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BOOK REVIEWS of the literature about the literature about the literature. Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake has commendable qualities. The seasoned Joycean critic who turns to it will find much of value. The English professor who assigns it to his or her unfledged charges will be doing a disservice. Burrell hasn't hit the home run he thinks he has; still, in swinging for the fences, he has managed to chop the ball far enough into the outfield to move a runner or two along. John Gordon ________________ Connecticut College Joyce & Jewish Identity Neil R. Davison. James Joyce, "Ulysses," and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and "the Jew" in Modernist Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xi + 305 pp. $49.95 IN 1940 Joyce applied for a visa to enter Switzerland, hoping to spend the Second World War in that neutral country as he had the first. His request was initially denied by the Zurich authorities on the grounds that he was a Jew, and only after several reapplications and additional fees was he granted permission to enter the country. The irony of this situation certainly did not escape him, though his amusement no doubt was tempered by his concern for his Jewish friends and fellow artists, on whose behalf Joyce wrote innumerable letters during the last years of his life. What might have misled the Zurich authorities? Joyce's circle in Zurich was, in fact, heavily Jewish, including his secretary, Paul Leon. But more importantly, he had chosen Leopold Bloom as the protagonist of his major novel, thus permanently confounding the status of Jew and Irishman (not to mention Homeric Greek) in the context of modern literature. The apparent oddity of Joyce's decision to do this has inspired several excellent studies of the problem. First was Louis Hyman's The Jews of Ireland (1972), a fine book tracing the history of the Jewish settlement in Ireland up through 1910. The next significant work on the subject was probably a group of essays by Leslie Fiedler around the same period, helping to establish the generally accepted parallel between the alienated, introverted modernist artist and the Jewish "outsider." The major sustained study of Joyce's relationship to Judaism, though, was Ira Nadel's Joyce and the Jews (1989), a book that Davison's work attempts, mostly successfully, to complement. Abook that itself complements Davison's is Bryan Cheyette's Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 105 ELT 41:1 1998 (1993), also from Cambridge, but too recent for Davison to make much use of it. Davison's argument is that whatever work has been done has generally failed to recognize "the centrality of 'Jewishness' in both Joyce's consciousness" and in Ulysses, because "despite the movement in humanities from a liberal to a radical center, 'the Jew' as a key point of cultural analysis has negligently remained a 'specialized' endeavor." In this I think there is little question that Davison is correct. I have always been amazed that in discussions of what is arguably the most acute and prophetic literary work of social analysis of the century, critics have generally ignored the significance of Joyce's choosing a protagonist identified as a Jew. Davison's own analysis is certainly not radical, but it is sufficiently inflected by cultural studies and the New Historicism that he casts his net more widely than earlier studies. He is interested in the "discourse of Jewishness" that formed a significant part of turn-of-the-century intellectual life in Europe, and excels at explaining how "racialist" thought, popular myth, and literary conventions combined to produce a rich and complex set of images and expectations regarding Jewishness in the period. Bloom, of course, is an unusual type of Western, urbanized, secular, quasi-assimilated, "non-Jewish Jew" who is still somehow inwardly "Jewish"—like Joyce's contemporaries Stefan Zweig, Otto Weininger, Thedor Herzl, and Joyce's close friend Ã-talo Svevo. And, Davison points out, like them he experiences a group of "double-binds": the struggle to straddle both a Jewish and nationalist identity; to believe oneself a Jew while often rejecting organized Judaism; to be legitimized as...

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