Voices and Values in Joyce's Ulysses (review)

Voices and Values in Joyce's Ulysses by Weldon Thornton. Gainesville, et alia: University Presses of Florida, 2000. Pp. 238. $49.95.

Despite a somewhat misleading title, veteran Joycean Weldon Thornton's new book is a fairly traditional narrative study of the styles of Ulysses and Joyce's artistic designs in employing them. Joyce's work always has and still continues to invite widely varied critical approaches, which give his oeuvre plenty of room to breathe, withstand any analysis, and leave open the possibility of other readings. One of the hallmarks of Thornton's interrogation of Ulysses (and that is the best way to describe it), however, is an absolutist bent regarding the character of Joyce's perspective towards narrative. It seems that Thornton has thought long and deeply about Joyce's art, but his odd contention that Joyce's employment of narrative "styles" in Ulysses belies a moral imperative to educate his readership about the dangers of rhetoric appears to give Thornton license to browbeat the reader into accepting his conclusions. Some invective against classic texts on Joycean narrative by Steinberg, Lawrence, and Bernard Benstock adds to the already tendentious tone, and in reading this book, this reviewer felt as if he had wandered in on a heated argument fifteen years too late, long after most of the interlocutors had left the room.

The structure of the book, as would befit any traditional reading of narrative in Ulysses, is divided into two main parts devoted to Ulysses itself. In the introductory chapters, Thornton outlines his impressions of the historical development of the novel, contrasting the nineteenth-century adherence to realism with the modernist insistence on the impersonality and detachment of the author. The theme of this book arises out of Thornton's desire to locate the modern novel within the tradition of realist fiction (as the title of his previous book The Antimodernism of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will attest). More specifically, his aim is to explode the question of Joyce's experimentalism and in a way reclaim Joyce's identity as an artist rather than as another High Modernist reactionary against flabby Victorian prose. Thornton's basic point is that Joyce's alleged experiments with style are merely a foil for the underlying moral message of Ulysses; namely, that Joyce's shifting between voices serves to underscore moral themes:

Joyce's rejection of valuational and stylistic relativism—the second alternative—is a broader and more complex issue, and in a sense this entire book is devoted to it, since I am arguing that Joyce persistently makes value judgments about the various styles of Ulysses. But there is evidence of several kinds that Joyce is not a relativist. One is that Joyce's earlier works—Dubliners and A Portrait—clearly do involve values, including the ways that certain modes of language can paralyze us, and it seems plausible to see Ulysses as consistent with those human and aesthetic values, rather than having abandoned them. (39)

Thornton goes on to assert that among the clues that Joyce's intent is highly moralistic are Stephen Dedalus's artistic grasping for a coherent outlook, Bloom's concerns for the other characters he encounters during his day (not the least of whom is Stephen) and the general pillorying of hardened Irish stereotypes, provincial attitudes and nationalistic sentiment (exemplified by Mulligan, Deasy, and the Citizen, among others). Thornton elaborates in this portion from his discussion of Ulysses' latter half:

One recurrent theme of Joyce's work, from Dubliners and A Portrait through Ulysses, is his concern to reveal the dangers of various ideas, institutions, and mdoes of discourse that have the capacity to frustrate the potential of his fellow citizens. Joyce lived in a time when an increasing array of voices and media and modes of discourse—nationalistic, religious, commercial, journalistic—arose to assert a claim on people's lives. He subsumed some of these modes and voices into his works in...