Margot Norris has defined a generation in Joyce studies in at least two senses of the term. She has been, for upward of four decades, an exemplary voice on Joyce's oeuvre, the ideal reader of our title. Invited to keynote more Joyce conferences than anyone in the history of the field, and by a wide margin, Margot Norris has combined preeminence as a theoretician, an exegete, and a historical critic of all things Joyce. She has anchored what has come to be known as the “Joyce industry” like no other figure since the heyday of Hugh Kenner. But she has also defined a generation of Joyce studies in the sense of delineating the outline or form of our collective project, of simultaneously marking and pushing the boundaries of the field in all directions. No approach to Joyce's work has been foreign to Norris’ imagination or intractable to her powerfully prehensile intellect. To trace her career, accordingly, from the mid-1970s to recent times, is to follow the march of our investment in and engagement with Joyce's literary creation and its critical heritage—not that she has followed the prevailing footsteps, but that she has led the parade.

Appearing two years before Colin McCabe's James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, widely credited with initiating the post-structuralist turn in Joyce studies, Margot Norris’ The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake had already executed that paradigm shift with respect to Joyce's most challenging, experimental opus, a foray beyond not only the avant-garde bourne of modernism, but beyond the pale of a postmodernism yet to be born. In her own words, Joyce's last work assaulted “not only the conventional literary modes but also many of the epistemological presuppositions of our culture.” Its means for accomplishing this radical demarché, on Norris’ account, is to enact a narrative anatomy of the infrastructure of language as such, in which our “empirical belief in the separation of inner and outer, subjective and objective, mental and physical—completely disintegrates.” By casting this Wakean “colliderscape,” an environment where human characters are periodically “melting into their landscape to become river and land, tree and stone,” Norris not only captures Joyce's disruption of the logic of identity at its most cosmic, but anticipates today's ecocritical indictment of the Enlightenment construction of the Anthropocene.

In 2003, Eve Sedgwick published an influential critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion, which in her view had grown all but synonymous with academic literary analysis itself, to its great detriment. The key to her argument, and its fatal flaw, is a conflation of the various types of skeptical interpretive attitudes and approaches—suspicion, demystification, anagnorisis, unveiling, questioning generally—with a paranoid mode of reading, clinically understood: hence the title “You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is about You.” For Sedgwick, the “strong” theories underwriting the dominant methods of contemporary literary scholarship and interrogation—Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive and queer—cherish and militate for a rigorous idêe fixe, which blinds their practitioners to the manifold semiotic and affective contingencies at play in their object texts. Averse to surprise, obsessed with “exposure,” devoted to forestalling “negative affect,” the hermeneutics of suspicion rewrites the documents studied in terms of its own defensive master code instead of taking them on their own terms. To this paranoiac end, it treats any given text as symptomatic of whatever motives or pathologies its own grounding theory is primed to diagnose. In this searching for the hidden, yet presupposed cause of which the text is but a mediated reflex, the hermeneutics of suspicion, on Sedgwick's quite suspicious appraisal, is itself symptomatic of a reductively tendentious disposition.

To the often “ugly prescriptions” of the dominant paranoid approach, Sedgwick counterposes what she calls “reparative reading”: one that attunes oneself to the contingencies of the text in question, allows oneself to experience the “joy-inducing” surprises they might offer, and (re)assembles the text on that basis. Perhaps because Sedgwick herself has long displayed a thoroughgoing mastery of the suspicious interpretive mode that she latterly decries, her birthing of the reparative alternative remains notably underdeveloped. It did, however, prove suggestive enough to spawn an entire post-critical movement of exegesis known as “surface reading.”

As articulated by its leading proponents, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, this (anti-) interpretive strategy contests not just the hermeneutics of suspicion and its associated methods (historicism, deconstruction, etc.), but also the “hermeneutics of depth,” the search for any truth not “evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts.”

This dedicated volume proposes to honor the rich, varied, trenchant, and tremendously influential scholarship of Professor Margot Norris in a series of essays amplifying her illumination of Joyce's literary oeuvre along with several prominent lines she introduced and investigated. Our title is intended to mark the common denominator running, like Ariadne's thread, throughout Professor Norris’ many-sided explorations of Joyce's labyrinth. For Professor Norris, the quiddity of Joyce's work, its elusive whatness, resides in its unfolding of multiple what elses, its opening up of alternative ways of regarding the novels themselves, the narrative or generic forms they destabilize, the world to which they refer, the heritages they tap, and above all the readers they address. These five categories, in fact—textual plurivalence, formal innovations, possible worlds, emergent histories, and variegated readerships—serve as anchoring points of the collection, each corresponding with one of the significant projects delineating Professor Norris’ esteemed career. Prominent Joycean, Modernist, and Irish studies scholars of different nations and generations supply the essays under each heading.

Until recently, the field of Irish Studies, while not actively excluding questions of disability from the orbit of its concerns, has tended to discourage their prioritisation and has done so for the very sort of political reasons that make such questions not only exigent but also fundamental. In this regard, Irish Studies has followed the lead of the Irish nationalist sensibility, with which the field has, its occasionally sharp criticism notwithstanding, remained in general sympathy.

The early life and career of James Joyce unfolded during a turbulent period in the history of sexuality in the United Kingdom. A cluster of sometimes competing cultural and scientific discourses emerged to catalogue, diagnose, and explain a broad spectrum of human sexual expression. At the same time, a series of explosive events (the Dublin Castle Affair, the Cleveland Street Scandal, the trials of Oscar Wilde, the rise of the New Woman) turned certain less approved elements of that spectrum into matters of mass spectacle and contention. A fundamental if contradictory mutation in the enlightened sexual attitudes of the time occurred in response to these developments. There was an increased awareness of the irrepressible varieties in sexual practices and preferences among individuals and across cultures. But there also arose a closely related desire to limit such variation, manifest in a concerted effort to establish traditional standards of sexual practice as interiorized norms of sexual desire and identity. With its long-standing cultural privilege newly enhanced by its importance to nation and empire building, reproductive heterosexuality became a truly 'compulsory' touchstone in this regard: other erotic modalities were not only treated as deviations from but distorted replicas of this libidinal regime. To take the most salient example, the widely accepted 'inversion' model of homosexuality - the notion of a woman's soul trapped in a man's body or vice versa - referred all same-sex desire not to the bodily sex of its bearer, but to the 'opposite' gender of the mind, thereby framing it as cross-sex desire at a remove.

THE “GIACOMO JOYCE” CONNECTION: RICHARD AND BEATRICE

Joyce composed his one play, Exiles, after finishing the main body of the Giacomo Joyce notebook, but well before appending that frame, 45, which, as we have seen, has the retroactive effect of leavening and to a certain extent salvaging the whole. The chronological placement of the drama between the layers or variants of the palimpsestic sketchbook accords with what I take to be one of its more intriguing designs: refocusing, extending, and externalizing the situation secretly recorded in Giacomo Joyce and doing so from a vantage point attained in large part through that interlude. Joyce harvests individual motifs and even lines of dialogue from Giacomo in a methodical enough fashion that a reader conversant with the prior document and its context in Joyce's life can discern in Exiles a public translation of the hitherto private experience.

The crucial figure in marking the transition out of Giacomo, Beatrice Justice, is also the first to appear in Exiles.

THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES

The genre of the law is itself subject to what Derrida has termed the law of genre, the principle that the “mark of belonging does not belong” to the corpus so demarcated. This mark of belonging constitutes a point of intrinsic otherness, a double inscription, which “gathers up the corpus and, in the same instant, in the same blink of an eye, keeps it from closing, from identifying itself with itself.” The concept of justice can be said to represent the mark of belonging or propriety of the law; to be just is the imperative whose perceived fulfillment translates tyrannical force into legitimate authority. Any system of rule entails, at least implicitly, a canon of justice, some principle of proportional treatment, power, and opportunity among diverse groups, rival claims, and competing perspectives in accordance with relatively fixed criteria for defining and assessing those groups, claims, and perspectives. But at the same time, justice can never simply belong to or be absorbed by that system, for reasons that are themselves strictly de jure. The law may indeed wish to enjoy a purely formal, hence integrated existence, as Stanley Fish has proposed, to be a self-monitoring, self-transforming, self-regulating system or autopoesis. But it cannot, either in principle or in fact, so long as it also aspires to the condition of justice. The law of equity is the always imperfect equity of the law.