Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

11. Reopening “A Painful Case”

❦ 238 11 Reopening “A Painful Case” PAUL K. SAINT-AMOUR AND K AREN R. LAWRENCE We think of our essay as an intergenerational pas de deux. Its analytical moves and steps lead back over several decades, places, institutions, scenes of instruction , and discrete moments in both Joyce scholarship and literary studies more generally. As an undergraduate in Mark Wollaeger’s “Ulysses” seminar, Paul Saint-Amour read Karen Lawrence’s 1990 essay “Joyce and Feminism,” just published in “The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce,” with the result that his hitherto Bloomian reading of Joyce was critically checked by Karen’s poststructuralist feminist approach. A dozen years later, a “Confessions of Xenos” panel Karen chaired at the 2002 International Joyce Symposium in Trieste engaged Derrida’s recent turn toward Levinasian ethics as a way of exploring questions of hospitality and foreignness raised by Joyce’s work. By then we had become friends and begun to talk together about Joyce and hospitality, not least about how an ethics of hospitality in Joyce’s work might have helped foster the nonhierarchical sense of welcome that characterizes the Joyce community, making friendships among scholars of different generations—friendships like our own—remarkably common. The following year both of us gave papers on hospitality at the University of Tulsa’s “Post-Industrial Joyce” conference, whose title pronounced the death of the so-called Joyce industry while holding that Joyce scholarship was, nevertheless, alive and well. Paul’s talk explored Joyce’s interest in uninvited guests and the communities they both threatened and consolidated , linking that dynamic to the relationship between Joyce’s grandson and literary beneficiary, Stephen James Joyce, and the scholarly community that was galvanized by his antagonism. Karen’s keynote address, subsequently published Reopening “A Painful Case” ❦ 239 in the “James Joyce Quarterly,” considered hospitality and literary form in several of Joyce’s works, including “The Dead,” and helped spark, in turn, Paul’s tandem reading of that story and Dickens’s novella “A Christmas Carol” in the “Counterfactuals” special forum of the journal “Representations.”1 We drafted “Reopening ‘A Painful Case’” much as we have written elsewhere of Joyce and hospitality: in a serial, antiphonal manner, with one writer pushing the argument dialectically ahead by responding to what the other had just written. If the finished essay contains only vestiges of this way of writing, it is because we met several times in person to agree on the general argumentative direction of the piece and to revise it with an ear toward vocal consistency. Already well acquainted with the alternating sounds of our exchange, we were curious to write in some less familiar compound voice. Our meetings about the essay took place over taco salads in an Irvine mall, so that the wintry hard precincts of Joyce’s story are now softened in memory, for us, by the light and contours of Southern California, a place we have both since left. We are grateful for the chance this volume has given us to let years’ worth of conversations—with Joyce’s work, with other readers, and with each other—leave this collaborative trace. How stands the case with the eleventh story in Dubliners? Is it a case for a detective, a judge, a physician, a psychoanalyst, or a social worker? What exactly is the case the title names as painful? And is that case open or closed? On the face of things, “A Painful Case” seems to be as decisively sealed as the inquest into Emily Sinico’s death, with its diagnosis of “shock and sudden failure of the heart’s action” and its verdict, “No blame attached to anyone ” (D, 140). James Duffy’s journey from isolation to entanglement back to isolation ends with a paragraph of decelerating repetitions—eight sentences beginning with “He,” each sentence a hammer blow on a coffin nail—the last of which is the most unlyrically terminal of Dubliners’ last lines: “He felt that he was alone” (D, 143). But already the cases have multiplied: Are we talking about the case of Duffy’s entanglement or that of his isolation? 1. Published work referred to in this headnote: Lawrence 1990, 2003–4; and SaintAmour 2007. On copyright and the Estate of James Joyce, see Saint-Amour et al. 2007. 240 ❦ PAU L K . S A I N T -A MOU R A N D K A R E N R . L AW R E NC...