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Joyce & Flaubert Scarlett Baron. 'Strand-entwining Cable': Joyce, Flaubert, and- Intertex- tuality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 311pp. $110.00
JAMES JOYCE, writing to Ezra Pound on the subject of Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine·. "We might believe in it if Flaubert had first shown us St. Antoine in Alexandria looking at women and jewel- lers windows." We might believe in the book's sequence of hallucina- tions, that is, if we had earlier witnessed St. Antoine assimilating the raw material from which his mind, conscious and otherwise, will gener- ate them. Phantasmagoric fiction is all very well, so long as its specters can be realistically accounted for, can be recognized as the product of the mind of their progenitor interacting with the data of a real world. Give us the pearl, but show us the grit and the oyster, and then the grit in the oyster, first.
I begin with this quotation because it highlights my main disagree- ment with Scarlett Baron's book about Flaubert and Joyce. Although evidence of Flaubert's influence can probably be found in just about everything Joyce wrote, it has long been recognized that nowhere is this so much the case as in "Circe," the culminating chapter of Ulysses. Goethe's Faust and Ibsen's Peer Gynt, along with some Strindberg, some Christmas pantomime hijinks, and some Chaplin-era movie magic, probably all contribute, but La Tentation de Saint Antoine is unquestionably "Circe'"s main inspiration. So clear is this that anyone who has read both could reasonably wonder whether a certain amount of anxiety-of-influence may be at work when Joyce complains about Flaubert's lack of believability. Perhaps he feels a need to stress the difference between his own production and that of his forerunner.
Be that as it may, the difference is real. Let me give an example of the kind of thing which, according to Joyce's account, happens in "Circe" but not in La Tentation. An unenthusiastic Leopold Bloom (un- enthusiastic because he has recently masturbated), visiting a brothel, encounters a "young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze bucklesHer name is Zoe. In the background, "oriental music" starts up, heard by Bloom ("Sad music," he remarks), which as we will lat- er learn is being played on the house's...