Who's Afraid of James Joyce? (review)

Karen Lawrence's 1982 book The Odyssey of Style in "Ulysses," a revision of her Columbia PhD dissertation, quickly established itself as one of the few essential secondary texts on Joyce's novel, among the hundreds burdening the library shelves. Its premise was simple: Ulysses offers the reader a temporally-governed experience of changing styles—it is, as Lawrence writes in her introduction, "a book that changes its mind"—and a proper understanding of the role of these stylistic transformations is essential to a full understanding of the work. Although not self-consciously part of the post-structuralist wave that was then beginning to transform Joyce studies—there is only one reference to Derrida and a few more to Barthes—Lawrence's argument that Ulysses is, among other things, a novel about the procedures and possibilities of the novel genre belongs to that transformative moment.

Who's Afraid of James Joyce? has many affinities with the earlier book—in fact, the first four chapters of Part I, headed "Retracing The Odyssey of Style," are reprints of four of its chapters. As far as I can see, these chapters have not been updated at all, notwithstanding the publisher's blurb, to the extent of leaving cross-references to other parts of the original book unchanged. The remaining chapters, with one exception I will come to later, are also reprints. I suspect that neither the author nor the series editor (this is the 52nd book to appear in the unflagging Florida James Joyce Series) would claim that the volume is anything other than a collection of discrete pieces, some more substantial than others. Though this results in a degree of discontinuity, it is not a book that can be said to change its mind: Lawrence consistently shows the value of attending to the nuances of Joyce's linguistic and generic manipulation from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. How the President of Sarah Lawrence could find time to complete this project—and in the same year publish a book on Christine Brooke-Rose—remains something to wonder at.

The three most substantial of the nine essays not from the earlier book are on "Joyce and Feminism," on the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses, and on the Dubliners story "A Painful Case." The first is taken from the initial edition (1990) of The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, and has been superseded in the second edition; as editor of that volume, I should report that when preparing the new edition I invited Karen Lawrence to update her essay, but she felt unable to do so in the time she had at her disposal. Nevertheless, the essay remains a readable and illuminating account of the reflections of male anxiety in Joyce's writing. (It is complemented by a short account of the increasing contribution made by women to the International James Joyce Foundation, a process in which Lawrence played a key role.) The essay on "A Painful Case" was co-authored with Paul K. Saint-Amour, and is the only piece in the book not to have been published elsewhere. As a joint effort focusing on a single Dubliners story, it is no doubt part of the current project initiated and overseen by Vicki Mahaffey and forthcoming from Syracuse University Press, in which pairs of authors have responded to all of the stories. It is a seamless and insightful essay which does not betray its dual origin, and makes a good case for treating "A Painful Case" as a case study of hospitality in the Levinasian sense, beginning with an examination of the resonances of the term "case."

The "Eumaeus" essay is one of the strongest in the book. Called here simply "Eumaeus Redux," it originally had a subtitle that included the phrase "Politics and Style": it reads as an answer to those who might be tempted to charge Lawrence with a neglect of the political dimension of Joyce's writing. The careful analysis of language is still there, but in the service...