Joyce & Memory

BOOK REVIEWS grandfather William (1770-1832), and his great-uncle William (1820-1882), all of whom appear in poems. I give their dates—Conner does not—but I can't find Henry Middleton's. The Corbets too—Jane Corbet Yeats was Yeats's paternal grandmother—appear only in an entry in the dictionary section. Some important dates not given at all are William Pollexfen, the poet's grandfather, died 1892, Elizabeth Middleton Pollexfen, the poet's grandmother, 1819-1892, Susan Mary Pollexfen Yeats, the poet's mother, 1841-1900, George Pollexfen, his uncle, 1839-1910. In the list of "Books Consulted" Conner gives us "Cleaneth Brooks" for "Cleanth Brooks" "Richard Ellman" for "Richard Ellmann," "Tain Bo Cualgne " for "Tain Bo Cuailgne," dates Wade's edition of Yeats's Letters 1914 instead of 1954, and cites the 1984 Poems, edited by Richard Finneran , instead of the corrected 1997 or at least the 1989 edition, both out when Conner's Dictionary was published in 1998. Elsewhere in the book is an occasional misprint. I find "Kytler" for "Kyteler," "Kabva" for "Kanva," "'Men and the Echo'" for "'Man and the Echo,'" "Cushal" for "Cumhal," "Formorian" for "Fomorian," "'drunken and vainglorious lout'" for "'drunken, vainglorious lout.'" But enough of carping. I do like Conner's Dictionary despite these errors . It is helpful, full of all the essential information, genial, humane, not at all dry, a very civilized, good-natured aid. This humane point of view pervades the whole. There is not one tone in one part of the book and a different tone in another. The genial tone of the author never flags to be replaced by pedantry. One could do much worse than to learn one's Yeats ABCs from him. David R. Clark __________________ Sequim, Washington Joyce & Memory John S. Rickard. Joyce's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of "Ulysses". Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. χ + 240 pp. Cloth $49.95 Paper $17.95 JOHN S. RICKARD'S Joyce's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of "Ulysses" is the most comprehensive and convincing treatment of its subject to date. The study examines the ways in which memory functions within Joyce's writings and the ways in which Ulysses "reflects and responds to different Versions' or modes of memory within the traditions of Western metaphysics and psychology." In particular, Rickard is interested in how "Joyce's historical position," as determined by his gen475 ELT 42 : 4 1999 eral education, reading, and comments about his own writing, "supplied him with various and conflicting notions of what memory is and how it works." Joyce's Book of Memory argues that The importance of memory in Joyce's work . . . extends far beyond [the author's] own mnemonic powers and his obsession with reworking and renaming his own past, for his writings, more than those of most writers of prose, depend on elaborate repetitions, reworkings, and distortions of their own materials.... Furthermore, Joyce's texts demonstrate a deep interest in the nature and workings of memory itself. Much of Joyce's writing involves itself in a reflection on the nature and extent of our access to the past—personal and collective—and the effects the past has on the present and future. Rickard's study is most valuable for its consideration of a number of now "forgotten debates concerning the nature of memory, chance, habit, and the self." For example, although mental telepathy is all but discredited today, Rickard valuably documents this idea's currency during Joyce's time, and relates it to Stephen's and Bloom's "telepathic exchanges " in Ulysses. Rickard is sensitive, too, to the ever-present relationship between memory and subjectivity—the ways in which what and how we remember shape our conceptions of self. And he compellingly demonstrates how such a relationship between memory and identity effects the interactions between and among Stephen, Bloom, and Molly. Rickard reads Ulysses as "an Odyssey' of memory or an Odyssey' through memory, a novel in which characters and readers struggle to come to terms with the past in order to move toward the resolution of the desire for closure." And he shows how Ulysses "functions as a site of struggle or tension between competing philosophical and...