Raising the Wind We have long taken it for granted A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an exemplary model of the Bildungsroman, its stature founded not only on its own impressive achievement but on its adaptation of the rich resources of this Continental genre as well. Gregory Castle’s essay opening this issue of the JJQ, however, returns to this basic assumption about the text in order to question some of its key tenets. Carefully re-tracing the genre’s origins in the specific historical conditions of the German Enlightenment, Castle synthesizes the insights of Adorno with the tools of postcolonial theory to insist that Joyce deliberately fails to produce the kind of subject the genre typically creates. “In the modernist era,” Castle contends, “the Bildung concept cannot contain or explain a colonial condition or experience, cannot make sense of the dehiscent interiority of the colonial subject, cannot recognize it, much less legitimize it.” By locating A Portrait at the intersection of the degradations of colonial discourse and the optimism of the Bildungsroman, this essay reveals a powerful paradox that drives Joyce’s text to its famous irresolution—both in the closing diary sections as well as in the opening episodes of Ulysses. This generic examination of Joyce’s first novel is followed by David Earle’s nuanced and visually engaging cultural history of absinthe. Moving between canonical paintings and the ephemera of posters and advertisements, the essay concludes that “absinthe is a paradoxical tool of disruption and realism,” and like Ulysses itself it remains emblematic of both the excesses and pleasures of aesthetic modernism. The wonderfully creepy image decrying the “green menace” on this issue’s cover suggests some of the intense anxiety generated by this highly alcoholic drink, and Earle’s essay reveals the way such concerns are subtly woven into Stephen’s aspirations and self-perception as a bohemian artist. The issue then turns to a cluster of three essays each uniquely devoted to an examination of doubt in Joyce’s work and the subsequent burdens this places upon individual readers. First, Tim Conley, in “‘Are you to have all the pleasure quizzing on me?’: Finnegans Wake and Literary Cognition,” turns his attention to the vast array of questions posed in Joyce’s most interrogatory text. Many of the questions asked in the Wake are incorrectly answered, and Conley maintains that the errant nature of such responses gives us an opportunity to test “our own humanity, errors and all.” Ulysses too, Barbara Leckie contends in “The Simple Case of Adultery,” is full of errors and seeming contradictions. The resulting sensation of doubt and confusion produces a vital epistemological gap, one which Joyce seems deliberately to have borrowed from divorce-court journalism. Reading portions of “Eumaeus” against these newspaper intertexts, she examines the ways in which the discourse of adultery is powerfully shaped by the inability to know that the transgression has been committed. Asking provocatively “what exactly does Bloom know about adultery?” she opens a productive aporia in the text of Ulysses generated by “the capacity of adultery to undermine all knowledge claims.” Finally, this group of essays concludes with a suggestive meditation on the problem of interpretation in the “Cyclops” episode by Ryan Guth. Describing his own experience with what he usefully calls the “technical difficulties” of reading the opening paragraphs of episode 12, he—like Conley and Leckie—insists on the importance of the reader in adjudicating the text’s apparent contradictions. He concludes, finally, that we become the work’s secondary “arranger,” sorting and shifting the materials Joyce provides in a conscious and labored effort to produce a stable narrative thread. This issue of JJQ concludes with a lengthy and learned study of Dante’s influence on “The Dead” by Gian Balsamo as well as two intriguing notes: one a meticulous examination by Wolfgang Wicht of the tenants of “Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15” and the other a peculiar intertext for the “Cyclops” episode provided by John Gordon about snakes and cow udders that simply defies summation. The productivity of Joyce scholars is legendary and continues apace. Although fifteen book reviews are here on offer, we nevertheless continue to run a bit behind in the timely publication of such pieces. You can expect to see a large number of them in each of the next three issues as we clear our backlog and work dutifully to keep pace with your labors. News and Notes This issue reaches your no-doubt anxious hands a bit later than we would have liked, but the JJQ has become once more an itinerant traveler, moving our home in an inadvertent homage to the displacements of the Joyce family. You can rest assured that we are neither fleeing creditors nor stiffing our landlords, and thankfully no bailiffs have appeared to tag our old oak desks and precious back issues. For the third time in nine years, however, the JJQ as well as Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature have been sent packing. When I showed up here three years ago the staff of academic publications still referred to our headquarters as the “Red House,” despite the fact that the two-story bungalow we inhabited was manifestly sand-colored. To make matters stranger, even the graduate assistants and most of the editorial staff who used this moniker had no memory of the original red-painted house once occupied by Tom Staley and Germaine Greer when they edited Tulsa’s two flagship publications. When that original house was finally demolished the journals wandered to the edges of campus, occupying stately old homes that—though never painted red—nevertheless provided us with a sense of autonomy and intimacy that traced its roots back to that first old house. Perhaps too eager to make a clean break with the past, I initially refused to call our headquarters red. Traditions are powerful, however, and just as I began to accept and even savor the absurdity of the designation we learned that we would once more be on the move, this time not to another house but to the center of the English department. The move has been both exhilarating and traumatic as we left behind what felt like an old home passed on dutifully through generations of editors for a cleaner and more modern workspace complete with access to the campus phone and computer networks. JJQ’s staff is now right across the hall from my office, and this will no doubt improve our ability both to produce issues and deal far more efficiently with manuscript submissions. It is difficult to avoid the feeling, however, that something has been lost in this (hopefully) final translation. These sleek new digs, though cozy and efficient, will always lack the quirky humanity and the beautiful contradictions of our dear old red house. Was it perhaps merely coincidence that just as we cleared out ahead of the bulldozers word of another equally painful closing reached us? After over seventy-five years, what Brendan Behan famously called “the heart and hearth of Dublin ,” Bewley’s Tea Shop in Grafton Street , has shuttered its doors. Any recent visitor to the city cannot help but be struck by its rapid transformation into a modern metropolis, its skyline and architecture a curious and revealing blend of the country’s location at the intersection of Europe and the United States. Bewley’s has, of course, changed hands a number of times in the last twenty years, and finally the rents on its now fashionable Grafton Street location have become unaffordable. The parent corporation decided in November to close both the flagship location as well as another shop on Westmoreland Street leaving the city without a Bewley’s shop for the first time since 1884. The Irish papers lamented the loss, and it was even featured in an elegiac essay on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. A group calling itself Bewley’s Oriental Saved Cafés Alliance (BOSCA) has been formed to help preserve the shop’s unique appearance, though it is not clear how successful they might be. Long the haunt of Dublin ’s impecunious literati, Richard Ellmann notes that when Joyce returned to Dublin in 1909 he met Richard Best at the café and flamboyantly displayed the wad of money he had brought with him to start the short-lived Volta theater. Many Joyceans have since made the trip to Bewley’s, and while we cannot begrudge Dublin its modernity we can, nevertheless, lament the loss of this landmark. On a more serious note, we were all struck painfully by the sad news that on 8 October 2004 the philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida died in Paris of complications from pancreatic cancer. Finding the proper way to describe his contribution to the intellectual life of the last forty years is a daunting task, for this learned and humane man required us to confront the deep and often terrifying complexity and contradiction of language. Both admired and reviled over the course of his career, he nevertheless left a lasting imprint on generations of scholars. He wrote over seventy books and lectured throughout the world while serving on the faculty of various universities, including the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris and the University of California at Irvine . He joined us at meetings of the International Joyce Foundation and wrote extensively on Joyce’s use (and abuse) of language in Ulysse gramophone; Deux mots pour Joyce. Scholars and critics in the JJQ and elsewhere have argued extensively about Derrida, Joyce, and language, generating a now decades-long debate that is lively, rigorous, and engaging. The New York Times, in its obituary for Derrida, unfortunately failed to do proper justice to the man, his work, and his legacy. I, for one, found the letters and other materials gathered together on UC Irvine’s website to be an instructive tonic and urge you to visit the site at http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/index.php. In keeping with our traditions we will feature our own memorial piece in a forthcoming issue. Even as these old institutions—from Bewley’s tea shop, through Derrida, to our own red house—vanish into dust, I am pleased to announce that thanks to the efforts of Clive Hart and Ian Gunn old number 7 Eccles Street is being rebuilt, albeit only virtually. Based on the success of their newly reissued and fantastically useful topographical guide to Joyce’s Dublin , they have begun to assemble a three-dimensional model of the house originally demolished over fifty years ago. Still in search of any information local informants might be able to supply about the property, they encourage you to contact them by email at ian@no7.org.uk. As the process of virtual mortaring continues, you can stop by their web site at http://www.no7.org.uk/ and see two Quicktime movies showing their working models of the house’s façade and interior. Though we cannot, of course, return to number 7 itself, we can go home to Ithaca — New York , that is, for the 2005 North American James Joyce Conference. Organized by Bill Brockman and Jim LeBlanc and hosted by Cornell University , the meeting will run from 14-18 June. The Cornell University Library is playing a prominent role in putting the event together, and we can expect to see another exhibition of the kind that has dazzled us at recent conferences in Tulsa and Dublin . Though the papers themselves are certain to be as broad-ranging as ever, particular attention will be paid to issues of home, nostalgia, departure, and return. Information about the event as well as registration forms can be found on-line at http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/joyce. Also feel free to contact either the academic organizer, Bill Brockman, at uxb5@psu.edu or the local host, Jim LeBlanc, at JDL8@cornell.edu with specific queries. Conferences, colloquia, and schools abound this summer, and Fritz Senn will once again be organizing the annual workshop sponsored by the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. This year the working group will focus on a single text: the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. Participants do not deliver papers but are instead invited to participate in a series of typically lively discussions and exchanges that are renowned for their generosity and intensity. The workshop runs from 31 July to 6 August and charges the very modest fee of Swiss Fr. 50. Applications are available on the Foundation’s website at www.joycefoundation.ch. In addition to this annual meeting, the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures will be meeting at Charles University in Prague from 24-28 July. Organized in cooperation with the second Prague James Joyce Colloquium, the conference will deal with a wide range of topics while focusing, in part, on Ireland and globalization. While the deadline for paper submissions has already passed, information on the conference can be found on-line at http://www.iasil.org/prague/index.html. Currently we are at work on a special double issue of JJQ that will arrive early this spring. Gathering together a selection of papers and addresses from the Post-Industrial Joyce Conference in 2003, it contains a good deal of new material as well as a series of critical reflections on the rise and consolidation of the Joyce industry. Over fourteen papers, most of them only lightly revised from the conference, will provide a sense of where our shared critical enterprise has been as well as where it might be headed. Sean Latham University of Tulsa