Disembodied voices : non-narration in James Joyce's Ulysses
Date
1989
Authors
Niwa, Maureen Anne Sadie
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The focus of this thesis is on-Circe, the fifteenth episode of Joyce's Ulysses. because of its typographical and narrative pretense to~ a drama. Because it is easily misrepresented by critical discussions based on its differences from the rest of the narrative, my purpose is to establish the technical similarities that Circe shares with the surrounding narrative of lilysses in order to show how it is not only a scenic, but a technical continuum of Ulysses. This consideration provides Circe with a comparative, framework with the preceding episodes, and reforms the treatment it receives as narrative. My thesis is that by analysing the ways in which Circe dramatises the narrative techniques in the preceding episodes, we can interpret Circe as a logical and narrative continuum of Ulysses. as opposed to an embedded parenthetical episode that is separable and unintelligible.
Dual-narrator theories fail to accommodate non-narrated passages of Joyce's text, Circe in particular, because they attribute everything that cannot be said to be spoken by a character to a "second-narrator," who is characterised as schizophrenic, ironic, insolent, playful. By attributing voices in Joyce's text that escape naming to a second narrator, dual-narrator theorists personify or humanize the effect that Joyce creates with non-narrated voices, thus effacing the ambiguity that thematically informs his text. The danger of the dual-narrator theory is that although it is metaphorically correct, it is technically misleading.
Even in his early narratives, Joyce does not create or characterise two different speakers. He creates a type of narrative which technically offers more than one way of reading the same words by removing the speaker's identity through non-narration. Figuralised speech and compositional monologue close the distance, or verbal difference, between the voices of what may be ideally separated as those belonging to the narrator and character. Imitation, impersonation, and ventriloquism are all words that describe what verbally occurs when these two voices become indistinguishable. Through verbal impersonation, Joyce demonstrates the ability of different forms of narrative speech to exchange functions: third-person narration is used to represent subjectivity, and the interior monologue form is used to narrate. Joyce adapts the form of narrative that either enacts the way a character structures experience (figuralised speech), or the way in which a character would structure the telling of that experience (compositional monologue).
With figuralised speech, Joyce exploits the ability of the narrative proper to dramatise subjectivity by rendering characters' speech and third-person narration as two forms of one style of speech. This technique is essential in demonstrating how narrative voice can be shared, that is, how it can belong to more than one speaking source at the same moment in the narrative. Compositional monologue is a style of interior monologue that describes the representation of a character's consciousness in the act of composing or "narrating" fictive scenes to itself. Through compositional monolgoue, we experience a transparency of voice in which the character assumes or "performs" many voices in his consciousness which cannot be said to be his own. Both figuralised speech and compositional monologue constitute strategies of narration that are dramatised in Circe. They support Circe as a technical continuum of the narrative within the context of Ulysses--a continuum, as mentioned, that dual-narrator theorists see as lacking due to absence of a narrator. Non-narration in Ulysses disembodies voice to the extent that we cannot name it: we can share subjectivity without attributing it. Ulysses demonstrates a sensitivity equal to portraying the objectivity of a narrative situation, and the character's subjective experience of it by removing the narrator as a speaker, and transforming narration into a reflection of voice. This makes the verbal quality of the narrative analogous to dramatic scripts in allowing more than one way to perform voice. In a performance of voice, the question "Who speaks?" is replaced by the question of what kind of voice is doing the speaking, and what kind of interpretation the speaking voice is making.