JAMES JOYCE AND THE LANGUAGE OF HISTORY: DEDALUS'S NIGHTMARE. By Robert Spoo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994- Pp. xii + 195- $39-95.

The germ of Robert Spoo's James Joyce and the Language of History may be found in the "Nestor" episode of Ulysses, when Stephen Dedalus parries the anti-Semitic ramblings of the Irish schoolmaster Garrett Deasy: "History," Stephen tells his employer, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." In this study of Ulysses, Spoo argues that a preoccupation with history is at the center of Stephen's artistic impasse and of Joyce's own artistic project. Though the author reveals a strong sense of Irish history, this is not a book about names, dates, and places. Rather, history is defined broadly and treated thematically. It can mean "historical circumstance," both past and present; it includes the personal as well as the cultural past; and it involves our ways of imagining and representing history. The book is not dominated by a single methodology, and Spoo rejects deconstruction, which has "come to seem abstract and self-indulgent, totalizing in [its] epistemological claims" (p. 6). Its theoretical underpinnings are eclectic and intermittent, as Spoo situates Joyce among an impressive gathering of historiographers from Nietzsche to Hayden White. Refreshingly, Spoo does not plod through Ulysses; instead, he focuses on several episodes--"Nestor," "Aeolus," and "Oxen of the Sun"--and allows them to shed light on the rest of the work. In general, the book asks us to see history as the potentially nightmarish material of the artist, and to regard Joyce (and Stephen) as historians who subvert (or who would subvert) traditional patterns of historiographic thinking.

In Chapter 1, Spoo examines Joyce's sojourn in Rome from 1906 to 1907, when the young writer began to move from the "moral history" of Dubliners to the more genial "Irish history" of "The Dead" and Ulysses. Spoo describes Rome as...