“His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”: Towards an Indirect Social Efficacy of Joyce’s Attitude to Mistakes – through (Beuys’) Art Responding to Joyce

The heretofore unknown level of reality that we perceive in Joyce’s works partly owes to the fact that the writer makes active and positive use of his characters’ failings. He programmatically explores the gap between what one person says and what another understands and employs this insight to construct his writings, as well as an ethics of and in his work. This chapter first asks why it is important that Joyce embraces mistakes as portals of discovery, what kinds of mistakes may be meant, and then turns to artists who have taken up such an understanding in their works. I turn to Eco (open work), Senn (dislocution) and Maharaj (perfidious fidelity) to theorise the matter in relation to Joyce. This artistic and theoretical material together enables me to use Wollaeger’s argument on the social function of reading Joyce, as well as Social Science scholarship (Boltanski) on who in society is permitted to interpret freely and make mistakes. I will lastly turn to scholarship on unintended negative consequences, in order to make a case for an indirect social efficacy of art (history) and Joyce’s work in our mistake-adverse world.