Joyce's Musical Imagination

BOOK REVIEWS anti-Semitic story about a Gentile character like Dodd? Overall, in States of Desire, Vicki Mahaffey looks at issues of authority, responsibility , and identity and emerges with new and often startling perspectives on her subject. The writing is lucid and compelling, the scholarship thorough . This is a book not to be missed. Patrick A. McCarthy __________________ University of Miami Joyce's Musical Imagination Sebastian D. G. Knowles, ed. Bronze by Gold: Music in Joyce. New York: Garland, 1999. 343 pp. $75.00 IT IS A TRUTH (nearly) universally acknowledged that James Joyce is one of literature's most musical writers—not only because he was a first-rate tenor himself, but also because he had the good fortune to have been born in Dublin, a city that is to music what Paris is to food. Small wonder, then, that several generations of Joyceans should have been attracted to the way that musical allusions—and music itself— serves to thicken Joyce's plots and fatten his modernist style. What distinguishes Sebastian D. G. Knowles's collection, however, is its interdisciplinary character and how its fifteen essays easily "fit" into the formula announced by Daniel Albright, the series editor: To study one artistic medium in isolation is to study inadequacy. The twentieth century, so rich in literature, in music, and in the visual arts, has also been rich in criticism of these arts; but its possible that some of the uglinesses and distortions in modern criticism have arisen from the consideration of each artistic medium as an autonomous field of development, fenced off from other media. It is hard for us to believe, but when, long ago, Horace said Ut Pictura Poeses—the poem should be like a picture—he meant it. Given the general consensus that "Sirens" is Joyce's best, most sustained experiment in the musicalization of fiction, it is hardly surprising that the four articles devoted to Ulysses concentrate on this chapter. Susan Mooney represents—fairly, I think—what, for better or worse, is going on at the cutting edge of Joycean scholarship. Her interest is in calling our attention to an "aurteur"-based theory of narration: The narrating or narrated subject can be thought of as an "aurteur" [a term, Mooney tells us is derived from film criticism and literary theory], the creative (often unconscious) organizer or mediator of acoustic fragments (instances of memories of voices, music, noise, sounds). Within the aurteur's arrangement of his episode is an aurally inclined protagonist, Bloom. His own silent musings inside and around the Ormond Hotel reflect the aurteur's im361 ELT 43 : 3 2000 pulse to arrange, locate, classify, repeat, examine. While sounds, songs, and chatter go on all around him, the usually garrulous voice of Bloom is marked by inferiority and silence. In the days when critic-biographer Richard Ellmann ruled the Joycean roost, this uncharacteristic aspect of Bloom's behavior might have generated an article entitled, "Why Bloom Doesn't Speak to the Sirens?" Not so here, because Mooney has quite other fish to fry—and what she has in mind is yet another definition of "fugue," one that differs substantially with the one used by Jean-Michel Rabaté and others who see "Sirens" as a fugue-like musical structure. For Mooney, we need not depend so heavily on musicology (others might argue that we need not impose the fugue in the first place), because "fugue" is also a psychiatric term. Thus, ... a fugue is a period during which a person suffers from a loss of memory, often begins a new life, and, upon recovery, remembers nothing of the amnesiac phase. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, there is a fugue-like experience that we all go through in early childhood development—a series of painful renunciations of womb, breast, and so on—until we abandon these props to prop ourselves up, in turn, on the cash register of the symbolic. While this rebirth of the subject into language pays off in invaluable ways, the memory of the pre-mirror, pre-Oedipal stage remains only in traces of the unconsciousness . Joyce himself was, let us say, mighty suspicious of Freud's talking cure and I...