Ulysses Through Comic Eyes

BOOK REVIEWS demands our attention—but it is not heresy to suggest that Friedman may not have the final word and that a careful reading of this major book should send us back—or perhaps for the first time—to H.D. herself for the much that remains to be said and for what may, in fact, be quite different from the H.D. Friedman presents to us. Caroline Zilboorg ___________________ Lake Erie College Ulysses Through Comic Eyes Robert H. Bell. Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in Ulysses. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. xii + 231 pp. $24.95 IT IS HARDLY a secret that many professional Joyceans have turned pinchfaced of late, and that in their efforts to see Joyce as a neo-Marxist, a crypto-feminist, or a budding poststructuralist, they race past his abiding sense of comedy. As Bell rightly points out: "while tragedies such as The Iliad dramatize what man is and must be, comedies such as The Odyssey show the resilience and elasticity of identity. Joyce was originally attracted to The Odyssey because its hero enacts so many roles, assumes so many guises, and makes so many turns." Indeed, Bell argues that shapeshifting, rather than the absence of identity, is at the very heart of Ulysses; but he goes on to insist that "Ulysses does not work or play in any programmatic way." The caveat is crucial because Bell's study eschews the overly neat formulations—from Bergson or Freud— that usually attach themselves to studies of the comic mode. The result is a book longer on play, and playful insights, than "thesis." Add a capacity to write in clear, engaging prose and Jocoserious Joyce becomes a study that serves to remind us that "folly is the way of allflesh—including the author and readers of this chaffering chronicle," whether it be called Ulysses or Jocoserious Joyce. "Joyce" has, of course, become a name, one that stands as a convenient shorthand for any number of things—high modernism, the avant garde, the experimental, the elitist—but for Bell, the name "signifies less the originating, shaping imagination than a playground of contending comic figures: jokers, punsters, humorists, clowns, satirists, parodists, farceurs , raconteurs, fools, and quacks." In this sense, those who read Ulysses as if it were essentially a representational novel, one which depicts characters in realistic situations, end up with half a loaf. For as Bell insists: "To do so ... is to overlook or undervalue the follies (sometimes marginal, sometimes central)—the absurdity, virtuosity, 393 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 and slapdash skittle-knocking—that derive not from the great tradition [of George Eliot, Lawrence, and Conrad] but from the great clowns: Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding, and Sterne. Moreover, the highjinks Bell has in mind are not those we normally associate with comic vision—say, Hal and Falstaff rehearsing the Prince's upcoming interview with his father or Hamlet's bantering with the gravediggers. Rather, what Bell's study seeks out are those moments when "we must be prepared to take the comedy of Ulysses in two ways, not just ambiguously but also oxymoronically, as 'jocoserious' ": Persistently, Joyce rectifies the ordinary unbalance between such common dichotomies as the ridiculous and the sublime, the profane and the sacred, and the jocose and the serious, empowering the underprivileged term and often implying that apparent opposites must be seen simultaneously—in words from Finnegans Wake, "by the coincidence of their contraries re-amalgamerge in that identity of undiscernibles." ... [Thus] some Joycean humor is evidently gratuitous and profoundly disorientating, beyond or beneath "the permanent realities of human life," at least as defined by formalist or Arnoldian critics; its categories and lists, its in-jokes and sideswipes, its sniggers and guffaws, its manic proliferations, nonsense, and highjinks, the stuff that is rarely explicated in new critical studies or highlighted by students' yellow markers. At one point in "Circe," in what strikes me as the most intriguing stage direction since "Exit, pursued by a bear," Virag "unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm." Not to be silenced by a mere technicality, Virag, or rather his head, quacks. Ulysses devotes at least as much loving attention to such antics...