Greek Culture & Joyce

BOOK REVIEWS phor of the harp indicates that only a musician, or something beyond himself, could make him live fully; it also betrays music in the boy's imagination as the representation of a fate he doesn't control. One could still argue that other tropes (seeing/blindness or illusion/reality ) are more integral to the story's initiation theme than is music; but Hepburn's argument is surely worth serious consideration. Unfortunately, many of the pieces Knowles collects are designed for highly specialized musicologists rather than for general readers, including those who have made Joyce study their specialty. What is one to do, for example, with a passage such as the following, taken from Margaret Rogers's "Mining the Ore of 'Sirens'": A musical mode is an arrangement of the eight diatonic notes of a scale (the eighth note being the octave of the scale), according to one of the several fixed schemes of intervals. The traditional modes are Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian , Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. An ascending scale from middle C to the next C played entirely on the white keys yields a scale in the Ionian mode. If you were to play the scale beginning with D (still only on the white notes), you would have played a scale in the Dorian mode. To untrained musical ears and minds, this doesn't look at all like literary criticism. Small wonder that such people might question just what sort of payoff such discussions could possibly have in terms of better understanding "Sirens." However, the fact of the matter is that Joyceans have always been a generous, accommodating group—partly because Joyce's work can be enriched by subjecting it to a wide variety of disciplinary angles , and partly because Joyceans are, at bottom, a seriously playful (and playfully serious) bunch. Bronze by Gold is for them, if only because it brings the ever-growing Joycean industry the latest news about music and their Master. Sanford Pinsker Franklin & Marshall College Greek Culture & Joyce R. J. Schork. Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. xvii + 322 pp. $49.95 ONE OF THE MAIN pleasures provided for readers of modernist masterpieces such as Ulysses or the Cantos is being forced to live up to the high expectations set by a culture revised and at times created by the very text. Those who expect to be "readers" in the strong sense discover a complex process of education and have to read or re-read the classics in a new way, moving away from the traditional sense of culture (what 363 ELT 43 : 3 2000 vaguely surfaces on an ocean of references when all the rest has drowned and been forgotten) to a renewed and quickened association with the great minds of the past. This process is a cumulative discovery, a real Odyssey that can send us for months looking up curious references to Greek rituals or Confucian texts; it implicates the writer and reader, who happen both to have been caught up by the consequences of the wish to "make it new"—or, as Pound expresses it more forcibly in Canto CV: "I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up with this/ but so will you, drratt you" (London: Faber, 1989, 764). This is why, even if we already know Latin or Greek, but even more if we don't, we need books such as those written by R. J. Schork. A professional classicist who is an authority on Byzantine music, he has become one of the most challenging and exciting Joyce scholars in the last ten years, not just because he has brought to the Joyce industry his wellneeded competence as a Hellenist and Latinist, but also because he has grasped that a new epoch in the reading of the Joycean canon has opened with what has been called "genetic criticism" in France and Germany —that is the meticulous study of notebooks, drafts and various pre-compositional manuscripts. Schork notes early on that he has "brought archival research into the critical process" and this proves invaluable . The convergence of these two types of expertise is formidable indeed and throws new light on issues...