Joyce's Voices

by Hugh Kenner

When a "correspondent from Missouri," wrote to Hugh Kenner and asked that he elaborate on his assertion that "Joyce began Ulysses in naturalism and ended it in parody," Kenner answered with this book. Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists--Joyce foremost among them--found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is an aid to better understanding--and enjoying more fully--the work of one of the world's greatest writers.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literature, Irish Literature, Ireland, Literary Fiction

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taking this one pretty slowly, since it'll be the cornerstone of my thesis on Joyce. It's pretty excellent- not the least so because it's built around the idea of language and narrative.

The idea is what Kenner calls "The Uncle Charles Principle"- which subverts the traditional novelistic trick of telling the reader "only the things an observer would have experienced, and told them in the order in which he would have experienced them." It sounds kind of strange, but once you get the hang of it you really start to see narrative in a different way.

Traditional realist novels gave you what the character was seeing as he was seeing it. Ok, so Jasques is walking down the road looking at a tree, we're told as much. What is he thinking? Ok, we can get that, too: "Jasques remembered the trees which ran in stately rows alongside the courtyard in his father's estate...." his thought process? That's Joyce: "trees what are long and green. Capped with icicles. Cold. Brrr..."

By using this kind of narrative subversion, we're getting what you (I, that is) might call a three-dimensional view of the scene. We're getting more than just sensory impressions- we're getting the senses but also the response to the sensations, and we're having a narrator who sort of sees beyond this. It's like seeing a painting but with the frame adjusting itself as you walk back and forth, accomodating the colors and the subject matter and the dimensions and all that buisness. It's a radically new way of percieving narrative space, and it anticipates the radical innovations of the post-modern novel to come.

Kenner has a fine, rather burnished prose style which suits his conspicuous critical skills as much as his occasionally annoying donnish attitude (re: footnotes "you may read them now or later"- well, thanks Hugh, that's mighty big of you) but I think he's really onto something here. (If that's not too big of me) Joyce gently nudges from Objectivity and sequential descriptions of his character's perceptions as they happen into two- two!- narrative voices, the second one as a new stranger sort of interjecting and giving his own two cents on the action, creating an entirely different narrative space as he does so. Bloom, for example, speaks in phrases at certain points which would be alien to him were it not for the sort of subversive ventriloquism of the alternate narrator.

I for one don't think that Ulysses proves that Realism is only a construction, an illusion, a self-evident hokey construct, and what's more I don't think Joyce did, either. But I do think that the fact that as humans we must interpret our empirical world through language and the senses meant that Joyce needed to bring himself to a place where he could still be essentially mimetic without having to pay more of debt to Flaubertian methods and means than he'd already shelled out in Portrait and Dubliners. Joyce took it father, took it weirder, and more wonderfully in a new place entirely.

Ulysses is one of my beloved books because it really shines with the glow of the everyday and the mind refracting it. I am there, moment by moment. Not EVERY moment, of course, since I'm barely there half the time in my own life. But yeah it's at least as Real as Reality can be- an effusive bit of irony which I am sure Joyce appreciated and ended up reckoning with by mocking in increasingly varied and fecund ways, which is very much in keeping with the way he dealt with any number of things. He knew what he's done by the end of the writing process. He didn't write another line of prose for a year. According to Ellmann he might have had one tipple too many ("white wine is like electricity, red is like mud") and agitatedly wandered into traffic, shouting "I made them take it!" to no one in particular. By the plural pronoun, he meant the reading public.

The voices were alternating like a well-trained, humorous, vividly sensitive orchestra. No wonder one of Ulysses' most nature modes is the musical.

Kenner starts to veer a bit here and there but ultimately the analysis is very useful, placidly engaging, and confidently articulate. A good place to go for fans who aren't necessarily aching to become full-fleged Joyceans.


Anybody out there in Goodreads-land have any insights or book or paper recommendations, PLEASE feel free to lay them on me. I'm researching on my own, of course, but would love a nudge in one interesting direction or another.

[Quentin Ferrari · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty huge recommend for Joyce fans who want to dip their toe in Joyce scholarship. Also a fun read, since Kenner writes with such skill and humour. The whole book is about objectivity (or its lack) in Joyce, barring the Wake, and how Ulysses tries to liberate art from fact. The argument is fun, impressive, and helpful. I particularly liked the notion that Ulysses has two dueling narrators. It gives Kenner an excuse to do some great close readings of every chapter in Ulysses, as well as much of Dubliners and Portrait. Really helpful for intermediates of Joyce like myself. I feel like I finally have entry points into Eumaeus, Calypso, Penelope, Hades, and Circe. Joyce's Voices is cheap too, at least for scholarship.

[GD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent enough literary non-fic about Joyce's Ulysses. One question that will almost certainly never be answered for as long as people are studying James Joyce is how much of what we think he did did he actually do and how much of it is something we made up and then attributed to him? Most of this book I thought was great but sometimes it seemed to be stretching just a little bit.

Oh one weird thing, I've read the commentary books with the Greek titles so much that I forgot that the first published version of Ulysses didn't actually have those title names. His original draft did, but he took them out later because, as the author of this book posits, he wanted people to read into it. Haha.

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

some solid insights. more of a pamphlet than a book. i stupidly forget where i found this in the citations, but that summary was pretty much as good as reading the full 120 pages. quick, though, so little lost.

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a pleasure, Mr. Kenner.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kenner studies variants of realism via Joyce, starting with the standard Flaubertian model and then peering into Dubliners and Ulysses which, compared with Sterne's and Swift's ironic social mileus, suggest that the most ultimate form of realism is voice-oriented, making the Joycean parody its natural end. This gives way both to some analysis of the Odyssey (namely its apparently spectator-oriented form of narrator, and the role of the Muse as a modifying element); and also to a number of incidental readings on scenes within Joyce' work. Sometimes, as you seem to get with this guy, Kenner's Poundian eagerness to read these arcane literary metaphysics into passages is a bit too strident, but his attention to detail and the author's intentions are amazing

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, but crackling with insight on every page. I particularly appreciate that Kenner performs the rare (and seemingly almost critically impossible) feat of tackling the Homeric apparatus without falling into the twin traps of either discounting it entirely or merely offering a stultifying concordance of allusions and parallels. The argument here is wide-ranging, but with moments of incisive and inventive close reading. Kenner's prose is really at its best here, too; his style has a kind of flair and verve that's fully appropriate for writing on Joyce. A must-read for casual readers and serious scholars of Ulysses alike!

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this little book in one sitting for research, and it did not disappoint. I was even surprised how long it took for me to get to this gem in Joyce criticism. The prose is clear, and passages are selected throughout Joyce's oeuvre. Included here is the definition of the "Uncle Charles Principle".

Granted, the analyses carry the flavor 70s criticism, and many insights are outdated today anyhow. But still, one can expect to find interesting parallels between various Joyce texts.

[Farzan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started really well, but soon found its way into academic sophistry. Apparently, we're meant to be amazed that Joyce used words to bring his characters into life, as opposed to other authors who use . . bricks? Or we're just supposed to pretend as if the writer hasn't spun the yarn for an additional forty pages, delineating the same principle he explained deftly in chapter 2, approached from a different angle.

In all fairness, the first two chapters are well-written and useful, especially chapter 2 "The Uncle Charles Principle", which I wish I had read before tackling Ulysses, does a brilliant job of explaining the delicate minutiae in Joyce's fiction. I highly recommend reading the first two chapters, but the rest is, I'm afraid, hoax.

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugh Kenner conoce a Joyce y a su generación como pocos, ensayista genial (aunque aquí no llega a la maravilla que es The Pound Era) peroes un texto muy útil para entender ciertas técnicas y aspectos cruciales de la obra de Joyce,la forma en la que la gramática se acopla a sus personajes, la manera que tieen de ir delimitando el mundo, su concepto original de la objetividad, etc. Libro útil para estudiar la obra del irlandés, pero muy específico (pienso que si no has leído casi todo Joyce habrá partes que te pierdes pues sigue el hilo de los argumentos dandolo por sabido).

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If the past seems other, it is because we are deceived by costume"

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous. Despite its brevity maybe the most USEFUL mook on Joyce I've yet read.

[Daisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

turned out to be completely irrelevant to my diss but hey i had fun x

[Vietzsche · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure Canon. 从一开始，「尤利西斯」就埋下了缪斯复仇的种子。

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have ever read Joyce's Ulysses, or even looked at a few sample pages in succession, you've asked something along the lines of "why on earth does this guy write the way he does?" Well, here's Kenner's response to that insistent question. He goes section by section through the novel, with useful stops along the way to look at Joyce's other works, showing how the sections sort of grow out of one another. By the time he's finished, you're convinced that there's something impressive and psychologically profound about the whole thing, in addition to being impressed, as always, by Kenner's eagle eye for minutia and deft handling of complex matter.
Not Kenner's best, but still in a class above most scholarship.

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this little, thin, paperback at the card table of a street vendor in Greenwich Village, 30 years ago, while walking with a lovely woman named Joyce. Felt it was syncronic, or synchronisitous. It was. I'd just finished reading Ulysses, which I wrote about somewhere, I hope it's on Goodreads; anyway I started reading it, [U.], during the Perfect Storm, very dramatic. This Hugh Kenner book is terrific, very enlightening, for me; of course I've since learned something of the infinite spectrum of Joycean Critical Literature.

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is famous for Kenner's formulation of the "Uncle Charles Principle" as a key element of James Joyce's writing style. He argues that in many parts of Joyce's work, word choices are altered with calculation to focalize a character's perspective, while not necessarily changing the style or deviating into another aspect of free indirect discourse. This is a great contribution to narrative theory.

[david · Rating 4 out of 5]

kenner sets out to answer a singular question and achieves his feat. notice that one sentence of kenner's can turn into a pure onslaught of inquiry. that speaks to his wherewithal as commentator; he should be praise more highly than he is.

[David Markwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kenner examines the narrative structures Joyce uses in his Ulysses. A quick read and a nice bit of Joyce scholarship. While this book did not blow me away or change the way I thought about Ulysses it certainly helped illuminate certain aspects of the text.

[Hater Shepard · Rating 5 out of 5]

come on, it's so short and smart as a whip

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I know of no other piece of literary criticism that packs more bang for the buck. A must read for anyone interested in Joyce & Ulysses.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very helpful insights into Joyce. I especially like the chapter on the Uncle Charles Principle.

[Ben Doeh]

Clear and spectacularly insightful criticism. Kenner's common sense enables the reader to understand Joyce's innovation and renovation of narrative techniques.

[Gravitas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very insightful book that will surely help anyone who is reading or wanted to read James Joyce's work. The book clearly explains the way how Joyce and authors like Joyce write their fictional work.

[NLK]

Some, in my opinion, blatantly untrue characterizations of Exiles and Finnegans Wake, but it’s largely solid criticism of Dubliners/Portrait/Ulysses. The Uncle Charles Principle is the most essential essay here.