About the idea

‘This is Dyoublong’  

‘he mostly sees double’ (‘Aeolus’)

Zenon Fajfer,  “A Portrait of the Artist”. More about the visual poems,
one of which became XXX IJJF logo, in the article below

If he could get to the heart of Dublin, Joyce ventured, then he could get to the heart of all cities of the world.  This suggests that all cities are potentially doubles of each other. Dublin could find its essence doubled elsewhere: Trieste, Zurich, Paris, Lublin. Or Krakow.

In the 19^th century Poland may have seemed like a double of Ireland: a Catholic country in which powerful nationalist feelings and histories expressed a longing for freedom from the rule of dominant neighbours. Krakow, like Dublin, was a lapsed capital city.  Indeed, the name of ‘Stanislaus’, the patron saint of Krakow, was popular amongst Irish nationalists, including Joyce’s father and his brother.  When Joyce was living in Trieste, Krakow was part of the same Austro-Hungarian Empire. The disintegration of this empire seemed to be reflected in the revolutionary forms now associated with modernism and the avant-garde.   How might doubles contribute to the disruption and the shaping of these revolutionary forms? 

As a concept, ‘doubles’ effortlessly spawns further considerations as: 

mirrors and cracked mirrors, nature and art, reflection and mimesis; inversion and reversal; growth, accumulation, and reproduction (‘doubling their mumper all the time’); the aesthetic technique of extension: repetition, echo, rhyme, copying, repetition; the double entendre; adaptation and translation (‘transluding from the otherman’); the spirit and the letter; duals and dialectic, thesis-antithesis, master and slave; twins and döppelgangers, Siamese twins and double acts, uneasy identifications, uncanny recognitions: Philip Sober and Philip Drunk, Jim and Stannie, Mutt and Jeff, sosie sesthers, Nuvoletta-Nuvoluccia; double vision, double crossing, leading a double life, double or quits.

Zenon Fajfer –  “A Portrait of the Artist”, 1996

Zenon Fajfer is a Polish poet, playwright, creator of Liberature, a new literature genre, co-author, with Katarzyna Bazarnik, of Finnegans Make after Thought, Word and Deed of Mr James Joyce (a play premiered in Dublin 1996 at James Joyce Summer School) and author of visual poems.