Joyce & Lowry

book reviews us with narrative but satisfies us with its display of narrativity, which is to say with its foregrounding of the reader's performance of a text as sequential and coded. The Joyce symposiums have consistently welcomed new voices as well as familiar ones, although I can only suppose that the published proceedings are less inclusive of younger voices and of female voices— three out of twenty-seven contributors—than the actual program of 120 sessions and the more than 100 submissions for this volume would have demonstrated. The growing adventurousness combined with a respect for still-relevant if now more traditional approaches makes of a collection such as this one not just a useful anthology on Joyce but a lively experience of today's eclectic critical environment. Lisa Pagano Carstens _______________ Virginia Wesleyan College Joyce & Lowry Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen, eds. Joyce I Lowry: Critical Perspectives . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. χ + 206 pp. $34.95 BEWARE OF SLASHES or hyphens in titles! That is the by now familiar refrain in academia about books, and particularly essay collections , sutured together through these ominous punctuation marks: they tend to signify incoherence, a haphazard amalgamation of disparate arguments , and a general tendency to yoke as if by violence together that which should not be within one and the same cover. Not so with Joyce I Lowry. Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen have assembled an impressive and wide-ranging array of original essays that does hold together well. Its content holds what the title promises: it is the first collection to explicitly investigate the multiple relays between James Joyce, the canonical arch-modernist in the English literary tradition , and Malcolm Lowry, the writer who, until fairly recently, was known almost exclusively to an elite circle of literary specialists and, if known to a larger public at all, then only as the aberrant writer of a rumored-to-be brilliant masterpiece containing traces of plagiarism from nobody less than Joyce himself. In that sense, the slash in the title signifies equal critical-literary status for Lowry, and hence complicates the various hierarchies of literary history that have plagued Lowry and parts of Lowry scholarship for almost a generation, sometimes identifying Lowry as a Joycean clone who helped himself amply to the stylistic resources of the master. 505 ELT 41 : 4 1998 Creating such a more level literary-theoretical playing field does, of course, not mean to deny the obvious: as a young fledgling writer in the 1930s, as McCarthy points out in his fine introduction (which not only situates the collection but also retraces the critical history between the two writers), Lowry could not ignore Joyce as one of the most visible fixtures in modern literature. Under the Volcano (1947) indeed bears all the high-water marks of literary modernism, such as dense verbal richness , experimental narrative structure and perspective, various mythological grids, and an acute self-consciousness about processes of artistic creation, among others, that put the text into proximity with Ulysses (1922) and suggest various levels of (in)direct influence. Stung by early reviews, which described Lowry's masterpiece as one of the many offshoots of the Joycean vine, Lowry vehemently and repeatedly denied questions of immediate influence, even though growing evidence from his letters and scattered biographical reminiscences suggests that Lowry had "greater familiarity with Joyce's work" than he would have liked to let on. Without denying Lowry's monumental achievement in Under the Volcano, in particular, it is certainly not unfair to observe (as it is consonant with the tenor of many of these essays) that Lowry's pattern of denial and disavowal bespeak a gigantic act of repression, an almost monolithic reaction formation to control an anxiety of influence in danger of destabilizing a self haunted by literary father figures, romantic notions of authorship, ingenuity, originality, and the charge of plagiarism . In light of Lowry's creative agon, in particular—a reverse Lowryean influence on Joyce being virtually out of the question in terms of simply chronology (notwithstanding their joint appearance in the Spring 1931 issue of Cambridge University Press's literary magazine Experiment )—one of the virtues of these essays is their focused...