All the Way from Debrecen Marianna Gula The story of how I got to the Foundation goes back to the summer of 1998 when I first met Fritz Senn, listened to his plenary talk and attended his Ulysses seminars at the 2nd Joyce School in Trieste. The Trieste Summer School on the whole was a mind-expanding and inspiring event, but Fritz Senn's approach to Joyce’s texts, his way of posing questions and the manner of exploring them enkindled a feeling of affinity in me. It was only in Trieste that I first heard about the existence of the Zurich Joyce Foundation and that it accommodates the biggest Joyce library in Europe. A few weeks later I met Fritz Senn in Dublin again, and that meeting and my later reading his Joyce’s Dislocutions gave me the courage to ask him whether he would support my application for a fellowship offered by the Swiss Government to three Hungarians to pursue research within any field of study at any university of Switzerland for nine months. To my greatest delight my application was accepted and thanks to the Swiss government’s generosity prior to going to Zurich I could even participate in a three month intensive German language course in Fribourg. Speaking no German at all before coming to Switzerland, in retrospect I am even more grateful for this opportunity than in advance, since my impoverished use of Hochdeutsch helped me a lot in getting about in the city. After the first peep into the life of the Foundation in August 1999 in the closing phase of the Workshop on "Annotating Joyce", I took up my daytime and occasionally even nighttime residence at the Foundation from the middle of October to do research for my PhD thesis. Fritz Senn, Ruth Frehner, Ursula Zeller, Margrit Neukom and Frances Ilmberger were most helpful in introducing me into the ways of the Foundation. The first weeks I spent thrilled by the atmosphere of the place, the discovery of bits and pieces of the immense resources: browsing among the book rarities—Leopold Bloom’s library blossoming into life—leafing through photo albums and relishing the vast audio material. The recognition slightly hurting my vanity that I was not the only one who had thought of reliving and documenting Joyce’s verbal world came of course many years ago, but the wide range of material the Zurich Joyce Foundation offers to aid such imaginary tours surpassed my expectations. It helps to sustain for all those who read Joyce a collective memory that functions like a mole on the ever changing molecular composition of cities, cultures and human beings populating them. Zurich in 2000 is not the city Joyce knew, still I cannot walk along Zurich See at Bellevue without thinking of the allround man Odysseus ever since Fritz Senn drew my attention to the fact that it was there that Joyce commenced his later on-going commentary to Frank Budgen on his emerging Ulysses. As I walk along or hop on a tram in Bahnhofstrasse “the ineluctable modality of the visible” and several other factors divide my experience of the place from that of Joyce, still humming to myself in my flutiest voice his poem "Bahnhofstrasse", which among others I set to music inspired by the people associated with the Foundation, gives me the feeling that once one was like me now. The summer of 1998 and the Trieste Joyce School brought the ontological understanding that although Joyce’s roots go back to Ireland, the real blossoming of his creativity began and owed a lot to his peregrinations on the Continent. The first recognition connected to Switzerland was linguistic. After being spoken to in French (a language I do not speak) in the daily life of Fribourg, learning German three/four hours per day, making efforts to wake up my heavily slumbering Spanish and escaping into the safe haven of English when exhausted made me ontologically understand again to what a great extent Joyce’s cultural conditions contributed to his moving towards an ever greater elastication of linguistic boundaries. Before coming to Zurich I made a few coy attempts to venture into Finnegans Wake alone. I soon gave up. I had no difficulty to keep in mind the stoic rule "Expect nothing, you won’t be disappointed", so hard to observe in most matters, while striving to understand this text. With this framing attitude I could fully and humbly yield to the pleasure of the communal readings, and even if I seldom came to grips with any sense (joining one of the groups on page 104 and the other on page 204), rumbling in this echoing chamber at times called forth my reflexive laughter. The Thursday readings have proved how essential it is to experience Finnegans Wake acoustically, but then reading out without other ears to hear it is just not the same, isn’t it? Among the many questions haunting the Wake is "Where did thots come from?" Just as much as this question is unanswerable, I could not exactly locate the origin of my interest in the topic of my PhD thesis: names and naming in Joyce. According to one of the tenets prefacing Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. “All criticism is autobiography". The readers’ conscious/unconscious perceptual focuses highlight various textual aspects through the prism of which other details are organized. From my early childhood I have been made aware of the queerness of my name, which has been distorted—translated into meaningfulness out of which it is slightly dislocated: Gula in Hungarian means nothing, but with an accent on the "u", Gúla, it assumes the humble radiation of the common noun pyramid. Just one slight change, but what a great semantic difference, and a delightful source of mockery for my secondary school maths teacher. Joyce’s attitudes and his texts show his preoccupation with the multiple potentials of names and naming. The first version of his first published story 'The Sisters” appeared in 1904 shortly before his leaving for the Continent under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus. Later living in Trieste being immersed in a mixed racial and cultural milieu Joyce renamed himself Giacomo as though redefining his own identity, and relegates his previous pseudonym into the world of his emerging fiction. In the final version of his so-called autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the first question draws attention to the queerness of the young protagonist’s name Dedalus, and its plot apparently drives towards the revelation of the meaningfulness of the name. Was my early suspicion of the revelatory function of the slightly dislocuted name innocent of my own childhood experiences? I know the question concerns only me. Joyce’s later works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake swarm with queer names, and onomastic play is an artistic device closely related to Joyce’s ever evolving vision and technique. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake stage the dissolution of names as apparent tokens of identity into a masquerade. What becomes meaningful is not the name in itself, but how it is caught up in the stylistic changes of the narratives. Fritz Senn's interest in the topic of naming - which both his talks and writings frequently reveal—has served as an important stimulus in my "fumblings" in the field of onomastics related to Joyce. Onomastic questions have been treated sporadically all over Joycean scholarship. Shari and Bernard Bernstock compiled a directory of names in Joyce’s works preceding Finnegans Wake in Who is He When He is at Home?, and two book length studies have been published on the topic, Claire E. Culleton’s Names and Naming in Joyce and a German language study. My limited command of the language has so far prevented me from consulting the latter, but the former one though thought-provoking in some ways has still left much room for excavating in this field and its handling of the topic has failed to evoke the above mentioned feeling of affinity in me. However Maud Ellmann’s post-structuralist conception of the name and her lucid arguments relating the classics like The Odyssey and the Oedipus Trilogy to Joyce’s texts along the ghostly thread of the name could provide fruitful ground for further elaboration. I am still in quest for a central thesis, but before leaving Zurich I commenced on inquiring into the two kinds of narrative dynamisms that the two protagonists’ names are subjected to in Ulysses.   Debrecen, Hungary March 2000