tells us in Building, Dwelling, Thinking. But building and dwelling risk settling into sedimented, solidified, and sometimes stifling conventions. Thinking needs quickening; and the movement between being at home and being away, of leaving and returning, of settling down and of beginning-again is the way by which consciousness [mind] is formed, by taking a pathway through the Other. “Being comes to know itself through a returning from otherness”, by “subjecting oneself to the infinity of the difference” of an “Other equal and opposite self-consciousness” (Hegel 1979: 110). The to-ing and fro-ing, reciprocally giving and taking, leaving and returning is a graceful dialectical dance through which we become unified with one another in solidarity, an “’I’ that is ‘We’ and a ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel 1979:110). One of the elementary rhythms of the ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and the ‘We’ that is ‘I’, a rhythm that enlivens thinking and being, is the rhythm of walking. With our feet on common ground and our eyes raised towards a shared horizon we fall into step with one another, we find our feet with one another, we walk alongside one another; and as we walk and talk, we see, we observe, and we converse. The rhythm of walking synchronizes and resonates with the rhythms of conversation, of talking and thinking, and of exchanging views and sharing and interpreting our thoughts and feelings with one another. Walking a path together, walking towards a new horizon, we are always also returning to dwelling and settling, as through our walking and talking we turn towards social solidarity, building and re-building, extending and enlarging and enriching our shared cosmos of mutual understanding and our communal dwelling.

Walking, talking and thinking together is our original and universal classroom. We need to re-imagine and recover our original and universal walking-talking classroom today, because we have lost our way. We have lost our way in so many ways that is redundant and dispiriting to enumerate them! We know that we are lost; and so we must begin by acknowledging that we are lost; and rather than wandering around, individually, aimlessly and anxiously in circles, or rushing ahead blindly into thickets, we must stop and think, for ‘the path to the clearing lies near to hand’: This is [at least] one of the things that Heidegger (1971: 10) means when he says that “the oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us. That is why thinking holds to the coming of what has been, and is remembrance.”

Unless we find the right path -or at least find our way to a better path, then we know what is coming to meet us down the path that we’re presently on, for amongst the ‘oldest of the old’ is a recurrence of primordial, bestial savagry. Vico (1999) tells us that in the history of the rise and fall of civilisations, in every epoch, as golden ages decline and eventually collapse into dark ages, the liminal period of transition is characterised by “two fatal civil maladies”: the “tyranny of anarchy”, when there is no Logos, no transcendent horizon, no starry constellation of shared ideals by which people agree on and collectively take their bearings and thoughtfully adjust their paths and critically reform themselves, and to talk about, co-create and reach understanding about the common ground that we share; and, as a consequence of the loss of a common ground -lebenswelt (lifeworld)- and the loss of an horizon of radiant ideals -a symbolic order- there can be no versthen -empathic mutual understanding- what is coming down the path to meet us is the second, primordial, fatal, civil malady, namely the “unbridled liberty” of individualism:

Like beasts, such people are accustomed to think of nothing but their own personal advantage, and are prone to irritability, or rather pride, so that they are filled with bestial rage and resentment at the least provocation. Though their bodies are densely crowded together, their intentions and desires are widely separated. Like wild beasts no two of them agree, because each pursues his own pleasure or caprice ( Vico 1999: 488).

The method, the art of education -i.e. pedagogy- seeks to address these two fatal civil maladies by turning us towards a path lit by Logos, a unifying horizon, a constellation of radiant ideals, and thereby turning us away from lawless individualism. This turning -‘turning of the soul’, metanoia Plato called it, means a ‘transformation of consciousness’, a ‘change of heart and mind’ a ‘conversion’. Metanoia, to be ‘turned around’ onto a shared, empathically felt, mutually understood, morally elevated path, is the deeper meaning of teaching and learning, education and wisdom. ‘Education’ from educare/ educere means to nurture, to cultivate, to lead forth, to draw out from within; and wisdom is derived from vis in vision and dom meaning judgment and authority. The art of pedagogy as metanoia entails the exercise of judgment based on good authority to bring about a turning towards the light of radiant ideals, for “once the mind is illuminated by a knowledge of what is highest, it will lead the spirit to choose what is best” (Vico 1999: 136).

James Joyce read Vico's New Science while he was living in Pula and Trieste, working as a language teacher, writing and re-writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. How Joyce first stumbled upon Vico isn’t exactly clear (Mali 2012: 76). ² Vico's influence on Joyce was serendipitous, reiterative and recursive: “Vico's theories gradually forced themselves upon me through the circumstances of my own life”, he told his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver (Verene 2003: 20). Having stumbled upon Vico, Joyce found his way, for vico also means ‘way’, and as Joyce assimilated Vico's influence he and Nora moved into an apartment at Via Bramante 4, just off the Piazza Vico, where he lived for three years, the longest that Joyce dwelt anywhere, and there he finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's apartment was a 2 km walk along Via San Michele, up the hill of San Gusto, from Trieste's citta vecchia and the waterfront. Halfway along Joyce passed through the ancient arch, Arco Riccardo, probably taking a rest at the café-bar Il Trionfa. Though he often paused at cafes and bars, where he became well-known around town as a flâneur and as an avid conversationalist, Joyce was a tireless city walker. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom walks 15kms; Stephen Dedalus walks even further. Walking through city streets, whether in Pula, Trieste, Rome, Paris, Zurich, and always in his memory and imagination walking through Dublin, was essential to Joyce's method as an artist. Walking was also central to Joyce's pedagogy. He taught classes while walking and talking, as he did with his Triestine student Ettore Schmitz, who became the model for Leopold Bloom. Their ‘classes’ mostly took place in Trieste's streets, where Joyce and Schmitz walked and talked for hours. A contemporary witness describes them “clinging to ropes fixed along the steep side streets under the Bora's blast, as if they were climbers roped together, and talking incessantly” (Price 2016: 74). Mindful walking -walking with Vico in mind, was what Joyce methodically practiced as his [met]hodos, for finding good things by chance, serendipity, is not mere accident, it is a faculty of mind that enables one to ‘stumble upon’ valuable and extraordinary things in mundane and ordinary places. But to be serendipitous, to be ‘furnished by chance’, as Joyce says, one's heart and mind have to be present and oriented towards discovery. We might call this state of readiness ‘presence of mind’, and the presence of mind that makes serendipity possible is the sine qua non of what we may call ars pedagogia, the art of teaching & learning. Serendipity is a method, an art that can be learned and taught, akin to cultivating an ‘ear’ for music or an ‘eye’ for beauty (Wittgenstein 1994: 227) and educating such eyes and ears, cultivating such a presence of mind while walking and talking in the city is central to Joyce's vocation as an artist and as a teacher. Joyce's walking-talking pedagogy resonates with Heidegger (1972: 74) who says that he “stumbled his way” into phenomenology, and with Benjamin (1999a) who says that for the flâneur or flâneuse – and Joyce himself [and his literary avatar Leopold Bloom] is the quintessential flâneur, the portrait of History can be discerned in scraps, in the detritus of the city, which to a mindful walker can be denkbilder, dialectical images, flashes of illumination and awakening; ‘epiphanies’ Joyce called them, in which the fragmented world is momentarily unified by the light of a radiant ideal. The method of the artist-teacher as mindful city walker is to serendipitously find epiphanies and to grasp and express them with great care so that they may become radiant ideals to illuminate and guide the world.

Being a language teacher, as Joyce was, entails guiding a person into a new symbolic order by finding and sharing echoes and reverberations amongst words and their usages, contexts, connotations and resonances, gradually forming a more expansive arc of meaning and understanding greater than in either one of their original languages, ³ and because “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” ( Wittgenstein 1994: 19) both teacher and student are mutually transformed as they co-create the cosmos of language that they come to inhabit together, and Leopold Bloom, an ideal type subject of a new and more commodious cosmos, was born as the literary child of Ettore Schmitz and James Joyce's walking-talking classroom in the streets of Trieste.

James Joyce was already ready for serendipity when he and Nora arrived in Pula, by mistake. But “a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”(Joyce 1990: 190). Alessandro Bruni, Joyce's new teaching colleague and soon to be friend, recalled the moment many years later when Joyce and Nora arrived, “a bunch of rags tumbling out of a third class carriage, like two sacks of spoiled beans” (Bruni 1977: 131). Like so many young University graduates today, James Joyce was amongst a generation of migrant academic precariat, itinerant teachers who “run around the world, fatalistically struggling to avoid disaster, now under this job label, now under that, but always either unsuccessful or rejected, indifferent to everything and prepared to be everything: hotel waiters, interpreters, cicerones, tourist guides, middlemen, and so forth. The specialty of these teachers is really their ability to transform themselves, to appear and disappear, turning up in different masks, but really always unchanged, always remaining in that category which is spread all over the world, and which is called the category of the Desperate” (Bruni 1977, 130).

But “Joyce didn't think for even a minute about the state of his clothing”, Bruni goes on.

“The problem of sartorial harmony never crossed his mind. On the contrary, Joyce in his greatness, was so aloof, so aware of his role, that he waited motionlessly for the other to approach and welcome him on behalf of the city. … Ragged and tattered as a beggar, he dragged along nonchalantly a hyena of a suitcase, which had lost its fur but not its vice of laughing immoderately at the distress of its owner and master. From every rent in it things hung dangling in the breeze, but he did not trouble himself to tuck them in. On the contrary, he dragged it behind him with absolute poise” (Bruni 1977: 132).

Joyce's ‘absolute poise’, nonchalance and aloofness should not be construed as conceited affectations, airs and graces, but as outward signs of his self-consciousness of the ugly discrepancy between his dishevelled appearance and his dignity as an Artist, an intellectual, a university graduate, a teacher, and also as an Irishman, a representative of a colonized people and a fallen house. Joyce walked through the city as an ashamed man, but on an elevated mission, a self-appointed cultural ambassador who would try to restore his own and Ireland's good name. How many James Joyces are amongst the refugees and asylum seekers in today's cities -artists, poets, visionaries, trying to preserve their dignity in spite of their destitution?! Walter Benjamin similarly says that one should always try to dress one's best when travelling, because “travelling is an international cultural transactaction” (Brodersen 1996: 36); a traveller is -for they will be taken as being, a representative of his or her country, its people, and their culture. As soon as he could, with his first pay packet, Joyce bought a brown suit and a scarlet cravat and Nora styled his hair. Joyce presented himself as “cool and collected … He had the nonchalance of a bored dandy returning from a surfeit of pleasure at the seashore”, and even though at that time Joyce spoke an archaic Classical Italian of Dante as he had learnt it in Dublin, a language peppered with anachronisms “He spoke with great naturalness. The beautiful thing was the confidence with which he uttered those heresies” (Bruni 1977: 132).

Behind his poise of aloof dignity, “walking the streets with his head in the clouds or entering the classroom with a pious bow” (Bruni 1977: 134) one should bear in mind that Joyce, as well as being confident and already knowing that he was in fact a literary genius, was a callow youth, only twenty-two years old, a runaway with his girlfriend -they’d first bumped into one another on Nassau St, Dublin on June 10^th; they first ‘walked out together’ on June 16^th (hence Bloomsday) and ran away to Europe together on October 6^th, so they’d known one another barely three months when they washed up in Pula; from a chaotic family with an alcoholic father, grieving for his mother who had only recently died, Joyce was like wax: vulnerable, soft and impressionable. Whatever about the first impressions that Joyce made on his arrival in Pula, the more important question is how the experience of Pula stamped, shaped, moulded, and taught James Joyce.

Joyce was open to influence, which is to say that he was moved by the in-flux of surrounding currents in which he was immersed and that flooded and ebbed and eddied and swirled around him in the new city. Joyce was in a state of flux, and being in such a liminal state is exactly the condition in which impressions make a lasting stamp on intellect and character. In some circumstances -war, trauma, and the lasting impacts of shellshock and PTSD for instance, the moment of stamping is readily identifiable, but usually the processes of impression and influence are subtle, mimetic, and mostly unconscious. Even a writer as reflexive as James Joyce is mostly unaware of how he is being influenced as it is happening to him. “The process of assimilation takes place in depth. … 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. “Imagination is the resurfacing of recollections”, Vico says (1999: 315), a principle assimilated by Joyce as “imagination is memory” (Ellmann 1982: 661); and the formative influences on life, on memory and imagination, and on Art and teaching are “transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness” (Joyce 1985: 185).

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’. From the very beginning and throughout, Berlitz students and teachers together were immersed in the same stream of language-in-use, playing out real-life dramaturgical situations, students learned by ‘practice and perform’, mimetically assimilating pronunciation, meanings, vocabulary, usages, and grammar. Pula's Berlitz school was brand new, with teachers, from Italy, France, Germany, Slovenia, England and Ireland, and a dynamic school Manager who enrolled 160 students within a few months, students Bruni describes colourfully as “vain and dull apes of every imaginable kind: coquettish women, cashiers about to abscond, single girls with no hope of ever being otherwise, officers as ignorant as donkeys, jobless waiters, and ship's officers ready to embark, and more” (Bruni 1977: 128). Joyce as a model English teacher for his students, and his polylingual students as models for Joyce, all together constituted the talking-walking classroom and the city's streets as a mimetic theatre of mutual influence and co-creative language and cultural assimilation.

Although the building was a relatively new bourgeois townhouse, Joyce and Nora's flat, on the second floor of 2 Via Giulia was essentially a bedsit with a kitchen, but with no heating. When Joyce and Nora arrived in Pula the weather was still warm, and the mosquitos were annoying; but as winter came in it became terribly cold, minus 8 for an entire week, with burst pipes. Joyce described it as a ‘naval Siberia’. But offsetting their flat's discomforts it had the advantage of being right in Pula's city centre. Descend the stairs to the ground floor [now a McDonalds]; exit the tall, elegant front door onto Via Guilia; to the left, a few doors down, was the Theatro Ciscutti, where Pula's Social Studies Circle organised lectures on socialism and politics; to the right, walk 50 paces to the Arco dei Sergi, cross the piazza with another 25 paces; up the steps to the front door of the Berlitz school [now a hotel].

Less than one hundred footsteps from their apartment, at the front door of the school, just outside his classroom window, was the Arco dei Sergi, a Roman triumphal arch, also called the Porta Aurea [‘golden gate’] due to its lavish decorations of Corinthian pillars, Greek friezes and motifs; traces of distant past glories, echoes resonating with the origins of Pula [Pola, Polis, a Greek city state] with Jason and the Argonauts, and Ulysses too (though he is a more recent historical iteration of the primordial mythic theme of the sailor culture-hero's quest) the Arco dei Sergi is a window into and doorway between mythopoetic, historical, and modern worlds through which one can see, as Vico (1999) says, how Gods, Kings, heroes and ordinary people have died and have been reborn many times under different names. Both Michelangelo and Dante had come to Pula specifically to see this magnificent arch, and these resonances cannot but have been impressive influences on Joyce, as he walked by the Arch every morning and looked out upon it outside his classroom window all day. After work, Joyce steps out onto the piazza of the Arco dei Sergi, into a flood of people passing through the Arch, coming home from work and going about their business. Joyce rounds the corner to meet Nora at their flat. They chat and freshen up. They come downstairs and cross the street to eat at a snack bar, before going for a walk. Together they walk up to the piazza, pass under the Arch, on through to the streets of the city centre. 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.

Joyce's word for walking in the city is “sauntering”. On their fateful first encounter on June 16^th 1904, Joyce says that Nora “sauntered into his life” (Menard 2012: 5). ‘Saunter’ is from san terre, ‘holy ground’, and for flâneurs like Benjamin and Joyce to walk through the city is a pilgrimage, in search of illuminations and epiphanies. The usual destination for Joyce and Nora on their evening saunter is the Café Miramar on the Riva, one of Pula's most fashionable venues, frequented by uniformed officers with their wives and girlfriends, peacocks in gold braid and epaulettes displaying their finery to one another. From their table at the Miramar [mira mar, ‘look sea’, built on the site of an ancient watch-tower] Joyce became part of an eternal ricorso, alert and on the look-out for sails on the horizon. Towards home eventually, sauntering through the night-time fragrant streets, passing again by the ancient temples and monumental ruins, traces of continuing Byzantine and Venetian presences, and the influences of other impressive empires and cultures, and the modern shops, lesser simulacra of Paris… Or perhaps James and Nora took a longer route along the Riva, looping up by the Roman Amphitheatre, and on down towards home, invariably reaching again the Arco dei Sergi, stopping for a while to imbibe the spirit of whatever happened to be going on there on any given evening. Flushed with the local wine of Opollo de Lissa Joyce, tipsily stumbling along, on sauntering Nora's steadier arm, somewhere between the Arco dei Sergi and the Café Miramar James Joyce bumped into the Greeks half-way between Athens and Dublin, fellow travellers in the time-space wormhole of Pula.

The genealogy of the essential themes of Joyce's work originate in these saunters through the Arco dei Sergi through the city streets of Pula: metempsychosis, wherein the spirit of one personality, word, or situation, transmigrates into another in the flood and ebb of history, the currents and eddies, the confluences and ongoing influences; the eternal ricorso of ancient mythopoetic, historical and contemporary forms -from Pula's origins with Hera and Poseidon, Athena and Apollo, Jason and the Argonauts and Ulysses, to the Romans, to Byzantine, Venetian, and French powers, to the contemporary rise [and imminent fall] of Europe's Central Power, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all of their colourful fractals and refracting facets -seen through the synesthetic sensorium from the Arco dei Sergi, the streets, window displays, streetlights, scents and the smells, and the noise and music and the talk of the streets, the Babel of a thousand languages, the glamour of power and the spectacle of fashion, the lights of the city and of the battleships glittering on the harbour merging with the starlight twinkling on the horizon, the illusion of the permanence of powers of Empires, Religions, Nations, cities, trade and commerce, industry and Capitalism, and the decay, decline and ruination of all things in the passage of time, “dissolved as a sudden wave dissolves the sand-built turrets of children” (Joyce 1992: 123) glimpsed already in ancient ruins and more recent dereliction, and by the faded uniforms: the Arco dei Sergi gives Joyce his parallax view whereby he can see [even though he is already beginning to lose his eyesight] in his mind's eye, the city as a “collideoscope” (Joyce 1985: 119) in which any fragment, any scent or sound or scrap, if so adjusted to the light and viewed under a different aspect ( Wittgenstein 1994: 194–5) can enable the mind to become “a moving prism catching light from many angles” (Mills 1959: 214), stirring imagination “to perceive the monuments of contemporary civilisation as ruins, even before they have crumbled” (Benjamin 1999a: 13); or, as Simmel says, resonating in the same key: “from any point on the surface of existence, no matter how superficial, one may drop a sounding into the depths of the soul” (Simmel 1971: 328).

Under the influences of his new environment in Pula, a city where Gods and Kings had died and been reborn again many times over, in numerous ricorsos of de-symbolization and re-symbolization under changing ‘names of the Father’ (Dufour 2008) the Babel of the school and the synesthetic sensorium of street life with its metempsychotic fluxes of mythic, historical and contemporary scenes flooding and ebbing through the Arco dei Segri, already within the first two weeks in Pula (in notes dated 7^th, 15^th, and 16^th of November 1904 (Ellmann, 1975), with his new moustache and his scarlet cravat, James Joyce was refining his theory of aesthetics and revising his autobiography. In this genealogical moment and from now on James Joyce is undergoing a metamorphosis, and he transitions: no longer will he be the protagonist of Stephen Hero, Joyce begins to re-compose and re-write that book as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he styles himself from now on as Stephen Dedalus, master-builder of the labyrinth as an ingenious pedagogical machine.

The School of Athens and Joyce's School of Dublin

Let us see now how Joyce transposes his transformative experiences in Pula into his walking-talking classroom in Dublin.

Whereas Socrates did all of his teaching in the agora amidst the hustle & bustle of the city, after his teacher's condemnation, trail and execution Plato left the city and set up his Academy in a grove of olive trees outside Athens’ precincts, 3km or so from the scene of the crime. Aristotle similarly, and for the same reasons, institutionalised his school, the Lyceum, diagonally opposite to Plato's, 2km or so from the Agora, and peripatetic to Athens -that is to say that Aristotle established his school as a walking classroom, for Aristotle taught while walking, he with his students always on the move, engaging with the city for his examples, for his ‘fieldwork’ we would say today, while keeping the city also at arm's length, so that the city is his subject, rather than he and his Lyceum becoming subject to the city with its mundane and instrumentally political interests and intrigues.

Joyce's modern ‘school of Dublin’ resonates with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle's classical school of Athens. In a central scene of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen [Joyce] is amongst a group of fellow University students who are playing and spectating a game of handball. The themes of their conversation are current political affairs organised around Nationalism, Catholicism, and the Irish language revival, all interpolated with the distraction of their sports match. These are enthusiasms his fellow students share, but of which Stephen Dedalus is sceptical, for many reasons, but primarily because these pursuits are colonial mimeses of imperial powers, so that while the students imagine themselves to be in opposition, they remain in thrall, substituting one form of subjection for another. Stephen challenges his interlocutors’ positions, countering their self-professed patriotism and heroics as conceits and hypocritical impostures: their thoughts are too settled; they dwell in comfortable conventions; they are not thinking. Against the monotonous rhythm of their too-settled views of the world Stephen tries to shake them up, to quicken their thinking: the priest running the Irish language revival courses is more interested in flirting with the girls in the class, Stephen says to them. Our countrymen threw off their language and took another; they allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them; they sold their leaders to the enemy, or reviled or abandoned them at the crucial hour. And you want me to be one of you?! he asks rhetorically. “When the soul of a man is born in this country nets are flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (Joyce 1992: 157). Their conversation and the ball-game continues on its path, a circular rut that Stephen has little hope of diverting or elevating, so, like Plato, and aware of how his fellow students who indulge his provocations for now may quickly become hostile to their gadfly, he turns away, plucks the sleeve of his fellow-student-companion Lynch, and leads him from the scene, out into the streets, and, like Aristotle, Stephen Dedalus takes Lynch on a walking-talking class on the theme of aesthetics and the idea of Beauty.

Dublin's busy, noisy, dirty streets at first seems to be the wrong place in which to conduct a discourse on Beauty.

Their walk takes them through a grove:

…They had reached the canal bridge and, turning for their course, went on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water, and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the course of Stephen’s thoughts…

…This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came around the corner of Sir Patrick Dun’s hospital covering the end of Stephen’s speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch covered his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited a few moments until his companion’s ill-humour had had its vent.

-This hypothesis, Stephen repeated…(Joyce 1992: 161).

As Stephen elaborates his discourse his walking-talking classroom is disrupted again:

“They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped.

-Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked.”

Stephen's discourse on beauty is side-tracked into a banal chatter about how so & so did in the exams and how they’re going into such & such a branch office of the empire's administration, and of what they ate and drank last night on the spree…

Eventually their acquaintance goes off, and Stephen and Lynch

“…turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in silence.

-To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

-Of course, I am, said Lynch. (Joyce 1992: 163).

But it is not at all sure that Lynch is following Stephen's elevated discourse, for just a moment previously Lynch, who is poorer, and hungrier than his classmates, so much so that his mind is distracted from transcendent ideas of Beauty by his body's immanent instinctual needs -he is a hungry, he moves furtively, like an animal, with a flattened skull and small, dark hooded eyes; he had been enthralled, annoyed, and envious during the conversation about good jobs and dinners, “his lip curling in slow scorn until his face resembled a devil's mask” (Joyce 1992: 163). But now something remarkable happens: the hustle and bustle of the everyday life of the city, which had previously presented itself only as noise and disruption and distraction, becomes for Stephen Dedalus a serendipitous pedagogical opportunity to effect a metanoia for Lynch. Dedalus moves, as Wittgenstein (1994: 106) would say, from abstract, theoretical concepts, “back to the rough ground”, to anchor and suture the sacred realm of ideas into the concrete and particular temporal realm of the city; by pointing things out, by looking, and by seeing, by observing, by interpreting, and discussing; by the pedagogy of the walking-talking classroom:

-Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher’s boy had slung inverted on his head.

-Look at that basket, he said.

-I see it, said Lynch.

-In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates that basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An aesthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the aesthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self-bound and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You apprehend its wholeness. That is Integritas.

-Bull’s eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

-Then said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt it as one thing you now feel that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.

-Bull’s eye again, said Lynch, wittily. Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar.

…

…When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and then analyzed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and aesthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he [Aquinas] speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind, in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony in the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence. (Joyce 1992: 163–5 passim).

Lynch is silent, standing for a moment in a thought-enchanted clearing, whereas only some minutes previously Lynch's eyes had seemed to Stephen “reptile like in their glint and gaze …yet humbled and alert in their look they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and self-embittered” (Joyce 1992: 158–9). Having been made low, humbled and demoralised by his colonial subaltern position of servitude, poverty, and hunger Lynch is entrammelled if not in nets of nationality, language and religion, but in even more de-humanizing nets of immanence, materialism and nihilism: “Damn you, and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You can’t get me one”, he’d said to Stephen (Joyce 1992: 160). But Stephen's walking classroom has led Lynch into a clearing and raised Lynch's eyes towards the transcendental, sacred ideal of Beauty as it is immanent in the temporal realm in the profane object of the basket in the everyday street scene of ordinary life, and Plato-like, Stephen Dedalus has thereby effected a moment of metanoia and turned Lynch's soul around, raising his gaze towards the light of a radiant ideal.

Lynch is the name Joyce gives to the subject in this lesson because Lynch, like Joyce, bears the name of a once noble Irish house, the Lynchs of Galway, whose castle stands in the main street of the medieval city centre. The Joyce ancestral house is also from Galway, until the Joyces along with the Lynchs were dispossessed and scattered by Cromwell. The Lynch name is famously [and infamously] associated with law and justice, as James Lynch-Fitzstephen, while Mayor of Galway in 1493 executed his own son William Lynch for murdering a house guest, Gomez, the son of a Spanish merchant. While on a business mission to Spain, Mayor Lynch-Fitzstephen had given his word to Gomez’ father that he would protect his son while visiting Galway, but Gomez and the Mayor's son, Walter, became rivals in love for the same girl, Agnes Blake, and Walter, seeing Gomez emerging from Agnes's house, attacked Gomez in a jealous rage, stabbed him in the back, dragged him through the streets and threw his dead body in a pond. That the name of Lynch subsequently became associated with ‘lynching’ oblates and inverts the moral import of its original genealogy, for Mayor Lynch, finding no one in the city willing to be the judge and executioner of his murderer son, and expected by both Galway's grandees and the public to let Walter go free, instead, in the name of Justice, and the duties of care and hospitality owed to guests and the honour of the city of which he was Mayor, carried out the public execution himself, hanging his son from the window of the castle before a crowd assembled on the main street.

The story of Lynch is an historical ricorso of a mythopoetic Greek and Biblical epic. A story of civilisation-building on ritual blood sacrifice to restore order and build the city (Girard 1977: 17–18). Lawless murder, springing from envious desire and rivalry threatens to become mimetically contagious and dissolve the city's moral fabric. The spiral can only be stopped by the intervention of a higher authority acting in the name of a divine ideal -Justice, and the sacrifice re-establishes the common ground and the common good: the moral foundations of the citizenry as a community whose members are bound together in solidarity by reciprocal duties and responsibilities of care and hospitality to guests and visitors; by the honour of giving one's word; and by the public interest in preserving the good name and reputation of the city in the eyes of others; and transcending and unifying all of that, the master signifier, the Logos [Law] that makes the people and their city a well-ordered cosmos rather than a barbaric chaos of anarchic individual interests and capricious passions: the city is a community of law abiding people individually and collectively beholden to a shared horizon of radiant ideals -in this case the ‘Law of the Father’ as the divine ideal of Justice.

Redeeming and Subduing: The Transfiguration of Lynch / Cosgrave

The butcher's basket over the boy's head, bloodstained in the interior, is an executioner's basket; the intricate weaving of the basketwork resonating with the Labyrinth, with Arachne and Athena's rivalry, and before that resonating with Hephaestus’ net woven to restrain the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares. All of these resonances, and more, Joyce encodes and weaves into the aesthetic image of the basket inverted on the delivery boy's head, a denkbild (Benjamin 1999a) – a dialectical thought-image, furnished by chance and serendipitously stumbled upon in the street, adjusted to the light by the Artist-teacher to become an epiphany by means of which Stephen educates Lynch, effecting a quiet, thought-filled clearing and a moment of metanoia in which Lynch's soul may be turned and redeemed. The ‘tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul’ that had been Lynch's eyes only minutes previously, now open and turn towards the light by which he might see and restore the nobility of Lynch's name and house, the truth of the ideals that his house once stood for, redeeming Lynch from his fallen state as subaltern lackey, his impoverished, hungry, mean, bestial existence.

Just as Vico says, Ireland was [and, as with late modern Western civilisation generally, is again] suffering the two fatal civil maladies of anarchy and individualism. Without Logos, law or limit people are devolving into beasts. The well-fed porcine student raises his snout from the trough of pub-crawls and the truffles of well-paid positions to talk greedily with Stephen and Lynch, before trotting off with slavering chops home for his dinner; the reptilian Lynch, with his flattened, envious visage, his gimlet eyes and his pinched belly, his noble house and his character fallen so low… Lynch, we hear, has eaten cow dung; he leers and lusts after women; with his hands in his pockets he rubs his groin. In real life, Joyce's model for Lynch is Cosgrave, a fellow student whom Joyce thought of as a friend, but behind his back Cosgrave was stirring up envy and rancour; he had tried to seduce Nora away from Joyce -telling her that Joyce's love wouldn’t last, and that Joyce was insane. His temptations having failed, Cosgrave spread a rumour that Nora had been with other men -including himself …and yet, by good pedagogy, metanoia is always possible, even for the Cosgrave/Lynchs of the world.

“The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Antichrist” (Benjamin 1992d: 247) and so at the same moment, by the same movement of transfiguration Joyce redeems and subdues. Just as the Mayor's execution of his own son halts the city's slippage into liminality and chaos by the power of the Mayor's word as a reverberation of the divine Word, Logos, Law, Justice; by the power of Stephen [Joyce's] words, his exposition of Beauty, the splendour of Truth, he lights the path to redemption for Lynch's soul, while in very same moment and by the power of the same words he puts Lynch [Cosgrave] in his place: Stephen[Joyce] shows himself to be Lynch's [Cosgrave's] intellectual and moral superior; he subdues the Antichrist -Cosgrave [Lynch's] bestial, serpentine, devil's mask, forked tongue and venomous words and his corrupting character of envy, lies, and temptations. Joyce [Stephen] gives Cosgrave [Lynch] a glimpse of his own bloodied head in the butcher's basket, for Cosgrave, like Walter Lynch, was duly hanged by Joyce and suspended forever on the gibbet of Literature.

All of this aesthetic, moral and political lesson was developed from an obscure scrap of history that Joyce had stumbled upon, a diamond that he polished and posted back to Trieste from Galway, where, lovesick and jealous he had followed Nora where she was visiting her family in July 1912. The story, “The City of the Tribes: Italian memories in an Irish Port” (Joyce 2000) was written and published in Italian in Trieste's daily newspaper Il Picollo dela Sera on August 11^th 1912, and rewoven and reworked into the ongoing re-composing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The basket, furnished by chance and serendipitously stumbled upon in the street, is a metaphor for the labyrinth, and the basket-labyrinth is a metaphor for teaching and learning as building that enables the rhythms of dwelling and thinking. The human-animal in the labyrinth must learn to think its way outwards and upwards towards the light. As the Minotaur traces and retraces its path it must remember, recollect, retrace; it must quell animal appetites, it must temper and subordinate its furies and passions in favour of dwelling and thinking about its origins, its meanderings, and its teleology; where it has come from, where it has been already, and where it desires to go. To have any hope of releasing itself the Minotaur must become self-conscious, self-aware, self-reflective; it must concentrate, intensify and amplify presence of mind and imagination, and thereby it may learn how to transcend bestial individual carnal and immanent interests in favour of reaching towards a shared horizon of higher ideals and learn how to live with others rather than devouring them. Thus the ancient Labyrinth built by Daedalus to tame the Minotaur and thereby underpin the palace and the city of Knossos is a metaphor for a pedagogy of walking and talking and thinking, and thereby effecting metanoia as the foundation on which civilisation is built. The modern labyrinth as built by [Stephen] D[a]edalus in his walking-talking school of Dublin is a pedagogical method. Specifically, that method is the labyrinth of interpretation: the action of interpretation [interpretari -to explain, expound, understand; an agent, translator; from inter -between, + per, to traffic in, to sell] gives us a key that resonates with a creative method of pedagogy, one that has a special elective affinity with walking and talking, with dwelling, and thinking, and thereby, rather than going astray and falling away again into being Minotaurs, by means of a walking-talking pedagogy we may co-create a city in which we all live together in civility and solidarity.

Conclusion

The walking-talking classroom is about making a path together towards forming a centre, a centre that might enable us to hold against historical forces of anarchy and individualism. It will lead towards and enable us to form that centre through education - drawing out, and metanoia - turning around, through the power of words given power and resonance by being spoken while moving in and through the world, which is an act of communication and sociability and citizenship. Teaching and learning constitutes ‘community’ -a common-sense word expressing awareness of deep foundations of what it means to be human, a meaning that we have forgotten, Heidegger (1972) would say, because it is so taken-for-granted, but an understanding that is preserved in ordinary language usage whenever we speak, for instance, of a school as being ‘at the heart of a community’ or a University as an ‘academic community’, a community that presently claims ‘community engagement’ to be one of its pillars. But behind these ordinary language, rhetorical and even policy-instrumental cliched usages there is an etymology that points towards the very essence, the sacred centre that holds against the accelerations and dissonances of hypermodernity, for ‘community’ is comunus, and munus means ‘gift’, so ‘community’ connotes the shared common world, the mundus, constituted by our reciprocal gift relations. Stretching the usage and etymology to find further resonances we find ‘communication’ and the ‘common world’ that is constituted and grows from reciprocal gift relations of communication -walking and talking together we give to one another and thereby we co-create a world that is meaningful, a world of mutual understanding (Ingold 2017: 6). Joyce shows us how in the walking-talking classroom we are on our way, finding a path towards the clearing in which our common world may be glimpsed. This finding and co-creating is enabled through an opening up - which occurs through the experience of liminality - which is helped by walking, motion and travel - where images and influences are absorbed mimetically, transforming the person - who can change others in turn in a mimetic theatre of mutual influence. This can throw up the artist - like a Joyce - who not only shapes souls through his interactions but through his work, which is itself a rendering of his interactive and dialogical way of being.

Joyce's pedagogy may seem esoteric and idiosyncratic, but even though there is madness in his method there is also method in his madness. Insofar as Joyce's teaching and his Art are held together and balanced somehow in dynamic dialectical tension Joyce is the ideal-type and the model subject, the ‘beyond man’ of Nietzsche's Zarathustra who says “one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star” (Nietzsche 2003: 46). Joyce and his dancing stars -A Portrait, Ulysses, the Wake- gave Lacan (2016) his idea-type model of psychosis -‘le sinthome Joyce’, he dubbed him. Joyce's Art, Lacan says, is both a manifestation, an expression of his madness, (his symptom) and it is also what saved Joyce from falling into psychosis: Joyce's symptom -his Art- was the synthesis and sublimation (the sinthome) of the internal and external historical forces that beset him -forces that beset all of us subjects of modern/late modern/ postmodern/ hyper-modern conditions of The Unnameable Present (Calasso 2017) -social acceleration (Rosa 2013) Dufour and de-symbolization; hyper-individualized isolism, anomie, asymbolia and liminality that tear us asunder as we tumble through the Void and reach out desperately to grasp and manage to cling to one another occasionally. Joyce is a model of life in chaos who shows us the howling, spiralling madness of times when, as Yeats said, ‘the centre cannot hold / mere anarchy is loosed up the world’; and Joyce is also the model subject who shows us how we may walk together towards a centre - the comundus, the shared world that we co-create by the gifts of meaningfulness and resonance that we reciprocally and incrementally give to one another in the walking-talking classroom. We are all of us damaged and dis-membered, for sure, but Joyce's walking-talking classroom shows us how to re-member, and how to imagine together how we may begin-again to form new wholes.