Moorings

A Bulletin of All Things George Moore

No 1 : Summer 2007

Following Mary Pierse's organisation of the first international George Moore conference at the University of Cork in 2005, Christine Huguet and Fabienne Garcier of the University of Lille 3 took it upon themselves to reunite 'Moore friends' in March 2007. The event was wonderfully organised and Christine and Fabienne received much well deserved thanks from all those who attended.

The conference began on the morning of March 30th with a welcome from Michel Crubellier, Vice-President of the University of Lille 3, and Richard Davies, Co-Head of the English Department, which emphasised the strong Irish Studies presence at the University and thereby the appropriateness of holding an event on George Moore at the institution.

It was then immediately down to business with a stimulating group of papers under the general heading "Exploring/Exploding Borders". Stoddard Martin's (University of London) paper dealt with the subject of "George Moore and the Appropriation of Wagner to Literature: A Revisitation" and acted as an opportunity for Martin to reflect back on the role Moore played in the development of literary Wagnerism at the end of the nineteenth century, a subject he had previously explored in his book Wagner to the Waste Land (1982). His overview of the influence of Wagner on Moore's literary experimentation in a range of Moore's texts, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, provided a stimulating start to the conference. The second speaker, Fabienne Gaspari (University of Pau) spoke on "Painting and Writing in Confessions of a Young Man and Lewis Seymour and Some Women". Emphasising the importance of the visual in Moore's work and the frequent combinations of the spheres of painting and writing during Moore's career, Gaspari's presentation located an anxiety in Moore's writing around the issue of how to use words to convey the full possibilities of the multi-sensual experience, or as a character in Lewis Seymour and Some Women puts it how to show that 'Touch is Art'. Christine Huguet (University of Lille 3) and Marie-Josèphe Lussien-Maisonneuve (University of Lille 3) spoke and illustrated a final paper on "The Prima Donna and the Convent: Border Crossings in Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa". This paper was a truly inspired combination of literary criticism and architectural interpretation, drawing on the physicality of the space of the convent within Moore's pair of novels and his frequently combined understanding of the aesthetic and ascetic, and provided a highly informative example of interdisciplinary research.

The second panel of the day dealt with issues surrounding "Mapping Moore's Œuvre". A newcomer to Moore studies Alex Murray (University of Melbourne) presented an exploration of Moore's understanding of the cityscape in a paper entitled "Between London and Paris: George Moore’s Urban Cultural Geography". Murray's fresh perspective yielded a rewarding discussion of the 'cultural cartography' that invested Moore with the status of an 'Englishman abroad' in Paris and the positive and negative connotations of that term. Picking up on the idea of Moore as European and yet revelling in the transgression of all natural and cultural boundaries, Murray's comments on the ways in which Moore's aesthetic experience of the cityscape derived from and fed into a Decadent cultural geography were highly illuminating, especially in the close reading of the key suicide and Thames scenes of A Modern Lover. Mary Pierse's (University College Cork) "No More Than a Sketch" gave a succinct yet penetrating analysis of Moore's views on what a short story (and fiction more generally) should and could do through the lens three key statements: 'no more than a sketch', 'an instinctive desire to imitate nature' and 'I probed my fancy, I dabbled in psychology'. The highly focussed and precise readings of Moore's exhibitions of character, history and self through the minutest descriptive detail opened up several possibilities for rethinking elements of Moore's aesthetic and literary philosophy. Ann Heilmann (University of Hull) and Mark Llewellyn (University of Liverpool), editors of a new edition of Moore's collected short stories, discussed the problems and rewards they had encountered during the editorial process. "A Bibliographical Jungle: On Editing George Moore" was both a summary of the principles behind their edition and an account of elements of the peculiar and quite specific textual and editorial minefield to be found in Moore's work, especially in the short story genre.

Unfortunately two of the speakers scheduled for the next session, "Moore in / and Perspective", Robert Becker (University of Reading), "George Moore as Art, Artist, and Art Critic" and David Rose (The Oscholars), "Homage to Manet: George Moore and the Dislocation of Perspective", were unable to attend the conference. Although neither speaker could be easily replaced, we were fortunate in the presence of Marie-Claire Hamard (University of Besançon), former president, now honorary president, of the French Victorian and Edwardian studies association, SFEVE, and Marie Kelly (NUI Maynooth). The third speaker of the original panel, Isabelle Enaud-Lechien (University of Lille 3), was able to attend and spoke first. Her visual feast of a paper, "Moore and Whistler ou les différends de la plume et du pinceau", was a strong reassertion of the importance of Moore's writing to the visual arts and the importance of the visual arts on Moore's writing. Focussing on Moore's art criticism from Modern Painting, Enaud-Lechien spoke about the intriguing connections and differences between the approaches of Whistler and Moore to issues surrounding the aesthetic thought of the period. This was followed by Marie-Claire Hamard's paper on "Max the Caricaturist", which explored the ways Max Beerbohm had illustrated literary figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Moore. The panel concluded with Kelly's paper "It seemed to me that myself was my country". An exercise in 'imaginative geography' drawing on postcolonial and Anglo-Irish literary geography, the paper was designed as an exercise in thinking across disciplinary boundaries and picked up on some of the elements explored earlier in Alex Murray's paper but with a specific inflection towards Moore's geographical negotiations of his Irish homeland and the ways in which Moore sought to explore the possibilities of 'multiple identities' through 'multiple places'.

The day concluded with an impassioned and also entertaining keynote from Moore's biographer Adrian Frazier (National University of Ireland, Galway) on the topic of "George Moore and Collaborative Authorship". Frazier's discussion usefully re-focussed our attention not on Moore as an author but on Moore's understanding of the very concept of 'authorship'. As Frazier pointed out, Moore's flexibility on the issue of authorial identity fed into his relationships with many individuals, some writers and others not. Above all else, Moore's dictum was that life's multiple relationships were not only meant to be accessed through the written word but were also meant to become part of the act of writing itself. In this sense, all relationships were literary collaborations and Frazier illustrated this through a range of examples from the well-known (with Yeats, Edward Martyn, Virginia Crawford) to the often overlooked (Edmund Gosse and Father and Son) to the forgotten such as that between a Mrs Ethel Harter and Moore in the early 1920s that began at a party, led to a series of meetings between the two, and culminated in the publication of her novel A Love Conference in 1922, a text with a plot that can inevitably be read as semi-autobiographical on Moore's side. Frazier's address therefore served to remind readers of Moore that life and literature, friendships and fiction, are intricately entwined in his work.

At a delicious and convivial dinner in central Lille on the Friday evening, at which Mary Pierse's edited collection George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds (2006) was presented, delegates arrived refreshed and anticipatory for another full day of papers. The second day's first session, entitled "Reworking Motifs", had speakers on a diverse range of Moore's texts from Esther Waters to A Mummer's Wife via Aphrodite in Aulis. Michele Russo (University of Pescara), delivered a paper on "The Limitations Connected to Class and Gender in George Moore’s Esther Waters: A Study of 'Ideological Regionalism'". Russo's detailed analysis of the colonisation of the female body in Esther Waters and the semantic importance of the word 'flesh' in Moore's text offered an illuminating insight into underexplored elements of cultural critique in the text. As a classical scholar, Konstantin Doulamis (University College Cork), came at Moore's work from a different perspective and followed up his paper at the 2005 Moore conference on Daphnis and Chloe with a discussion of "Classical Motifs and Aesthetic Communication in George Moore’s Aphrodite in Aulis". Drawing on Moore's awareness of late nineteenth century Hellenism and his knowledge (or otherwise) of the scholarship available on both the period and setting of his novel, Doulamis sought to interrogate Moore's avant-garde style in order to begin the process of rethinking how the text might be read in the light of developments in classical studies in the second half of the twentieth-century, revealing how some of Moore's techniques, including his emphasis on storytelling and self-referentiality, might mark him out as an important figure for re-examination. The final speaker, Corinne François-Denève (University of Liverpool), explored convincingly the ambiguities surrounding generic status in Moore's fiction, taking as her example "A Novel in between? A Mummer’s Wife". Speaking of the triangulation of characters within the novel, François-Denève honed in on Moore's exploration of borders and the indefinable areas of the in-between character and subject identity which are so central not only to A Mummer's Wife but much of Moore's fiction.

Session 5, "Correspondence", again provided a varied and diverse account of Moore's (re)interpretation of self and experience through his letters in both fact and fiction, and the telling negotiations between those terms in Moore's work and life. Alain Labau's (University of Caen-Basse Normandie) "George Moore on the Margin" underlined the importance of intertextual reference and the drive to co-authorship evidenced in Moore's letters. Through an illuminating use of the ideas of the polyphonic (Bahktin) and stereophonic (Barthes), Labau argued that Moore's works are a 'hymn to hypertextuality' built upon a continually evolving reassessment of self-identity through the devouring experience of new impressions. In "Les Lettres françaises de George Moore à Édouard Dujardin", Michel Brunet (University of Valenciennes) also used Moore's letters as he sought to discuss the cultural and literary exchanges between Moore and Dujardin as they were enacted in the correspondence the two authors. Two of the most interesting elements to emerge from this very interesting paper were the lengths Moore sought to go seemingly in order to prevent the publication of his 'bad' letters and yet his unashamed embrace of his spelling and grammatical errors, even his pride in making an original contribution to both English and French style. In her concluding paper "'A Letter Came into his Mind': Fictional Correspondence and Role-Shifting in The Lake", Fabienne Garcier-Dabrigeon (University of Lille 3) brought together aspects of both the earlier papers in her analysis of the role of 'fictional' letters in Moore's novel. Highlighting the fact that Moore's fictional letters in the narrative were actually part of a complex real-life exchange and enactment of the novelistic correspondence, the paper provided a stimulating insight into the ways in which letters fed into the concept of the interior monologue Moore sought to develop in English and his attempts to introduce a polymorphic and yet ventriloquistic polyphony of voices into the literary form. In each of the papers in this session in particular, Moore's position as a leading exponent of new ways of literary thinking came to the fore and one could not help thinking how Moore would respond to the inter- and hyper-textual possibilities available to contemporary authors through modern technologies.

The final panel session was entitled "Cross-Influences". The first speaker, Nathalie Saudo (University of Amiens) provided a compararive approach to her subject "'The soul with a false bottom' and the deceitful character: analysing the servant in the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux and George Moore's Esther Waters". Linking Moore's work with that of the Goncourts, Saudo illustrated how the writers delineated elements of the body and fleshliness in their depictions of the female body as a site of Naturalist discourse, especially in their portrayal of a class and gender divide based in a corporeal framework. As a creative writer, Catherine Cole (University of Sydney) sought to explore Moore's understanding of the short story as a form that could express elements of a distinctly Irish social and cultural landscape. In "Zola Gone to Seed: The Interrelationship between the Short Story Collections of James Joyce and George Moore", Cole provided a neatly formulated analysis of the interconnections and separations between the work of these two iconic writers of the Irish experience in the early twentieth century.

The conference concluded with a second plenary delivered by Elizabeth Grubgeld (Oklahoma State University) on the subject of "George Moore and the Body". Grubgeld's lecture presented a new reading of the labyrinthine elements of story to be found in Moore's short fiction "Albert Nobbs". Originally published in A Story-Teller's Holiday in 1918 and then removed from the revised version in 1928 because of its inclusion in Celibate Lives (1927), itself the reworked In Single Strictness, the story of Albert Nobbs, Grubgeld argued, is one concerned with Yeats's phrase of needing 'to hold within a single thought reality and justice'. Nobbs's tale, in which a cross-dressing waiter's physical and emotional frustrations with his/her life are narrated through a series of framing narratives, is to be seen as exemplifying Moore's awareness of the impossibility of being able to 'tell the body' or narrate either one's own physical experience of the world or to listen and hear correctly the narratives of self presented by others. In a striking comparison between Moore's narratological technique in this story and that of the film-maker establishing or blurring the divide between the edges of the inward-looking screen and the outward-leading frame, Grubgeld suggested that Moore's inscription of a particular kind of readership into the text edged around a series of issues concerning his work looking back to the end of the nineteenth century, even to his childhood, and forward to future readers able to interpret and understand the signs held into his work concerning the themes of gender, sexuality and the body.

Overall this conference was a stimulating and invigorating event which neatly encapsulated the diversity and exciting range of new work being undertaken on Moore's writings and placed this into the kind of European context that Moore himself would have appreciated.