Two on Joyce

BOOK REVIEWS either to elevate some episodes of Ulysses as part of a consistent theory of comedy or to denigrate others as irrelevant Munchausen performance , Bell suggests nothing more, or less, than a re-thinking of Ulysses itself: "Antic Joyce cherishes confidence tricks, games, gulling, concealment , impostures, and horseplay, even inviting an excreting horse to make a comic point." Creating and gulling, and sincerity and fooling, are not always distinct in this work so " 'carried away by a wave of folly"," so frequently following " 'the fools rush in where angels principle'." And so, convinced that the paths of folly lead to more delicious follies around the corner, Bell sees the likes of Buck Mulligan or Leopold and Molly Bloom through new eyes. Buck Mulligan, for example, turns out to be a "brilliant clown in the Shakespearian tradition" rather than Stephen Dedalus's foil-in-residence. One wonders about this, especially as Bell pushes the analogues with the fool in Lear and then goes on to liken Stephen to a displaced Malvolio or Jaques. Curiously enough, Hamlet—the one Shakespearean play that resonates throughout Joyce's novel—is conspicuous by its absence. On the other hand, Bell's "take" on Leopold Bloom—namely, that he progresses from simply fool to its holier equivalent—strikes me as a worthy addition to the critical lore about modern literature's most fully developed character. As for Molly, Bell sees her as a comic heroine, one riddled with contradictions and sublimely, wonderfully, ridiculous. But the barest outlines of what Bell focuses on hardly does Jocoserious Joyce justice, for his critical art is in the details, and sometimes in very unstuffy footnotes. Moreover, Bell has not been shy about wrinkling in quirky observations that I suspect amuse his undergraduates at Williams as much they delighted me. In short, Jocoserious Joyce both delights and informs. It is also one of the best studies of those odd corners where Joyce's comic vision is likely to go unnoticed. Sanford Pinsker Franklin & Marshall College Two on Joyce Janet Egleson Dunleavy, ed. Reviewing Classics of Joyce Criticism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. 229 pp. Cloth $39.95 Paper $14.95 Jean-Michael Rabaté. James Joyce, Authorized Reader. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1991. xiii + 206 pp. $28.95 THE SECOND STORY of Dubliners, describing what its title names "an 395 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 encounter" between two boys and an old man, introduces a theme that runs throughout Joyce's work and much of the criticism devoted to it. Here are two very different critical books, Janet Egleson Dunleavy's collection Reviewing Classics of Joyce Criticism and Jean-Michael Rabaté's James Joyce, Authorized Reader, both of which in their own ways enact encounters of a Joycean kind. Dunleavy's are of the Ulysses variety: classic figures of the past revived and recalled with varying degrees of appreciation by the young and not-so-young. Seventeen current critics of Joyce have been gathered to review as many works, written between the years 1929 and 1959 by an earlier generation only two of whom are still active in the field. That a certain valedictory note should sometimes steal into the proceedings was probably inevitable, and on the whole no cause for complaint. Joyceans, a clubable lot whose meetings are everything the MLA's annual death-of-the-spirit-a-thon is not, usually like one another, and it's quite in keeping that in Clive Hart's consideration of Frank Budgen or Fritz Senn's of James Atherton, or in Bonnie Kime Scott's moving thoughts on the ailing Adaline Glasheen, review should melt into reminiscence and the personal consort with the analytical. That Dunleavy approves is perhaps shown by her decision to save until last Ruth Bauerle's homage to Matthew Hodgart's and Mabel Worthington's Song In the Work of James Joyce, and thus end with its last page's evocation of Joycean harmony: I have never known a Joyce meeting that did not have, in addition to formal musical programs, a spontaneous outburst of singing—at dinner, in the streets, in pubs, wherever we gathered . . . Faulknerians do not warble of Yoknapatawpha, nor Emersonians of Concord.... It...