Woolf, Joyce & Co-Consciousness

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 Stephen worthy of our interest. Susan Swartzlander ________________ Grand Valley State University Woolf, Joyce & Co-Consciousness Galya Diment. The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: GoncheWV , Woolf and Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. xiv+199 pp. $29.95 THE FIRST VOLUME in a new series of Joyce studies sponsored by the University Press of Florida bears a title that is uninviting in two respects. First, the coupling of Goncherov, a minor nineteenth-century Russian novelist, with two giants of twentieth-century modernism 259 ELT 39:2 1996 seems, at first glance, more eccentric than provocative. Second, strange classifications such as "novel of co-consciousness" seldom promise enjoyable reading. Thus, it is a pleasant surprise to discover that Diment's study succeeds, despite some minor shortcomings, on several levels. Clearly written, thoroughly researched, and highly innovative, the book convincingly places three novels—Ivan Goncherov's A Common Story (1846), Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse (1927), and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)—within a "distinct genre of autobiographical fiction," one which has served, in Diment's view, as a subtle, even covert, vehicle for self-exploration at moments in literary history when the Bildungsroman has been considered inappropriate or inadequate. This "distinct genre," according to Diment, is the "novel of co-consciousness ," a text that juxtaposes, within a comparatively limited span of fictional time, two or more autobiographical personae, each signifying a different region or phase of its creator's personality. In all three of the works that Diment examines, these personae are divided, first, in terms of age. Thus, in her analyses of To the Lighthouse and Ulysses, the sections of the book most likely to interest readers of ELT, she argues that Cam Ramsay and Lily Briscoe stand, respectively, for Woolf as a precocious child and as a mature artist, just as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom represent, among other things, the division between Joyce the rebellious young intellectual and Joyce the older, more "complete " husband and father. Diment also examines the split between "sense and sensibility" in To The Lighthouse, arguing that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay personify the two contrasting sides of Woolf s own personality: her creative and imaginative nature (represented by Mrs. Ramsay) versus her exacting logic and rigorous analytical skills (embodied in Mr. Ramsay). By the same token, Joyce's Bloom and Dedalus form, according to Diment, a body-and-soul dichotomy...