Raising the Wind

Abstract

Raising the Wind Sean Latham I'm writing this from the corner of a room that has now become my office, looking out at the mix of storms and flowers that define every Oklahoma spring. From here, I can see neighbors in similar nooks in their homes and on their porches—all of us trying to figure out just what it means to work from home. We sometimes shout greetings or wave, trying to make up for the fact that we otherwise edge nervously away from one another on the sidewalk. The global COVID-19 crisis means that scenes like this have been playing out around the world for the last few months—as if we all stumbled into a play. We yearn for connection, yet are fearful of anyone who might draw close. The beauty of spring is balanced by the stark realization that illness and death move among us. In some ways, this feels like the antithesis of Joyce's fictional worlds, which pulse with the human energy of pubs, offices, and street corners. He reveled in the dirt and diversity of the cities he called home, but we have perhaps forgotten that those crowds too bred anxiety. As we know from the work of scholars and critics like Michael Groden, Kathleen Ferris, Kevin Birmingham, Vike Plock, and others, Joyce wrote in a world of pervasive illness, where medicine operated somewhere between art and science while the germ theory of disease still seemed new. We're reminded of that fact in subtle ways throughout his work: in the agonizing labor Mrs. Purefoy endures, in the shockingly early death of Eveline's brother, and in the funeral procession that winds its way through the streets of Dublin in order to see poor Dignam's body to its final resting place. I have been thinking a great deal lately of the "Hades" episode of Ulysses, which, for me, is the emotional center of the book. It's possible, after all, that the novel itself began here, in the graveyard. In 1906, Joyce wrote to his brother about a possible new story for Dubliners to be called "Ulysses," in which a character named Alfred Hunter would attend a funeral. The first manuscript draft we have dates from June 1917, which means Joyce worked on it in the ghastly aftermath of Verdun, a pointless battle that took one million lives. It appeared the next fall in The Little Review, its themes of death and mourning made even more urgent in a war-weary world now suffering the first wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Joyce's earliest readers, in other words, encountered this episode in a situation similar to our own. Life had been disrupted for so long that everyday habits—writing a letter, talking a walk, visiting the [End Page 7] pub—seemed suddenly strange. That's one reason Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and others could focus their work on the most innocuous events. Like our own anxious trips to the store or around the block, Joyce's everyday too had become a source of wonder, experimentation, and nostalgia. And death, arguably the great pivot around which Victorian fiction once turned, had suddenly become the most mundane thing in the world. When I can stomach the news, I struggle to make sense of terrifying numbers that fall far short of what Joyce experienced. As I write, the novel coronavirus has left 50,000 dead in the United States, 185,000 dead around the world, and infections are now measured by the millions. Numbers like these are simply too big for the human imagination to grasp. Maps with pulsing red circles around New York, Paris, Milan, and Wuhan don't really help since such digital precision seems stale, distant, abstract. I think then about Joyce with his crayons and notebooks in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, struggling with some of the same questions we now confront. How to make sense of death and illness on such a vast scale? How to justify the work of the artist and critic in such times? And how to go on writing about the past when the present so urgently demands our attention? The answers Joyce...