Kenner in bloom.

WHEN Hugh Kenner died in 2003, the English-speaking world lost a master stylist, one of its best literary critics; NATIONAL REVIEW lost a longtime friend and contributor. Dalkey Archive has just released a new paperback edition of his 1962 masterpiece, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (107 pp., $12.50). Kenner makes characteristically worthwhile observations about all three writers, and his prose is a delight.

The following, from his discussion of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet, is a good example not just of Kenner's style but also of his wide-ranging intellect: "Before encyclopaedias were invented, facts had to be invented, the very concept of a fact: fact as the atom of experience, for the encyclopaedist to set in its alphabetical place, in dramatic testimony to the realization that no one knows in what other place to set it, or under what circumstances it may be wanted again. The [dictionary] does not find the word 'fact' used in this way before 1632. Before then, a fact was a thing done, factum, part of a continuum of deed and gesture." The bourgeois-intellectual heroes of Flaubert's wonderful satire thus provide, Kenner demonstrates, an epitome of history: "Having commenced, like the first men, tilling the fields, they were to end like the last men, making Encyclopaedias: inheriting, so, the new heaven and the new earth of the Enlightenment."

Joyce, too, he considers an avatar of the modern, because Joyce's stories are in their essence creatures of the printed page; the spoken-word echoes of traditional literature have been replaced by a text that its author views very self-consciously as a text: "Joyce is acutely aware that the modern Homer must deal with neither an oral culture nor a manuscript one, but with a culture whose shape and whose attitude to its daily experience is determined by the omnipresence of the printed book. He was very careful, therefore, to reproduce in his [writing] the very quality of print, its reduction of language to a finite number of interchangeable and permutable parts."

One of my own favorite moments in Ulysses is when Leopold Bloom's cat meows--and Joyce reports to us precisely what the cat said: "Mrkgnao!" Kenner explains why this is so effective and captivating: "Let an intelligible sound which the dictionary has omitted to register be transcribed according to approved phonetic rules, and the result is taut, arbitrary, and grotesque: something living has been imperfectly synthesized out of those twenty-six interchangeable parts to which every nuance of human discourse can allegedly be reduced: as though technology were offering to reproduce Helen of Troy with an Erector set."

Kenner is equally incisive on Samuel Beckett, characterizing him in swift strokes as "the non-maestro, the anti-virtuoso, habitue of non-form and antimatter, Euclid of the dark zone where all signs are negative, the comedian of utter disaster." Beckett's approach to writing novels, Kenner reports, is "subtracting from the methods of Ulysses all the irreducible realities of Joyce's Dublin, and so transposing the novel to a plane of empty but oddly gripping construction."

To read this brief, joyful book is to experience a great mind at work--and, finally, to rediscover hope for the future of literature. The "dead end" of Beckett, Kenner assures us, may prove a fecund beginning.

* In the thought-provoking book The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy (AEI, 65 pp., $15), American Enterprise Institute fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht argues that it's not secular moderates but believing traditionalist Muslims who will be central to the effort to democratize the Arab world. Iraq's Ayatollah Sistani, for example, issued a fatwa endorsing democracy; the Shiite leader's directive was, writes Gerecht, "in its essentials ...flawlessly secular, clearly and concisely asserting the people as the final political arbiter."

Gerecht contends that the bin Laden movement must be defeated "from the inside out": "The liberal and neoconservative hope that Muslim moderates or liberal secularists can compete with and vanquish mainstream fundamentalism, which ultimately is the wellhead for bin Ladenism, in a Western context, is to imagine Thomas Jefferson without Martin Luther." Or try to imagine the collapse of the Soviet Union without a Gorbachev figure: a convinced Communist dictator who started the reform process, with amazing consequences.

The U.S., writes Gerecht, "has no alternative to switching its allegiances from the rulers to the ruled [in the Muslim world]....In doing so, we will undoubtedly aid those who hate us and we may well hurt true friends....But down this uneasy path lies an end to bin Ladenism and the specter of an American city attacked with weapons of mass destruction." Written before the stunningly successful Iraqi elections, this book is an important pointer toward the future of Iraq, and of the Middle East in general.

* Those of us who grew up reading NATIONAL REVIEW in the darkest days of the Cold War remember with fondness how consoling it was to be reassured, every two weeks, that there were some folks out there who understood the true dimensions of the conflict, and how important it was that the good guys win--not just deal, or trade, or coexist, but win. In this regard, NR's history is bound up with the biography of its most famous subscriber: the late Ronald Reagan, whose summons to moral clarity ended up toppling an Evil Empire. Tear Down This Wall: The Reagan Revolution--A National Review History (Continuum, 197 pp., $12.95) is an anti-Communist nostalgist's dream, a moving anthology of some of the best NR pieces about Reagan (and some by him), as well as his most important speeches. To read this book--which contains an amazing amount of material in its brief length--is not just to revel in a past that ended well, but to be strengthened for the struggles America will face in days to come.

* It is now widely feared that the campus as a free-speech haven is a thing of the past: Between the day-to-day impositions of stifling political correctness and the draconian "speech codes" that afflict students at some universities, the ivied halls seem to be less robust arenas of debate than is society as a whole. But Donald Alexander Downs, in his important new book Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus (Independent Institute/Cambridge, 295 pp., $28.99), says there's cause for hope. Downs, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison--and a research fellow at the Independent Institute--documents the difference campus activism itself can make in the struggle for free speech. At the University of Pennsylvania, intellectual historian Alan Charles Kors helped spark a successful movement to scrap the institution's speech code; Downs himself was a key player in a similar effort at Madison. "Freedom is not manna from heaven," he writes. "Someone or some group must be willing to stand up and protect it when it comes under fire.... Individuals matter."