Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives ed. by Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen (review)

516 LETI'ERS IN CANADA 1997 existence of fundamental principles oflaw. Bodin also saw that only a wilt the will of the sovereign~ could positivize those higher principles and constitute legality. On this foundation rests any claim to legitimacy. But, as Dyzenhaus observes, these fundamental principles are not metaphysical, but are immanent to 'our ethical practices' and constitute an ordre nature! discoverable by human reason. At the same time, the core of certamty contained in those principles needs to be concretized by an 'authoritarian power' as positive juridical precepts. This is required to deal with the penumbra of a 'deeply uncertain secularized world where certainty exists only in highly personal religious spheres.' Herein. lies Heller's Hobbesian reaffirmation of sovereignty and the state. But in recognizing that 'when the sovereign acts, it is we who are acting/ Heller also reaffums popular sovereignty and a democratic state. Only the general will of socially homogeneous people renders a legal and political system legitimate. Heller has found in Dyzenhaus an admirable defender. This book rescues him from sixty years of total oblivion in the English-speaking world. And the rescue is conducted in grand style by exposing the philosophical core of his work, while extensively drawing on politics and history. Dyze.nhaus promises to complement this rescue with the publica~ tion of a much-awaited translation of extracts from Heller's works. (RENATO CRIST!) Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen, editors. Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives University Press of Kentucky. x, 2o6. us$34·95 As a writer hyperconscious of his belatedness, Malcolm Lowry both incorporated other literary figures into his own texts and anxiously disclaimed their influence. If he had arrived 'late' in a general sense, he was more particularly a second generation modernist~ aware always of the figure of James Joyce looming behind and above and thus all the more eager to repudiate that shadow, to define himself as an (the?) anti-Joycean. Thus in the famous letter of defence of Under the Volcano sent to Jonathan Cape, Lowry describes his methods in that book as 'opposite' to those Joyce pursued, presumably in Ulysses- although a half-dozen years later he will claim to another correspondent thathe is only then reading Ulysses through 'essentially' for the first time. He 'dislike[d]' Joyce, he bluntly told one friend, but to another he quickly enlisted him as ally: when David Markson apparently suggested that Joyce might 'smile' at cabalistic and other occult suggestions in the Volcano, Lowry riposted with a lengthy screed on the older writer's 'superstitiousness.' Aware as Lowry was of Joyce, the reverse could hardly be true (a situation corllically re-echoed in 1997 at the University of Toronto, where conferences concerned with Joyce and Lowry were held simultaneously at HUMANITIES 517 opposite ends of the campus: for their single joint session, the smaller group of Lowry devotees trooped over to swell the indifferent mass of ensconced Joyceans), but such personal consciousness or Lmconsciousness only begins to touch on relations between these two important writers. Inverting the usual balance of power, the volume under review makes Lowry the somewhat privileged figure (Lowryans are almost always, like their author, aware of Joyce: Joyceans, focused on the Master, may or may not be aware of anyone else). An unusually strong collection by various hands~ ]ayce/Lowry overall assumes Ulysses and Under the Volcano as their authors' masterworks: only Suzanne Kim's essay deals at any length with the Kilnstlerromans, Joyce's Portrait and Lowry's Ultramarine, and only Patrick McCarthy's so much as mentions the fictional writings of either that postdate the canonical Great Novel. The volume gets off to a stim.ulating start by positioning Sherrill Grace's strong argument for distinguishing the essentially comic Joyce from the tragic Lowry against Joseph Voelker's less traditional contention for a deeply comic sense underlying both, each critic making pivotal use .of 'Circe' to buttress opposing positions. One could hardly expect the serendipity of such a conjunction to be repeated, and although the collection does dose with two pieces concerningliterature and film, they are not reaJJy a matched pair: Paul Tiessen's interesting case for the broader implications of Lowry's passionate involvement...