Joyce & the Saints Above

ELT 45 : 2 2002 had made some attempt to explain why she chose these particular subjects (and not others)? None of them is empty of social or ideological reference . And yet as each is discussed here, it's as if this reference can be finessed, and in fact—in abstracted deconstructive fashion—is. But in the interest of what? Garber characterizes herself only once in these pages. Her "upbringing " has made her "a lay observer" to the whole business of the seven deadly sins. Who, or where, is she, then, in relation to her chosen subjects ? Not a "lay" observer, surely; indeed, if the book is, as she writes in the preface, a "love letter" to her partner, "the profession of literary study," then Garber is a spouse. No talk of gender, please. Suppose, though, we wanted to talk of personality. The cover ofAcademic Instincts reproduces Raphael's famous The School of Athens with, of all people, Marjorie Garber herself smack in the middle. Garber glosses the painting as representing a transcendent "interdisciplinary moment." If so, then what precisely is Garber herself doing here? Sitting erect and smiling, between her two dogs, she is strikingly in contrast to the sprawling, dejected figure to her immediate left, the cynic, Diogenes. How to read her proximity? Of course as a lover Garber has defeated Diogenes. She is happily married to humanistic study. However, as an academic her relation to Diogenes is not so unproblematic , especially insofar as her very presence partakes of the superstar politics, about which everybody is talking today, from the MLA to the Times. Garber has nothing to say about these—or any—politics. Too bad. She has produced, in her terms, a wonderful book. But she could have produced a much better one by exploring and exposing these terms, in particular to what degree the professional marriage she celebrates is in fact founded upon a prior union between the institutional and the personal. As it is, the "libidinal" energies ratified by this union represent in Academic Instincts a love that dare not speak its name. Terry Caesar ______________Mukogawa Women's University Joyce & the Saints Above R. J. Schork. Joyce and Hagiography: "Saints Above!" Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xvi + 239 pp. $49.95 R. J. SCHORK'S NEW BOOK continues a venerable tradition in Joyce studies, one that takes seriously Joyce's encyclopedic strategies of 242 BOOK REVIEWS textual inclusion. For the most part this tradition has produced (through the copula of the ampersand: Joyce & ...) eminently useful critical texts that have enriched our knowledge of Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake. Schork's study of hagiography in Joyce will be "useful" to Joyceans, to be sure, but in the rather limited sense of a reference book—an elegantly written one, filled with many fascinating details about saints and the processes by which they are recognized by the Catholic Church, but a reference book nonetheless. To put the matter plainly, there is no argument here of the sort we are used to seeing, one that might run like this: "Joyce deploys the figures of Christian saints in order to invest his tale of quotidian heroism with the ironic counterpoint of a tradition whose power is vestigial, ghostly, parodie . . ." and so on. Perhaps this lack of an argument is a good thing in a book that aspires to a purely descriptive source scholarship. But perhaps only a committed (not to say obsessed) Joycean could do without argument in this way, and only a Joycean could reap the full benefits of Schork's book. Let me clarify this by describing the method and style of Joyce and Hagiography. The book consists of eleven chapters, the first of which is an introduction that demarcates the field of study, defines concepts, and suggests that its method is unburdened by any curiosity about intentionality that would require an argument: "I have no ulterior motive— and certainly no theological design—in examining Joycean hagiography . I am also firmly convinced that Joyce's inclusion of saintly matters is not intended, even in his earliest fiction, to be an emblem of nostalgically rejected fervor or an overture to bitter anathemata." Well, given only these choices, I might be...