Rejoinder

ELT 43 : 3 2000 and characters, speech and thought, indeed, what is outward and what is inward. She weaves in and out of different kinds of consciousness: from third-person narration to Scope Purvis's mind, to the narrator's brilliant metaphor that merges narrator and character, to Clarissa's mind. Deftly, she describes Clarissa with "a touch of the bird about her, of the jay." She is never physically described; indeed Clarissa like many of Woolf's characters does not seem to have a body. On the other hand, note the leaden adjectives in Cunningham's description: his Clarissa "treads" the ground in ethnic slippers, "a female mammoth," with a slick "goodwitch sort of charm." Mired in literal, cliched adjectives, Cunningham barely touches the flight of Woolf 's mind, sentences and metaphors. And herein lies the difference. Woolf said of her own writing of a morning: "style is a very simple matter ; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words" (Letters III, 242). Those who know the pulses of Woolf's scintillating, dancing sentences and expressions of mind and heart on the page know that Cunningham—despite his accomplishments in this novel—does not get the rhythm right. Patricia Laurence __________________ City College of New York Rejoinder Susan Mooney's Review. Jack Weaver's Joyce's Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in his Writings, in ELT, 43: 2 (2000), 242-45. WHEN I SHOWED SIGNS of producing scholarship some thirty-seven years ago, Hal Gerber gave me advice I still remember and try to apply in my own writings. He said, "George Moore scholars are generous with each other. Ed Gilcher set a good example." He went on to name two specialty groups he had found more proprietary. I shall not name those groups but I did remember them when I read Susan Mooney's critique of Joyce's Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in his Writings (University Press of Florida, 1998) in ELT, 43:2 (2000), 242-45. While she finds the mote in my eye she overlooks the beam in her own. What is not indicated in the review is that Ms. Mooney and I are tilling the same field and using the same instruments to do so. If one wishes to condemn the work of another, this can be done by faint praise, by ignoring it completely , and by finding it says what oft was thought but not so well expressed . Ms. Mooney makes effective use of the first and last of these unfortunate practices. 376 BOOK REVIEWS No doubt the book has weaknesses. I confess to having one or two myself . One could criticize my work as eccentric, personal and even subjective (the latter being true of everyone). It can even be criticized for attempting to include too many ideas and pieces of information, some of which may be only tangential to a study of Joyce's use of the model and techniques of music. (I had researched and thought about the topic for twenty years and intended to include all I had learned about Joyce, since I did not know whether I would ever write another such book). Two of these parallel issues were Joyce's flirtation with the occult and use of the folklore of Dublin geography and gossip. Still, my major focus was his use of music history and theory to make his writings more meaningful. I found he counterpointed order and disorder in his works and invariably signaled these by use of or reference to music. The music which suggested order was always pleasing while that for disorder suggested cacophony , which I call noise. While this is a subjective judgment, Joyce does range from the Greek modes to Palestrina to Irish popular music (melodic tradition) to works of Bach (harmonic tradition) to Schoenberg (more mathematical, perhaps reflecting the Chaos theory). I made these part of my book, too, and included examples of rhetorical augmentation, diminution, modulation, and key signatures and suggested that Joyce moved from naming to listing to allusion to rhetoric. Study of writers about Bach led me to recognize that Joyce was establishing an "Endlessly Falling Canon" in his corpus...