Voices in the Text

Joyce employs a wide variety of voices in Ulysses, so it helps to have a basic understanding of a few of the techniques and stylistic innovations that appear in the text.  I’ll offer deeper and more specific explanations in the episode guides that are immediately relevant to these voices, but this page offers a few of the big ideas.

Inner Monologue/Stream of Consciousness

Inner monologue represents a character’s thoughts in present tense and in first person.

The final six pages of A Portrait take the form of Stephen’s personal journal, thereby granting access to his thoughts (although filtered and edited).  From the outset of Ulysses, Joyce strips away even that thin veneer, allowing the reader unfettered access to Stephen’s inner monologue (and, later, to that of Mr. Bloom, Molly Bloom, and others).  

The text will quickly shift between inner monologue and narration or dialogue, posing a challenge for readers until they get the hang of it.  Here, in an example from the “Nestor” episode, I have italicized Stephen’s inner monologue and bolded narration (Joyce, of course, will do us no such favors):

It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.  Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out in the the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy.  Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled,  with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. (U 2.67-74)

And here, another example, this time of Mr. Bloom’s inner monologue spliced with narration. Again, I have italicized inner monologue and bolded narration:

He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk: as if that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks. Women will pay a lot of heed, I don’t think. His fingers drew forth the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No. (U 5.76-81)

The jumps between 3rd person narration and inner monologue (not to mention the absence of quotation marks to make explicit the separation of dialogue from interior thought!) surely contribute to the challenge of reading this book.  However, Joyce trains us in how to read this novel as we go, and you’ll get the hang of it.

The Uncle Charles Principle

The style of the narration in Joyce’s fiction is like a chameleon, shifting in tone, diction, and syntax to fit the most prominent and present character at that moment in the book.  Hugh Kenner introduced the notion that “the narrative idiom need not be the narrator’s” (Voices 18).  

In an ironic reference to Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of Joyce’s prose in A Portrait, Kenner coined the term “the Uncle Charles Principle” to describe Joyce’s kaleidoscopic changing of styles.  At the beginning of Book II in Portrait, the novel reads: “Every morning, therefore, Uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse” (Portrait 53).  Lewis scoffed, saying “people repair to places in works of fiction of the humblest order” (qtd. in Voices 17).  Lewis did not understand that “repair” is Uncle Charles’s word, not Joyce’s. The narrative style shifts to fit the language of the focalized character. Consider the way the narrator in Portrait progresses from language of a “moocow coming down along the road” (Portrait 3) which seems appropriate for toddler Stephen, to the narrator’s language of “he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines” (Portrait 216) more apt to adolescent Stephen.

Therefore, in pursuit of the most accurate realism possible, Joyce was determined to use the language and patterns of speech most accurate to his characters without regard for whether those words are infantile, vulgar, stodgy, or ludicrous. As Kenner explains, “The Uncle Charles Principle entails writing about someone much as that someone would choose to be written about” (Voices 21). In other words, the narration assumes the flavor of the character’s most natural mode of language.

In this way, we can learn about Joyce’s characters by attending to the way in which the narrator describes the movements and worldly surroundings of a character.  For Joyce, then, narrative style serves as an instrument of characterization rather than a fixed element of the author’s prose.

The Arranger

The scholars Hugh Kenner and David Hayman provide readers of Ulysses with a useful way of identifying and discussing the voice, distinct from the primary narrator, that increasingly dominates the text from the “Wandering Rocks” episode on.  This voice, identified by Hayman as “the Arranger,” expresses a reader-like awareness of every word in the book and an omniscient attention to every character’s whereabouts at all times.  Indeed, the Arranger might be most simply described as the witty and omniscient mind of the book itself, knowing what words it uses where (so that it can repeat and riff off those words elsewhere in meaningful ways), what each character is doing when, and what is the essence of each moment.  Therefore, the voice of the Arranger capitalizes on the hyper-attention to detail paid by Joyce himself while displaying a mischievousness with language, “irreverently but consistently distort[ing] the rhythm of the narrative voice” (Hayman 98).

Hayman calls this narrative voice the Arranger because Joyce uses the phrase “retrospective arrangement” seven times throughout the text of Ulysses, signaling the significance of this idea to the understanding of the way the book works.  In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, he offers the most striking, hand-waving use of this phrase: “in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!)” (U 14.1044-45).  I read the parenthetical, “hey, presto!”, as a note of announcement (look here! I did it!), and the “mirror within a mirror” conveys the notion that the device of the Arranger serves as a mirror that can look back on the novel, which itself is a mirror into the essence of human life, thought, and feeling…hence, a mirror within a mirror.

Most scholars ascribe the headlines in the “Aeolus” episode as the Arranger’s initial mischievous interference in the text. As we reach the second half of the novel, though, the Arranger increasingly emerges as a prominent force in shaping the experience of the text, just as the styles of these episodes become more sophisticated. Hayman states, “I use the term ‘arranger’ to designate a figure or a presence that can be identified neither with the author nor with his narrators, but that exercises an increasing degree of overt control over increasingly challenging materials” (Hayman 84). Hugh Kenner makes clear the distinction between the novel’s more traditional narrator and the Arranger: “he exists side by side with a colourless primary narrator who sees to the thousand little bits of novelistic housekeeping no one is meant to notice: the cames and wents, saids and askeds, stoods and sats, without which nothing could get done at all.  Lounging in this drudge’s shadow, the Arranger may now and then show his hand” (Ulysses 67).

From Kenner, I love imagining the narrator as a diligent, responsible, and buttoned up administrator; he sits at a desk and ensures everything is moving along nicely.  Meanwhile, the brilliant, impish Arranger loafs on the couch, popping up and nudging aside his colleague to add something eccentric to the telling of the story of June 16th, 1904.

In the second half of the novel, though, the Arranger’s influence over the narrative style becomes dominant, and we as readers have to work ever harder to grasp what is actually happening in terms of plot. In “Wandering Rocks,” the Arranger is interested in monitoring the minute-by-minute whereabouts of three dozen characters all across Dublin simultaneously, in “Sirens” he is interested in using language to represent music, in “Cyclops” he is using a style of "gigantism” to inflate the importance of an afternoon in the pub, in “Oxen” he imitates 32 historical prose styles, “Ithaca” is written as a catechism, and so on. In these ways, the innovations of the Arranger are what make Ulysses truly revolutionary

Free Indirect Discourse

A technique whereby the narrator directly presents a character’s consciousness in that character’s natural idiom while retaining the third person perspective.  Free indirect discourse allows privileged access to a character’s thoughts and feelings in that character’s own language. Suiting Joyce’s interest in refining the artist himself out of existence within his work, free indirect discourse allows for the narrator to characterize and describe interiority without drawing attention to the artifice of “he thoughts” and “she noticeds.” 

Works Cited

Hayman, David. Ulysses: the Mechanics of Meaning. University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

        --- Joyce’s Voices. University of California Press, 1978.