Joyce & Roman Culture

ELT 41 : 3 1998 There are, I believe, other questionable readings, several of which are clustered on pp. 104—105. In Scylla and Charybdis, did Stephen apply the terms "bawd and cuckold" to Shakespeare because he "willed his own betrayal by the dark lady of the Sonnets"? In my copy of Ulysses, Stephen connects this description to Cymbeline and Othello, not to the sonnets (9.1021). I am not persuaded that Bloom literally "offers Molly to his new friend" when he shows Stephen her picture (16.1425-38), but here and elsewhere Kimball seems to take this intriguing but I think mistaken interpretation—first made by William Empson—for granted. She does cite Bloom's question "And why not?" (16.1480) as an approving remark about extramarital affairs, but I don't think that is what Bloom means: although the context is far from clear, the sense seems to be "And why shouldn't Stephen say that Molly was handsome?" or perhaps "And why shouldn't she be handsome even though she had gained weight?" Finally, in commenting on Oxen of the Sun, Kimball says that "Stephen refuses to settle either for the practical immortality of sexual propagation or for the collective immortality of heaven," adding that "he appears to opt for the status of 'glorified man, an androgynous angel... a wife unto himself" (9.1052). I think she is right about Oxen, but in citing the passage from Scylla and Charybdis she weakens her case, since there Stephen described heaven—whose "collective immortality" Kimball says he rejects—as the place where man is "an androgynous angel" and "a wife unto himself." I could argue about other passages, but I have to say that Kimball's strong, coherent reading of the text far outweighs her lapses. Odyssey of the Psyche is a pleasure to read and should help direct Joyce criticism back toward Joyce himself as a man whose mind is constantly reflected in the pages of Ulysses. In so doing, it should restore some balance to a field that has come to focus so much on the novel's alleged political meanings that it has lost sight of Joyce as an individual person who was trying, among other things, to make sense of himself. Patrick A. McCarthy University of Miami Joyce & Roman Culture R. J. Schork. Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. xvi + 318 pp. $49.95 READING R. J. Schork's Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce can prove to be an extremely disruptive experience, for the numerous in366 BOOK REVIEWS sights that it offers to the fiction of James Joyce impel readers to break off reading Schork's volume to make note of his commentary in the margins ofDubliners, A Portrait ofthe Artist as aYoung Man, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake. As part of the Florida James Joyce Series, ably edited by Zack Bowen, this book stands as a welcome addition to Joyce studies and it amply attests to the increasing prominence of the University Press of Florida titles in the study of the works of James Joyce. Indeed, Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce offers abundant information relating to a range of Classical references across Joyce's canon, but this study stands as a particularly useful resource for Finnegans Wake. Schork's examinations of Latin references in Finnegans Wake, providing detailed linguistic, literary , and cultural information, goes well beyond the glosses that appear in heretofore standard works like Roland McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake or Brendan O'Hehir and John Dillon's A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake. Schork's achievement grows out of an ability to draw upon a number of enviable intellectual skills in forming this study. Time and again he demonstrates a solid linguistic background. He presents readers with ample evidence of a profound understanding of Greek and Latin history and culture. He has a penetrating knowledge of Jesuit pedagogy from a century ago. And he repeatedly employs a sensitive talent for close reading . Taken together these traits produce a scholarly work that will soon become a necessary reference tool for any serious student of Joyce's writings . Early in his book Schork points out how the linguistic...