Samuel Butler

30:1 Reviews without telling people so" (170). A careful, extended reading of "Byzantium," however, displays a more sympathetic approach with textual composition supporting critical interpretation (181, for example). Childhood memories and biography also figure in Empson's reading. Composition and criticism are the foundation of the Eliot chapter. Poetic sketches united into a single theme of an approaching doom express Empson's reading of The Wasteland, contrary to the theme of personal grievance associated with Eliot's decision to live in England and marriage to Vivienne Haig-Wood presented in the facsimile edition. For Empson the central image of the poem is that of the father. Religion and Eliot's anti-semitism supplement additional textual concerns. The Joyce section contains Empson's most recent essay, "The Ultimate Novel" (1982). The preceding 1970 essay on Joyce's intentions sustains the view that Joyce was constantly opposed to Christianity despite the argument of more recent critics. The 1982 essay challenges Hugh Kenner's view that Stephen Dedalus sees blindly throughout Ulysses. Defending Stephen and his potential to be an artist, Empson reclaims the importance of his character for the novel. Molly, Stephen's possible involvement with her, and the importance of Nora Joyce for the novel come under equal scrutiny. Empson concludes that Bloom's offer to Stephen to join him at #7 Eccles Street is an implicit invitation and approval of his having an affair with Molly (251). Furthermore, Empson suggests that Bloom may be using his "adopted son as an agent in creating a real son" (251). This admittedly controversial view, supported by Empson's interpretation of various letters by Joyce and by reviewing Joyce's confidences with Frank Budgen, provides a stimulating conclusion and demonstration of the Empsonian use of biography. It also vividly illustrates the untiring strength of Empson's critical imagination which, if it at times appears extreme, is never dull. Ira B. Nadel University of British _______________________________________Columbia_____________________ SAMUEL BUTLER Ralf Norrman. Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. $25.00 For three generations now it has been a critical commonplace that Samuel Butler's resentment against his father's bullying was at least one motive for his famous championing of underdog artists and ideas. Not allowed to have his own way as a boy, he fiercely insisted, against "father" Darwin or the "father" Homerians, on having his own way as a man. One might add that the mid-century emphasis on "impartiality" at Cambridge legitimatized Butler's desire to temper popular views with favorable consideration of unpopular and sometimes unheard of ones, so as to strike a fair balance between them. Ralf Norrman's book broadly accepts this psycho-cultural explanation of Butler's oppositional mind, 115 30:1 Reviews but unlike any previous student of the twenty-some-volume oeuvre, he argues that Butler's upbringing, and perhaps his neurological inheritance, left him with an obsession that accounts for nearly everything he did, whether as man or as author. Norrman calls this obsession "chiasticism," a neologism derived from chiasmus, the rhetorical term denoting a two-part structure wherein the main elements of the first half (ab) are symmetrically inverted in the second (ba). Probably because our bodies, like most organisms', are symmetrically disposed, we all respond pleasurably to such minored anangements, in language as much as in painting or architecture. But the chiasticist is one whose pleasure is manic, compulsive, pathological: he is driven to see phenomena dualistically, with this side set antithetically against that, now inverting, now reciprocating whatever image, thought, or emotion is given out. Thus Butler early in his life projected a society which lay on the other side of the looking-glass from Victorian England, a nowhere compoundingly turned backward as Erewhon, in which disease was a crime and crime a disease; or late in his life he returned to his school-boy notion that "the Odyssey was the Iliad's wife," by claiming that the former was in fact written by a woman. Chiasticism is not merely a linguistic decoration; it is a way of thinking. If his real or imagined opponent says black, the chiasticist, refusing to countenance any in-between...