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31:3 Book Reviews Even more telling, Schwarz generally limits his yea's and nay's about Gabler to parenthetical remarks. After all, the main business of Reading Ulysses is to move systematically through the novel's eighteen chapters. But that said, Reading Ulysses will hardly be confused with earlier efforts at exegesis such as Harry Blamire's The Bloomsday Book or Stanley Sultan's The Argument of Ulysses. Schwarz means to raise hard questions, rather than to dispense easy answers: Epiphany, then, is another version of metaphoricity, for it substitutes a perception of significance for the fragmentation and pedestrian quality of ordinary chronological time. In terms of our inquiry into how Ulysses means, what does the process of discovering epiphanies signify? Does epiphany represent a quest for objectivity and for the spiritual unity that transcends intellectual understanding? Given the novel's cyclical nature of history and its denial of a universe ordered by God, perhaps we should say that epiphany is a quest both to compensate for the lack of teleology in the universe, and to alleviate—by positing a way of seeing and knowing in literature—the spiritual condition dramatized in Dublin. Perhaps we should say.... For Schwarz, "perhaps" is as privileged a word as "signifier" or "ventriloquy." Indeed, even the imperative to deal with each chapter on its own terms is suspended—or interrupted—so that Schwarz can fold in a few pithy thoughts about the "Influence of Futurism," "Joyce's Metaphorical Bestiary," or "Dante as Metaphor." If, as Schwarz keeps insisting, reading is an adventure, it is one that often ends up on side-trips. Students in the back row groan when I tell them that one cannot "read" Ulysses, one can only reread it. Fortunately, those who persevere discover a central truth about all thoroughly Modemist fiction. Schwarz begins his study by proclaiming that "This study is for readers of Ulysses." Given the expectations , and the difficulties, of Schwarz's investigations, I would alter the object of his preposition to "professional rereaders." I suspect that Gabler— and who knows, perhaps even Joyce himself—would approve. Sanford Plnsker Franklin & Marshall College GEORGE GISSING David Grylls. The Paradox ofGissing. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. $29.95 The paradox of Gissing is that he stood on both sides of every concern he tackled, from social reform to feminism. "Tackled" is a word that suits Gissing 's intensely engaged even combative approach. George Moore said that "ideas are the bane of modem literature," but one of the many virtues of David 326 31:3 Book Reviews Grylls's book is that his account of all Gissing's two-sided ideas, and they are innumerable, never merely concerns content, but shows what Gissing made of them in his novels, in fact how they dictate Gissing's very conscious presentation of character and ordering of plot. If Flaubert, as he himself said, wanted to write a novel about nothing, one that was sustained by style alone, Gissing wanted to write novels about everything. He is a Victorian writer especially in his concern with class, money, education, work, and marriage, just those Victorian obsessions that Oscar Wilde mocked. He debated the big issues, and in his complementary and opposite attitudes, like the two sides of a coin, he presents us with the paradoxes, parallels, doublings, and ambiguities that David Grylls analyzes. At the same time that Grylls keeps the twenty-two novels in mind, he stands back from them; his study is always sympathetic, but sometimes severe, as this most honest and engaged, but at the same most pessimistic and least humorous of writers, deserves. The basic paradox is that in Gissing, pessimism, which might prompt one to give up, cohabits with will power, which makes one keep going (14). Near the beginning of his book Grylls makes an essential distinction between will, as described by Schopenhauer, whose influence on Gissing was pervasive, and will power: "In Schopenhauer's philosophy, pessimism is not always inconsistent with labour and endeavour. What Schopenhauer terms the will-to-live is not to be identified with what common sense calls will power" (16). To Gissing, work was crucial and cruel, but it was the only palliative to his...

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