The Joycean Chaosmos

ELT 42 : 1 1999 alliances that I see an important direction in feminist studies, in and out of Joyce studies. Bonnie Kime Scott ______________ University of Delaware The Joycean Chaosmos Thomas Jackson Rice. Joyce, Chaos and Complexity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xv + 204 pp. Cloth $34.95 Paper $14.95 THE FIRST admirable quality of Thomas Rice's important new book is the way he lays his cards on the table: he is sensitive to the stakes involved in the way a critical book positions itself, especially one that addresses both the humanities and the sciences, and helps the reader to become aware of the implications of the author's beliefs, style, and horizons . His immediate audience is Joyce scholars, but he has written to this audience "not as a specialist to specialists but in a style that should be accessible to a general readership, for I am convinced that the increasingly opaque language of recent literary and cultural studies, rather than any inherently revolutionary viewpoint that these studies may offer, has isolated literary intellectuals from both the general audience and the scientific community." At first glance, Rice might seem to share the anti-poststructuralist presumptions of the famous hoaxer Alan Sokal, or of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, whose Higher Superstition : The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994) castigates much contemporary literary criticism for obscurantism and a fundamental failure to understand science. But this is not entirely the case; Rice distinguishes between the strongly relativist position of critics who view science and reality as purely social constructions on the one hand and on the other "the cultural critic—such as myself—who finds significance in the way that scientific thought conditions the modes of seeing and the constructions of reality that function in a particular society in a given historical epoch." From another perspective, it is evident that Rice has the least use for the deconstructive strand prominent in Joyce criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, but rather more sympathy for the more recent , socially inflected poststructuralism of Joyce criticism informed by Foucault or Bakhtin. Joyce, Chaos and Complexity is the most sustained and rigorous attempt to relate a group of modern mathematical and scientific ideas to Joyce's work yet to be attempted. Not the least valuable section of the book is its appendices, which include lucid but not overly simplified dis106 BOOK REVIEWS eussions of the concept of the field, relativity, quantum theory, and the uncertainty principle. But this book is far from a survey of Joyce and modern science; instead, it is a highly thesis-driven, even idiosyncratic, reading of Joyce's work as a whole. The first chapter following the introduction explores the role of Euclid's geometry in the stories of Dubliners, the second the application of concepts of post-Euclidean geometry to Portrait of the Artist. Both of these might be seen as exercises in the old history of ideas tradition, arguments that mathematical concepts of which Joyce was probably aware had a shaping effect on his fiction. But the third chapter, "Ulysses, Chaos, and Complexity," and the fourth, on complexity in Finnegans Wake, leave behind the author and intentionality , and argue instead that a group of ideas associated with chaos theory (which began its development in the 1960s) illuminate and parallel aspects of Joyce's last two major texts. Rice's first chapter really bundles together a group of related insights, and speaks as much to the groupings of Dubliners stories as to the reading of any one story. He begins by rehearsing the significance of sight in the Cartesian tradition that permeated Joyce's schooling. Rice emphasizes the syllogistic structure of many of the stories and argues that this is a legacy of Euclid. In a somewhat strained argument, Rice claims that the quincunx is a better structural model for Dubliners than the traditional four divisions to which Joyce pointed. But overall, his philosophical stress is on the proposition that Joyce thoroughly "assimilated the purportedly objective procedures for reasoning about reality common to Aristotle, Euclid, and the Scholastic tradition and still entrenched in the Cartesian worldview of the late nineteenth century." Here Rice sets himself directly against...