The Transformation Process in Joyce's Ulysses by Elliott B. Gose, Jr (review)

kind - and even in genre (,ironic romance') - from the earlier works, and that the corpus reveals continuity. He concludes that in the later works Conrad is still simply Conrad: he 'neithersuppressed his awareness of the heart of darkness, nor lost his interest in the craft of fiction' (pp 197-8). But the question that Geddes does not adequately address is whether Conrad successfully translated that 'awareness' and 'interest' into fiction that could match that of his earlier achievements. New readings of these little discussed texts will contribute to a better understanding of their author's career, and Geddes's comments on The Shadow Line are clearly valuable. But, in general, his examinations of specific texts are substantiallyweakened by his ignoring significant recent studies of narrative and style: his discussion of Conrad's language points outlittle more than recurring terms and the creationof mood and 'flavour'; his examination offirst-person narrative forms relies upon and progresses no further than Scholes and Kellogg's discussion of autobiography; and, over all, his speculations on Conrad's fictional strategies conclude merely in the judgment that he melded form and content. Re-evaluation of Conrad's later novels may indeed be in order, but we need a more rigorous analysis of their informing structures than Geddes has given us. (MARTIN KREISWIRTH) Elliott B. Gose, Jr. The Transformation Process in Joyce's Ulysses University of Toronto Press. xix, 228. $25.00 This study is in two parts, each consisting of six chapters, and is mostly concerned with two major influences on Joyce's thought and so on Ulysses. The first part pursues Joyce's indebtedness to the work of Giordano Bruno, 'the Nolan' as Joyce was pleased to call him; the second part both examines the influence of the father of modem psychoanalysis on Joyce and subjects the writer as well as his work to Freudian scrutiny. An important third source of influence is the philosopher Bergson. Elliott Gose is also, Ibelieve, attempting to go beyond questions ofinfluence and offer a more general account of 'the transformation process' as essential to Joyce's life, thought, and writing, though he has very little to say about the work in which Bruno and Freud figure prominently, Finnegans Wake, or any of the fiction apart from Ulysses. Joyce's use ofBruno as a complementand corrective to the Stagyrite has often been observed, and I began to read Gose's book in the enthusiastic expectation that it would be a thorough study of this aspect of Ulysses. Gose's apposite quotations from Bruno in the introductory chapters establish the theme well: Joyce's interest in the perpetual transformations by which kings make their progresses through the zoological food chain into the guts of beggars and, more positively, by which we perceive the 134 LEITERS IN CANADA 1980 divinity that doth hedge a dog. Unfortunately the discussion of Bruno, soon spent, gives way to a drifting commentary, overloaded with allusions to other commentators, in which the analytical procedures too wantonly mix up Joyce's biography and his fiction, while the prose often groans for further editing. So, in a passage launched from a reference to Joyce's glaucoma, we are told that 'Proteus and Glaucus may well come together in Joyce's description of the sirens in "cool glaucous eau de Nil'" and that the god Glaucus 'may serve us as a paradigm for the Joyce who had to give himself to the style of each chapter, who by descending to animal state in the writing of "Circe" became the god-like creator who could look back on that episode and say "I think it is the best thing I have written".' This example of critical quilt-making may serve as a paradigm for the overall method of the first part of the book, Iam sorry to say. 'May' and 'would have' are the critical needles and the thread is a quantity of propitiatory verbiage which assures us that the author is about to say, or has just said, something Significant, in such terms as this: 'I have looked in the last two chapters at the characteristic process to which Joyce committed himself in his efforts to realize and express fully...