Joyce's Grandfathers

BOOK REVIEWS furnish an informative and largely persuasive treatment of some aspects of Joyce's use of the content and techniques of music. Since they do not exhaust the subject of Joyce and music, they can expect to see others build on their efforts. Somehow I believe Joyce would like all this attention. Jack W. Weaver Winthrop University Joyce's Grandfathers John M. Warner. Joyce's Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne and Joyce. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. χ +193 pp. $35.00 JOHN M. WARNER'S Joyce's Grandfathers is not a good book. It might have been: it has a promising thesis, well-enough enunciated in the introductory chapter, by far the strongest of the volume. This thesis is that the influence of three eighteenth-century English novelists known to be important to Joyce can best be discerned dialectically "through the lens" of Joyce's own theory and practice, not in terms of what the earlier writer taught the later but in terms of what each might have to show about what the other has done. Warner takes his title from Stephen Dedalus's remark that Shakespeare came to be "the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather," and succeeds at the outset in convincing one to at least consider how Joyce might be taken as a forerunner of Defoe, Smollett, and Sterne. Drawing on Michael McKeon's influential The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, Warner is especially concerned with the ways in which Joyce and his "grandfathers" sometimes negotiated, sometimes hesitated between what were generally seen as the newer strictures of linear historicist narrative and the nostalgic appeal of cyclical myth and romance. Clearly, Warner does not want for ambition. Three or four perfectly respectable critical studies could have been delegated out of the assignment he has set himself, and it would be gratifying to report that his hardiness had been rewarded with success. Regrettably, however, what has happened is exactly what one would have feared: material has overwhelmed thesis. Between the introduction and a gallant attempt in the last few pages to regroup the troops, almost aU is disorder. Part of the problem is what seems to me an elementary structural miscalculation. Given Warner's stated purpose, it would have seemed logical to begin the book with Joyce, thus establishing the "lens" through which the others are to be considered. Instead Warner gives us the 433 ELT 37:3 1994 conventional chronological order, natural enough for a traditional influence study but strangely at odds with the proffered radicalism of his project. He appears to operate with the expectation that the Joycean dimension will emerge, inductively and inter alia, in these earlier chapters, as readers discern what they will later be able to recognize as a Defoe-like Joyce in what they are to take on faith is a distinctively Joyce-like Defoe—a lens seen through a (mirrored) lens, I suppose. In any case, it doesn't happen, if only because Warner's view of Joyce is too idiosyncratic to be either assumed without exposition or proleptically assembled piecemeal. This lack of effective coordination extends to smaller expository units—above all, to the paragraph. Taken sentence by sentence, Warner's prose is usually quite serviceable and sometimes better than that. Taken paragraph by paragraph, it is forever reminding one of Freshman Composition rules, whose wisdom one comes newly to appreciate , about transitions and topic sentences. Just as the overall development of the book seems undermined by Warner's failure to attend to the logic of his own position, so the typical paragraph or sequence of paragraphs seems chronically disinclined to, as politicians say, dance with the one that brought it, to show due deference to the argument which is presumably its reason for being. The effect is exasperating. Orphans and strays of the central argument are forever turning up incongruously in the middle of relatively marginal material which has momentarily turned the author's head, and the question they raise in all but words is, if he doesn't care to look after us properly, why should the reader? The quality of that marginal material is uneven...