Motif of Return in Joyce

ELT 37:3 1994 other novels, communicates the prospects for human freedom in a culture of dialogic openness. Henricksen makes a cogent case for the usefulness of a Bakhtinian/Lyotardian approach to these texts. His study is commendable for its clarity—hardly a hallmark of most poststructuralist analysis —and for its exacting thoroughness. Although he examines each of Conrad's novels in separate chapters, he is at pains to trace their complex intertextual relations. Given his desire to demonstrate the many voices of these texts, he might have explored more fully than he does their connection with fictions by other authors; these links are suggested in places (for example, the opening pages of the Lord Jim chapter note that novel's affinities with works by Robert Louis Stevenson among others), but these associations, unfortunately, are not elaborated upon. The author's use of secondary sources is much more wide-ranging. Though his book is grounded primarily in the work of the two theorists already discussed, it incorporates in a highly intelUgent manner a broad spectrum of critical opinion. A two-page section of the chapter on Heart of Darkness, for example, skillfully integrates the ideas and comments of William Labov, Jonathan Culler (on William Labov), Sigmund Freud, Ronald Schleifer (on Roland Barthes), Peter Brooks, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Seymour Chatman, and, of course, Bakhtin. This book would have benefitted, however, from a less antagonistic attitude toward the work of Aaron Fogel, whose Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue (1985), is likewise informed by Bakhtinian dialogics. Henricksen recognizes this study as "provocative and important ," but his eagerness to dismiss Fogel's ideas about Conrad, in evidence throughout Nomadic Voices, is overdone; he might have done weU to heed Don Bialostosky's call for a "novelized" literary criticism that adopts "dialogical articulation with other voices" as an aim rather than "rhetorical victory." Still, this remains a perceptive and richly rewarding work. David A. Ward University of Wisconsin, Madison Motif of Return in Joyce Susan Stanford Friedman, ed. Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xi + 314 pp. Paper $16.95 THE MOTIF of return in Joyce's work has been a recurrent concern of Joyce criticism since the 1930 publication of Stuart Gilbert's 424 BOOK REVIEWS James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Study, which emphasized the Homeric pattern of Joyce's novel; more recent books whose titles proclaim their interest in the principle of return include Brook Thomas's James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Book of Many Happy Returns (1982) and Kimberly J. Devlin's Wandering and Return in "Finnegans Wake" (1991). The ten essays in Susan Stanford Friedman's collection shift our attention to another form of return in Joyce's fiction: the insistent return, or eruption , of whatever has been repressed—psychologically, politically, culturally , or otherwise. A number of shared concerns and assumptions emerge in many of these readings—the concern, for example, with Joyce's depictions of maternal figures and the assumption that modernist aesthetics are open to criticism on ideological grounds—but the interpretations of the works often diverge significantly. These forays into territory that seems at once familiar and unfamiliar include several fine examples of the way texts may incorporate disturbing presences that have been repressed but cannot be erased. A thumbnail sketch of the contents will indicate the range of approaches taken in the essays. Following her introduction, with its informative overview of the collection, Friedman opens with her own contribution, "(Self)Censorship and the Making of Joyce's Modernism." Noting that the President of the Literary and Historical Society of Stephen Hero, the Jesuit Censor who must approve Stephen's paper, disappears from the revised A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Friedman connects Joyce's censorship of the Censor to the different ways the two texts portray Stephen's mother, a supportive and rather liberal-minded person in Stephen Hero who becomes an enforcer of the Church's oppressive authority in Portrait. In Joyce's retellings of Stephen's story Friedman sees the author's attempt to exorcise his mother's ghost; more generally, she wonders whether this "silencing of women as subjects" is a recurrent and...