Raising the Wind

The opening essay in this issue of JJQ argues that editors, biographers, and textual scholars have been too quick to attribute a rather dubious piece of newspaper writing to Joyce. In "An Emendation to the Joycean Canon: The Last Hurrah for 'Politics and Cattle Disease,'" Terence Matthews meticulously argues that we have long been mistaken in our belief that Joyce actually published a short article on foot-and-mouth disease in the 10 September 1912 issue of The Freeman's Journal. Matthews makes a measured assessment of the available textual, historical, and documentary evidence, focusing on the newspaper itself and its role in the debates about cattle disease in Ireland. The result is a convincing claim that editors of both James Joyce: The Critical Writings and James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing were too quick to include this piece based upon some rather thin external evidence from Stanislaus Joyce. Although such a discovery does not go to the heart of the canon, it nevertheless reminds us that textual scholarship can still profitably attend to questions of genesis as well as genetics.

This opening essay is followed by a pair of studies which each reflect in quite different ways on the virtual worlds created in and around Joyce's written texts. In "Possible Worlds Theory and the Fantasy Universe of Finnegans Wake," Margot Norris offers a daring and inventive new way for venturing into Joyce's most challenging work. Using the narratological tools of possible-worlds theory, she interrogates "the Wake's narrative and fictional operation" by rigorously analyzing the ways in which the book alternatively complies with and violates generic textual codes. Using chapter I.i. as a kind of laboratory, she explores how Joyce integrates elements of fantasy, actuality, and possibility to test the relationship between text and world. As a result, we are led beyond language and plot into the Wake's deep yet riven narrative structures.

In "Ulysses on Web 2.0: Towards a Hypermedia Parallax Engine," Mark C. Marino takes us from possible worlds to virtual ones. Working at the intersection of Joyce criticism and the digital humanities, he meditates on the idea of an interface while speculating about the ways in which Ulysses might be remediated as a digital object. Following up on the wide-ranging discussions which accompanied Michael Groden's now stalled Hypermedia Ulysses, he focuses, in particular, on the problems of constraint and control. As he notes, "If Ulysses solicits hypertext, the response to the solicitation threatens to be a nightmarish gathering, an onslaught of commentary, a vortex of links, a perversion, a black hole. What is worse, such a project might stabilize, cite, and annotate the text to death." These problems are themselves not unique; indeed, they are the same ones faced by any interface designer working either with the static structure of the printed page or the floating windows of the personal computer. Such decisions, however, have a profound effect upon the reception and circulation of a text, and Marino concludes by imagining a collaborative model of interface and commentary—a WikiUlysses or Joyce 2.0—in which user-generated editorial content can be organized yet prevented from stabilizing the text. The model he suggests is rich with possibility, but its application to Ulysses remains sadly stymied by copyright law, though prototypes based on Dubliners and A Portrait remain a rich possibility.

The final pair of essays pursue very different ends, though intersect in quite surprising ways in their reflections on the economy and epistemology of love. In "Getting Past No in 'Scylla and Charybdis,'" John Gordon transforms a small, even inconsequential scene in Ulysses—Stephen's confession that he does not believe his own theory about Shakespeare—into the resonant center of the entire book. This simple "no," he argues, is a "wound of doubt," a generative "not yet" which ripples across and even beyond the text to entwine Bloom and Molly every bit as tightly as it does Joyce and Nora, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Ulysses, he contends in this elegant reading, is founded on a vortex of doubt and uncertainty created by an open question about love...