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James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare Robert Spoo. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare. Oxford UP, 1994. xii + 195 pp.
That we do not normally think of Joyce as a "historical novelist," in spite of all the proper names, exact dates, and concrete details he weaves into his fictions, is testimony to the complicated relation his work has to the writing of history. He both utilizes and parodies a variety of historical styles and attitudes in order to put to the test, through comedy and critique, his fiction's claims to capture the past. Robert Spoo's illuminating book examines this engagement with historiography (primarily in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, but with some fruitful glances ahead to Finnegans Wake) by means of a judicious mixture of careful research, astute readings, and appropriate theoretical reflection.
As his subtitle suggests, Spoo treats Stephen Dedalus as a lens through which to view his subject, arguing that even when Stephen's presence as a character fades, his "intellectual influence" remains strong. The text of Ulysses is said to "enact" Stephen's subversive view of history, a view glimpsed in the "Parable of the Plums" in "Aeolus" and in the disquisition on Shakespeare in "Scylla and Charybdis." Fortunately, Spoo doesn't build too much on this argument, which seems uncomfortably close to the discredited idea that...