Essays on Finnegans Wake

BOOK REVIEWS is to be "achieved only through active resistance to political and cultural forces that inhibit the author's individuality and prevent his selfactualization in art." Moreover, Martin argues that Joyce, pace Wagner, believed that the genuine artist would be a "cultural messiah," a "revolutionary " opposed to the ruling spirit of the community. My qualm is not that these claims are inaccurate, but that Joyce's conception of the artist-hero could just as easily be attributed to Romantic and post-Romantic poetics generally, to Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats, Yeats, Wilde, or Shaw. Elsewhere in the text Martin even speaks of Joyce and Wagner as adhering to a Wordsworthian understanding of the author's relation to his audience, a telling statement given Wagner's and Joyce's common Romantic frame of reference. Other problems are far less significant: Martin might have done more with Wagner's infamous Judaism in Music, given Joyce's distinctly philo-Semitic bent (for example, would it be reasonable to consider Joyce's depiction of Bloom as in some sense a negative response to Wagner's slanderous attack on Jews in his text?); and Martin might have avoided moments of repetitiveness, although these may simply be a side effect of the author's thoroughness in introducing and summarizing his worthy arguments. Overall, however, Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence is a solid, carefully conceived, clearly executed work of scholarship, one that wül be consulted by Joyceans for many years to come. Replete with an exhaustive, thirty-five-page appendix of Joyce's aUusions to Wagner's operas, Martin's excellent study bridges an important gap in our understanding of the cultural context in which Joyce's texts were written and received. Brian W. Shaffer Rhodes College Essays on Finnegans Wake Patrick A. McCarthy, ed. Critical Essays on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. xi + 274 pp. $40.00 THE VIRTUES of Critical Essays on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, edited by Patrick McCarthy, are quiet ones. Since most of its selections were previously published, some more than thirty years ago, it is not making any flamboyant cutting-edge gestures. Because of the editor's (I think sensible) decision to exclude both the microscopic ScyUa of textual studies and the macroscopic Charybdis of "highly theoretical 393 ELT 36:3 1993 articles concerned more with demonstrating a theoretical position than with interpreting the Wake," some of the loudest voices of recent years have not been invited. Most of all, unless I am mistaken, McCarthy has gone out of his way to pick good writing by good writers. There is not one out-and-out coarse piece in the lot—and how many times can one say that these days?—and several of the selections are real pleasures to read. Studiously steering his middle course, McCarthy has directed this collection at the Finnegans Wake common reader, ignoring that creature 's much-advertised nonexistence. Good for him. Following an unexceptionable introductory summary of Wake criticism from origins to the present, the volume is divided into three sections, apparently arranged according to degree of particularity. The first comprises essays by Clive Hart, Louis O. Mink, Fritz Senn, Robert Boyle, S. J. Derek Attridge, Michael Patrick Gülespie, and McCarthy himself, all addressing the inevitable issue of how to read Finnegans Wake. Just what, if any, are the laws of evidence, the principles of validity in interpretation? Representing right and left wings respectively of this eternal controversy are CUve Hart and Derek Attridge. Hart, despite past disappointments, continues to believe that distinguishing probable from improbable readings according to a fairly rigorous standard is preferable to what he calls the "trivial" game of reading texts "in ways which guarantee the continuous generation of escape routes." Attridge's contribution is, I think characteristically, remarkable for its rhetorical vigor and substantive waffle: after dissociating itself from S. L. Goldberg's "famüiar accusation" that "there is no way of denying the relevance ... of any meaning any commentator cares to find" in Finnegans Wake, it then proceeds to in so many words adopt just that position. As must be clear I prefer Hart's essay to Attridge's, but...