ESC 25, 1999 prompt them to inspect, with the same critical spirit, another text, “the Book of the W orld.” Although McLuhan does not make this point explicitly, Finnegans Wake, in effect, inverts this medieval trope, and presents instead the “book as world,” as Marilyn French claimed. McLuhan analyzes in meticulous fashion the implications of this transverse trope in the bulk of his book, spanning ten chapters. Wake enthusiasts are accord ingly afforded the opportunity to delve further than before into the nooks and crannies of Joyce’s multi-layered verbal land scape. In an oft-quoted quip, Joyce said he wrote Finnegans Wake the way he did in order to keep professors guessing for cen turies, thereby ensuring his immortality. These two books, in their own ways and in different degrees, lessen the burden of contemporary guesswork considerably. WORKS CITED Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London: Penguin, 1986. DOMINIC MANGANIELLO / University of Ottawa Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen, eds. Joyce/Lowry: Crit ical Perspectives (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997). x, 206. $34.95 (U.S.) cloth. Malcolm Lowry once claimed that he spent a day with James Joyce in the Luxembourg Gardens. Patrick McCarthy, co-editor with Paul Tiessen of Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives, says that “it is almost certain that this meeting ... occurred only in his imagination” and thus denies as autobiographical fact what this collection of eleven essays foregrounds as literary fact (2). Taking a place among similar collections of essays about Lowry — Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Mal colm Lowry (1992), Apparently Incongruous Parts: The Worlds 102 R E V IE W S of Malcolm, Lowry (1990), Malcolm Lowry Eighty Years On (1989), Malcolm Lowry: The Writer and His Critics (1980), The Art of Malcolm Lowry (1978), Malcolm Lowry: The Man and His Work (1971) — Joyce/Lowry offers essays o f two sorts: the one assuming Joyce’s influence upon Lowry and arguing that Lowry’s work is not mere imitation but important critical and creative response, the other assuming the self-evidence of Lowry’s importance and comparing these writers for the good that it will do the history of modernism. Among essays of the first sort, Sherrill Grace’s finds that “Joyce parodies expressionism” in Ulysses, implying that “there is no expressive origin free of all traces of the socially, linguis tically, and textually constructed Self,” and that “Lowry uses it seriously” in Under the Volcano, presenting “the inevitable fate” of the expressionist Consul who “strives to believe (as Lowry also did) in a ‘content beyond convention, a reality be yond representation’ ” (13, 16, 13, 16-17). Similarly, Chris Ackerley finds that these novels “structured upon coincidence” reach different conclusions about the meaning of coincidence: “whereas Bloom at first is struck by coincidence and then re sponds with irony, the Consul first assumes irony and then at tributes to that a deeper underlying significance” (58). Joseph C. Voelker’s Bakhtinian reading discovers “ Under the Volcano to be performative, a theater with no delimitation of its stage area, in which Geoffrey Firmin, very much like Leopold Bloom in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses, acts as Master of the Revels” (23). Brian W . Shaffer explores the function of anti-Semitism in these works: “If Joyce uses his parodic and satiric powers to emphasize the distorted and distorting subject-object relations that make anti-Semitism seem rational, Lowry uses his feel for the tragic and pathetic to emphasize anti-Semitism’s power as a scapegoating tool for the purposes of theft, murder, and the consolidation of power” (89). From essays of the other sort comes one of this book’s finest: Martin Brock’s “Syphilisation and its Discontents,” a Foucauldian study of Under the Volcano and Dubliners. Brock finds syphilophobia in Lowry in “response to his conservative Methodist upbringing” and a similar interest by Joyce in syphilis as the turn-of-the-century “focal point of the public discussion 103 ESC 25, 1999 on the increase or ‘progress of insanity’ ” (140). The result is that “natural human love in the fiction of...