Raising the Wind
Unexpected pairings distinguish the collection of essays gathered in this issue of the James Joyce Quarterly. The hoary old formulation “Joyce and” has often been decried as a trite and tired phrase by those hoping for bolder inventive strokes. As has so often been the case in Joyce studies, however, the conjunctive alchemy of “and” permits critics to distill new readings of books like Ulysses, A Portrait, and Dubliners from a rich array of cultural, aesthetic, theoretical, and historical contexts. So the JJQ welcomes once more—in this its forty-fifth year—the humble conjunctive’s unique ability to weave Joyce’s texts into the world in ways still creative, thoughtful, and unexpected.
We begin with a study that offers a new way of understanding the illness and death that pervade Dubliners, infecting nearly every story in the collection with the taint of paralysis and hemiplegia. In “James Joyce and Germ Theory: The Skeleton at the Feast,” Martin Bock locates a surprisingly rich—and sometimes frightening—array of new connections that emerges at the nexus between affection and infection, where the bodies of the caring and cared for enter into dangerous proximity. In carefully nuanced readings of stories like “Eveline” and “The Dead,” Bock uncovers the quotidian symptoms of consumption, a disease that may have infected nearly half the world’s population as Joyce sat down to write at the twentieth century’s turn. By so carefully matching delicate close reading to larger medical and historical contexts, Bock insists on preserving the historical foreignness of a Dublin with which readers have perhaps become too sentimentally familiar.
From Edwardian Dublin, Matthew Spangler turns to the city as it arrayed itself for the spectacular Bloomsday centenary four years ago. Those celebrations reached a climax with a striking outdoor pageant staged on O’Connell Street, an event which dizzyingly mixed contemporary Dublin with its Edwardian counterpart while leaving many of its spectators perplexed by a twisting parade of Chinese and South American dancers. “Winds of Change: Bloomsday, Immigration, and ‘Aeolus’ in Street Theater” offers a compelling reading of this performative text by carefully embedding it amidst ongoing debates in the Republic of Ireland about nationhood, identity, and ethnicity. Spangler’s piece presses beyond this, however, to make the even more compelling argument that this event was itself a critical reading of Ulysses. In that figure of the soaring Dedalus-Joyce appearing on our cover, Spangler sees an attempt by contemporary Dublin artists to reclaim one of Ireland’s greatest authors not as a reservoir of nostalgia but a living political and aesthetic presence who still speaks hard truths to the city and country he so famously fled.
Questions of nation, autonomy, and exile are not unique to contemporary Dublin, of course, and Layne Parish Craig finds them deftly at work in Stephen’s struggle with Ireland’s mythic past. Continuing what has now become a lively debate about the woman in the Ballyhoura Hills whose strange story Davin relates in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this essay provocatively contends that Stephen seeks exile out of weakness and fear rather than courage and strength. In a closely wrought reading of Chapter 5, Craig explores the manifold ways in which Stephen constantly struggles yet fails to confine women in the text to static symbols, frozen in mythic time. Hearing Davin relate the story of the woman who mysteriously invites him into her home, Stephen fails to see the event as anything other than a symbolic rejection of his own kingship. Rather than a means of aesthetic liberation, therefore, his decision to leave Ireland becomes a defensive fantasy—an attempt to ward off the devastating autonomy of women who constantly exceed the constraints of his own stunted imagination.
From these contextual conjunctions that seek to link Joyce’s work to larger cultural and political issues, the issue turns to a pair of essays on oft-debated cruxes in Ulysses. In “A Dominant Boylan: Music, Meaning, and Sonata Form in the ‘Sirens’ Episode of Ulysses,” Scott J. Ordway asks us once more to consider the ways in which Joyce employs musical structure as a creative resource. In a somewhat surprising move, he claims that the narrow critical focus on the fuga per canonem in “Sirens” has, in fact, obscured the hermeneutic value of another musical form: the classical sonata. This highly structured type of music is built around a developing tonal tension and its eventual resolution. In applying this form to “Sirens,” Ordway develops an innovative and revealing reading of the episode in which Bloom and Blazes Boylan oppose one another as dominant and tonic keys, their thoughts and actions unfolding not in the strict abstractions of the fugue but in the more allusive patterns of the sonata. Such a model effectively preserves the episode’s structural obsession with musical form while simultaneously keeping it tightly focused on vital elements of the unfolding plot.
The second essay on Joycean cruxes in this issue offers a devilishly clever close reading of “Eumaeus” that finds wandering through its tortured prose no less a figure than Odysseus himself. In “Intertextual Metempsychosis in Ulysses: Murphy, Sinbad, and the ‘U.P.: up’ Postcard,” James T. Ramey argues that the sailor Murphy is, in fact, the textual incarnation of Odysseus himself, still making his way through the world. Marshalling a surprising array of evidence, Ramey goes on to argue that this figure for “intertextual metempsychosis” not only explains the mysterious dream of the Roc at the end of “Ithaca,” but even helps us decipher that curiously insulting postcard Denis Breen receives. Summarizing this carefully woven set of allusions and textual detection is impossible, so I urge you instead to read the argument itself—and hold on as it twists and turns before finally rescuing Bloom himself from textual death at the book’s end.
This issue’s final essay ends with an ambitious attempt to conjoin Joyce and Heidegger by tracking the humble yet curious passage of “*es-”—the Indo-European root for “to be”—through the final chapter of Finnegans Wake. In “The Resurrection of Being in the Ricorso of Finnegans Wake,” Damon Franke argues that by doubling, echoing, troping, and repeating this sibilant root, Joyce takes on the very question of being itself and its deep connection to the act of writing. Franke’s reading, in turn, opens onto Joyce’s complex engagement with resurrection and reincarnation, with the ways in which being itself might be imagined in and through the continuance of the individual beyond the horizon of death. The Wake, the essay concludes, seeks to move writing toward “one continuous present tense,” directing our attention away from the unimaginable space of the afterlife toward a new conjunction with the now of our being.
News and Notes
The JJQ’s entry into Project MUSE has so far been a happy success, with recent reports from this digital aggregator indicating that the journal is receiving thousands of hits on its articles over the last several months—and this with only three issues initially available. As we had hoped, this is clearly expanding the journal’s readership by making it accessible not only to subscribers but to students, researchers, and even the random “Googlers” all seeking information about Joyce and his work. Although we have lost a few institutional subscriptions from strapped libraries seeking to scrape together money from whatever sources they can, this new digital life has been invigorating for the JJQ. Indeed, this new source of income has allowed us to offset ever-rising postal costs and thus maintain the relatively low subscription price we still offer to our subscribers.
Our expanding digital presence has also led to some important changes in the format of the print journal. Since digital readers tend to enter the journal at the article level, we need to provide fuller information about the journal on each page. Thus beginning with this issue, running headers will provide basic citation information for all articles, notes, and essays, while new footers will offer complete bibliographic information on the opening pages. In addition, the JJQ will also be working with the Copyright Clearance Center to facilitate permissions requests made directly from within MUSE pages. MUSE itself, in fact, has recently updated its entire interface, adding new tools for citation, updates, and bookmarking—all of which may be of use to our digital readers. If you have not yet visited the site, I urge you to take a look.
I am also pleased to announce that an entirely new digital tool is now freely available for all Joyce scholars—a research tool so deep and rich that it will quickly become indispensable. Thanks to the hard work of the JJQ’s bibliographer, William Brockman, and his collaborators at the University of Texas, the complete records of the James Joyce Checklist (and a good deal more besides) are now available online as a searchable database hosted by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. You can find this tool available online at <http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/jamesjoycechecklist>—and you will be dazzled by the riches it contains. Although full-text searching and linking is not available, you can nevertheless search through decades of criticism, translations, and research, narrowing your results by publication type, place, and year. I urge you all to visit this newly available resource and send your thoughts to its editor and creator. Those concerned about the print version of the Checklist, furthermore, need have no fear since the JJQ will continue to publish it with each new issue.
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All this good news on the digital front, unfortunately, has been somewhat leavened by the news that Donald F. Theall, a digital pioneer and dedicated Joyce scholar, died in May. A leader in the field of computing and the humanities, a distinguished administrator, and a most formidable critic, we all owe considerable debts to his innovative work. Born in 1928 in New York, Professor Theall taught first at the University of Toronto and then at McGill University before becoming President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Trent, a position he held from 1980 to 1987. A productive and often visionary scholar, he not only grappled with some of modernism’s most challenging works, but became a leading theorist of media studies. In two books on Joyce—Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication (1995) and James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (1997), he argued for the importance of Finnegans Wake as a work of aesthetic engineering. In its carefully encoded pages, he found not only the emerging threads of hypertext, but a critical model for thinking about the relationship between memory, codes, and cultural practice. He helped a generation of scholars find ways to draw such startling links between literature and technology. There is little doubt that he is sorely missed.
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Another Joycean summer has now passed with students and scholars returning from the Symposium in Tours as well as from what seemed a dazzling array of schools and workshops in Dublin, Zurich, and Trieste. As we settle in for a new academic year with minds afire from these events, the time has already come to begin thinking about what comes next. The IJJF will run its regular pair of panels at this year’s Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco. And work is already well underway for next summer’s Eire on the Erie in Buffalo. Running from 12-16 June 2009, this installment of the North American James Joyce Conference promises a rich array of events, ranging from a display of Buffalo’s dazzling Joyce material to a reading by Colum McCann and a trip to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. For more information, including a call for papers, visit the already quite useful website at <http://english.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce/>.
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A new volume of the JJQ also means the addition of new staff members, so I would like to close by welcoming our newest interns, many of whom came to Tulsa as already dedicated Joyceans. These include Samantha Extance, Matthew Kochis, and Patrick Belk. In addition, Dane Spencer has agreed to continue his work as Book Review Editor—this despite a recent marriage and the imminent arrival of a new baby. Finally, I want to thank Irina Strout and James Bachman for their dedicated help over the last several semesters. These students allow the JJQ to do the kind of fact- and source-checking that has become increasingly rare for academic publishers, and we are deeply grateful for their efforts.
Sean Latham
University of Tulsa