Joyce & Irish History

BOOK REVIEWS And neither is anything in Finnegans Wake. If he gets into trouble with "Scylla and Charybdis," Klein is really up against it when trying to read that symphonic farrago of echoing voices as if it were one long essay on the subject of its own principles of composition. There are, to be sure, a few much-cited passages where someone in Finnegans Wake seems to be referring, usually with exasperation, to what one calls the jungle of words in which he or she is stuck. It's amusing to think that in such moments Joyce is addressing the reader on the subject of how to read his crazy book; it may even sometimes be so. But then again it may not. As Stephen reminds us in Ulysses, just because lago counsels cupidity does not mean that Shakespeare is doing the same—and Joyce is at least as hard to pin down as Shakespeare. Joyce's works are, to say the least, not reliably didactic, not expository—not, in a word, Lewislike . At times Klein seems intent not just on finding Lewis in dubious locales of Finnegans Wake but in treating the whole book as something Lewis might have written had he been a lot more gifted at that kind of thing. As easy, I would say, to imagine Carlyle writing "Salomé." So: a bright and learned and intermittently informative production, but one prone to getting carried away by conflicting agendas and theories, and consequently winding up a bit of a mess. Its faults, finally, strike me as traceable to two ages—our own, with its morass of competing methodologies, and the young author's. If he's reading this he may well find it insufferably avuncular of me, but I wish him well on his next book, which I expect to be a good deal better. John Gordon ___________ Connecticut College Joyce & Irish History Thomas C. Hofheinz. Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii + 200 pp. $49.95 HOFHEINZ HAS MADE a valuable contribution to the growing list of works on Joyce and history. His work complements especially Robert Spoo's James Joyce and the Language of History (1994), which focuses on Ulysses. Like many another contemporary literary critic Hofheinz is not satisfied with merely providing a closely argued assessment of a major author's use of historical sources. Rather, he demonstrates how Finnegans Wake models the deceptions inherent in all history-making thereby cautioning readers to examine their own assumptions regarding the causes, effects and particulars of historical events. 389 ELT 39:3 1996 By foregrounding and ironizing various inventions of Irish historiography , Hofheinz insists, Joyce equips us with the tools for disassembling all history. In the process we are alerted to certain ideological causes of the real misery and oppression experienced universally by colonized peoples throughout time. According to Hofheinz, Joyce targets "the seemingly ubiquitous forces of patriarchy and imperialism." Finnegans Wake in particular destabalizes one's habitual ways of interpreting history and enables readers to cross-examine traditional "witnesses" to collectively experienced historical phenomena while simultaneously questioning the so-called "facts" of their own private historical existence. In the Wake, Hofheinz argues, two interdependent narrative forms link individual with collective history. HCE, the vexed Dublin barkeep whose fitful dreams reveal a complex system of repressions and denials necessary for maintaining a socially acceptable identity, personifies the individual narrative form. The collective, transhistorical form is established through a series of rapidly, constantly shifting historical scenes and props. Hofheinz homes in on the "Norwegian Captain" episode to demonstrate how HCE's troubled nightmarish ruminations on his marriage "reveal marriage to be the centripetal force for historical play in the Wake," and indeed throughout Western civilization. Like Gabriel Conroy and Leopold Bloom before him, HCE flounders and founders as he attempts to emulate impossible patriarchal models of heroic and/or husbandly conduct. The trajectory, discernible in this episode, of the protagonist's fall from specious heroism to humiliation will recur again and again throughout the Wake. Moving from HCE, representative of the individual patriarchal Irish consciousness, Hofheinz next considers the transhistorical narrative of the Wake. Viewing the Irish...