Joyce's Judiac Other

BOOK REVIEWS of this artist merges fluidly into a two-page discussion by the lovers of Birkin's concept of "the unknown." The scene is notable for the lyrical force of Birkin's careful distinctions around such elusive subjects as sensational knowledge, conscious knowledge, and self-consciousness. Lawrence did not include this precise exchange in Women in Love, and the editors neither mention this omission (or comparable ones) nor deal with the more general issue of passages that often are unwisely deleted by Lawrence during his years of revision on this novel. The scene also charmingly includes a gentle kiss of a surprised Ursula, who responds in witty fashion to his abrupt transition from the heavily didactic to the inscrutably romantic. Such a multi-textural scene might have been used profitably by the editors to demonstrate their assertion that the earlier text makes Birkin sound more patient, affirmative, and gentle than in the later novel, but such pertinent illustration is not forthcoming. Similarly, in the section that will become the "Mino" chapter, Birkin's explanation of the essentiality of marriage is considerably more articulate , persuasive, and witty than the comparable passage in Women in Love. Perhaps the editors might have contemplated here the possible changes in Lawrence's views of marriage after an additional four years of his complex union with Frieda. Among the many other scenes in The First 'Women in Love" that strike me as arguably more powerful than their revisions, I must briefly mention a superb explanation by Birkin of how and why "desire is holy," and a tender moment of understanding he conveys about his own "dark and gloomy soul" confronted with "the perfect youth" of Ursula's soul—two Lawrencean gems that later are deleted from, respectively, the "Excurse" and "Flitting" chapters. Finally, my confident prediction about this important publication is that there will be a deluge of essays by scholars in the years ahead on the substance of the revisions to The First 'Women in Love", and much of this research will include evaluations of the effectiveness of Lawrence's revisions when he emerges from the war as a different artist from the one who years earlier ambitiously started a novel called "The Sisters." Peter Balbert ------------------------------ Trinity University Joyce's Judiac Other Marilyn Reizbaum. James Joyce's Judaic Other. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. χ + 194 pp. Cloth $49.50 Paper $16.95 239 ELT 43 : 2 2000 MARILYN REIZBAUM'S James Joyce's Judaic Other joins a significant and growing body of scholarship on its subject. Ira B. Nadel's Joyce and the Jews (1989), Bryan Cheyette's Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society (1994), and Neil R. Davison's James Joyce, "Ulysses ," and the Construction of Jewish Identity (1996) all devote themselves in part or whole to the question of Joyce's fictional representation, critique, and use of Jewish identity, yet Reizbaum does not, in the main, repeat the arguments or evidence of her predecessors. Instead, she offers largely fresh insights on this important topic of Joycean and literary modernist interest. Reizbaum centers her discussion on Ulysses because this novel, in her view, is both "the most significant of Joyce's works for a consideration of Jewish figures and Judaic sources [and] crystallizes related ideas that appear in Joyce's work from Dubliners on." Reizbaum provides a series of excuses for this focus—Bloom possesses an all too "minor status in Joyce criticism"; Bloom's Jewishness or lack thereof has been misconstrued by the critics; Ulysses's "readers have not been very good students ," and so forth—but her use of this novel stands on its own merits and does not require straw men to give it force. Reizbaum's first chapter explores the historical context for Joyce's "other" and what she calls his "thematics of Jewishness." It also explores anti-Semitic texts and ideas that would have been familiar to Joyce. Reizbaum argues that Joyce's interest in Jews had numerous sources. On the one hand, "Joyce was clearly struck by the personal relationships he had with Jews"—indeed such Jewish figures as Ã-talo Svevo, Teodoro Mayer, Ottocaro Weiss, and Edmund Brauchbar were "prototypes" for Bloom—and his...