No More Learning

Shoot! '.
Similarly, Ri~hard in the play Exiles has a shameful desire to give hIS WIfe to hIS f! lend Robert: '. . . In the very core of my ignoble h~art I longed to be betray~d by you and her-in the dark, in the mght-secretly, meanly. ' craftlly. By you, my best friend, and by her. r lon~ed for that passIOnately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever m love and m lust, to be . . . ' This yielding urge, shared by ~hree of Joyce's characters, ~nd even. given mythical status (it is
! mposed ~~Shakespeare, for Instance) m Ulysses, is an aspect ofthe womanly m the Joyce man, the yin that qualifies the yang. Bloom undergoes many metamorphoses in Mabbot Street and perhaps the
least spectacular of these is his change of sex. '
. As for the bigger, and more creative, theme of the one world of hvmg ~n. ddead, th! S. ~aybe thought ofas having its roots in Joyce's
CathohclSm: the stnvmg hvmg are militant and the beatified dead trIUmphant, but they are members of one Church. Dead and alive meet naturally in the phantasmagoria of the brothel scene' in the deeper dream of Finnegans Wake the unity of human hist~ry de- pends on the slmultaneous eXIstence of all its periods. But, in the mterests of economy, one man and one woman must play many rarts. The table c~lled, Joy~eanly, 'Who :s Who When Everybody IS Somebody Else III Adalme Glasheen s A Census of Finnegans Wake, makes EarwIcker play God the Father, Adam the sinner,
A. dam the father,. Abraham, Isaac, Noah, Buddha, Mohammed,
Fmn MacCool, TIm Fmnegan, King Leary and some twenty-odd
othe. r roles, and Earwicker's family isquick to find appropriate sup-
portmg parts. ThIS IS the Occam's Razor of the mature artist. At the
close of 'The Dead' Gabriel feels his own identity fading out and his
soul s:,"oomng as the sohd world dissolves: it is dissolving, prolepti-
cally, mto the huge empyrean ofFinnegans Wake; the seeds are being sown.
The importance of Dubliners in the entire Joyce canon cannot be exaggerated. There may seem to be little remarkable in the tech- nique nowadays, but this is because Joyce himself, through his fol- lowers as well as m the book, has habituated us to it: we take for
45
? ? ? ? The Stones
A Paralysed City
'And everything went on beautifully until J~hnny came in s. ight ~fKi? g Billy's statue: and whether he fell in love WIth the horse Kmg BIlly SIts on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue. Round and round he went . . . '
The exactly caught speech of these harnessed citizens is the true
voice of paralysis. Realising how essential its tones are to Joyce's art, we begin to understand his need for finding action outside, for his garrulous pub-crawlers will not generate it. Action has to come from an exterior myth, like that of the Odyssey, or a mcular theory of history which suggests, even if it does not fulfil, an image of pur-
posive movement.
Finally, Dubliners is important because It prOVIdes Ulysses WIth a ready-made cast of extras. We shall meet them all again or, if they are dead, hear about them-Bartell D'Arcy, Mr Power, Martin Cunningham, Hynes, Mrs Sinico and the rest. I~ we have not y~t met Mr Bloom, it is because, though he was mtended for thIS gallery, he had to be lifted out to be groomed for greater things. And if we have not yet met Stephen Declalus and hIS umversity cromes, it is because they had already been set down in a novel of their own, along with a roaring father and a sweet doomed mother.
granted the bareness of the prose, the fact that originality may well
consist in taking away as much as in adding. Joyce's later work is, in
fact, an art of adding, of building on to a simple enough structure incrustations of deeper and deeper richness: Finnegans Wake repre- sents the possible limit of loading statements with layers of signifi- cance. In Dubliners his task was different. He had to deromantlClse fictional prose, stripping off the coloured veneers that had passed for poetic brilliance in the heyday of the late Victorian novel. To write like Meredith or Hardy or Moore (or anybody else, for that matter) was not difficult for the author who was to create the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode in Ulysses. He naturally tended to richness, but richness was not wanted in this study of a drab modern city which should flash out its epiphanies from the commonplace. Where cliche occurs, cliche is intended, for most of the inhabitants of the city live in cliches. Where a stale bit of romanticism is used-as in 'Two Gallants': 'His harp, too, heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master's hands'-that also is in keeping, underlining the poverty of the Irish dream of the past. As for the management of humour, as in 'Grace' and 'Clay', this is as deadpan as anything in the con- temporary American tradition and a world away from the whimsy and heavy-footed japing of what passed for comedy in Joyce's youth. But the miraculous ear for verbal nuance is seen best in the dialogue.
Joyce's books are about human society, and most s~cial speec~ is 'phatic', to use Malinowski's useful term. It conc~rnsJtself. les~ WIth conveying information, intention or need than WIth estabhshmg or maintaining contact-mere comfortable noise in the dark. Irish town speech is the most phatic of the entire English-speaking world: it is all colour, rhythm and gesture. It is the very vOIce of charmmg apathy and shiftlessness, a deadly Siren trap. for the author who IS concerned with strong plot and dramatIc actIOn, for the creatIOn of Irish characters within the structure ofa plot must either lead to the destruction of the plot or the falsifying of those who must enact it. When we see Juno and the Paycock we feel somehow let down when action occurs: the play stands or falls on what the characters say, and what they say does not take us towards a final curtain. Jaxer and the Paycock, like Finnegans Wake itself, are destined to go round and round in a circle, lamenting the 'chassis' of the world but never doing anything about it, asking 'What is the stars? ' but never trou~- ling to find out. And so with Joyce's Dublinors, whose totem IS
Johnny the horse in Gabriel Conroy's story:
. . .
? ? ? ? ? ? 4: Martyr and Maze-maker
JOYCE'S FIRST ATTEMPT AT FORGING A PIECE OF IMAGINATIVE
prose out of his own artistic genesis belongs, apparently, to 1904,
Bloomsyear, when the genesis was still going on. The Dublin intel- lectuals Eglinton and Ryan were bringing out a magazine called, after the Irish earth-goddess, Dalla. Joyce wrote a story about him- self-the renegade Catholic discovering his creative soul through sin, then striding forward to change the world-in which the technique of the Symbolists was charged with the spirit of Ibsen. Stanislaus Joyce suggested 'A Portrait of the Artist' as a title; under this name it was submitted to Dalla and promptly rejected. Still, nothing was lost. Indeed, writers are sometimes quietly relieved about rejections: they will often have second thoughts as soon as the package has slid into the post-box, seeing in their subject-matter a bigger potential than was at first apparent: many a big book has started as something for a magazine. Joyce was quick to observe that his theme deserved to be developed on the scale of a full-length novel, and so he con- ceived aBilduIlgsromall ofsome three hundred thousand words. Thus Stephen Hero was born. The writing of it seems to have proceeded,
first in Dublin, then in Trieste, pari passu with the sketches for Dublillers, but Joyce was never to publish Stephen Hero. Most of the completed manuscript was apparently burnt-perhaps in a mood of dejection-but nearly four hundred pages survived, to be pub- lished posthumously as Stephen Hero: Part o f the first draft o f 'A Portrait ~fthe Artist as a Young Man'.
That is how we read this long fragment-as a groping towards a masterpiece. We can see why Joyce abandoned his original scheme: it had too little shape to it, there was too much concern with record-
ing life warm, as it was lived. The vitality of Stephen Hero derives mainly from its passionate egoism, the need to set down -as in a journal- everything that happens as soon as it happens, for every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
48
Joyce always wants the whole of something. His inability to en- compass, in Stephen Hero, the whole of a growing life, together with what that life feeds on, teaches him to be content with smaller wholes-the whole of a day in Ulysses and the whole of a night in Finnegans Wake. In every major artist there seems to be a conflict between the urge to swallow everything and the desire to select and shape. Joyce must have seen the dangers implicit in the writing of Stephen Hero more clearly because of his solution of the problem of Dubliners. It was not enough to gather a bunch of casual epiphanies and impose unity on them through the fact of mere common citizen- ship: Joyce arranged his stories cunningly, in a sort of genetic pattern, beginning with childhood, moving on to adolescence, adult- hood, public life, and modulating to the Church through mother- hood; finally, all the living and the dead, the young, the old, the frail forts they build against time and corruption, are wrapped to- gether under the metaphysical snow. For his autobiographical novel he conceived a cognate design but was bolder in his drawing on the resources of symbolism.
The growth of the embryo and the growth of the soul mirrored each other in Joyce's personal symbolism. In the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode in Ulysses, a history of English literature-which is a good enough record of the spiritual history of a nation-is used to sym- bolise embryonic growth; in A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, embryonic growth is used to symbolise the spiritual history of a young poet. There was no element of the cold and considered choice of symbols here: Joyce, as a medical student, had become fascinated by embryology; the conception and birth of his daughter Lucia pointed the mystery; his idiosyncratic passion for Nora avoided the
filial but often-in his letters to her-expressed itself in the foetal.
The static and passive organism, which does not move of its own
volition but on which growth is miraculously imposed, is a very Joycean concept.
As SOOn as we meet the name of Joyce's hero we recognise that
symbolism is at work, but in Stephen Hero that particular symbolism sticks out like a sore thumb, especially in the implausible form 'Daedalus'. Joyce was quick to change this to 'Dedalus', which will just about stand in a naturalistic novel, but the name can only really radiate significance in a symbolic context. So the 'Stephen Dedalus' of A Portrait, which makes naturalism serve symbolism, can sound all its harmonics-the self-elected martyrdom of literature, the wren which, in the song, is the 'king of all birds' and is sacrificed on St
49
Marryr and Maze-maker
? ? ? ? The Stones
Martyr and Maze-maker
Stephen's Day, the stones which killed a saint and which built a labyrinth, the invention of flight-flight for exile and flight for poetic creation, the image of a bird which unites the pagan name and the Christian.
A Portrait oftlze Artist as a Young Man has many symbols, but the fundamental one is of a creature trying to escape from the bondage ofthe grosser elements, earth and water, and learning pain- fully how to fly. The first of the five big chapters into which the book is organised begins with a child's discrete impressions-the father's
fairy tale (the father comes first), the stumbling ofan infant's tongue
that is not yet a poet's, so that '0, the wild rose blossoms' becomes
'0, the green wothe botheth', the smells ofbed and father and mother, water. The embryonic soul is surrounded by a sort of amniotic fluid- urine and the sea (Stephen dances a hornpipe); as for the land, it has two colours-red and green. These are also heraldic or political colours: 'Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. ' But the embryo is better used to darkness, and so Stephen hides under the table. Dante (Mrs Riordan, his nurse) foretells his future.
. . . His mother said:
-0, Stephen will apologise. Dante said:
- 0 , if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes- Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes.
The eagle, not the wren, is still the king of all birds, but he knows who is threatening to usurp his eyrie and he counter-threatens the poet with blindness. .
This opening page is aswift miracle, the sort ofachievement which, in its immediacy and astonishing economy, ought to make the con- ventional novelist ('My first memories are of my father, a monocled hirsute man who told me stories') ashamed. Prose and subject-matter have become one and inseparable; it is the first big technical break- through of twentieth-century prose-writing and, inevitably, it looks
as ifanybody could have thought ofit. The roots of Ulysses are here- to every phase of the soul its 0"'11 special language; Finnegans Wake must seem, not a wilful aberration from sense, but a logical conclu- sion from that premise. If we recognise the rightness of 'When you
50
wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the
oilsheet. That had the queer smell', we must accept the inevitability of 'Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the. '
The section that follows takes Stephen to Clongowes Wood College. He is still a child, a creature ofresponses and not ofthought, and he tries to hide from the boisterous world. The eye-pecking eagle has become a football: 'the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light'. In the pale and chilly evening air he feels 'his body small and weak amid the throng of players'; his eyes are 'weak and watery'. He is surrounded by mud and cold but he IS also ill: a boy called Wells (appropriate name) shouldered him into the slimy water of the square ditch because he would not swap his snuff- box for a hacking chestnut. The soul is kept pushed down to its primal water and earth. Stephen hears one boy call another a 'suck' and at once he hears and sees water going down a lavatory basin. The colours of earth assert themselves: '. . . he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could. ' A class-mate, Fleming, has coloured the earth and clouds on the first page of the geography book-the earth green and the clouds maroon. We are back to Dante's brushes and-gross forces which will try to hold the emergent soul to a particular spot of earth - Irish politics. Parnell is in Stephen's mind as he shivers in the study hall:
He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother an~ Uncle Charles were on no side.
When he is taken off to the school infirmary and his soul almost resigns itself to the earth ('How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old churchyard! ') he has a watery vision, full of the noise of waves, with the cry 'Parnell! He is dead! ' coming up
. from the crowd by the sea's edge. Dante, in maroon and green velvet, walks proudly and silently past.
The red of holly and the green of ivy usher in the Christmas dinner scene with its terrible quarrel about politics and the Church and Mr Cas;y's heartbroken cry of 'Poor Parnell! My dead king! '
5'
? ? ? ? ? The Stones
Martyr and Maze-maker
Stephen, old enough now to sit at table with his elders, raises a
terror-stricken face to see his father's eyes full of tears. The soul is learning about the world-loyalty, treachery, the bitter divisions of faith. Other lessons come when he is back at school-the crimes of adolescence and just punishments for those crimes. But Stephen himself is punished for nothing: his glasses are broken and (the eagles are at work) he cannot see well enough to write. The prefect
of studies comes into the classroom, calls Stephen a lazy little schemer and-in one of the most excruciatingly painful passages in all modern literature-beats him with a pandybat:
A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry
that scalded his throat.
-Other hand! shouted the prefect of studies.
The peculiar objectivity of Joyce's method can be seen even in
isolated words. In the paragraph that follows, Stephen draws back
'his shaking arm in terror' and bursts out 'into a whine of pain'. 'Whine' is not usually for heroes, but it is the exact word that is wanted here. Similarly, the Stephen of Ulysses is as capable of sneering as of picking his nose. Let traditionally unheroic connota- tions go hang.
And now the earthbound spirit, pandybatted to shameful lowli- ness, finds the courage to attempt the air. Nasty Roche tells Stephen to complain to the rector; aJellow in second of grammar says: 'The senate and the Roman people declared that Dedalus had been wrongly punished. ' His name is a great name, like the names of great classical men in Richmal Magnall's ~estions; the eagles are on his side. He complains to the rector, who gives him a kind hearing and says that. it will not happen again, and walks away faster and faster towards the air. He tells his schoolfellows what he has done, and they fling their caps into the air, cheering. They hoist him up on their
locked hands and carry him. He is airborne and the leitmotif is
'air'. But, when he is alone again, the smell of evening in the air
reminds him of fields and the digging up of turnips. The sound of the cricket-balls being bumped in the distance is 'pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brim- ming bowl'. We are back to the amniotic fluid. The foetus has had a
52
premonition of release, but there is still a long time to go before
emancipation.
In the second chapter the prose becomes staider and more periodic,
suggesting the tortuous groping towards the soul's expression through school essays and reading in nineteenth-century hterature. Stephen, under the old trainer Mike Flynn, is learning to run if not to fly. But words are already suggesting to him that another element awaits his fledging:
Words which he did not understand he said over and ove~ to himself till he had learnt them by heart; and through them he had glimp? es of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part m the bfe of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to ~ake ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended.
Dreams out of The Count ofMonte Cristo nourish his pride. His first image of woman comes to him in the form of Mercedes, filling his blood with unrest. Meanwhile, the rum of hIS famlly IS under way, and he is not to go back to Clongowes. But, says his fathe:, 'there's a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap. We're not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) nor half dead. ' And so the furniture-caravans move the Dedalus chattels to Dubhn, and the subject-matter awaits the artist.
The key-words a;e 'unrest:, 'dissatisfaction' 'embittered silence', 'anger': the growmg soul IS
drarrged down :nore than ever before by its sense of circumambient squ~lor. We have the first vague glimpse of the 'temptress'-the young girl at the party, Emma Cleary, who a~pears only m her initials, a cipher at the head of the poem he wntes for her, under A. M. D. G. and over L. D. S.
Stephen goes to Belvedere College, so that he is still receiving a Jesuit education. The steady thickening of the pr~se-stylematches the 'scum of disgust' that coats hIS palate for lIfe; an Immense amount of detail is marked-as in the description of the Whitsuntide
play in which Stephen performs-but there is no emergence of any single image. The sheer multiplicity of dally hfe bewIldersthe soul, and the tortures of pubescence addition~lly hold back flIght. B~t one bird his schoolfriend Heron, has achIeved one kind of emanCl- pation-;he giggling world of bazaars and tennis-parties and cigar- ettes. Heron taunts Stephen with Emma's interest in him (,And what part does Stephen take, Mr Dedalus? And will Steph~n not sing, Mr Dedalus I') and, threatening playfully to stnke hIm WIth hIS cane, tries to make Stephen admit that he IS a sly dog. ThlS easy world of
53
? ? ? ? The Stones
Martyr and Maze-maker
banter and flirtation is one the young poet cannot enter. Heron is
superficial, philistine Ireland with little, though painful, claws. It
was Heron, Stephen remembers, who, over a year ago, had tried to
make him admit that Byron was no good-a bad man and an atheist, hence (in Irish logic) a poor poet. Then Stephen had not given in and he had been beaten with a cabbage stump as well as a cane; it was the beginning of his literary martyrdom. Now he glibly recites the Confiteor to the indulgent laughter of Heron and his friend Wallis. He cannot really hold anger or resentment for very long; like peel from a fruit, all strong emotion becomes swiftly and smoothly detached from him. He is preparing for the single com- mitment of art. Meanwhile, he has to act the part of an aged pedant in the school play. The curtain falls and, in a complex and intolerable seizure of emotions he cannot understand-pride (wounded), hope (fallen), desire (baffled)-he runs and runs, as once before down the corridor leading from the rector's study at Clongowes. But this time it is down a hill-'at breakneck speed'. At the bottom of the hill the smell of horse-piss and rotted straw calms his heart. He must prepare for a greater descent into further squalor. He is still not
ready for take-off.
Stephen goes with his father to Cork, Simon Dedalus's old city.
Some vague business connected with saving the family itself from a too precipitous descent takes them there. Stephen's pubescent tor- ments find images of shame. In the QIeen's College, where Mr Dedalus was once a medical student, he meets the word Foetus cut several times on a desk. ' T h e sudden legend startled his blood. ' Unbidden and derived from no known memory, a vision of the act ofinscription springs up before him:
A broadshouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jack knife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had tan boots.
Stephen is to know other, seemingly pointless, epiphanies of this
order. The present visionary shock frames a significant word. He is
still held down in the womb of matter, longing for birth but com- pelled to remain an embryo driven by an enclosing will to take further, more grotesque, shapes before release into the air. He recognises his formlessness, the sleep of pre-birth which is repre- sented to him as death. 'His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon. '
54
The shell is a specious one. The outer life of Stephen is one of
academic success, and he even wins thirty-three pounds as an exhibi- tion and essay prize. With the money he tries 'to build a br~akwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tide within him'. But he fails, recognises that he must succumb to sin, and lets the tide break. In the brothel district of Dublin he finds what he must have.
Can the soul descend any lower? The world that Joyce now de-
scribes is one of dull light, through which the soul thuds and
blunders, taking a kind of crass pleasure in its own degradation. Sin
follows sin, fumblings with whores are matched by a gross appetite
for greasy mutton stews. Matter has reasserted itself, but the clogged
soul has no desire to be free. Yet one exalted image prevails, though
hopelessly: Mercedes has appropriately changed to the Blessed
Vircrin an allomorph of the Ewig-weibliche, the eternal woman. o,.
I f ever his soul, reentering her dwelling shyly after the frenzy o f his bo~y's lust had spent itself, was turned towards her whose. emb~em IS the ? ,? rnmg star 'bright and musical, telling of. heaven and mfusmg peace, It was whe'n her names were murmured softly by lips whereon there still ling~red foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a lewd kiss.
As for the lips of the embryo artist himself, they seem to have for- feited the right of golden utterance. At the beginning of the book they stuttered ('0, the green wothe botheth'); now they have yielded to a pressure 'darker than the swoon of sin'. They cannot receive the Eucharist, not yet.
The soul can, of course, descend lower, for it can descend to the Pit. Now follows the incredible and most unjesuitical retreat, in which Father Arnall's sermons on hell are presented unedited; the uttei" limit of naturalism. Here is the final victory of nafUral elements which have taken on divine intensity and duration. There is no air now only stench and corruption and fire. Stephen's terror is so great that\t breeds hallucinations: faces watch and voices murmur:
_ We knew perfectly well of course that. althoug~ it was boun~ to come to the light he would find considerable dIfficulty 10 end~ayounng t? try to induce himself to trv to endeavour to ascertaIn the sptntual plempoten- tiaryand so we kne';'" of course perfectly well-
The verbal technique moves closer to Ulysses. The image of personal hen is almost a stage direction out of the brothel scene:
A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettlebunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and
55
? ? ? ? ? The Stones
Martyr and Maze-maker
The faint sour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation o f vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.
He walks towards the sea and observes the raw white bodies of his
old schoolfellows, foetuses that will never emerge to outer life,
floppi~g about in the water. But they at least recognise, evell in joke, the 'mild proud sovereignty' of the poet, and his name, which they call, 'seemed to him a prophecy' - 'Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stepha- noumenos! Bous Stephaneforos J' And now, forthe first time, Stephen sees a winged form over the waves, slowly mounting the sky. It is Daedalus, the fabulous artificer. The soul at last takes wing:
His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.
He wants to cry out his sense of deliverance, in the voice of a hawk
or eagle. Fire, which had been presented to him as a property of hell, is part of the air-world: his blood and body burn for adventure. All that is now needed to mediate between earth and heaven is some angelic vision of a woman who is neither a whore nor the Virgin Mary. Stephen sees a girl standing in a rivulet, 'alone and still, gazing out to sea'. No word passes between them, but her image enters his soul for ever. She embodies the call oflife. He falls asleep in rapture on the earth, and the earth takes him to her breast. The grosser elements no longer drag him down: they have become sanc- tified by his newly found power of flight. The earth is for wandering and the sea for travel. He is master of the four elements. And then we remember the inscription on the fly-leaf of the young Stephen's geography, back in Clongowes: .
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe.
It is, we see, a manifesto of conquest, ;. tnd now it is heginning to be fulfilled. .
57
coils of solid excrement. J:. f~int marsh light struggling upwards from all the ordure t~rough the bnstlIng greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the lIght, curled upwards sluggishly out o f the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.
The field is full of grey satyrs. The horror of the vision is intensified
by the trivial sordidness ofsome ofthe properties-the canisters, stale excrement, a torn flannel waistcoat round the ribs of one of the creatures. It is authentic hell. Stephen cries for air.
He is not the only one. I still find it difficult to read the hell- chapter without some of the sense of suffocation I felt when I first met it, at the age of fifteen, myself a Catholic looking for emancipa- tion. I was hurled back into conformity by this very sermon and this very vision. As for Stephen, he runs blindly to confession and, in a white dream of holiness recaptured, receives the Eucharist. Every- thing is white-pudding, eggs, flowers, the altar cloth, the wafer, Stephen's soul. The lips that kissed a whore at the end of the pre- ceding chapter now open for the reception of Christ. But, by a fine irony, the elevation that the soul has awaited belongs to a different order of reality from what religion represents. Stephen's long. penance, with its curious mortifications of the flesh, seems to bear no real spiritual fruit. He finds himself in bondage to a quantitative concept ofsalvation which expresses itselfin very materialistic terms:
He seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven, not as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender flower.
He is still waiting for the real ciborium, and-the irony maintained- he senses its coming when his spiritual director asks him whether he has ever felt that he had a vocation. He nearly says yes, but he withholds the word. The priest means something very specific. 'The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J. ' Stephen is aware of temptation, but the vision of himself as a priest is at once confused with the images ofthe soul's repression we have already met in the Clongowes episodes. 'His lungs dilated and sank as if he were inhaling a warm moist unsustaining air, and he smelt again the moist warm air which hung in the bath in Clongowes above the sluggish turfcoloured water. '
Stephen at last knows that literature is his vocation, priestly
enough since its function is the transmutation of lowly aecide'nts to
godly essence. Through art he can come to terms with the down- dragging stuff of material life :
56
? ? ? ? ? ? 5: Free Flight
THE MATERIAL OF THE FEW SCORE PAGES WHICH MAKE UP THE final chapter of A Portrait is a distillation of hundreds of pages of Stephen Hero. Comparing the two, we see ~ith a shoc~ ho,,: cun- ningly the Joyce of A Portrait has lulled us mto acceptmg wItho. ut remark a revolution of form and style, for, however mterestmg Its content, Stephen Hero is stylistically and formally orthodox enough. Its charm, as I have already implied, lies in its appetite for notation: life, which chiefly means speech, is pinned down while it is still warm. What we read when we are not listening to voices is prose set solidly in the pre-Joycean era:
As Stephen looked at the b~g square block of maso~ry,looming before them through the faint daybght, he re-entered agam In thought ~he seminarist life which he had led for so many years, to the understandmg of the narrow activities of which he could now in a moment bring the spirit of an acute sympath~tic alien. He rec:ognised, at ,once the martial mind of the Irish Church In the style of thIS ecclesIastIcal barracks. He looked in vain at the faces and figures which passed him for a token of moral elevation: all were cowed without being humble, modish without being simple-mannered.
This is assured, decent, and literary. It will serve for man~ a respected writer, but hardly for a Joyce. As for the youthfulegOlsm of the book this is not a fault to be softened or expunged m a re- working. E~oism is essential to the scheme; what is req~ired is an approach more suitable to it-not the epic or the dramatic but the lyric. In the lyric form, as Stephen Dedalus is soon to. tell us, ev~ry- thing is subordinated to the personalIty of the poet. It IS appropnate, in the final phase of the artist's development, that he should not merely take to the air but dominate everything on the earth beneath
him.
In certain countries of the Far East, American films-even the most bizarre and fanciful-are taken for actuality, not fiction. Readers
58
of Joyce in the West are sometimes no more sophisticated: they are more concerned with the biography of A Portrait than with the art, and they welcome Stephen Hero as a source of elucidation and gap-filling. This is desperately wrong. If we want a Joyce biography, we had better go to Gorman or Ellmann or Stanislaus Joyce's My Brother's Keeper. If there are ellipses in A Portrait we can be quite sure that they are integral to the scheme and that Stephen Hero is not to be welcomed as a gloss. Apart from all that, we ought to remember that Joyce's novels are only approximately autobiographical: he was a shaping artist not a faithful recorder, though Stephen Hero comes closer to being an actuality film than any other of his works. A com- parison between A Portrait and its first draft, then, should be of interest only to the student of literary method. A style was adopted and later abandoned; A Portrait shows us why.
In Stephe/! Hero the egoism is, paradoxically, pointed because the young artist is seen on the same level of objectivity as the other characters: Stephen is a bumptious young man bumping against the foils of members of his family and of the University. In A Portrait Stephen has become godlike, containing everybody else, and his superiority is established by a sort of lex eterna. Similarly, events which are presented fully and dramatically in Stephen Hero become oblique, peripheral, rumours or whispers in the maturer book. Maurice has almost entirely disappeared in A Portrait; in Stephen Hero he is, as was Stanislaus in real life, a partner in dialectic. Dialectic has no place in a lyrical soliloquy, and so various of the white-hot arguments of Stephen Hero-particularly the one between Stephen and his mother about his refusal to make his Easter duty- appear in A Portrait only as the tiresome battering, reported with weary brevity, of a position the artist-hero has no intention of re- linquishing. In the last chapter of A Portrait there are no more con- clusions to reach: the hero knows the strength of his own wings; all that remains to do is to trumpet his position from the heights and then take off.
The element ofthis final chapter is, then, air, but the viaticum for
the air-journey is made out of the lowlier elements. Stephen drains his third cup of watery tea; the dark pool in the dripping-jar reminds him of 'the dark turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes'. Water now serves him: his mother gives him a ritual washing before he leaves the house to go to his lectures at the University. She is shrunken to a mere faceless servitor, as are his living sisters (the death of Isabel, so terrible in Stephen Hero, has no place here):
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Free Flight
? ? ? The Stones
- Fill out the place for me to wash, said Stephen
-Katey, liU out the place for Stephen to wash.
-Boody, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.
-I can't, I'm going for blue. Fill it out, you, Maggy.
Stephen's morning walk to the University recapitulates briefly his long training for flight. He shakes off, in 'loathing and bitterness', the voices that assail the pride of his youth-the screech of a mad nun, his father's shrill whistle, his mother's mutterings. He picks his way through the mounds of damp rubbish in the waterlogged lane, but wetness becomes the property of leaves and tree-bark, lifting his heart. He hears other voices-Hauptmann, Newman, Guido Cavaleanti, Ibsen (the god of the Stephen of the other book, and of the real-life undergraduate Joyce, here serves humbly, 'a spirit of wayward boyish beauty': the Stephen of A Portrait defers to nobody), Ben Jonson, Aristotle, Aquinas. He has absorbed a heterogeneity of influences. Add Blake, Bruno, Vico and you have very nearly the entire Joyce library.
He is late for his lectures, but the poet soars above time. He soars above other things too. He thinks of MacCann (nicknamed 'Bonny Dundee' in Stephen Hero: 'Come fill up my cup, come fill up MacCann'), and ofwhat this progressive fellow-student said to him:
-Dedalus you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a dem'ocrat and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future.
He thinks also of Davin, the peasant student who worships 'the sorrowful legend ofIreland' and once told Stephen about what hap- pened to him while he was walking home late at night from a hurling match. He called at a cottage for a glass of water and was offered richer hospitality by a half-naked young woman who said her hus- band was away for the night. The woman symbolises Ireland for Stephen, 'a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itselfIn
darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and VOIce and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed': In this final chapter there is a fusion offemale images-Emma, Stephen's mother, the Virgin Mary, girls seen on the street or coming out of Jacob's biscuit factory, Ireland herself-into a single figure, an Ewig-weibliche that has completed the task of bringing forth the artist's soul but whose demands for worship-from son and lover-must be resisted. A different image of the eternal womanly has to be created-the giver and renewer, not the taker and eater-
and this must be one of the Homeric tasks of the mature artist, no longer a young man.
Stephen will serve neither MacCann's world nor Davin'S, but the ensnarers of his soul are cunning. There is the dean of studies prac- tising the 'useful art' of fire-lighting in the physics theatre, an English Jesuit, 'a humble follower in the wake of clamorous con- versions', one easy to pity or despise. Stephen and he discuss aesthetics, but they are at cross-purposes: Stephen's metaphorical lamp provided by Aristotle and Aquinas, light-givers to the young aesthetic theorist, becomes Epictetus's lamp to the dean. Soon the dean, useful artist, is talking about the filling of this literal lamp. He uses the word 'funnel', whereas Stephen knows this only as a 'tundish'; 'tundish' is a word the dean has never met. And then Stephen feels 'a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson'. English belongs to the dean before it belongs to Stephen:
- The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. i have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay.