Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations Of "Finnegans Wake," ed. by Kimberly J. Devlin and Christine Smedley

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Reviewed by: Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations Of "Finnegans Wake," ed. by Kimberly J. Devlin and Christine Smedley Paul K. Saint-Amour (bio) Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations Of "Finnegans Wake," edited by Kimberly J. Devlin and Christine Smedley . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. xii + 323 pp. $74.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. Prose writers," says Nicholas Dames, "work in chapters with far less self-awareness than poets work in stanzas or composers in movements." 1 Joyce was an exception. In none of his novels does the chapter work simply as a narrative installment whose end offers the reader a convenient pause. Joycean chapters are discrete discourseworlds with their own stylistic tempers and internal logics, their own vocabularies and specific gravities. To the teacher, they offer syllabusfriendly units of instruction; to the scholar, they present themselves as bounded objects of study. Small wonder, then, that so many monographs and edited collections on Joyce's novels—and particularly on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—also treat the Joycean chapter as a strong unit of organization. Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities is the latest chapter-by-chapter study of Joyce's last book, and it is a welcome one. 2 Kimberly J. Devlin and Christine Smedley have brought together an A-team of established and rising Joyceans and allotted each of them one of the book's seventeen chapters, asking them to attend to what they call the text's "prodigal experimentalism" (2). Glossing that phrase in their introduction, the editors aver that "Joyce's linguistic prodigality produces semantic excesses—pluralities of possibilities, in terms of meanings—that veer off in multiple, nonexclusive directions" (2). As a premise for a book on Finnegans Wake, this seems pretty uncontroversial, but it has the virtue of freeing the contributors to pursue lines of description and interpretation more eccentric to their assigned chapters. The result is a lively, accessible guide that offers both new and veteran readers an appealing range of themes, approaches, and degrees of argumentative pitch. Many of the volume's contributors frame close readings of bounded passages within historical contexts activated by way of the Wake's dense intertextuality. Mia McIver reads I.4 as reverberating with memories of the Coercion Acts of 1801–1921, Parliamentary measures such as the suspension of habeas corpus by which the British suppressed popular discontent in Ireland. Vicky Mahaffey, in a beautifully balanced reading of Book IV, does equal justice to the Ricorso's use of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, its shout-outs to Ireland's antipodal twin (New Ireland, in Papua New Guinea), and its account of what Joyce called "the conversion of S. Patrick by Ireland." 3 Smedley [End Page 175] traces a constellation of Famine references in I.7 ("Shem"), including Biblical figures and plots (Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, the prodigal son) that were deployed by the British to justify the Famine only to be perpetuated later by Irish nationalists. Smedley goes on to read Shem's "strabismal apologia" as seeking a corrective distortion, a "cross-eyed re-visioning of the Irish Famine" (128) that makes Joyce's and Lucia's eye trouble a way of figuring a more just and habitable historical memory (FW 189.08). Twentieth-century media, particularly cinema and television, enjoy special prominence in the volume's historicist readings. Jeffrey Drouin maps the scuffle between Shaun and Shem in II.2 ("Nightlessons") onto a series of other conflicts: between Horus and Set in the Egyptian Book of the Dead ; between vision and hearing, their respective signature senses; and thence between digital and analog sensory processing as understood in Joyce's day. Enda Duffy sees the subsequent chapter as clearing space via new media to wake the Irish proletariat to revolution and an end to military and class warfare, and Richard Brown finds Joyce flooding III.4 with mimetic conventions—from theater and silent cinema, sports and pornography—in order to draw critical "attention to the structures, systems, and discourses of representation itself" (275). In all three of these contributions, the collision of literary and new media forms emerges as a crucial condition of possibility for social transformation. Brown's piece touches down on games...