In a Yale University laboratory in April 2019, a team of scientists was able to restore functions to the brains of pigs that had been dead (without oxygen) for four hours, far longer than anyone had previously supposed any form of resuscitation possible. Though its results have yet to reproduced elsewhere, this experiment poses significant challenges to the accepted definition of “dead,” a definition troublingly mired in the negative. The OED offers “deprived of life,” “insensible,” and “no longer in use or existence,” while in medical practice everything depends on expected reactions; the understanding inherited from the Enlightenment is summed up by Xavier Bichat: life is “the sum of all functions by which death is resisted.” The Irish saying “dead, but he won't lie down” thus assumes new force today, and points us back to Joyce, in whose works the definition of death remains persistently uncertain. This essay ventures the argument that this particular, pervasive form of uncertainty in Joyce, while not infrequently vexing for readers, suggests a conception of fiction as a suspended animation, a state without dead certainties.

“Good idea a postmortem for doctors,” thinks Leopold Bloom, who is not above posing as a medical man: “Find out what they imagine they know” (6.86–87). There are so many things that readers of Joyce do not know— and perhaps even things that we only imagine we know— even after much rereading and the insights of decades of criticism, research, and discussion, but it can be fairly said that the very word “know” in Joyce's texts often presents a slippery problem for readers. An extraordinary phrase such as “Do you know what I’m going to tell you?” (4.115–16) is simply common speech in Joyce's Dublin, and the words “don't you know” do not necessarily constitute a question that can be answered. (For some, like Richard Best in the library chapter, it is a verbal tic.) The question which I’ve taken as my title, “Don't you know he's dead?” comes, don't you know, from “Cyclops,” a chapter stocked with highly questionable kinds of knowledge, misperceptions, and leading questions.