Joyce & Wyndham Lewis

ELT 39:3 1996 commitment and affection for the subject under its consideration. Hussey's encyclopedia on Virginia Woolf clearly supplements the growing body of Woolf scholarship and significantly contributes to increasing interest in the work of this most influential twentieth-century writer, critic, and feminist. Hopefully, Hussey's work will hasten the appearance of comparable works on other authors. Mark Hussey's Virginia Woolf A to Z provides an exemplary standard to which other works of its kind should be judged. The text is both informative and a pleasure to read. Mark A. Graves ___________ Bowling Green State University Joyce & Wyndham Lewis Scott W. Klein. The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 260 pp. $49.95 WHERE TO BEGIN with Scott W Klein's The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design? It is—Jeepers , is it ever—expensive: fifty dollars for 260 pages. (And no pictures! And one of the subjects a painter!) As the title tells us it is a comparison -and-contrast book, therefore on call to show us new and surprising affinities about a literary relationship whose importance has long been recognized. It is a first book by a young man. I can't be certain of that, never having to my knowledge set eyes on Dr. Klein, but the MLA Bibliography does show a publishing record confined to the last few years, preceded by the 1991 dissertation which judging from its title and description must have been the origin of the book in question. In all probability, then, a young man, therefore freshly out of graduate school, therefore very likely heavily involved at the ground level in the current post-poststructuralist strife of tongues being raised by the proliferation of contending theories. The results are much what one might predict from such a profile. Based on this book, the word for Dr. Klein is "promising." His arrival on the scene is good news for the future of the Joyce industry. He is sharp and energetic and engagingly enthusiastic. He has read everything. He is full of arresting insights. But he does tend to go too far. In his effort to expand beyond the many Lewis-Joyce links already identified and accepted, he often overreaches, well past the point of plausibility. In his effort to consider every possible theoretical take on any given issue, he is wont to lose his argumentative rudder. One cannot sometimes resist 386 BOOK REVIEWS the feeling that the reason we know he has read everything is that he is telling us so. His writing, although as free from jargon as, given its subject, one could reasonably hope, does like to show off: "Communism and fascism, however imbricated with Vico's theories of recurrence, retain the urgency of their contemporaneity even as Joyce withholds engagement, in a Sartrean sense, with either." We don't need Sartre there to help us understand how Joyce could be curious about various doctrines without committing to them, and the only reason for "imbricated " is that it is one of those words that everyone is using. Still, one has encountered far worse than that. The real strain is not in Klein's style, which is often perfectly fine and only starts going off the rails, for some reason, in the last two chapters. The real strain is in the assignment it sets for itself, an assignment which is just too big, for this or for a book twice its size. That assignment is to show that Joyce and Lewis were even more important to one another than we all already thought, and to do it by tracing, both within the context of their time and in the perspective of recent critical theories, their evolving ideas on (and practice of) representationalism, along with various issues arguably related to representationalism. Now: take a minute, and try to name a major literary theorist or theoretical school of the last fifty years which by this definition does not qualify for inclusion. There's the problem. A related and compounding problem is that the book's two main dimensions—compare-and-contrast influence study...