Raising the Wind

For the last decade or so, the field of modernist studies has been in a productive state of flux generated by a diverse array of work that seeks a return, as Michael North puts it, to the “scene of the modern.” Driven by more than just the ever-present historicist impulses of literary scholarship, this new critical turn seeks to challenge the self-sufficiency of the autonomous work of art, to demystify the structures governing modernism’s cultural production, and to embed works within the complex (and often enduring) legal, technological, political, and erotic contexts that shaped their production and reception. Although the various contributors to this issue of the JJQ may not think of themselves as part of the “new modernist studies,” the essays gathered here all share in this impulse to locate Joyce’s work in new contexts and often in unexpected dialogues with everything from nineteenth-century brain science to the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce.

The issue begins with an essay by Sandra Tropp that turns our attention to the complex changes in neuroscience at the turn of the twentieth century and its powerful ability to unsettle the presumed autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. In “‘The Esthetic Instinct in Action’: Charles Darwin and Mental Science in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Tropp contends that Stephen’s sometimes torturous aesthetic theory actually encodes a broad attempt to incorporate the insights and discoveries not only of Charles Darwin, but of other emerging scientists like Grant Allen and Alexander Bain. On the one hand, this piece is a valuable and carefully researched source study that makes a convincing argument about how Joyce deployed Darwin’s idea of beauty and its apparent cultural relativity. Yet it is also much more than this, since Tropp uncovers in her examination of these scientific debates about the nature of mind and perception a largely unrecognized tension within Stephen’s aesthetic theory. In compelling close readings of these oft-examined passages from A Portrait, she invites us to see how words like “attention,” “stasis,” and “awaken” take on density as nodes in an even larger scientific and philosophical debate.

The issue then turns from theories of mind to Peirce’s theory of semiotics in Murray McArthur’s “‘The Index Nothing Affirmeth’: The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters.’” The most intensely theoretical of the essays in this number, it brings Peirce together with Jacques Lacan’s work on psychoanalysis to offer a provocative re-reading of “The Sisters.” McArthur’s argument turns on Peirce’s concept of the “index,” a special kind of signification that cannot be easily aligned or reconciled with the more familiar dualistic Saussurean sign. By drawing on the unique powers of the index, McArthur contends, Joyce was able to formulate a unique aesthetic mandate for himself—an understanding of his own relationship to language and representation that manages simultaneously to abolish and affirm his own autonomy. Joyce’s indexical language still signifies, he claims, but it ultimately points to nothing, becoming itself a powerful figure of “paralysis,” “gnomon,” and “simony.” Moving effectively between the complex theoretical claims of Peirce’s work and subtle close readings of “The Sisters,” this challenging essay ultimately provides us a new way of thinking about the story and its importance as the genesis of Joyce’s own career.

Maren Linett too takes up Joyce’s fascination with the shape and trajectory of his own career, albeit in his last rather than his first novel. “The Jew’s Text: ‘Shem The Penman’ and ‘Shaun The Post’” makes the provocative claim that a pairing of these two chapters from Finnegans Wake uncovers Joyce’s deployment of Jewishness as a metaphor for his own position as a writer. Beginning with issues of copyright and piracy, she argues that Shem’s letter doubles as the Old Testament, a text ripped from its original context and then misinterpreted for the world. Casting Shaun in the image of Paul of Tarsus, she discovers in Shaun an abject Jewishness that doubles as an image for the modern artist. By following the various changes...