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...