Authorizing the Reauthorizing

Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 ing?" Mills was unable to utilize Keith Cushman's edition of Lawrence 's Introduction (1987), which published three holograph pages on homosexuality from Lawrence's manuscript and seven pages on inversion from Magnus's book that were cut by his publisher, Martin Seeker. Mills irritatingly uses the initials L and M for Lawrence and Magnus, and misses the wit and irony in Douglas's remark that the parasitic Magnus was "one of those people who are never happy, never quite happy, unless they are obliging others." In the final article Ellis argues that Lawrence's greatest poem, "The Ship of Death," has attracted "an attention which is disproportionate to its merits" and that the relatively trivial Pansies (his weakest volume of poetry, apart from Nettles) has been misrepresented and undervalued . But Ellis confuses Edward VII and Edward VIII. He misses in "The Elephant Is Slow to Mate" the childlike naivete that also inspired the animal poems in Theodore Roethke's Words for the Wind (1958). And he once again concludes his article with the familiar and the obvious by commenting on "how essentially English Lawrence remained during all his years of self-imposed exile" and how "Lawrence remained until the very end of his life extraordinarily diverse in interests, moods and concerns." Jeffrey Meyers _______________________________University of Colorado______________ AUTHORIZING THE REAUTHORIZING Vicki Mahaffey. Reauthorizing Joyce. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. $37.50 Mahaffey^ book is one of the most interesting major studies of Joyce to be published in a long while. It is as much about the nature of the scholarly response to Joyce's work as it is about the Joyce canon. Her thesis is that "Joyce's resistance to the unnatural stabilization of language and of value begins with a more generalized criticism of society in Dubliners; but it becomes increasingly more specific as he moves his primary focus to an individual in Portrait, to narrative style in Ulysses, and finally to individual words and letters in Finnegans Wake." "Mainstream criticism of Joyce is firmly rooted in the epistemology of Dubliners; post-structuralist criticism of Joyce is as strongly rooted in the epistemology of the Wake." The bridge between the diverse orientations of the two critical schools is Ulysses. While Dubliners , relatively the most accessible work, epitomizes institutional authority , the Wake is in itself an "immensely subtle critique, or 'reading' of the limitations of monological authority, that anticipates many of the 262 Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 arguments advanced on different theoretical and political fronts over the last twenty years." In the process of his four major works Joyce himself has run the same gamut of approaches to textual authority that critics have followed over the last thirty years. Mahaffey sees Ulysses as a series of tensions which divide into binary opposites, tripartite divisions, etc., all based on tensions which are themselves interchangeable. The structure of the novel is in itself a microcosm of the whole canon, with Stephen identified with the "patriarchal . . . transcendent authority," Bloom with the binary and paradoxical , and Molly with the "collective immanent, and largely unconscious." Mahaffey similarly divides her study into three major sections: "Unitary Authority," "Double Authority," and "Multiple Authorities," while citing the inherent contradictions in each approach, all leading to a fluidity which she describes as particularly feminine. Joyce's work begins with the self-contradictory nature of Stephen, at once obedient and revolutionary, and with Father Flynn, who is vested with an authority that prompts him to disregard simple acceptance in favor of exploring the complexities of self-contradiction. The characters and the works themselves, beside reflecting Joyce's position, challenge the readers' habits of interpretation. Through his words, Joyce creates sets of oppositions between the reader and the writer, words in opposition or contradistinction to themselves, as would a punster. He is abetted by the reader, who, like the author, has the power to transform by repainting "verbal portraits anew through the inevitable selectivity of observation and memory." The whole is complicated further by Joyce's relations to Stephen and the text, and their shared awareness that characters will reenact prior narratives in unintentional, unproductive, and repetitive ways. Mahaffey 's canvas is dense and...