Covert Relations: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James (review)

Book Reviews 217 short space to restore the humanity of James himself. Readers who recall Naomi Lebowitz's earlier book on James, The Imagination of Loving: Henry James's Legacy to the Novel (Wayne State U P, 1965), will recognize her common-sense criticism and wide reference to other novelists as a feature of this book. The only real drawback to die strategy in The Impossible Romance is that, in any given chapter or particular discussion, one of the four novelists begins to seem included somewhat as a matter of duty, or merely as an illustrative reference, rather than as an essential part of the argument For me, the author most often lost in the shuffle is Zola; for anodier reader of comparative literature, it might be James. (Dickens and Manzoni are die more considered writers: though each of the four gets roughly equal space in the book, these two seem most consistently essential to its dialectical framework of spirituality and blunt history.) Having said that, however, I would emphasize that mis study represents refreshingly clear-headed criticism about Henry James and has much to offer to specialists as well as to readers familiar mainly with The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. Newton and Lebowitz place James in die forefront of world literature, for his time and ours; though that might seem like nothing new in itself, it is an assessment that is too often taken for granted rather than stated witii this kind of eloquent conviction. Larry A. Gray University of Virginia Daniel Mark Fogel. Covert Relations: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Charlottesville: The U P of Virginia, 1990. 210 pp. $ 26.50. An anxious young phUosopher in Woolf 's To the Lighthouse is said to be writing a dissertation on "the influence of something upon somebody," or "of somebody upon something." It is Woolf 's way of putting this dreary intellectual climber beyond the pale of the reader's sympatiiy. For what could be duller, safer, dian die hothouse realm of influence study—an endogamous academic mating ritual in which nobody "marries out." Yet this once unglamorous field has recently become the site of a highly charged ideological debate, in which such major literary dieorists as Harold Bloom (in a series of books beginning with The Anxiety of Influence) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (in a multi-volume study of a distincdy female literary line, beginning with their The Madwoman in the Attic) turn the question of precursors, filiation, and die use of tradition into the essential problem in a writer's self-definition. Professor Fogel's impressive study of James's influence on Joyce and Woolf is itself deeply indebted to Bloom, Gilbert, and Gubar—as he would be the first to acknowledge. But he wants to use the careers of the two twentieth-century writers as test cases to confirm or challenge the very general claims made by diese critics—for example, mat the "strong" writer is inevitably locked in anxious combat with a single powerful precursor whose seductive influence he must escape if he is to achieve imaginative independence; or that women writers can escape from this oedipal rivalry only by "diinking back dirough their mothers," by affiliating themselves with a female rather than a male literary tradition. Both Joyce and Woolf, he argues, were initially under tiie powerful spell of Henry James; both needed to work dieir way free of him. How adequate are the paradigms provided by Bloom and by Gilbert and Gubar to explain die relation of Joyce and Woolf to their distinguished predecessor in die art of fiction? Not entirely, it would appear. Although Joyce's relation to James "corresponds to major elements of Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' theory," his attitude is less a form of anxiety than "a highly aggressive playfulness," in which James appears (in 218 The Henry James Review Ulysses) as the minor writer Philip Beaufoy, whose stories serve Leopold Bloom as an inexpensive form of todet paper. Fogel also argues persuasively diat James's late style is remorselessly parodied in the inflated, prolix, exhausted prose of Joyce's "Eumaeus" chapter. Nor do either of diese critical paradigms...