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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 modem 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...