Parody in Joyce

BOOK REVIEWS continued friendship between Stephen and Bloom is indeterminate, and remains veiled by the "Ithaca" narrator's verbal pedantries, and vitiated by Stephen's prickly defensiveness. Further, we do not know whether Molly's comment about Bloom's request for breakfast in bed is merely her misinterpretation of Bloom's drowsy "egg" speech. To me, these seem pretty spindly legs on which to build a thesis. More significantly for the overall aims of Mackey's study, the theoretical and practical components of his argument—chaos theory and a new appraisal of Joyce's heroic character—don't really mesh. The first section , although it helpfully outlines the assumptions and paradigms of current scientific practice, doesn't engage with the text; the second half, where Mackey makes his most significant contributions to Joyce criticism with agile close readings and a refreshingly humanistic approach, doesn't require chaos theory. While both parts of the book are individually strong, they don't add up to a coherent whole. Mark Osteen ______________ Loyola College in Maryland Parody in Joyce Christy L. Burns. Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce. Albany : SUNY Press, 2000. viii + 224 pp. Paper $19.95 "JOYCE was a little of everything" is the quotation which begins and permeates this exceptional study of meaning in his works. Based on the variety of interpretations offered by Joyce critics, Burns's book tries to account for the range of conflicting opinions regarding meaning his closest readers have postulated over the years. She does so in terms that recognize the purposeful ambiance Joyce's techniques built into his works, from Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake: I am here proposing to re-open the question of Joyce's textual politics, focusing particularly on an ambivalent gesture in his works that moves between conscious artistic intentions and unconscious desires, between social commentary and pleasurable diversion, between ambitious universale and humorous disruption of their more arrogant claims.... Joyce's work repeatedly retraces a double gesture, one that both mimics the subject's turn toward stereotypes and inscribes narrative ripples and ironies that draw attention to the absurdity of such aggressive interpretations." In short, Joyce presents self-identifying stereotypes of character, behavior and speech in a parodie form that questions their efficacy of both idea and depiction—a sort of ultimate and virtually undefinable selfreflection : "Stereotypes ... inform ... each new aesthetic innovation, and 529 ELT 44 : 4 2001 each innovation, in turn, serves to further disrupt and call into question the very process of stereotypic definition and conventional restraints of words." In contradistinction to earlier parodists whose ideas inescapably blend the subject with the parodie form used to form a new textual reality —part parody, part realistic representation—and a pretty fair certainty of where the author stands on whatever truth evolves, Joyce leaves speculation on final truths so indefinite that attempts to supply meaning generally fall short of their goal, no matter how fervently readers espouse any single definitive opinion. In evading such a conclusion both aesthetically and politically, Joyce has created a new art. Burns's explication of examples of stereotyping include the aggressive stereotypical behavior of challenged characters who become aggressive under pressure, like the challenged Stephen Dedalus in the concluding diary entries of Portrait. The theory relied upon in Burns's description of such instances of aggressive behavior resulting in paranoid and alternatively narcissistic "gestures" is predominantly Lacanian . Its manifestation lies in Joyce's extensive use of parody, as, for instance, Ulysses draws on previous moments of aggression and replays them with humorous distortions, which define "a politics that is embedded in our understandings of gender, sexuality, and social identity." From the less obvious parody of himself in Stephen Hero, Joyce's newer ironic parody in Portrait increasingly poses a question about where Joyce's self-parody stops and where a new and subtler version takes over in "gesture," associated with the lyric/epic/dramatic aspects of Stephen's aesthetic scheme. Bloom likewise is "a complex composite of possible selves" and in Circe they assume bodily sexual identities as well as those arising from his conscience, the whole larded over with comic parody to avoid ultimate judgments of intention. The pervasive complexities of multiple...