James Joyce

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 JAMES JOYCE Bonnie Kime Scott. James Joyce. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1987. Cloth $29.95 Paper $12.50 It's all very well for Molly Bloom to cry out "Tell us in plain words," as she does at a famous juncture in Ulysses, trying to get a clear explanation of "metempsychosis" out of her husband. Some matters just require a specialized vocabulary. Feminist scholarship on Joyce, the subject of Bonnie Kime Scott's volume in the Feminist Readings series, requires the specialized vocabulary of post-structuralist theoretics -the gynocriticism of one feminist school, the "mainstreaming" or écriture feminine of others, the female libidinal body, marginalization, encoding, jouissance, Marxist polylogic, the dynamics of phallic power. Scott moves carefully and unpretentiously in and among these terms, supplying reasonable arguments about what they mean and why they are necessary, and it is only once or twice that a comic gap opens up between a Joycean detail and the ponderous academÃ-cese into which it is translated, only once or twice that I longed for Molly's debunking (not "deconstructing") wit. The "unkempt fierce and beautiful girls" who fascinate the youthful narrator of the short story "Araby," for example: what would Molly make of Scott's solemn claim that they "violate the cultural norm of grooming?" Readers unused to talk of cultural norms will in fact be unlikely to work through this James Joyce, which is for initiates, not beginners. Scott's book comprehensively surveys the feminist criticism of Joyce over the last decade or fifteen years, and in doing so it of course surveys a wide variety of approaches, psychoanalytical (Freudian and revisionary), archetypal, political, linguistic. (It would be an excellent resource for, say, a graduate student beginning work on a dissertation and wanting to locate his or her ideas somewhere in the pattern of contemporary responses to Joyce.) Its chapters are arranged, sensibly, not by Joycean text but by feminist issue; within each chapter Scott skips from one work to the next, emphasizing what seems most relevant . Thus in the chapter on canonization (a "male-centered literature and history") she concentrates on Stephen's reading and Jesuit education in A Portrait, his teaching in "Nestor," his theorizing on Shakespeare in "Scylla and Charybdis," "Oxen of the Sun" with its uhguided tour to literary history, and the "mamafesta" of Finnegans Wafce-all places where Joyce himself seems to value or disparage various kinds of writing. Later chapters consider the links between gender and discourse (Simon Dedalus's verbal performances compared with Gerty MacDowell's daydreaming and Bertha's forthrightness in Exiles), the 120 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 myths of femaleness on which Joyce drew or failed to draw, and finally the connections between Joyce's linguistic innovativeness and a specifically female way of writing-a valuing of similitude over logic, words recombined over words hierarchically ordered. This sequence of chapters matches, as Scott notes, Joyce's shift of interest from specific people and places to the "nowhere" of universal myth and pure linguistic play. Throughout the book the fictional characters one would expect appear for brief or extended discussion: the tiny (but nurturing) Maria from "Clay," Anna Livia Plurabelle, Bloom's penpal Martha Clifford, Emma from Stephen Hero, Aunt Dante, Gretta Conroy, Stephen's mother (alive or beastly dead). Scott casts her net wide and sometimes brings up mere trivialities: does it really mean anything that one of the girl's names Stephen contemplates in "Nestor," Lily, is also the name of the caretaker's daughter in "The Dead"? Molly Bloom herself is only briefly discussed (she figured largely in Scott's earlier Joyce and Feminism ). I regretted Scott's neglect of the two Siren barmaids and even more of the two "Dublin vestals" featured in Stephen's Parable of the Plums, Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe-creatures of the male imagination, perhaps, but none the less interesting for that. Scott is no radical, as she notes at the start. Though willing to criticize a few wrongheaded or extravagant claims advanced by fellow feminists, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, she is in general evenhanded, tolerant, more interested in identifying interpretative possibilities...