Eliot and Joyce

31:4 Book Reviews ELIOT AND JOYCE Stanley Sultan. Eliot, Joyce & Company. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. $29.95 Professor Sultan is, of course, the author of The Argument of Ulysses (1964), a chapter-by-chapter exegesis of what is arguably our century's greatest, and most influential, novel. At the time, his study struck readers—including those who may have disagreed with him on this critical point, or that interpretive reading—both as ambitious and useful. Indeed, that the Joyce industry has busily chumed out dozens upon dozens of specialized books and hundreds of articles on every manner of Joycean minutia is tribute, in part, to the groundwork for "close reading" that The Argument of Ulysses so carefully laid. Sultan's recent book not only widens the focus to include T. S. Eliot and such other Modemist "company" as Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Henry James, and William Butler Yeats, but it also "takes on" such slippery theoretical questions as source and analogue, influence and anxiety. The result is a thickly textured consideration of Modernism's history, one that juxtaposes an ongoing debate about critical theory with a sustained focus on three principal works: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Ulysses. Unfortunately, there was a clearer "argument" in Sultan's first book than there is in Eliot, Joyce & Company. One way to answer the nagging question—namely, "what's this book about"—is to say everything, but that is only to exacerbate the problem. The balder truth is that Sultan has a hard time letting his ideas loose. In this sense he reminds me of a recent New Yorker cartoon in which an aging commencement speaker surveys his audience and begins this way: "I know so much that I don't know how to begin." For better or worse, Sultan has so steeped himself in the secondary literature about Modernism that he feels obliged to march us through a forest of footnotes before unloading an opinion of his own. To paraphrase Prufrock, what we have, then are pages that follow "like a tedious argument/ of insidious intent," but that generally end in small potatoes rather than overwhelming questions. Indeed, much of the book reads like a bibliographical survey, the sort of thing one might ask graduate students to produce in a seminar on Modernism. Here is a representative sample in a section devoted to the question of Whitman's "influence": In Eliot's Early Years (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), Lyndall Gordon criticizes "the dogmatic 'Tradition and the Individual Talent,' with its theory of impersonality" for "obscuring the personal nature of Eliot's poetry" (p. 166). And her chapter "Beyond Philosophy" establishes how starkly personal is much of his early poetry. In his more recent book, Ronald Bush asserts the importance of "Eliot's psyche" in his poetry, quoting Randall 503 31:4 Book Reviews Janell's characterization of him as "the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions [and] obsessions," and as—more specifically to the point here—"From a psychoanalytical point of view ... the most interesting poet of [the] century" (p. x).... The recent books of Gordon, Jay, and Bush have expounded the daemon of a suffering and driven man in the poet eloquently. At this point, Sultan goes on, for several pages, to expound on what these books expounded, and so on, and so on. Those interested in ways to see "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prafrock" steady and whole would be well advised to look elsewhere—say, to the dazzling reading in Hugh Kenner's Pound Era. Indeed, Sultan is, for the most part, still warming up to his talk after 300 pages. On the other hand, if Eliot, Joyce & Company is often a tortured read, it is also a useful investment for those who want to have the best that has been thought and said about Modernism at their fingertips. Moreover, I would be less than honest if I did not add a measure of thanks to my litany of reservations . Sultan not only brings us up to date—clearly, and reasonably quickly— where the state of Ulysses criticism is concerned, but he has also dotted his book...