Ulysses's Cast of Characters

ELT 44 : 1 2001 seemed to have held no rancor toward her, at least as expressed in his letters to her. One cannot help thinking about the limitations of the various volumes where the letters have been selected rather than published in the entirety. Those limitations become apparent when we compare the complete record of the written relationship like the one under review here. The variations in the attitudes of James to his correspondent are clearly shown, as are the degrees of intimacy and the manner in which they either develop or deteriorate. The rhythm of the relationship is shown uninterruptedly . The letters to four women we have referred to before have been selected from a much larger group of letters so that certain aspects which we find revealed in the Clifford-James relationship seem to have been concealed. James related to his women friends most freely in those late-night conversations. They are the only signs of those relationships that are permanent and that are open to us all. Therefore, we find these records more truthful than if we had heard the conversations themselves. We know that when James spoke, he tended to talk on and on, and that he also stuttered occasionally. In these free late-night letters, those peculiarities and deterrents to a real, lively conversation with him have been avoided. The heart of his friendships seems to reside in the intimate little dramas in which he is Célimare to Mrs. Jones, where Jessie Allen is Goody Two Shoes, or he is a loving "Newy" to Mrs. Clifford. In contrast to his career as a playwright, which was a lamentable failure, he was a great success to his audience of one in these intimate conversations, such as he never was to the large audiences in the commercial theater. These were the theatricals where he succeeded and they remain entertaining to the present day reader. Let's have more of these correspondences and let them be as complete and brilliantly edited as these letters from James to Mrs. Clifford. Adeline R. Tintner ________________ New York Ulysseses Cast of Characters Paul Schwaber. The Cast of Characters: A Reading of "Ulysses". New Haven : Yale University Press, 1999. xix + 236 pp. $27.50 WHAT SETS Paul Schwaber's The Cast of Characters: A Reading of "Ulysses" apart from other psychoanalytically inclined studies of Joyce is that the author, rather than casting a coldly academic, mechani110 BOOK REVIEWS cally critical eye on his material, thoroughly enjoys, and enjoys describing , the experience of reading and grappling with Ulysses. "I am fascinated," Schwaber writes, by the engaging, sustained illusion of complex persons populating the verbal world of Ulysses. I have been since first reading the book and continue to be after three decades of teaching it, my interest enhanced meanwhile by training in clinical psychoanalysis. It is fair to say that I revel in Ulysses, in its frolicking language and unique mix of historical actuality, mythic resonance, literary echo, daunting originality, modernist self-awareness, and sheer psychological brilliance. This excerpt from Schwaber's introduction also makes abundantly clear another thing that separates this book from much recent Joycean critical fare: the author adopts a critical language utterly uncluttered by technical jargon, psychoanalytic or literary. This is all the more impressive when we recognize that Schwaber is both a professor of literature and a Freudian clinician, one who, in this study, employs and seeks to contribute to both of his areas of specialization. Schwaber's title is a pun. Not only does the title bear "first of all on the array of [Ulysses's] characters, major and minor," but it "bears as well on their tenacious presence, how the illusion of their reality persists throughout the book___" "Like the cast of a lengthening shadow," Schwaber observes, "character remains visible" in Ulysses, however indeterminate or indistinct it may seem to become at points. As a third implication of his title, a cast of character suggests what Joyce at twenty-one described as an "individuating rhythm" or "curve of emotion," an idiosyncratic idiom of being that lends definition. Rather than implying reification or rigidity, it acknowledges continuities that include contradictoriness and mystery, spontaneity and surprise— [PJsyches...