Joyce & History

BOOK REVIEWS which will be a recurrent theme in the book. Mechanism (materialism, abstraction, collectivization) progressively encroaches upon and supplants vitalism (spirituality, blood-consciousness, true individualism), whether one looks at the gaudy factory-made crucifixes found south of the Brenner Pass, the sterile lives of Italian factory workers exiled in Switzerland, or the "process of disintegration . . . [and] the perfect mechanizing of human life" embodied in a modern city such as Milan. Another benefit of the frame is that, in effect, it conflates two journeys in a way that subverts linear time and reinforces a sense of synchronicity . This is particularly useful in establishing the fundamentally double perspective that critics have found to be the key to Twilights effect: the juxtaposition of a prelapsarian viewpoint dating from 1912-1913 and an embattled, disillusioned viewpoint implicitly issuing from the "nightmare " of 1915-1916. It is this synchronicity or doubleness which gives a special pertinence and poignance to the series of contrasts between the old yarn-spinner and the "neutral" monks, the doomed lemon gardens and the new-fangled automatic door opener, the spirited peasant actors and the bitter self-repudiation and denial highlighted in the Hamlet they gamely perform, the vülage woodcutter who dances superbly on his wooden leg and the series of emigrants and wanderers spiritually cut off (like Lawrence himself) from their autochthonous roots. Again, the motif of twilight, underscored by the book's title, beautifully represents this accommodation of opposites, whether temporal or spiritual, the underlying elegiac mood that qualifies and even subverts the volume's lyricism . By making avaüable materials documenting Lawrence's earliest impressions of "abroad" along with their far more complex revisions in Twilight in Italy, the Cambridge edition undoubtedly enriches our understanding of Lawrence's first travel book, with the special brand of "thought-adventure" he made distinctively his own. Ronald G. Walker Western Illinois University Joyce & History James FairhaU. James Joyce and the Question of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 290 pp. $54.95 IN THE PREFACE to James Joyce and the Question of History James FairhaU expresses his belief "not only in the value of a historical approach to Joyce, but in the value of his writings as a catalyst for 95 ELT 39:1 1996 investigating and interrogating history." FairhaU then poses a series of questions, the answers to which, particularly as they inform the relation between Joyce's texts and various historical narratives, comprise the subject of the present study: What is history, anyway? Something that happened in the past, or an account of that thing? How true are historical narratives? How do they differ from fiction? How firm, controllable, and even referential is that common medium of history and fiction, language? Joyce's works—grounded in a dense historical reality, yet at the same time free-floating in a universe of endlessly signifying, interconnected words—provoke such questions. Along the way, FairhaU's study, which considers Joyce's entire canon in lucid, fluid prose, traces "the evolution of Joyce's own narrative interventions in history, which began with the word's attempt to change the world [Dubliners] and ended with the collapsing of the world into the word [Finnegans Wake]." In his preface FairhaU also offers what might be taken as his book's thesis: that Joyce, in his work, "attempted to subvert history, which he saw as a chronicle of violence and oppression, and as a fixed past that had ousted other possible pasts and thus delimited the present." If, in his early fiction, Joyce "attempted to subvert those ideologies which underlie the violence and the oppression," in his later work he attacked and destabalized "the very basis of modem history—the idea that historical narratives can somehow teU 'the truth' about a complex event, can recount what 'actuaUy* happened." Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, FairhaU continues, also destabalized "the linguistic basis of ideology, undermining binary notions such as 'race/ 'people/ and 'nation' which depend on defining something or someone else as the Other." FairhaU's point here is on target but is not, in and of itself, an original claim. What makes this book valuable are FairhaU's rich contextualizations of the question of history...