W. Somerset Maugham

ELT 40:3 1997 of 'masculine' order" and Miss Ivors's impulse to travel and the metaphoric potential for transformation it embodies are displaced onto Gabriel: "As the one who points the 'travelling' Gabriel westward, Molly has a large impact on his potential for crossing the bar into metaphoricity in the last paragraphs." Though I think Ingersoll intends to qualify and complicate the polarization he puts into place, the argument reinscribes it at every turn. What is wanted is a mode of dialogical or dialectical reading in which travel and staying home constitute a process of development allowing for fluidity across the boundaries that restrict women to the home and that limit the duration and reach of men's travel. As I've said, Ingersoll gestures toward this kind of reading, but behind the Lacanian flourishes and the appeal to French philosophical feminism, there lies the desire of the formalist to align linguistic "events" along axes and to consign these alignments to a fixed tropological milieu. I don't mean to gainsay Ingersoll's approach; in many cases this is what we want: witness Hayden White's rewriting of historiographie method based on an essentially formalist tropology easily as "restricted" as Lodge's. But what one wants is a stronger sense of the structural design of Dubliners as a whole and a stronger sense of the ways in which the stories at various points deconstruct this design. A greater emphasis on the work of people like Irigaray and a more "eccentric" approach to Lacan would allow for the kind of reading that would take us and Joyce beyond formalism. I want to conclude by emphasizing that, despite the tendency toward a formalist reading that elides as much as it reveals, Ingersoll's study brings together in a single volume many important insights into Joyce's Dubliners. Perhaps most important of all, Ingersoll has demonstrated that Leonard's book is far from the last word on Lacan and, indeed, that Lacan and the psychoanalytical approach to Joyce is in demand. Gregory Castle ________________ Arizona State University W. Somerset Maugham Philip Holden. Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham's Exotic Fiction. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. vii + 168 pp. $52.95 IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham's Exotic Fiction, Philip Holden notes that Somerset Maugham's colonial fiction has not been the subject of much critical study. The reason for this, he posits, is the narrowness of various 364 BOOK REVIEWS literary approaches to the works. The New Critical perception is that Maugham's writing is superficial and lacks texture: "Its symbolism is clumsily obvious, plots contrived, language polished and euphonious but tending towards the cliché." Postructuralist analysts, Holden concludes, find the author's "confidence in intentionality and writerly craftsmanship misplaced." Feminists are repelled by the misogyny of Maugham's later fiction. Deconstructive analysts are troubled by the writer's "internally consistent sex/gender system." A more efficacious approach to Maugham's writing is to "read his sexuality more affirmatively and to attempt to explore the imbrication of homosexuality and manliness in his works." Thus, in this volume Holden attempts to analyze Maugham's exotic/oriental fiction—the short stories and novels set in Asia and Australasia, excluding A Writer's Notebook and The Gentleman in the Parlour—from The Moon and Sixpence (1919) to The Razor's Edge (1944) through a lens focusing on the author's fit within contemporaneous constructions of race, masculinity , and nation. Holden does this in a twenty-six-page-long introduction , seven chapters, and a conclusion. The volume also includes a bibliography and an index. Holden defines the terms that he uses in his analysis and explains his biases. He demonstrates that Maugham is located at the fracturepoints of narrative constructions of masculinity and sexuality by his homosexuality and that those points intersect with imagined communities of race and nation. This determination is based upon the assumption that the fact that Maugham does not write about homosexuality is tantamount to an admission of homosexuality as an "unmentionable invisible presence." Holden, therefore, uses homosexuality as a lever to investigate his subject's connection with early twentieth-century British constructions of masculinity...