Ulysses as Stephen's Novel

ELT 39:2 1996 relationship in Finnegans Wake—that I wasn't convinced the claim extended beyond this one text, which critics place as often in postmodernism as in modernism. Overall, Emer Nolan has written an important text for scholars and graduate students working in modernism, postcolonialism, and Joyce studies. Perhaps the most helpful way to think of her book is as a reservoir of significant observations concerning these three areas, observations which other scholars will need to explore further in order to know how much, and what, to make of Nolan's insights, many of which, if embodied with fully developed examples and definitions of abstract concepts, could enrich these three areas of study. Susan Shaw Sailer ______________ West Virginia University Ulysses as Stephen's Novel Robert Spoo. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xi + 195 pp. $39.95 ROBERT SPOO'S BOOK on James Joyce and history begins with the old saw that Joyce, like his protagonist Stephen Dedalus, rejects history as "that nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Spoo describes Joyce's whole career as "a crusade against the historical Devourer." Although one might take issue with such sweeping pronouncements , the book as a work "devoted to Stephen and his struggle to awake from that nightmare" offers a new and interesting reappraisal of Dedalus's role in Ulysses. Spoo's study "rehabilitates Stephen as the novel's hero," offering an assessment of the character's engagement with the past shaped by his intellectual fervor. Those intellectual sources range from Nietzsche's essays about historical obsession, the chains that imprison human beings, to the Romantics ' notions about historical continuity, the threads that link past, present, and future. Spoo cleverly uses close readings of the text to expose metaphors commensurate with these various attitudes toward the past. "Mortuary metaphors" predominate in his discussion of history as mortmain. He explores Joyce's attitudes toward Rome in 1906 as indicative of Stephen's sense of the past. Joyce's dismissal of Rome and the ruins as equivalent to "a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother's corpse" leads to a discussion of Stephen's extensive links between the past and the grave, from the riddle whose answer is the fox burying his grandmother to Stephen's fear of his mother's corpse 258 BOOK REVIEWS spurning her graveclothes. For Spoo the Romantics offer another, related paradigm, engaging with the past as a process of conjuring ghosts and of weaving and reweaving stories of past and present. Spoo sees in "Stephen's Romantic desire to revive the voices of the dead and to transform the fabrics and fabrications of life" a dual impulse toward history. Stephen maintains a sense of the past as strange and unapproachable, yet attempts to appropriate history through story: "language is a magical incantation by means of which the past and its phantoms may be the artist's present and presence." Spoo draws on a diversity of scholarship—theories of Barthes and Derrida, literary scholarship on the marriage plot, scholarship in rhetoric—to attempt to show a number of ways in which Ulysses counters conventional historical ways of thinking. Spoo sees in the novel an opposition between Stephen Dedalus as champion of art and Garret Deasy as champion of history, representing an allegorical struggle between art and history for "cultural supremacy." Other oppositions include the "Proteus" episode as an "alternative set of rhythms" to "Nestor" and Molly Bloom's soliloquy as a corrective to history which has all day "been in the hands of men; they have taught it, created definitions for it, exploited it, enlisted it in patriotic causes, made a nightmare of it." Spoo shows us that if Stephen attempts to liberate history from a rigid causality in a bid for freedom and potentiality, Molly actually does replace the "when" and "because" dimension of language with "and": "clauses are no longer aggressively subordinated; pronouns float free of their antecedents." Although Joyce himself declared while writing Ulysses the character Stephen Dedalus no longer interested him, Robert Spoo has given us in James Joyce and the Language of History a complex portrait of...