Joyce's Voices by Hugh Kenner

Author:Hugh Kenner [Kenner, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, European, General, Literary Criticism, Joyce; James, Ireland, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, History
ISBN: 9781564784285
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2007-01-15T07:12:14+00:00

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and pinning down those hollow but indisputable resemblances, beneath which it does us no good whatever to enquire. A Pyrrhonist description of The Divine Comedy would note its vast inventory of interlocking similarities, most evidently its interlocking sounds, and observe that whatever else Dante's poem may be it is certainly a vast adduction of words that come in threes: the Italian dictionary, so to speak, reorganized to display resources of triple rhyme.

This parody of a Structuralist description unhitches what is discoverable in the poem from all history that came before the poem, including the history of Trinitarian theology that conferred such virtue upon threes. It is by removing history, confining yourself to the present instant--as to 16 June 1904--that you produce odd effects of that order. When Gulliver describes English lawcourts to the Houyhnhnms, and the Houyhnhnms decide on the evidence he has presented that the courts exist to persecute the unfortunate, there is no way to answer them without evoking history: explaining what the law was intended for and asserting that its intention does persist though things go wrong in practice. But Swift is already playing the Pyrrhonist game; he contrives that there is no way history can be evoked, principally because Gulliver knows none. So the Houyhnhnms cannot be answered. Similarly there is no way to confer meaning on Dante's threes except by invoking an intellectual history which you must produce from your sleeve because the poem (here, now) cannot contain it. And Ulysses teems with analogies of theme and contour on which likewise there is no way to confer meaning except by adducing what Ulysses cannot contain: the intellectual past which is not in the mind of anyone in the book.

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