Uncle Charles Repairs to the A&P: Changes in Voice in the Recent American Short Story

That the craft and effect of the mainstream American short story evolved rapidly during the latter half of the 20^th century is beyond dispute. Still problematic, however, are the theoretical underpinnings of widespread shifts in narrative technique, especially as they involve vision and voice. Efforts to theorize the short story have focused overwhelmingly on a turn from omniscient narration and a necessary sense of unity in the story to "the familiarity of an individual point of view" (Miller 35) and "fragmentation as an accurate model of the world" (Ferguson 191). Equally salient to the actual narrative discourse of the contemporary short story, however, may be the relative disappearance of the technique known as the Uncle Charles Principle. By pinpointing both the waning of this so-called principle and the strategy that may be taking its place, we not only limn an aspect of literary evolution, but also locate its significance in the place occupied by fiction in a world populated and counterbalanced by other forms of narrative to which story audiences are necessarily attuned.

Any stylistic shift observable over a broad spectrum of writers and a certain period of time raises the question of what contemporaneous writers and readers are looking to short fiction to accomplish. Narrative techniques and strategies, after all, arise not out of fashion but out of narrative intent. It follows that an empirical examination of stylistic change over time can illuminate an otherwise ineluctable change in narrative goals. It was with this latter premise that undergraduate students in a recent Trinity College course in "Contemporary Short Story" were asked to focus on tense and grammatical person, two commonly cited integers of style, in mainstream stories published from 1945–1965 and from 1981–2000. Surprisingly, the students found little difference across time in either of these techniques. What they did find was a vanished Uncle Charles Principle, its place taken by what was christened the "A&P Principle." From this anecdotal study we can begin to explore the larger implications of a change that speaks to and draws on more dramatized forms of story and suggests how audiences and readers form a different sense of narrative meaning from a different principle of narrative voice.

Discovering Uncle Charles

The Uncle Charles Principle, or UCP, was named by Hugh Kenner after a technique observed in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the third-person narration, as the character of Uncle Charles comes on stage, drifts toward Charles's idiom in lines such as, "Every morning, therefore, Uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse." Kenner writes: "If Charles spoke at all about his excursions to what he calls the outhouse, he would speak of 'repairing' there. Not that he does so speak, in our hearing. Rather a speck of his characterizing vocabulary attends our sense of him. A word he need not even utter is there like a gnat in the air . . . the normally neutral vocabulary pervaded by a little cloud of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative" (17).

Kenner himself perceived the UCP as uniquely Joycean. His other example, from "The Dead"––"Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet" (Joyce 183)––relies for its argument on Joyce's own exactitude of language. Joyce, according to Kenner, would never use "literally" when he meant "figuratively." The adverb belongs in Lily's expressive toolbox, as does the later line "It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also" (Joyce 183).

At first glance, Kenner's distinction seems to fall within the category labeled by his contemporary Gérard Genette as "internal focalization" (189). With the UCP, Kenner writes, "the narrative idiom need not be the narrator's" (18); similarly, Genette stresses that, in internally focalized narrative, "the narrator almost always 'knows' more than the hero . . . and therefore for the narrator focalization through the hero is a restriction of field" (194). In practice, however, the UCP goes further than Kenner's definition states. Its central concern is fleeting "specks...