Music in Joyce

BOOK REVIEWS dying mother." This interpretation is utterly dependent on an erroneous citation of the passage. For the record, Molly did not tend her dying mother. Similar problems occur with Boone's comments about Molly's fantasy of "fellatio with Stephen's 'lovely young cock there so simple... so clean and white'" (209). I know Molly's pronouns are often confusing, but the "lovely young cock" belongs to the statue that Bloom bought her; then Molly thinks of Stephen, erroneously believing that "hed be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of washing it from 1 years end to the other." I am also dubious about several of Brownstein's readings, including her belief that Bloom's "Catch them once with their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen"—in connection with his thoughts that it might not be a good idea to pay an unannounced caU on Milly, who just turned fifteen—is somehow an "allusion to Bloom's voyeurism, or perhaps his innocent error of walking in on a micturating Milly" (243). At least Brownstein refrains from commenting on Bloom's initial thoughts on the subject of a possible visit to Milly: "Perhaps I will without writing. Come as a surprise." I shudder to think what perversion (or, as Brownstein likes to call it, "père-version ") she might find there. A caveat, then, to readers of Joyce: The Return of the Repressed: double-check the accuracy and context of citations in this book. Despite my skepticism about specific interpretations, however, this collection serves a useful function by bringing together a related yet diverse set of theoretical perspectives on repression and return in Joyce's rich and engaging works. Patrick A. McCarthy _______________ University of Miami Music in Joyce Ruth H. Bauerle, ed. Picking Up Airs: Hearing the Music in Joyce's Text. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 220 pp. 4 Appendices and 2 Indexes. $34.95 SINCE THE TIME of Joyce, a handful of scholars have been arguing that his works not only contained allusions to songs, composers and their lives, but also approximated an occasional musical form and contained some examples of augmentation, diminuition, syncopation, modulation, or counterpoint. Previously, Ruth Bauerle offered us the James Joyce Songbook, a collection of words and music that Joyce is known to have used in his works. Her collection supported the efforts of 429 ELT 37:3 1994 M. J. C. Hodgart and Mabel Worthington in Song in the Works of James Joyce, those of Zack Bowen in Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce, all "guides" to Joyce's writings, and everyone's reference to Joyce's debt to Richard Wagner. While this current volume also contains lists of allusions, five of its six essays relate them to music hall subjects, its techniques, and its archetypal significance. In so doing, Bauerle and her co-authors come closer to persuading us that rhetoric can be music, as well as musical. Bauerle's "Introduction: Some Notes We Haven't Heard in Joyce's Music" reminds us that Joyce mentaUy heard the music to his more than 5,000 allusions as he mentioned them in his works. As happens to all who are musical, an air would jump from his memory (usually in a verbal or musical variation) to the manuscript, lodge itself there, and broadcast itself to musical readers as they read. To the degree that communication takes place, the music of his rhetoric receives a boost from the music alluded to. If the latter is also a song, Joyce can use its lyrics to offer ironic comment on the action his other rhetoric is dramatizing. As additional proof, Bauerle offers the words and music for four recently discovered songs that Joyce alludes to with some frequency: T. W. Murphy's "A Thing He Had Never Done Before," Harry King's "Young Man Taken In and Done for," T. W. Connor's "At My Time of Life," and Hamilton and Jackson's "Invisibility." While these examples relate both to characters and situations in Joyce's works, all were popular pieces, musical hall songs, or pantomime pieces in seasonal music hall productions . As Cheryl Herr...