Joyce's Ulysses

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 these materials concern James's fiction rather than his plays, criticism , or travel writings. Especially useful are the extensive materials provided for five of James's novels, written during different stages of his career: The Europeans (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Tragic Muse (1890), The Awkward Age (1899), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although there are no changes in Gard's volume from the original 1968 publication and the 1976 reprint, this collection is one we are fortunate to keep in print. Virginia C. Fowler Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University JOYCE'S ULYSSES Theoharis Constantine Theoharis. Joyce's 'Ulysses': An Anatomy of the Soul. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. $24.95 BOTH IN ITS METHODOLOGY and in its essential attitude toward the novel, this new study of Ulysses, by Theoharis Constantine Theoharis, is fairly traditional. The methodology depends largely upon close reading of the text in the light of four previous authors whose ideas Joyce appropriated for his own purposes; the conclusion reached is that the symbolic and realistic levels of Ulysses reinforce one another, producing a coherent, affirmative portrayal of the soul's encounter with the reality of experience. Without directly challenging the currently fashionable view of Ulysses as a discontinuous text concerned primarily with the operations of language, Theoharis gives us an alternative reading in which the book's events are significant both as elements in an engrossing human drama and as illustrations of the central philosophical concepts underlying the novel. Theoharis is concerned, first and foremost, with Joyce's portrayal of the soul's relationship to external reality. He presents this subject to us through four perspectives, those of Aristotle, Bruno, Dante, and Matthew Arnold. In each of the four main chapters, Theoharis first concentrates on providing his readers with an overview of the relevant ideas in a major antecedent text: Aristotle's De Anima, Bruno's Cause, Principle, and Unity, Dante's Divine Comedy (supplemented by his treatise On Eloquence in the Vernacular and his letter to Can Grande della Scala), and Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. These introductory sections serve as bases for the subsequent discussions of aspects of Ulysses that seem to depend upon concepts and terminology from the earlier writers. While his selection of a handful of sources might at 375 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 first seem arbitrary, Theoharis constructs a reasonable argument for regarding each of these works as fundamental to some aspect of Joyce's vision, and he deals with them in a way that üluminates their relationship to one another as well as to Ulysses. Turning first to Aristotle's De Anima, Theoharis elaborates on the implications, for Joyce, of Aristotle's belief that the soul identifies itself with the external forms that it experiences through the senses. In a section entitled "De Anima and the Narrative of Ulysses," he demonstrates that Aristotle's concept of the soul has a direct and substantial relevance to specific passages of Ulysses, especially in the Nestor, Proteus, and Scylla and Charybdis chapters. Another section applies Aristotle's belief that the soul and body are inseparable from, and in a sense are identical to, the twin aspects of realistic narrative and arcane symbolism found in Ulysses. For Joyce, Theoharis argues, the "epic" element in Ulysses, including the Homeric parallels and other symbols, allusions, and formal structures that give the book its enlarged scale of meaning, is its "soul," while the "novel" or realistic element is its "body"; moreover, the two depend on one another in a manner suggestive of the Aristotelian relationship between body and soul. Here, the categories of body and soul run the risk of becoming a Procrustean bed into which every aspect of Ulysses must be made to fit. Still, the argument throughout the chapter on Aristotle is vigorous and enlightening, stimulating even when not fully persuasive. Chapter 2, "Joyce & Bruno," elaborates on the body/soul distinction in another way, through the Brunonian figure of a world-soul that comprehends all contrary principles. Theoharis puts it succinctly: "The universal law Bruno supplies to Ulysses holds that any particular in experience coincides with its opposite, and...