Renascent Joyce

Foreword

Foreword In their admirable introduction to this volume, Messrs. Ferrer, Slote, and Topia lay out the broadest definition of Renaissance writing “immarginable ” for the enterprise at hand. As the essays progress, the question becomes one of writing across periods: how the modern engages with the Renaissance, a period that was itself engaged with an early classical period , and how that engagement lends itself to dialectics and dynamism, to reflection and renewal. For many authors in this volume, the Renaissance returns as play, as farce, or even as hoax: neither Pantheon nor pantomime but “Pantheomime.” Joyce’s writing has its own periodicity, and the central question grows to include Joyce’s revisions of his own work as well as the work of others, whether as avant-texte (for Saint-Amour and Froula) or as après-texte (for Rodriguez and Byrnes). From an engagement with Joyce’s critical pasts, the book moves to an engagement with what Saint-Amour calls Joyce’s “critical futurities”: a Renaissance that is a looking forward as well as a looking back, both a reconciliation and a sundering. What the future holds—the “imprevidibility of the future”—is the crucial uncertainty in all of Joyce’s work, and the only way to know that future is to return, again and again, to the past. Renascent Joyce, in retracing so many pathways to the lost worlds of Lucretius, Giordano Bruno, the missing Hamlet lectures, and what Christine Froula beautifully calls “these whimsical lost umbrellas and blossoming girls of Proyce and Joust,” has opened limitless possibilities for future study. It is not for nothing that “Proteus” contains all the letters in “Proust” (to say nothing of all of the letters in “Stupor”): Froula shows, as Van Hulle has before her in this series, that Proust and Joyce share an eddying relation with their past writing. This volume establishes a link between the idea of Renaissance writing and genetic criticism, in the use of a writer’s own past (“who will read these written words?”). Renaissance as release, as the expression of possibility. As Beckett said of Finnegans Wake, so too one could say of this book’s approach to its subject: “it is not about something: it is that something itself.” From Birgy’s beginning, brimful with dagger definitions of the Renaissance , through Pollock’s dynamic presentation of the idea of Renaissance as both turba (vortex, a state of turbulence) and turbi (turbine, a repeating cyclical process), terms that perfectly apply to Finnegans Wake, to the debatesinRodriguezandByrnesontheinviolabilityofJoyce ’sauthority,every essay in this collection is written with a verve and conviction that more than matches the Renaissance theme. One might even call them Tours de force . . . Sebastian D. G. Knowles Series Editor viii Foreword ...