Norris, Margot: pg 485

“Hearing poorly, [Hugh] Kenner heard acutely in a variety of registers simultaneously. He heard unspoken sounds that had no substance, that were there but not there, and he heard sounds as material and solid as a hard substance. To convey what he heard, Kenner composed his own poetic language, a singular style of critical writing that lodges with particular grace in our ears. He figures the “little cloud of idioms” surrounding a narrator’s words in free indirect discourse as specks of tiny insects—seemingly insignificant and yet as insistent as gnats: “A word he need not even utter is there like a gnat in the air beside him, for us to perceive in the same field of attention in which we note how ‘scrupulously’ he brushes his hat” (JV, 17).
— “Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923–2003) The Voice and the Void: Hugh Kenner’s Joyce,” Modernism/modernity. Vol 12, Number 3, September 2005: 483-486.