Raising the Wind
In the last few years, Baruch Spinoza has certainly come into his own as a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophers and theorists as diverse as Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze, and Martha Nussbaum. The eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher’s work on ethics, religion, and the material world, in fact, absorbed the attention of some of the twentieth-century’s most formidable figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein invokes his logical ethics in the Tractatus, for example, while Albert Einstein and Jorge Luis Borges both counted him among their most important influences. Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher who helped establish the deep ecology movement, draws heavily on Spinoza’s arguments about the rights of animals and the ways in which they can be balanced against the demands of human utility. Even P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is caught reading Ethics in “Jeeves and the Greasy Bird,” though he later pronounces it “fundamentally unsound”—why, we will never know.
Elizabeth S. Anker begins this issue of the JJQ by drawing on the expanding theoretical interest in Spinoza’s work in an effort to reconsider the troubling conclusion of Bloom’s day in Ulysses. “Where Was Moses When the Candle Went Out?: Infinity, Prophecy, and Ethics in Spinoza’s Philosophy and ‘Ithaca’” explores two key elements that help us better understand the narrative structure and underlying ethics of the episode Joyce called “the ugly duckling” of Ulysses. First, she seizes on Spinoza’s concept of revelation as an encounter with a kind of infinitude that constitutes the very essence of the Other. Bloom’s sleepy reflections on the infinite, she contends, are imbued with this Spinozan awareness of alterity, forming a distinctive ethics—an “admixture of resignation and avowal”—which allows him “to assume a selflessly generous posture of magnanimity and forgiveness.” Second, she argues that Joyce draws heavily on Spinoza’s concept of the prophet in constructing Bloom, rendering him at the end of this book less an ascendant Christ-like figure than an Old Testament prophet racked by the incompleteness of his own revelation. The essay thus offers not only a provocative intertextual reading of Joyce and Spinoza, but opens up an ethically inspired way of reading the irresolute end of Ulysses itself.
From doubts about revelation, the issue turns next to the equally uncertain—and therefore endlessly productive—meeting between Joyce and psychoanalysis. In the elegantly written “Circuits of Meeting and Telling: Joyce, Psychoanalysis, and Narration,” Tony Thwaites draws on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to explore the generative doubt produced by free indirect discourse. This narrative form, he contends, functions as a symptom of language itself, “the enigma at the heart of sense, the knot that, although it is itself meaningless, holds meaning together.” This essay then redefines Joyce’s modernism, exploring the complex ways it seeks to elude the imposing strictures of the realist novel. Rather than focusing solely on narrative elements like free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, however, Thwaites instead identifies the ways Joyce channels the flow of language to produce a subject and a book never fully coincident with itself. This leads to a conclusion at once simple and elegant: “For there to be that incessant murmur of interiority, interiority must be ever-so-slightly dislocated from itself, never quite coincident with itself, able to address itself in a circuit across a gap that is at once unimaginably thin . . . and unimaginably vast.” This essay urges us to work in that gap from which Joyce’s texts continue to whisper their urgent challenge.
These theoretical considerations give way to historical ones in the next two essays, both of which attend to the complex interplay between life and fiction in Joyce’s work. In “‘Time Drops in Decay’: A Portrait of the Artist in History (ii), Chapter 2,” Andrew Gibson continues his own deeply researched attempt to locate Joyce’s first published novel in the precise historical conditions it so critically and directly engages. Focusing here on Chapter 2, the essay looks specifically to Dublin in the 1890s and ranges across the controversies and debates surrounding the Revival, the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, and the period’s subtly attenuated yet deeply imbricated structures of gender, class, and cultural identity. Drawing specifically on the metaphor of the labyrinth, Gibson uses it not only to describe this complex historical moment, but to figure the connection between dominant and counter-formations as well as the impulsive power of sexual experience to impel Stephen ever deeper into the maze of his own identity. The aim, Gibson asserts, is finally to complicate a crudely generalized account of modernist Bildung with Joyce’s meticulous portrait of an “Irish adolescent from a specific background undergoing a specific education in Dublin in the early and mid-1890s.”
Where Gibson looks at a Joyce still grappling with Dublin’s fragmented, colonial modernity, Patrick Reilly considers instead the author’s late engagement with the burgeoning media ecology of the 1930s. “Séansong, or whatyoumacormack, in Finnegans Wake” offers a close reading of the paragraph that marks the likely beginning of HCE’s dream in Book III of Finnegans Wake. Focusing on the famous Irish tenor John McCormack, Reilly uses the singer’s strange textual presence to open a much broader reading of the book, one that deftly interweaves media, history, and philosophy. Indeed, Reilly persuasively argues that this single paragraph of the Wake becomes a vital point of intersection between the art and technology of radio on the one hand and the subtle power of the book’s dreamwork on the other.
In addition to these essays, this issue of JJQ includes the complete report of the special panel on intellectual property convened by the International James Joyce Foundation. “James Joyce: Copyright, Fair Use, and Permissions: Frequently Asked Questions” provides extremely useful information about the principles of copyright, the copyright status of Joyce’s works, and the principles of fair use. Joyce scholars, in particular, are aware of the constraints placed on their work by intellectual-property laws, and anecdotal evidence as well as direct encounters with the Joyce Estate sometimes make this regime seem even more restrictive than it actually is. The FAQs thus provide some much needed clarity and can be used by critics, artists, and publishers to get a better sense of the reach as well as the limits of copyright. The work of the IJJF in this area, in fact, has already begun to resonate, and the Modernist Studies Association has recently set up its own task force on copyright to produce a parallel kind of document. This is an important service to the profession, and I am grateful to the task-force members who produced this report as well as to the IJJF for demonstrating such clear leadership in the area.
Thanks to a growing number of shorter contributions, this JJQ also contains a rich array of original and engaging notes. These begin with a meticulously researched piece by Ian Gunn and Clive Hart that maps out the imaginative space of No. 7 Eccles Street. Two longer notes then follow, one by John Gordon on the ghostly presence of the Mary Celeste in the pages of Ulysses and the other by Peter Mahon detailing his dogged attempts to track down actual sales numbers for Finnegans Wake. Both of these short studies demonstrate the careful kind of detective work that the short note or essay can so effectively convey. This section then concludes with Abby Bender’s bibliographic study of Roger Casement’s “The Language of the Outlaw” and Aaron Winslow’s list of some heretofore unnoticed parallels between Giacomo Joyce and Ulysses. This forty-fourth volume of JJQ finally concludes with a wide array of book reviews as well as an intriguing letter from Sandra Tropp, whose essay on Joyce and Darwin will appear in a forthcoming issue. Don’t forget to renew your subscriptions!
News and Notes
It has been some time since our pages have included those stark black boxes marking the death of a member of the Joyce community. Unfortunately, this issue bears two such memorials. I note with great sadness the loss of David G. Wright, a frequent contributor to this journal and also a very good friend. His warm humor and keen intelligence were always on display at Joyce gatherings of all sorts (as was his uncanny ability to step energetically off an airplane after the fourteen-hour flight from New Zealand to the United States). He was the author of three books on Joyce, including The Ironies of Ulysses and Characters of Joyce and had lately been publishing a series of important essays on Dubliners while also digging deeply into the life of Joyce’s sister, Margaret, a nun who lived most of her life in New Zealand. David was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University of Auckland, and his colleagues there mourn him as ruefully as do I and the rest of the Joyce world. He is survived by his wife and his young son to whom we send our sympathies and best wishes.
Earlier this year, Jane Ford also died. A prominent psychoanalytic scholar, she had a doctoral degree from the University of Buffalo in English and Psychoanalysis, a heady mixture of topics that helped form the core of her contributions to Joyce scholarship. She worked as a teacher in both colleges and high schools and helped found the San Diego Independent Scholars association. She contributed five articles and notes to the JJQ, including “Why Is Milly in Mullingar?” and wrote Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce. She too will be missed, and we are thankful for the insight she provided for so many of us into Joyce’s works.
As in Finnegans Wake, death gives way to birth, and I am happy to welcome a new journal to the field of Joyce studies, this one published by the steadily expanding James Joyce Research Centre at University College Dublin in partnership with the National Library of Ireland. Jointly edited by Luca Crispi and Anne Fogarty, The Dublin James Joyce Journal will put out its first issue this June. According to the prospectus, this annual will “showcase a broad variety of approaches to Joyce’s work, but it will particularly highlight textual, historical, and archival research.” The first installment features the work of Irish Joyceans and Joyce scholars currently working in Ireland. Alongside the newly revived James Joyce Annual and Hypermedia Joyce Studies, the Dublin James Joyce Journal adds another important voice to the field, and I look forward to the exciting work sure to appear in its pages.
In addition, the Centre just marked its official opening by hosting the inaugural James Joyce Research Colloquium. This event included an opening lecture by Michael Groden, as well as a series of talks delivered by an international group of scholars including Hans Walter Gabler, Vicki Mahaffey, Daniel Ferrer, Emer Nolan, and Paul Saint-Amour among many others. A report on this exciting event will appear in the next issue of JJQ.
Summer is, of course, the season for Joyce conferences, though things have gotten off to an even earlier start this year. In addition to the colloquium at UCD, two other groups convened. From 11-12 April, the Spanish James Joyce Society held its nineteenth annual conference in Vigo, on which we will report in the next issue. In February of this year, the newly established James Joyce Italian Foundation organized its first Graduate Conference in Rome, a lively event Teresa Caneda describes in this issue.
This summer, of course, the International James Joyce Foundation will convene its twenty-first symposium in Tours, France. “Re-Nascent Joyce” features keynote addresses by Hélène Cixous and Leo Bersani, as well as a diverse array of panels and a social program featuring a tour of Loire valley, a concert of Madrigal music and a grand Bloomsday banquet hosted by the city’s mayor. Information on the event is available online at <http://joyce2008.univ-tours.fr/>. Sadly, I will be unable to attend this year’s symposium, but hope you will seek out Carol Kealiher, JJQ’s tireless Managing Editor, who will be making the rounds.
Other events this summer include not only the usual array of local Bloomsday celebrations throughout the world, but summer schools and workshops as well. The Dublin James Joyce Summer School will run from 6-12 July, its academic program featuring talks by Finn Fordham, Abby Bender, Luca Crispi, Stacey Herbert, and Murray Beja among others. Information is available online at http://www.joycesummerschool.ie
The Trieste Joyce School will run from 29 June to 5 July, marking its twelfth anniversary. Organized by John McCourt and Renzo Crivelli, it features a wide range of distinguished speakers. Seminars this year will be conducted on genetic criticism, Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, and contemporary Irish poetry. Information about scholarships and enrollment is online at http://www2.units.it/~nirdange/school/index.html.
The summer’s Joyce pilgrimage ends, as ever, with the Zurich James Joyce Foundation’s Summer Workshop conducted by Fritz Senn. Running from 3-9 August, this year’s participants will be focusing their efforts on “errears & erroriboose”—or what Fritz less elliptically calls the “pervasive occurrence of mistakes, fumbles, errors, howlers, misunderstandings in Joyce, from ‘rheumatic wheels’ all the way to Wakean hitormiss deviations—whatever goes wrong.” Those interested in participating should contact the center or consult the workshop’s homepage at http://www.joycefoundation.ch.
Finally, I want to conclude this “Raising” by welcoming Professor Robert Spoo, JJQ’s former editor and current legal advisor, back to the University of Tulsa. He recently decided to leave Howard Rice in San Francisco and return to Tulsa as an associate professor in the law school where he will teach courses in intellectual-property rights as well as law and literature. It’s good to have him “home” again.
Sean Latham
University of Tulsa