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DAVID THORBURN
order)
remaining remarkably faithful to the form" (her italics). In fact)
of course, just the reverse is true: Joyce emphatically alters the Homeric
sequence and even deserts the
Odyssey
entirely in the "Wandering
Rocks" chapter (where the classical model is an episode from the
Argo–
nautica
of Apollonius of Rhodes) . Since joyce's manipulation of the
Homeric story is a crucial aspect of his novel's form and meaning, this
is a massive, a fundamental error, very nearly fatal to Cixous's credi–
bility as an interpreter of Joyce.
There are some striking and genuinely original ideas buried in
Cixous's book, but its undisciplined excesses make the labor of salvaging
them almost intolerable. A disquieting example of sensititivity, even
brilliance, gone wrong,
The Exile of James Joyce
encourages the sad
suspicion that the general level of literary discourse in France is cur–
rently no higher than in England or America.
The contrast with Richard Ellmann's elegant reading of
Ulysses
could scarcely
be
more decisive. Trying for less, he achieves immeasur–
ably more. Where Cixous is prolix and disorganized, Ellmann is com–
pact and lucid; where Cixous wears her scholarship with laborious
ostentation, Ellmann's more genuine learning, implicit in every line,
adds to the grace and authority of his argument.
Ulysses on the Liffey
may be a minor work in the increasingly impressive Ellmann canon,
but it will have real value for students of Joyce and of modern litera–
ture.
Ellmann offers an original description of the structure of Joyce's
masterwork - which he sees as advancing in groups of three chapters,
each triad enacting a progression of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis–
and supports his view with a series of compelling readings of each chap–
ter. Ellmann argues that Joyce replaces the Homeric deities with "two
undeclared gods of this world, space and time." He shows how these
relate to other pairings crucial to
Ulysses
-
body and soul, temporal
and spiritual power - and suggests that "in every group of three chap–
ters the first defers to space, the second has time in the ascendant, and
the third blends (or expunges) the two." Applying this scheme with
remarkable openness and tact, Ellmann identifies connections and paral–
lels in
Ulysses
that have until now been slighted or misunderstood. He
seems especially fine on the knottiest episodes, and his explication of
the"Scylla and Charybdis" chapter, where Stephen gives his theory of
Hamlet)
is the first genuinely satisfying account of that episode that I
have seen. Like all his readings, this one clarifies not only the meaning
of many incidents and symbolic references within the chapter but also
discloses the episode's intimate links with the rest of the novel, and par–
ticularly with the final chapter, where (as Ellmann convincingly shows)
