Style as Ideology

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 reading of the Bloom-Zoe encounter in "Circe" goes curiously astray. She quotes the stage direction in which Zoe is said to bite Bloom's ear gently "with little goldstopped teeth," then suggests that Bella Cohen's brothel becomes, symbolically, "Circe's cave." But it is Calypso rather than Circe who dwells in a cave. Nor can Joyce's lines about Zoe's mouth ("The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones") easily hint at a "womb that threatens death," as Scott claims. Here she is working too hard to link Zoe and the specter of Stephen's mother later to come in the episode. The real limitation of James Joyce does not lie in these occasional forced readings, or in the two or three plain errors of the book (Bloom commands authority as a speaker in "Cyclops," the source of the passage quoted on page 59, not in "Circe"; Conan Doyle's Stark-Munro Letters is not at all "in the detective line"). The limitation lies in Scott's unwillingness to address more forthrightly the really important issue which some feminists have raised: what is to be done with Joyce? Here is a novelist who created very few female characters one could now think of as "role models." In "Oxen of the Sun" he completely leaves women novelists out of literary history. In a variety of ways he remains stubbornly authoritarian, patriarchal. So regarded, he is as outmoded as the Nelson's Pillar which figures prominently in Ulysses and which was blown up a few years ago. (It was blown up as an unwanted memorial to English imperialism, but might-given its shape and its statue of the "onehandled adulterer" at the top-have been the target of feminist bombs as well.) Should Joyce be blown up? Should scholars, as Catherine Stimpson has asked, pay more attention to Gertrude Stein than to him? Joyce's canonical status is at stake, and Scott hints that a study of his views on canonization may help determine his future-but her chapter on the subject fails to predict (or call for) one future or another. Finally, she seems unwilling to answer the hard questions about the novelist's status. Given her obvious knowledge of Joyce, her capacity for absorbing so much of even a male author and a misogynist Dublin, I suspect I know what her answer would be-that male and female readers alike should continue to study Joyce's words and world-but there are occasions when one wants more than a suspicion of a critic's commitment. Jefferson Hunter Smith College_____________________ STYLE AS IDEOLOGY Patrick McGee. Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. $25.00 122 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 Any modernist worth his or her salt knows how Joyce held forth on the subject of aesthetic autonomy: "Don't talk to me about politics," Joyce would insist, even as World War I was changing the face, and the fate, of Europe forever, "Tm only interested in style." Generations of modernist critics have kept his faith, as careful to separate literary style from political intrusion as strict constructionists are to hold church and state on short leashes. No doubt they will be saddened to learn that they have been dead wrong, and that Joyce was as ideological as a hatter all along: Joyce's apparent refusal of politics, like his refusal of psychoanalysis , is the symptom of what his writing could not refuse and therefore teaches us-that no style is innocent, whether it be the objectivism of Flaubert, the impressionism of James, the romantic naturalism of Conrad, or the expressionism of Lewis. Every style, as the performative dimension of Ulysses proves again and again, occupies political spaces and contains political content, for the politics that Joyce seemingly disowns comes to signify through repression; it signifies as the disclosure of those stylistic illusions grounded in the fiction of the autonomous writing subject. That is Joyce's symptom, and that is what signifies for those readers who come to reinvest and reinform his work with their collective...