Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures by Tony Thwaites (review)

Abstract

Reviews Reviews he says, a stylisticaberrationbut a device to give emphasis to a condition that is beyond the reach of words. Black makes subtle observationsregardingthe split between the two novels that were originally conceived as one, TheSisters.He notes sequences in TheRainbow relating to moonlight that project an implicit female power, contrasting them with the 'Moony' chapterof Women inLove. There, Birkindisplaysan emerging 'selfconsciousness 'in naming the mythic females associatedwith the moon's dominance and recognizing the futilityof his attacksupon its reflection. In this act of deconstruction Birkinfinds a way forward to a new kind of relationship. Women in Love seemed strangeand difficultto its firstreaders,Blackconsiders,because, like other emergingmodernistworks,it conveys consciousnessfrom within its characters.The reader must infer meaning and motive without authorial comment. Lawrence's sophistication in narrative method is reflected in Birkin, who bears some of the author'svalues but at the same time open-mindedlyseeksnew meaningsand modes of existence. This studyis a personalreadingwith little referenceto other criticsand few footnotes or bibliographicalreferences. Its virtues are a close knowledge of Lawrence and the changing England to which he was responding. Sometimes Black makes inferences,for example about the influence of Lawrence'searly readingin Palgrave's Golden Treasury, which he possiblytakestoo far, but these are a markof his empathy with his subject. FRAMINGHAM STATE COLLEGE MARGARET STORCH JoyceanTemporalities: Debts,Promises, andCountersignatures. By TONY THWAITES. (Florida James Joyce Series) Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Tampa: University Press of Florida. 2001. xviii + 225 pp. $55. ISBN:0-8130-2II4-6. Edited by Zack Bowen, the FloridaJames Joyce Series runs to over two dozen beautifullyproduced monographs on specific aspects or interpretationsof Joyce's work: 'Joyce and ...' is the strategy:Music, Advertising, Chaos Theory, Popular Culture,Latin and Roman Cultureare some of the fieldsin which he is considered, while Shaw, Goncharov, Woolf, Bely, and Doblin are some of the authors compared with him. Tony Thwaites's 'PromissoryNote' to JoyceanTemporalities begins, 'This book is about time inJoyce's work' (p. xiii)- a dangerouslywoolly subject.The discussion focuses on both the representationof time inJoyce's writingand the ways in which the forms of that writing resist fixity and closure, developing 'an aesthetic of the contingent' (p. 9). Thwaites'spremise is thatJoyce's writing is 'structuredas promise ' (p. 3), so that the significance of Joyce's name remains open. This may seem almost arbitrarilytrue of any authorwhose work continues to fuel the scholars,as if Thwaites is actuallycelebratingthe potentiallyendless calibrationsof his colleagues in the series.Yet surelyof all authorsJoyce invites such exegesis. Thwaites cites the last lines of Finnegans Wakeand comments: 'Before there is really anyone or anywhere, there is a call, from elsewhere -elsewhere itself calls ("Farcalls") and only with that call is there one who answers, someone somewhere called up' (p. I58). The theoretical ranging Thwaites takes us on, from Dubliners, through the Portrait, to Ulyssesand the Wake,finally delivers a renewed he says, a stylisticaberrationbut a device to give emphasis to a condition that is beyond the reach of words. Black makes subtle observationsregardingthe split between the two novels that were originally conceived as one, TheSisters.He notes sequences in TheRainbow relating to moonlight that project an implicit female power, contrasting them with the 'Moony' chapterof Women inLove. There, Birkindisplaysan emerging 'selfconsciousness 'in naming the mythic females associatedwith the moon's dominance and recognizing the futilityof his attacksupon its reflection. In this act of deconstruction Birkinfinds a way forward to a new kind of relationship. Women in Love seemed strangeand difficultto its firstreaders,Blackconsiders,because, like other emergingmodernistworks,it conveys consciousnessfrom within its characters.The reader must infer meaning and motive without authorial comment. Lawrence's sophistication in narrative method is reflected in Birkin, who bears some of the author'svalues but at the same time open-mindedlyseeksnew meaningsand modes of existence. This studyis a personalreadingwith little referenceto other criticsand few footnotes or bibliographicalreferences. Its virtues are a close knowledge of Lawrence and the changing England to which he was responding. Sometimes Black makes inferences,for example about the influence of Lawrence'searly readingin Palgrave's Golden Treasury, which he possiblytakestoo far, but these are a markof his empathy with his subject. FRAMINGHAM STATE COLLEGE MARGARET STORCH JoyceanTemporalities: Debts,Promises, andCountersignatures. By TONY THWAITES. (Florida...