Raising the Wind

In the last few years, Baruch Spinoza has certainly come into his own as a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophers and theorists as diverse as Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze, and Martha Nussbaum. The eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher’s work on ethics, religion, and the material world, in fact, absorbed the attention of some of the twentieth-century’s most formidable figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein invokes his logical ethics in the Tractatus, for example, while Albert Einstein and Jorge Luis Borges both counted him among their most important influences. Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher who helped establish the deep ecology movement, draws heavily on Spinoza’s arguments about the rights of animals and the ways in which they can be balanced against the demands of human utility. Even P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is caught reading Ethics in “Jeeves and the Greasy Bird,” though he later pronounces it “fundamentally unsound”—why, we will never know.

Elizabeth S. Anker begins this issue of the JJQ by drawing on the expanding theoretical interest in Spinoza’s work in an effort to reconsider the troubling conclusion of Bloom’s day in Ulysses. “Where Was Moses When the Candle Went Out?: Infinity, Prophecy, and Ethics in Spinoza’s Philosophy and ‘Ithaca’” explores two key elements that help us better understand the narrative structure and underlying ethics of the episode Joyce called “the ugly duckling” of Ulysses. First, she seizes on Spinoza’s concept of revelation as an encounter with a kind of infinitude that constitutes the very essence of the Other. Bloom’s sleepy reflections on the infinite, she contends, are imbued with this Spinozan awareness of alterity, forming a distinctive ethics—an “admixture of resignation and avowal”—which allows him “to assume a selflessly generous posture of magnanimity and forgiveness.” Second, she argues that Joyce draws heavily on Spinoza’s concept of the prophet in constructing Bloom, rendering him at the end of this book less an ascendant Christ-like figure than an Old Testament prophet racked by the incompleteness of his own revelation. The essay thus offers not only a provocative intertextual reading of Joyce and Spinoza, but opens up an ethically inspired way of reading the irresolute end of Ulysses itself.

From doubts about revelation, the issue turns next to the equally uncertain—and therefore endlessly productive—meeting between Joyce and psychoanalysis. In the elegantly written “Circuits of Meeting and Telling: Joyce, Psychoanalysis, and Narration,” Tony Thwaites draws on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to explore the generative doubt produced by free indirect discourse. This narrative form, he contends, functions as a symptom of language itself, “the enigma at the heart of sense, the knot that, although it is itself meaningless, holds meaning together.” This essay then redefines Joyce’s modernism, exploring the complex ways it seeks to elude the imposing strictures of the realist novel. Rather than focusing solely on narrative elements like free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, however, Thwaites instead identifies the ways Joyce channels the flow of language to produce a subject and a book never fully coincident with itself. This leads to a conclusion at once simple and elegant: “For there to be that incessant murmur of interiority, interiority must be ever-so-slightly dislocated from itself, never quite coincident with itself, able to address itself in a circuit across a gap that is at once unimaginably thin . . . and unimaginably vast.” This essay urges us to work in that gap from which Joyce’s texts continue to whisper their urgent challenge.

These theoretical considerations give way to historical ones in the next two essays, both of which attend to the complex interplay between life and fiction in Joyce’s work. In “‘Time Drops in Decay’: A Portrait of the Artist in History (ii), Chapter 2,” Andrew Gibson continues his own deeply researched attempt to locate Joyce’s first published novel in the precise historical conditions it so critically and directly engages. Focusing here on Chapter 2, the essay looks specifically to Dublin in the 1890s and ranges across the controversies and debates surrounding the Revival, the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, and the period’s subtly attenuated...