Raising the Wind Joyce may have been a quiet, almost shy man, but his life and his afterlife certainly share that extremity and extravagance we associate with opera. The romantic flight from Dublin to Trieste with Nora, the comic mishaps which led the couple to Trieste, and even the tragedy of Lucia’s mental illness all share, to some degree, the grand motifs which echoed in the concert halls and opera houses of Dublin, Paris, and Trieste. The publication and reception of Joyce’s texts—from the oft-rejected Dubliners through the banned Ulysses to the baffling Finnegans Wake—have also become a melodrama of sorts, to which each revision of the U.S. copyright code adds yet another tragicomic act. This bastardized mix of the comic and the serious, the ironic and tragic which defines the opera helps us also to understand the unique connections between this dramatic form and Joyce’s own life and work. We know that throughout his life Joyce was fascinated by music and possessed (according to all reports) a tenor voice fair enough to take third prize in Dublin’s 1904 Feis Ceoil. This passion for music echoes faintly through his works, and critics like Ruth Bauerle and Sebastian Knowles have helped us, in turn, to discern the strains of Joyce’s distant music. Indeed, no Joyce conference is now complete without a rousing performance of the author’s favorite tunes—not least among them our unofficial anthem: “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” But opera, of course, is more than just its music. Indeed, Richard Wagner—whose writings Joyce knew well—wagered that the mixture of drama, music, poetry, and spectacle which defined his own works could become a Gesamtkunstwerk—a supreme work of art combining all others into a single, totalizing unity. In the wake of the cinema and the advent of the digital age, we may consider Wagner’s claims somewhat grandiose, but we cannot deny the peculiar attraction of what may have been the first self-conscious experiment in multimedia art. This special double issue of the James Joyce Quarterly, guest-edited by Timothy Martin, emphasizes the appeal of opera’s extravagance for Joyce, and the many structural and thematic affinities it shares with his works. Tracing what he calls the “operatic turn” in Ulysses, Martin argues in his thoughtful introduction that we eventually find ourselves surrendering the “dramatic principle of unity and economy” in that text for the ecstatic “multiplicity” of operatic form and structure. Opera’s peculiarly hybrid nature, which draws on music, poetry, and melodrama, seems a form particularly well suited to an author who refused to be bound by anything so restrictive as the generic conventions of the novel. In a letter which coincidentally arrived in our editorial office just before this issue went to press, J. Mitchell Morse proposes that some brave—or perhaps foolhardy—soul should, in fact, render Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into an opera. The letter, which appears at the end of this issue, not only testifies to the affinity between Joyce’s work and the grand productions of Wagner or Rossini, but suggests just how timely this special issue may be. Martin has assembled here a strong and unusually diverse collection of essays, and I want to thank him and his contributors for both their diligence and their patience as this project gradually took shape. I am particularly fascinated by the variety of ways in which these pieces tackle their topic, for none are content with simply exploring textual parallels or citations. Bernfried Nugel opens by developing an ambitious theory of echo and resonance in order to explore the ways in which Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has been folded both structurally and thematically into A Portrait. Allen Hepburn, in “Ulysses, Opera, Loss,” leads us deftly through the complex field of psychomusicology to stress the ways in which opera invites the trauma of loss and death to leak into our consciousness. In the kind of detailed genetic study we have come to expect from him, Geert Leernout identifies an almost forgotten book by Edouard Schurè as a key source for Joyce’s development of the Tristan and Isolde theme in Finnegans Wake. Finally, Joseph Kestner and Ruth Bauerle both remind us just how deeply the iconography of opera—its stars, its themes, and its heroes—was embedded in the cultural life of the early twentieth century. Working his way through the images of William Tell which would have surrounded Joyce in Zurich, Kestner matches sharp critical analysis to a stunning visual record of the theme’s long history and insistent fascination. Turning to the lowbrow world of the criminal courts, Bauerle scrutinizes the newspaper accounts surrounding the arrest and trial of Enrico Caruso for lewd behavior in Central Park in 1906. She locates in this fascinating archive a potential source for HCE’s crime in Finnegans Wake, while reminding us of the immense celebrity of opera stars in the period. These richly varied articles are complemented by a collection of inventive notes on Joyce and the opera by Chris Ackerley, Anne Nolan, Bernfried Nigel, Judith Harrington, and Timothy Martin. By assembling this collection of essays, Martin reminds us that opera is one of the most vital formal and thematic influences on Joyce’s work. Its textures can be discerned in the vast symbolic structure of Ulysses and in the microtextual crevices of Finnegans Wake. More scholarly work remains to be done in this area, and I have been surprised of late by the steady trickle of contributions we have received which examine Joyce’s use of operatic texts and themes. One of the real highlights of this special issue, in fact, is Ruth Bauerle’s annotated bibliography surveying the work which has been done on Joyce and opera. I am certain that it will become an invaluable resource for scholars who wish to pursue the many critical paths which lead in and out of Joyce’s lifelong fascination with the opera. When George Bernard Shaw wrote of Wagner’s return to conventional operatic form in Die Götterdämmerung, he complained that it was “back to opera again.” I want to thank Martin for his hard work and attention to detail in putting together an issue of the James Joyce Quarterly that will allow us all to say with pleasure and enthusiasm, “back to opera again!” Bravo. Thomas Flanagan The news has reached me that Thomas Flanagan, after suffering a heart attack at his home in Berkeley, passed away on 16 March at the age of 78. Flanagan had been a member of our editorial board since 1989, and helped shape the history of the JJQ by offering us his unique perspective as both a scholar and a working novelist. In 1959 he published The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850, a book which quickly became and still remains one of the standard surveys of nineteenth-century Irish literary history. It returned to us the writings of a diverse array of marginalized figures—from Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan to William Carleton and Gerard Griffin—many of whom still remain woefully under-appreciated. In 1979 Flanagan published his first novel, The Year of the French, and won the National Book Critics Circle award for the year’s most outstanding work of fiction. This novel, which richly details the 1798 Irish Rebellion, became the first part of a loose trilogy of Irish historical novels which includes The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). In recent years Flanagan’s name has become familiar to readers of the New York Review of Books, where his essays and reviews have regularly appeared. He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1923, attended Amherst College, and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He taught first at Columbia, then moved to Berkeley in 1960 and finally to SUNY—Stonybrook in 1978. He retired from teaching just six years ago, when he moved with his wife back to Berkeley. Flanagan’s knowledge of Joyce and his writings was legendary. In his obituary in the New York Review of Books, Seamus Heaney recalls that the young scholar had learned Dublin’s geography from Joyce’s works so well that on his first visit to the city he could easily recognize and name the streets and buildings. I did not have a chance to meet Flanagan, and it is an opportunity I am sad to have missed. *** News and Notes The saga of Ulysses and its contested copyright took yet another sudden and certainly unexpected turn when the United States Supreme Court agreed in February to hear the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft. The plaintiffs in the case claim that the 1998 Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act went too far in extending by twenty years the legal protections for all currently copyrighted work. Lawrence Lessing, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, claims that Congress exceeded its authority when it extended these new protections, and effectively prevented the digital publication and distribution of a wide array of historical, literary, and cultural materials. “Just at the time that the Internet is enabling a much broader range of individuals to draw upon and develop this creative work without restraint,” he claims in his filing, “extensions of copyright law are closing off this medium to a broad swath of common culture.” If the Court were to overturn the 1998 law, Ulysses and a host of other modernist texts would immediately enter into the public domain. A decision from the court is expected by the end of the year. The issue of copyright and the role its protection has played in the “Joyce Wars” fought over the Gabler edition of Ulysses emerged recently in a Boston Globe article on the troubled life of John Kidd. David Able, who wrote the piece, notes that the former director of the James Joyce Research Center at Boston University is currently jobless and in very poor health. W. W. Norton, which contracted with Kidd to produce a new edition of Ulysses in 1988 has put the project indefinitely on hold, saying that though “it’s not out of the question we won’t publish it . . .we have a lot of other projects.” Whatever side you may have found yourself on as the Joyce wars were waged, I hope you can all join me in wishing Kidd well as he battles his illness. We may have to continue to wait for a new edition of Ulysses, but I do know that a new edition of Finnegans Wake has appeared—in Korean. The unlikely translation was done by Chong-keon Kim of Korea University. Professor Kim, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Tulsa under the direction of Thomas Staley in 1977, also translated Ulysses into Korean in 1988. He writes that his attempts to recreate the polyglot puns and portmanteau words of the Wake led him to mix Chinese characters with the more prosaic Korean Hanguel. I am certainly in no position to assess this particular text, but I can say that even in a language completely unknown to me, it retains the visual distinction and discomfort of the original text. I have also heard some encouraging news from Donald Theall, who writes that the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto has agreed to create and maintain an archive of the old on-line Finnegans Wake discussion group, FWAKE-L. The materials will be generated from files thoughtfully preserved by Greg Downing at New York University, and then posted by Tim Szeliga under the guidance of Michael Edmunds, the Director of the Information Commons at the University of Toronto. Theall asks that inquiries, suggestions, and requests be directed to him by email at dtheall@trentu.edu. While on the topic of all things digital, it has come to my attention that the James Joyce Society of Gotham Book Mart fame has a new website at http://www.joycesociety.org. In addition to information about the Society, it contains announcements about upcoming events, and has a wonderful gallery of photographs and other documents detailing the history of the Society. Heyward Ehrlich from Rutgers delivered a talk to the group in February entitled “Rewriting Homer Through Celtic Myth: ‘Matriarchy v. Patriachy’ in Joyce’s Ulysses,” and Zack Bowen spoke in April on “Theatrical Bloom: Cloacal Aesthetics.” I will be speaking to the Society on 5 May about Joyce, Ulysses, and the problem of snobbery. For more information about the Society, contact Nicholas Fargnoli at afargnoli@molloy.edu. If the Gotham Book Mart evokes a certain degree of nostalgia and admiration among Joyceans, so too does Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The Irish Independent reports that after a great deal of debate and speculation, the Abbey will remain at its traditional Lower Abbey Street location. The theater was desperately in need of a more modern space, and the management had hoped to move to an entirely new site in the Docklands. After a cabinet level decision, however, it was decided that the current building should be demolished and replaced and that the Abbey Theatre should retain its traditional address. Construction of the new facility is (optimistically) expected to take up to three years or more. Finally, we here at JJQ and the Department of English at The University of Tulsa are hard at work on putting together the program of events for the 2003 North American James Joyce conference, now firmly scheduled to run from 16-20 June. Among the speakers will be Thomas Staley and Bob Spoo, who will join me in a roundtable discussion of the history of the JJQ and its future. In addition, we expect keynote lectures from Robert Scholes, Margot Norris, and another player yet to be named. A call for papers will appear in the next issue of the JJQ, and copies will be available in Trieste as well. I hope you are all gearing up for the trip to Italy this June. I’ll look forward to seeing you there. Sean Latham Editor