Beyond the Uncle Charles Principle

Abstract

Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "The Dead" begins with someone else's story. 1 Lily, the maid, is not only "literally run off her feet," but, as every Joyce student knows, somehow her "literally" has slipped past more exacting, educated censors, subtly putting her own harried, overworked, ungrammatical self front and center (D 175). Hugh Kenner's "Uncle Charles Principle" suggests that Joyce's rhetoric is something machinic, "in such delicate equilibrium, like the components of a sensitive piece of apparatus, that they detect the gravitational field of the nearest person." 2 Thus, just as Simon and his moocow give way to another, larger story, so does Lily's agitated introduction in "The Dead" merge into another voice, under the "gravitational field" of another presence, this one less harried, more chatty, partial not to Lily but to the employers running her ragged. As Margot Norris points out, this voice has turned into a cool warning targeted back at Lily herself: "But the only thing [the sisters] would not stand was back answers" (D 176). 3 One of the most familiar elements of Joyce studies, Kenner's Principle offers a means of describing this dynamic in Joyce's prose; it is what he calls "great economy" and an "iridescent" way to delineate character (15). If "The Dead" engages great pain, beauty, conflict, and critique, all under the aspect of empirical, secure, late-Victorian narration, then the critical instigator of this double structuring, of this hiding in plain sight, is the Uncle Charles Principle. Through a series of new close readings, and then an analysis of these readings alongside Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory of projective identification, 4 we can see how the Principle moves far beyond the aesthetic realm, grounding terms such as "equilibrium" and "sensitive piece of apparatus" into the rhetorical and political negotiations of the text at hand-negotiations Joyce forces us to participate in, whether we like it or not.