Joyce & "Techno-Poetics"

ELT 42 : 2 1999 who analyze symbolism (Cushman, Mark Schorer, Louis Martz) apparently without using any of the foregoing approaches. And a few names (especially Harris's) appear in virtually every category at one time or another . While a too-rigid system of categorizing would doubtless impose more order onto the critical scene of the last 75 years than anyone could reasonably claim to find, it is nonetheless difficult to imagine the putative student reader finding much in the way of clarification from such a hodge-podge of information. Stylistic infelicities and a rather large number of typographical errors add their share to the general murkiness of these discussions and send one back, positively with relief, to Harris's The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence (1984), still by far the best single book on the subject. Ronald G. Walker ______________ Western Illinois University Joyce & "Techno-Poetics" Donald F. Theall. James Joyce's Techno-Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. xxii + 246 pp. $50.00 AMONG THE DOMINANT TRENDS in Joyce studies, there is a minor one that seeks to discover in Joyce and his work a connection (that more or less determines Joyce's artistic practice) with the "new" physics, radio and tele-communication, theoretical mathematics, and other technological advances of the early twentieth century. This approach has somehow not achieved the luster of Lacanian, cultural studies, postcolonial and new historicist approaches, and the reason cannot be a lack of "relevance." Perhaps a lack of technical expertise has prevented a greater upswell of criticism in this vein; it certainly has prevented grand readings of Joycean physics, a fate from which the Social Text scandal may have saved us. Still, there is a strong desire to see in Joyce's work some kind of connection with the techno-scientific revolution that began with telecommunications, internal combustion and the theory of relativity . Until now, this desire has expressed itself in a handful of insightful articles, some of which (those of M. Keith Booker) were written by a Joyce critic with an advanced knowledge of physics. In this context, Donald Theall's James Joyce's Techno-Poetics attempts, at monograph length, to elevate a minor into a major trend. And it certainly adopts the rhetoric for paradigm shifting, for it is written in the dizzying, cumbersome style of the postmodern critic-as-awiewr, a style that relies on citation to overcome the weakness of an overbold thesis. 224 BOOK REVIEWS Put simply, Theall argues, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari and using illustrations from Finnegans Wake, that Joyce's language follows a generally "machinic" orientation and that this orientation represents a revolution in language and style. He canvasses theories of technology and science and discovers that the logic of machines, physics, radio and telecommunication are always already in Joyce's texts, intervening at every level of expression and producing new technologies of writing. In Joyce's "techno-poetics," the poet becomes a kind of "engineer" who (to quote the title of chapter four) "sings the electro-mechano-chemical body." Even Joyce's "Jesuit strain" is accounted for in what Theall calls "the art of profane illumination" in which "Joyce machines and secularizes " the liturgy of the Eucharist "to sacramentalize the technoscientific everyday life of the end of the second millennium." This is a tall order. And, to give him credit, individual chapters are convincing. But in the long run, the accumulation of evidence that marks his style tends to undermine our conviction in that the nearly litigious fervor of Theall's citations and explications is wearying and sometimes unhelpfully diffuses his argument. At its best, this fervent analytical style is useful (many tidbits here for the margins of dog-eared copies of the Wake); at its worst, it is bombastic. What might irritate many readers is that while Theall presents his evidence for "machinism" at the level of language and sometimes convinces us, he doesn't use the same evidence to make a case for a "machinic" style of narrative—something which David Hayman has been exploring in Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning (1982) and Re-Forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction (1987). Theall just doesn't have much...