The Joycean I.O.U.

BOOK REVIEWS vite some other woman for him who is Mrs Fleming," Mrs Fleming being the Blooms' conspicuously decrepit cleaning woman. Molly is joking. Well, basta. It's a surreal world, this summarized Ulysses, a world of picnics-for-swingers, tree-and-groom weddings, and projectile masturbation —rather, in fact like that of my first, untutored reading, in which, for instance, not realizing that an "ashplant" was a walking-stick, I finished "Telemachus" with a distinct picture of Stephen's being followed around by a singing sapling. I was wrong about that, and so, on the same level, for much if not indeed most of the time, is James Joyce's Ulysses: A Reference Guide. Anyway, two books after the same thing—a cheap, short one, on the whole quite good, and a longer, much more expensive one, on the whole not. All of life's choices should only be so easy. IOHN GORDON ________________ Connecticut College The Joycean I.O.U. Tony Thwaites. Joycean Temporalities:Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xviii + 225 pp. $55.00 TONY THWAITES'S critical study of Joyce alerts us to the celebration of promise and its attendant unpredictability in Joyce's oeuvre. Thwaites convincingly argues that "Joyce's work is structured as promise ." But this is not to say that Joyce in his work either explicitly offers or definitively fulfills a promise. Thwaites rather demonstrates that the promise and the signature, or countersignature—as that which looks backward to a supposed original and forward to a supposed but ultimately uncertain future—and their related matters of speculation, future outcomes, and the unknowable nature of such outcomes lie at the foundations of meaning in Joyce's works. Completeness, knowability, and fulfillment do not apply; but the promise of all three, the promise made by the claim implicit in the signature—that is what matters. And though some of Thwaites's claims sound familiar at first, his innovative engagement with received criticisms rewards the patient reader with some strikingly new insights. This approach—the renovation of received criticisms in relation to time, promise, and signature, with occasional forays into the nature of identity—becomes apparent in Thwaites's first chapter. He acknowledges Dubliners and particularly "The Sisters" as beginnings of sorts, but then almost immediately complicates the very notion of beginning, by emphasizing the drafting, revision, and publication 341 ELT 46 : 3 2003 history of the book and its opening story. He rehearses the customary engagement with the important words—paralysis, gnomon, and simony —but makes it new by revealing the words' relations to time and promise. Furthermore, he appeals to Joyce's well-known habit of offering overtures to his works, but discusses the habit with regard to the stories' setting the temporal stage for what is to come in Joyce's oeuvre: "Dubliners initiates the Joycean project of a writing structured on deferral, rather than a writing about loss." More specifically, Thwaites sees Dubliners as embodying both a theme and a promise of incompletion; this promise resides in Dubliners's concern with speculation on the word not so much as signifier but as object in itself, as that which escapes signifying and signification, just as the stories themselves seek to escape thematic analysis. Similarly, the Joycean artist is the artist of infinite incompletion, in which "everything is yet to be done, or made, or meant, awaiting its own arrival." This description may sound familiar also, but again, it emerges somewhat refreshed by Thwaites's placing it so firmly in the context of Joycean temporality. This chapter is titled "Paralysis," and Thwaites closes the chapter by suggesting that it is not so much any particular meaning of paralysis that we must attend to in "The Sisters" (and the other stories) as the infinite polysemousness and incompleteness of this word, and by association, any word; "paralysis suggests the blocked, gnomonic process by which one is to read," encompassing a range of possible significations from blockage to passage, from neglect to emphasis, and reminding us always of that which is at once both incomplete and infinitely expanding, both arrested and slipping by, continually spilling over. Similarly, the words and ways of Dubliners...