Joyce's Critics

Book reviews Following on from this, since both his title and his texts imply a significant link between the motif of scapegoating and the modernist movement , Cousineau might have taken the opportunity of a conclusion to expound this theme. His introduction goes some way to addressing this, drawing on the ubiquitous From Ritual to Romance, and mentioning the mythological paradigms from which Eliot and Joyce drew. But it would have lent some ballast to his argument had Cousineau been able to show how and why James, Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald, and Woolf were also drawn to mythological patterning. Of course, there is already a considerable body of work on the mythic aspects of some of the texts considered here yet Cousineau could go further to explain why, in particular, the narrative of scapegoating was so significant for these writers. To have claimed direct influence would have been a step too far (although more generally speaking the relationships of influence between James, Conrad, Ford, and Woolf, in particular, are well documented), but Cousineau clearly implies a modernist trend which is never fully explicated in modernist terms. In the end, due in many ways to this lack of an explanatory or unifying conclusion, Ritual Unbound suggests more than it details and details more than it suggests. KATHERINE I. BAXTER British Library Joyce's Critics Joseph Brooker. Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. ix + 266 pp. Paper $24.95 FIRST things first. Here is Joseph Brooker, English author of Joyce's Critics, writing about Irish critic Emer Nolan's 1995 book James Joyce and Nationalism: "The argument's centerpiece is a revisionist account of'Cyclops' that seeks to show how the prejudices of earlier readers have obscured Joyce's real sympathies. Nolan is perhaps the first critic to entertain in public the idea that Joyce supports the citizen in his debate with Leopold Bloom." Uh, um. Hm. Gosh. No, actually. Not really true, not "perhaps" true. Sorry, but it so happens that your reviewer it was who twice argued, once in a book published in 1981 and again in an article published in 1994, that the citizen might be what Joyce's notes call him, Bloom's equally aggrieved "shadow," that he has his own legitimate causes for offence at Bloom's behavior in his presence, and that the ensuing screaming match is, if anything, more Bloom's fault than his. 495 ELT 48 : 4 2005 Well: Brooker is a solid scholar who has done his homework, but one can't read everything. It isn't remarkable that he missed those two publications of mine. On the other hand, if one can't read everything, one shouldn't go about making semicategorical statements about who was "perhaps the first" to say something, should one? Unless, that is, you have your own criteria for what constitutes the categorical. Brooker has two, one acknowledged and one not. First, apart from a pardonable weakness for the Irish, Joyce's Critics is highly Anglo-centric, most of all at the expense of the Americans. (I'm an American.) When it refers to "this country," what it means is England and nowhere else. Its bibliography is top-heavy with English names—far out of proportion, certainly, to England's historical presence in Joycean scholarship. There are about as many references to TLS as to the James Joyce Quarterly, a fact which would be unremarkable were it not that the latter is dedicated to studying Joyce's work and the former isn't. The issues the book dwells on tend to be tempests in Oxbridgean tea-party teapots. There is a good deal, for instance, on F. R. Leavis, whose primary contribution to Joyce studies was to sneer at it. The French Joyceans who made such a pother in the eighties and early nineties are most regarded on account of their way of stirring things up in English academe. Mainly because his (entirely worthless) James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word once caused a tenure-candidacy ruckus at Cambridge, the Englishman Colin MacCabe gets twenty-five pages, whereas the American Tom Staley, who founded and edited two leading Joyce journals, has...