Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce: A Reassessment

In the mid-1950s James Joyce was still a figure that intimidated most academics. The Dublin about which he wrote obsessively seemed as distant and foreign as Tolstoy's St. Petersburg. Dubliners had a gritty edge that directly challenged post-World War II optimism. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made stylistic leaps and presented thematic challenges that disrupted the normal course of reading. Ulysses was a book that far more scholars owned than read. And neither New Criticism nor old Historicism seemed suited to illuminate what, if anything, was going on in Finnegans Wake. All that changed with the publication of Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce. With energy, humor, and erudition, Kenner offered incisive views of each of Joyce's works, and made a convincing argument that they could not only be read but enjoyed by a wide range of individuals. Kenner's writing irrevocably changed the way we read the canon of James Joyce. Nonetheless, it seems appropriate, nearly fifty years after the book's appearance, to inquire into its continuing critical worth.

When I asked the three young critics whose essays follow this brief introduction to write about Dublin's Joyce, I do not think that I consciously had any specific model in mind, and I did not give them a template for their critiques. Of course, subconsciously I expected them to produce exactly the sort of essay that I would have written--and, in fact, did write ten years ago--confirming all of my views and vindicating all of my beliefs. Thank God, none of them did that.

Instead they have offered, in voices uniquely their own, sharp analyses and rigorous reappraisals. Readers already aware of their work will hardly be surprised. David Gardiner, Lauren Onkey, and Joseph Kelly are excellent representatives of a well read, articulate, and insightful generation just now beginning to make its mark on critical studies. They are full of exactly the sort of self-confidence that young scholars need, especially when confronting the critical heritage of Joyce studies. I have read with interest and profit their evaluations of Kenner's impact. And if I come away not agreeing with everything that [End Page 134] they say, I certainly do not agree with everything that Kenner opines. The consistent thread in all of their studies is the sense of déjà vu that Kenner's work produces, and, if for no other reason than to remind us of our intellectual antecedents, it is a good policy to revisit periodically such criticism.

Of course, these young critics do more than that. David Gardiner's essay presents a thoughtful and enthusiastic recapitulation of the structure of Dublin's Joyce. In language that celebrates Kenner's impact on Joyce criticism, Gardiner gives a good overview of Dublin's Joyce. It respectfully acknowledges the debt that current readers owe to Kenner's early work, and at the same time sets the book in critical perspective.

Lauren Onkey's assessment takes a more edgy tone. With an eye toward current trends in critical thinking, she raises useful questions about the interpretive limitations that contemporary readers, unaccustomed to Kenner's style and unsympathetic to his epistemology, will find in Dublin's Joyce. That is not to say that Onkey simply dismisses Kenner's early work, for she gives a balanced sense of its continuing value within the historical perspective that she assumes.

Joseph Kelly begins with an account of first meeting Kenner, and then goes on to show how the personal and the public always coalesce. Using an allusion to Chapman's Homer as a subtle evocation of Keats's exuberance, Kelly nicely captures the enthusiasm that Kenner can evoke, but he does more than simply venerate an older critic. With a deft understanding of how context always informs comprehension, Kelly underscores the significant impact that Kenner's writing had and still has upon Catholic readers of Joyce