to swallow the neat
definitions
that come after.
re-joyce-a-burgess
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):
59
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. Mv soul frets in the shadow ofhis language. . .
Sooner or later it will become necessary for the artist . to kill English by driving it to the limit, to put in its place a created langUage of his own. Meanwhile he must fret at the incompleteness of his emancipa- tion: Ireland he may use in his art, but English will still use him.
Stephen sits through the physics lecture, 'fascinated and jaded' by
the involutions of formula and calculation, a paper-borrower who has brought no notebook, distracted, superior, no model student. It is a brief marking-time before his encounter with MacCann in the entrance-hall. MacCann is collecting signatures for a testimonial in favour o f general disarmament. Stephen, o f course, refuses to sign. His antlers flash: 'Do you think you impress me when you flourish your wooden sword? '; dramatically jerking his shoulder in the direction of a picture of the Tsar, he says: 'Keep your icon. If you must have a Jesus, let us have a legitimate Jesus. ' He is in good form. His fellow-student Temple admires him ('He's the only man I see in this institution that has an individual mind') but his friend Cranly, dark, coarse, saturnine, has nothing to say. Cranly's function in this scene is to play handball; he bounces and bounces his ball and says to Stephen: 'Your soul! ' His true office appears later. Mt~r
6,
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Free Flight
? ? The Stones
Free Flight
rejecting MacCann's ideals, Stephen now disposes of Davin's. He
makes harsh and definitive pronouncements about Ireland: '~hen the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at It to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. ' Ireland is no poor old woman seeking the recovery of youth and beauty: she is 'the old sow that eats her farrow'. And now Stephen goes off with Lynch, not Cranly, to expound the articles of his true faith, art.
Stephen's theory of aestheticsis original,l~gical, and totally un- compromising. It is delivered With such bnlhant eloquence that It reminds us of another lengthy and authontatlve piece of propa- ganda-Father Arnall's sermon on hell, which this peripateti~ dis- course exactly balances. It is illuminating to contrast the techn~ques of presentation. The sermon is given whole, uninterrupted, st~t1cally -an unedited tape, its capacity to shock and harrow needmg no enhancement from the artist. We are riveted, as young Stephen IS, because we are scared. The aesthetic lecture has a purely intellectual appeal, and novel-readers, rightly, cannot bear very muc~ intellec- tuality. Joyce, knowing this, orchestrates the long expository solo with comedy, coarseness, the everyday, the vapid. When he begms by saying, 'Aristotle has not defined pity ~nd terror. I,have. I say . . . ' Lynch immediately interrupts with Stop! I won t hsten! I am sick. I was out last night on a yellow drunk With Horan and Goggins. ' The reader takes courage at this and is able.
to swallow the neat definitions that come after. It was a stroke of gemus to exchange Cranly-Stephen's interlocutor in the corresponding section of Stephen Hero-for Lynch. Cranly is, for all hi~ Wicklow coarseness, a deep and disturbing character full of Freudian obsesslOns. Lynch is a lighter foil, and Joyce is to use him agam to accompany Stephen into another unknown region, that of the Circean. phantasma~on. aof
Nighttown in Ulysses. Lynch's low comedy here m A Portra,t high- lights perfectly Stephen's intellectual shaft~, but he wdl not do f~r later-the final nervous spiritual unburdemng for which Cranly IS the only proper recipient.
Stephen does what Aristotle did not do, and ~ow follows his definitions of pity and terror With a sttlct dehnutauon of the term 'tragic'. People die in street accidents, but we canno~,hke n. ewspap~r reporters, properly call such deaths tragic: 'the tragIC em? tlon . . . IS a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. ' (Both terror and pity, he has said, arrest the mind 'in the presence of whatsoever
62
is grave and constant in human sufferings'. ) 'I mean that the tragic emotion is static. ' Joyce is really defining his own kind of art, proper art. The arts which excite desire or loathing are improper, kinetic: they are pornographic or didactic. With the 'static' aesthetic emotion -which we cannot feel in relation to real-life events-'the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing'. This, of course, is why proper art cannot be popular, why Ulysses and Finnegans Wake met either fury or indifference. Your list of best-sellers always in- cludes the pornographic (the arousers of desire) and the didactic (the books which tell you what to do). Combine the didactic and the
pornographic, as in some Hindu sex-manual, and you have your best best-seller. The aesthetic emotion is no more generally wanted than is the mystical state. The average reader does not want to get outside life, to view it detachedly and indifferently; he requires the illusion of being more deeply involved in it.
We are already in deep philosophical water. Stephen's general
definition of art requires setting off with memories of Cranly who,
recalls Lynch, 'told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs'. The
pigs snort about Stephen's lucidity: 'Art is the human disposition of
sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end. ' But what is the
aesthetic end, what is beauty? Stephen goes to Aquinas, who says:
'That is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. ' This is a starting-point. Truth and beauty Stephen, like Keats, recognises to be akin. If we want to know more about truth we must study the intellect which tries to perceive it, we must 'comprehend the act itself of intellection'. Similarly, to understand the nature of beauty we must 'understand the frame and scope of the imagination, . . . comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension'. Before we can go further we must meet the fat student Donovan on Lower Mount Street. He announces examination results and goes off to eat pan- cakes. Lynch is scornful and envious of Donovan : 'T o think that that yellow pancakeeating excrement can get a good job, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes! ' We have had our breather; we are ready fo~ 'integritas, consonantia, claritas': how far do these, Aquinas's condi- tions for beauty, correspond to 'the phases of apprehension'? Stephen translates them as 'wholeness, harmony and radiance'. He now proceeds to define them.
A butcher's boy has a basket on his head. Stephen asks Lynch to look at it; to do this he must separate the basket from the rest of the visible universe. 'You see it as one whole. You apprehend its whole- ness. That is integritas. ' Immediate perception is synthetic (many
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is no doub~ th~t we are listening to the Joyce voice, voice of Shem, and that thIS pIece of drama is really a piece of epic. Joyce is his own Proteus, and he IS never more dramatic than when not using the outward shapes and machinery of drama.
The discourse ends-in rain, shelter, the sight of the girl who has become . namel~ss u? der the arcade of the National Library. 'Your beloved IS here, whIspers Lynch. Stephen feels a twinge ofbitterness
seeIn~ her standmg there silently among her companions-'She has
no pnest to flirt with'-but his mind takes on a listless peace-the
druid5cal ~cease,to str~ve' peace he is to know again when, having
emptIed hIS bram of hIS Hamlet theory, he is to stand in sunlight on
thIS very spot, Bloomsday halfway through. The peace engenders chanty now:
And if he, had)udged her harshly? If h. er life, were a ~imple rosary of
hours, her hfe s~mple and strange as a blrd's hfe, gay In the morning,
restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?
Having talked of the enchantment of the heart, Stephen is now to
e~pertence It. , He wakes to a morning inspiration, the beat of a vlllanelle passmg from his mind to his lips:
Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Reading the poem, we cannot but feel a little let down. After the wave~ 0:eloquent aesthetic theory, after the wonderfully moving deScrIptIOn ofthe dawn rapture-'In the virgin womb ofthe imagina- ! I. onthe word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the vIrgm's chamber'-we have the formal perfection of Fleet Street ;hymesters, followers of Austin Dobson, and the stale Swinburnian- ISm of'. : . languorous l? ok and lavish limb'. Stephen is as small a poet as ~IS ~reator, T h e mterest o f the section lies, as always, in the
prose WIth ItS subtle rhythms, the evocation of subtle moods. What
formed solid narrative i~ Stephen Hero-the parties, the classes in Erse, the coy dark-eyed glrls-becomes here a lyric memory. Stephen may despISe the composite image of Irish womanhood he has formed, he may be angry with the girl whom Lynch has called 'your beloved'-'He had done well not to salute her On the steps of the lIbrary. He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy
WIth a church whIch was the scullerymaid of christendom'- but the strength of his feelings is a kind of homage. And here now is the
65
parts bound up into the sense of a whole); after this first phase comes analysis: 'Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, har- monious. That is consonantia. ' Lynch says that if he will tell him what claritas is he wins the cigar. Stephen tells him, eloquently. We have heard about claritas, or 'radiance' before, in Stephen Hero-it is the quidditas, the 'whatness', shining out of the perceived object. Then we heard much about epiphanies, now the word is not men- tioned: Stephen prefers terms like 'the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the enchant- ment of the heart'.
Stephen ends his discourse with succinct definitions of the three main literary forms-the lyric, in which the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the dramatic, in which he presents it in immediate relation to others; the epic, in which he presents it in mediate relation to himself and others, But these forms interpene- trate, or rather form a natural continuum, so that the personality of the artist starts as the lyrical centre, then passes into the epic narra- tive, and finally refines itself out of existence in the dramatic form.
- The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, in- different, paring his fingernails,
- Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
Much of this aesthetic theory, despite its strange and limited
provenance, goes on making admirable sense; but it is of greatest value when considered in relation to Joyce's own work. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake look like epics but are really dramas: Joyce achieves the divine aim of invisibility and indifference by handing over the task of narration to unsympathetic or even inhuman agents-a pub cadger, a woman's magazine, a fugue, a scientific catechism, a dreaming mind. That chapter of Ulysses which is couched in drama- tic form is not necessarily the most truly dramatic part of the book. The stage directions of the brothel scene are written in highly man- nered prose, so that-as with the reading of Shaw's plays-we are aware of the dramaturgist breathing down our necks. Is this drama- turgist Joyce, 'mediately' presented, or is it some specially intro- duced play-writing agent who enables the true creator to remain in the background, invisible impresario, paring his fingernails? There
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poem for her-what in Stephen Hero is called 'The Villanelle of theT<;mptress'. Hesees her shorn of her Irish piety, or pseudo-piety, and YIeldmg to hIm, the priest of the imagination. The poet is also magICIan an~ can turn a trim-booted colleen, equipped with Irish phrasebook, Into eternal woman.
. The priest of th<; imagination draws a good deal of his villanelle's Imagery from the nte practised by the lowlier, despised priests of the Chu. rch. Blasphemy? The temptress is praised in a eucharistic hymn, sacnficIaI hands raJse the chalice. If it is blasphemy it is also a kind of homage, a homage to be accorded back-handedly again and again throughout the major works. Stephen says, in the penultimate section we now approach, that he fears 'the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration'. He will not
make a sacrilegious communion; he is under no delusion as to the ~ncomp~eteness of his emancipation. But, perhaps without knowing It, h~ will best free himself from the Church's domination by secu- lansmg the emotIOns attached to her rites and symbols. Stephen secular Jesuit, heretic Franciscan, is less mixed-up than he seems. '
The final narrative section begins in a flurry of birds. Stephen in
fin de siecle weariness, leans on his ashplant watching them wheeling 'about a temple of air' in Molesworth Street. The bird motif is fullest developed here-Cornelius Agrippa on bird-auguries, Sweden- borg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect. Stephen's stick becomes that of an augur, the image of ibis-headed Thoth, god of writers, appears to him; in a sort of fear he sees Daedalus hi~self, 'soaring out o f his captivity on osierwoven wings'.
The actual buds of Molesworth Street he cannot identify-are they swallows? It is the word 'swallow' that conjures the thought of his own impending migration, also-through the line 'I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes'-the remembered opening of the new National Theatre with Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, the hissing and cat- calling of his fellow-students-'A libel on Ireland! ' and 'Blasphemy! ' and the rest. Cathleen had sold her soul to the devil to buy bread for her starving people; the audience was not willing to wait for her r~demption, God's ways exhibited as stranger and more compas- sIOnate than the Dublin Catholics would allow. Everything points to Stephen's leaving.
The time for exaltation, for really taking to the air, must wait till the very last. Stephen must clear his mind in the presence of Cranly, make a final confeSSIOn and a final avowal. We are very much earth-
66
? ound ~gain; the ~ext is full of dragging-down symbols-the priest m the hbrary readmg-room who closes his copy of The Tablet with an angry sr:ap; ~ranly's hook, Diseases ofthe Ox; the Scott-reading dwarf who IS sald to he the product of a noble but incestuous union (Stephen sees this act in an unbidden visionary flash, matching that earher one of the Foetus-carving student in Cork-the rainy park the swans, the embracing brother and sister); the coarse banter of the students under the colonnade; his own awareness ora lousy body and of thoughts that are 'lice born of the sweat of sloth'? his ambiva- lent bitterness towards his 'beloveti'. But Temple, like an oracle, makes mad and prophetic pronouncements. He says that Giraldus Cambrensis celebrates Stephen's people as pernobilis et pervetusta familia. He quotes the last sentence of the zoology textbook: 'Reproduction is the beginning of death. ' The Church, he says boldly, is cruel like all old sinners. Stephen at last drags Cranly away from the student-crowd. Dixon whistles the bird-call from Siegfried after them: we must not forget the mystery of flight.
Stephen tells Cranly that he has had a quarrel with his mother (the quarrel that is presented as a painful and lengthy narrative in Stephen Hero): he refuses to make his Easter duty. 'I will not serve', sa~s LUCifer-Stephen, giving meaning to the line he has just now misquoted to hlmself-'Brightness falls from the air. ' He is, as the protomartyr, doomed, but his damnation may be more than a meta- phor. It is one thing to fall as Icarus (the father-son identification theme of Ulysses is emerging at the end of A Portrait: 'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead'); it is another to f~ll as Lucifer. Siegfried-Stephen, who understands the song of the btrds and brandishes the sword Nothung at visions of hell, may yet have to go to hell; but he says that he is willing to make mistakes that he is not afraid to make even 'a great mistake, a lifelong mistak~ and perhaps as long as eternity too'. Cranly does not respond to all this as Lynch might have done; Stephen could not say to Lynch what he now says to Cranly:
- I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve
that in which I no longer believe: whether it call itself my home, my fat~erland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of lIfe or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning.
This is, des~ite the brave words, a scene lacking altogether the fine, uncompronusmg, blade-bright confidence of that peripatetic lecture.
67
? ? ? ? The Stones
Pree Plight
There is desperation in the defiance, a sense that what is being abandoned is being abandoned through pride as much as vocation, that a 'malevolent reality' may well reside in the bit of consecrated bread Stephen will not take, as well as in the whole absurd coherence and logicality of the Church. Above all there looms the terrible image of loneliness, incarnated in the cold sadness of Cranly's face.
- And not to have anyone person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, morc even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.
Stephen says he will take the risk.
Here the action of the novel ends. We must mark time a little
before Stephen's mother puts his 'new secondhand clothes in order' and the self-doomed, unafraid young artist prepares to embark. We need a brief epilogue in which the mood ofexcitement at the prospect of flight can be restored, in which the spirit of the great comic novel to come can be hinted at, in which a new literary technique can be foreshadowed. The diary entries which close A Portrait anticipate, in their clipped lyricism and impatient ellipses, the interior mono- logue of Ulysses. But they also look back to the very opening, the baby Stephen coming to consciousness in flashes of discrete observa- tion. This is right: the cutting of the physical omphalic cord is matched by the cutting of the spiritual. 'Welcome, 0 life! ' says
Stephen, going forth 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race'.
A Portrait is, by any standard, a remarkable novel, though Ulysse;, which carries on Stephen's story, overshadows it and makes both its candour and its technical innovations seem less considerable than they really are. To the young, discovering it in paperback, its modernity may, since it is the spring o f a whole contemporary mode ofwriting, seem unremarkable; the free-loving, drug-taking, agnostic undergraduate may wonder what the fuss could ever have been about. The type of student whom Stephen Dedalus represents, poor, trea- suring old books with foxed leaves, independent, unwhining, deaf to political and social shibboleths, fanatically devoted to art and art
only, is no longer to be found in the cities of the West: he dIsap-
peared in 1939. He is the traditional student, as old as Chaucer, and
literature, as life, must be poorer without him. The rebels of the
post-1945 novel rebel against everything on behalf of nothmg-
against coherent theories of art as much as agamst the authonty of
at all. But at least Lynch listened to Stephen's aesthetic and even asked for some of the definitions to be repeated. Stephen Hera- that abandoned title is a proud one and a just one: Stephen Dedalus is the last of the artist-heroes of bourgeois fiction. The concept of the young man as comic Hamlet or ineffectual rebel remains, but he derives more from Eliot's Prufrock than from Joyce's Stephen- the innocent blushing butt of a hard world assured of certain certain- ties. As Denis in Huxley's Crame Yellow he shambles shamefully out of the picture; as Paul Pennyfeather in Waugh's Decline and Pall or William Boot in the Same author's Scoop, he achieves his triumphs through a kind of trickery or the intervention of the god from the machine. But the rounded portrait of a young man who sins, suffers, and develops a noble f<1naticism is hardly to be found after Joyce: Stephen Dedalus is both an end and a summation.
The book is not just the character: it is also itself-a lyric medita- tion which is also highly organised, in which symbolism is cunningly planted and even the most casual record of seemingly pointless speech or action proves (and this is even more true of Ulysses) to have its place in the intricate scheme-there is no slack, no irrele- vance. The symbolism under the naturalism is not there for the glorification of Stephen, but for the glorification of art. If it were not for this perpetual feeling that every word, every act means more than it says or does, the name Stephen Dedalus would be a mere bit of pretentious decoration. As it is, the final image of Stephen as a priest of the imagination holds. Like a priest of the Church, he is bigger than himself by virtue of the power of which he is an agent. . The egoism is not self-aggrandisement: it is the god inside the priest saying '0,"-I, myself. ' And finally the artist, the maker, is himself a creation of unknown arts-the ignotae artes of the epigraph: he is enclosed by a mystery. It is because of the presence of this mystery that our final response to A Portrait is one of wonder.
church state and family. They are closer to Lynch than to Stephen,
,.
grumbling . about having to smoke cheap cigarettes or no CIgarettes
68
? ? ? 6: 'You Poor Poet, You! '
,COUSINSWIFT,'SAIDJOHNDRYDEN,'YOUWILLNEVERBEAPOET. , Stephen Dedalus, walking on the beach in Ulysses, thinks of Swift- one of his literary ancestors-and even, for a brief moment, identifies himself with the great Dean. But he says to himself: 'Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. ' He resists literary condemnation but will gladly enough accept the other kind. Joyce must have been aware of the slenderness of his poetic talent, but it is essential to the Stephen Dedalus image that it be haloed with great poetic promise and even achievement. The only verses that Stephen makes in Ulysses are poor Rhymers' Club stuff; the villanelle in A Portrait is, after the loftiness of the artist's claims, very disappointing. The poems that Joyce published in two separate volumes-Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach-make no great pretensions: they arc not to be read in a' Stephen Dedalus context. They are charming, competent, memorable, but they would never, on their own, have m~de t~e name of their author. The 'poetic' side of Joyce (using the term m its narrowest most orthodox sense) had to be enclosed in the irony of the great ~rosebooks for it to be effective. His verse talent is, in fact, close to that of Swift (Dryden was, of course and as always, right), and this is appropriate for the second man to draw great prose our of Ireland. Joyce the versifier is best in lampoons and m the occasional parodies and private satires he wrote for his friends. ,
We can take Chamber Music in good heart when we have taken itS title. There are coarse undertones: Joyce read the poems to a woman who interrupted the recital to relieve herself, audibly, behind a screen. This oracle named the book. When the book first appeared, in 1907, it brought Joyce into association with the Imagist poets. But the artist who drew his aesthetic philosophy from Aristotle and Aquinas was not one 'to derive his poetic inspiration from c? n- temporary modes of versifying, and there is as little of the Imagls:s in the poems of Chamber Music as there is of Yeats and the CeltiC
70
Twilight. These slight lyrics go back to the Elizabethans and they
are meant to be set to music and sung. Joyce the tenor knew what
was needed in words for music-plenty of long vowels, simple
stanzaIC forms, no great length, umty ofmood, conventional imagery
~ndso ~n.
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):
59
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. Mv soul frets in the shadow ofhis language. . .
Sooner or later it will become necessary for the artist . to kill English by driving it to the limit, to put in its place a created langUage of his own. Meanwhile he must fret at the incompleteness of his emancipa- tion: Ireland he may use in his art, but English will still use him.
Stephen sits through the physics lecture, 'fascinated and jaded' by
the involutions of formula and calculation, a paper-borrower who has brought no notebook, distracted, superior, no model student. It is a brief marking-time before his encounter with MacCann in the entrance-hall. MacCann is collecting signatures for a testimonial in favour o f general disarmament. Stephen, o f course, refuses to sign. His antlers flash: 'Do you think you impress me when you flourish your wooden sword? '; dramatically jerking his shoulder in the direction of a picture of the Tsar, he says: 'Keep your icon. If you must have a Jesus, let us have a legitimate Jesus. ' He is in good form. His fellow-student Temple admires him ('He's the only man I see in this institution that has an individual mind') but his friend Cranly, dark, coarse, saturnine, has nothing to say. Cranly's function in this scene is to play handball; he bounces and bounces his ball and says to Stephen: 'Your soul! ' His true office appears later. Mt~r
6,
60
Free Flight
? ? The Stones
Free Flight
rejecting MacCann's ideals, Stephen now disposes of Davin's. He
makes harsh and definitive pronouncements about Ireland: '~hen the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at It to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. ' Ireland is no poor old woman seeking the recovery of youth and beauty: she is 'the old sow that eats her farrow'. And now Stephen goes off with Lynch, not Cranly, to expound the articles of his true faith, art.
Stephen's theory of aestheticsis original,l~gical, and totally un- compromising. It is delivered With such bnlhant eloquence that It reminds us of another lengthy and authontatlve piece of propa- ganda-Father Arnall's sermon on hell, which this peripateti~ dis- course exactly balances. It is illuminating to contrast the techn~ques of presentation. The sermon is given whole, uninterrupted, st~t1cally -an unedited tape, its capacity to shock and harrow needmg no enhancement from the artist. We are riveted, as young Stephen IS, because we are scared. The aesthetic lecture has a purely intellectual appeal, and novel-readers, rightly, cannot bear very muc~ intellec- tuality. Joyce, knowing this, orchestrates the long expository solo with comedy, coarseness, the everyday, the vapid. When he begms by saying, 'Aristotle has not defined pity ~nd terror. I,have. I say . . . ' Lynch immediately interrupts with Stop! I won t hsten! I am sick. I was out last night on a yellow drunk With Horan and Goggins. ' The reader takes courage at this and is able.
to swallow the neat definitions that come after. It was a stroke of gemus to exchange Cranly-Stephen's interlocutor in the corresponding section of Stephen Hero-for Lynch. Cranly is, for all hi~ Wicklow coarseness, a deep and disturbing character full of Freudian obsesslOns. Lynch is a lighter foil, and Joyce is to use him agam to accompany Stephen into another unknown region, that of the Circean. phantasma~on. aof
Nighttown in Ulysses. Lynch's low comedy here m A Portra,t high- lights perfectly Stephen's intellectual shaft~, but he wdl not do f~r later-the final nervous spiritual unburdemng for which Cranly IS the only proper recipient.
Stephen does what Aristotle did not do, and ~ow follows his definitions of pity and terror With a sttlct dehnutauon of the term 'tragic'. People die in street accidents, but we canno~,hke n. ewspap~r reporters, properly call such deaths tragic: 'the tragIC em? tlon . . . IS a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. ' (Both terror and pity, he has said, arrest the mind 'in the presence of whatsoever
62
is grave and constant in human sufferings'. ) 'I mean that the tragic emotion is static. ' Joyce is really defining his own kind of art, proper art. The arts which excite desire or loathing are improper, kinetic: they are pornographic or didactic. With the 'static' aesthetic emotion -which we cannot feel in relation to real-life events-'the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing'. This, of course, is why proper art cannot be popular, why Ulysses and Finnegans Wake met either fury or indifference. Your list of best-sellers always in- cludes the pornographic (the arousers of desire) and the didactic (the books which tell you what to do). Combine the didactic and the
pornographic, as in some Hindu sex-manual, and you have your best best-seller. The aesthetic emotion is no more generally wanted than is the mystical state. The average reader does not want to get outside life, to view it detachedly and indifferently; he requires the illusion of being more deeply involved in it.
We are already in deep philosophical water. Stephen's general
definition of art requires setting off with memories of Cranly who,
recalls Lynch, 'told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs'. The
pigs snort about Stephen's lucidity: 'Art is the human disposition of
sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end. ' But what is the
aesthetic end, what is beauty? Stephen goes to Aquinas, who says:
'That is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. ' This is a starting-point. Truth and beauty Stephen, like Keats, recognises to be akin. If we want to know more about truth we must study the intellect which tries to perceive it, we must 'comprehend the act itself of intellection'. Similarly, to understand the nature of beauty we must 'understand the frame and scope of the imagination, . . . comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension'. Before we can go further we must meet the fat student Donovan on Lower Mount Street. He announces examination results and goes off to eat pan- cakes. Lynch is scornful and envious of Donovan : 'T o think that that yellow pancakeeating excrement can get a good job, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes! ' We have had our breather; we are ready fo~ 'integritas, consonantia, claritas': how far do these, Aquinas's condi- tions for beauty, correspond to 'the phases of apprehension'? Stephen translates them as 'wholeness, harmony and radiance'. He now proceeds to define them.
A butcher's boy has a basket on his head. Stephen asks Lynch to look at it; to do this he must separate the basket from the rest of the visible universe. 'You see it as one whole. You apprehend its whole- ness. That is integritas. ' Immediate perception is synthetic (many
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is no doub~ th~t we are listening to the Joyce voice, voice of Shem, and that thIS pIece of drama is really a piece of epic. Joyce is his own Proteus, and he IS never more dramatic than when not using the outward shapes and machinery of drama.
The discourse ends-in rain, shelter, the sight of the girl who has become . namel~ss u? der the arcade of the National Library. 'Your beloved IS here, whIspers Lynch. Stephen feels a twinge ofbitterness
seeIn~ her standmg there silently among her companions-'She has
no pnest to flirt with'-but his mind takes on a listless peace-the
druid5cal ~cease,to str~ve' peace he is to know again when, having
emptIed hIS bram of hIS Hamlet theory, he is to stand in sunlight on
thIS very spot, Bloomsday halfway through. The peace engenders chanty now:
And if he, had)udged her harshly? If h. er life, were a ~imple rosary of
hours, her hfe s~mple and strange as a blrd's hfe, gay In the morning,
restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?
Having talked of the enchantment of the heart, Stephen is now to
e~pertence It. , He wakes to a morning inspiration, the beat of a vlllanelle passmg from his mind to his lips:
Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Reading the poem, we cannot but feel a little let down. After the wave~ 0:eloquent aesthetic theory, after the wonderfully moving deScrIptIOn ofthe dawn rapture-'In the virgin womb ofthe imagina- ! I. onthe word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the vIrgm's chamber'-we have the formal perfection of Fleet Street ;hymesters, followers of Austin Dobson, and the stale Swinburnian- ISm of'. : . languorous l? ok and lavish limb'. Stephen is as small a poet as ~IS ~reator, T h e mterest o f the section lies, as always, in the
prose WIth ItS subtle rhythms, the evocation of subtle moods. What
formed solid narrative i~ Stephen Hero-the parties, the classes in Erse, the coy dark-eyed glrls-becomes here a lyric memory. Stephen may despISe the composite image of Irish womanhood he has formed, he may be angry with the girl whom Lynch has called 'your beloved'-'He had done well not to salute her On the steps of the lIbrary. He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy
WIth a church whIch was the scullerymaid of christendom'- but the strength of his feelings is a kind of homage. And here now is the
65
parts bound up into the sense of a whole); after this first phase comes analysis: 'Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, har- monious. That is consonantia. ' Lynch says that if he will tell him what claritas is he wins the cigar. Stephen tells him, eloquently. We have heard about claritas, or 'radiance' before, in Stephen Hero-it is the quidditas, the 'whatness', shining out of the perceived object. Then we heard much about epiphanies, now the word is not men- tioned: Stephen prefers terms like 'the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the enchant- ment of the heart'.
Stephen ends his discourse with succinct definitions of the three main literary forms-the lyric, in which the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the dramatic, in which he presents it in immediate relation to others; the epic, in which he presents it in mediate relation to himself and others, But these forms interpene- trate, or rather form a natural continuum, so that the personality of the artist starts as the lyrical centre, then passes into the epic narra- tive, and finally refines itself out of existence in the dramatic form.
- The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, in- different, paring his fingernails,
- Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
Much of this aesthetic theory, despite its strange and limited
provenance, goes on making admirable sense; but it is of greatest value when considered in relation to Joyce's own work. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake look like epics but are really dramas: Joyce achieves the divine aim of invisibility and indifference by handing over the task of narration to unsympathetic or even inhuman agents-a pub cadger, a woman's magazine, a fugue, a scientific catechism, a dreaming mind. That chapter of Ulysses which is couched in drama- tic form is not necessarily the most truly dramatic part of the book. The stage directions of the brothel scene are written in highly man- nered prose, so that-as with the reading of Shaw's plays-we are aware of the dramaturgist breathing down our necks. Is this drama- turgist Joyce, 'mediately' presented, or is it some specially intro- duced play-writing agent who enables the true creator to remain in the background, invisible impresario, paring his fingernails? There
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poem for her-what in Stephen Hero is called 'The Villanelle of theT<;mptress'. Hesees her shorn of her Irish piety, or pseudo-piety, and YIeldmg to hIm, the priest of the imagination. The poet is also magICIan an~ can turn a trim-booted colleen, equipped with Irish phrasebook, Into eternal woman.
. The priest of th<; imagination draws a good deal of his villanelle's Imagery from the nte practised by the lowlier, despised priests of the Chu. rch. Blasphemy? The temptress is praised in a eucharistic hymn, sacnficIaI hands raJse the chalice. If it is blasphemy it is also a kind of homage, a homage to be accorded back-handedly again and again throughout the major works. Stephen says, in the penultimate section we now approach, that he fears 'the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration'. He will not
make a sacrilegious communion; he is under no delusion as to the ~ncomp~eteness of his emancipation. But, perhaps without knowing It, h~ will best free himself from the Church's domination by secu- lansmg the emotIOns attached to her rites and symbols. Stephen secular Jesuit, heretic Franciscan, is less mixed-up than he seems. '
The final narrative section begins in a flurry of birds. Stephen in
fin de siecle weariness, leans on his ashplant watching them wheeling 'about a temple of air' in Molesworth Street. The bird motif is fullest developed here-Cornelius Agrippa on bird-auguries, Sweden- borg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect. Stephen's stick becomes that of an augur, the image of ibis-headed Thoth, god of writers, appears to him; in a sort of fear he sees Daedalus hi~self, 'soaring out o f his captivity on osierwoven wings'.
The actual buds of Molesworth Street he cannot identify-are they swallows? It is the word 'swallow' that conjures the thought of his own impending migration, also-through the line 'I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes'-the remembered opening of the new National Theatre with Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, the hissing and cat- calling of his fellow-students-'A libel on Ireland! ' and 'Blasphemy! ' and the rest. Cathleen had sold her soul to the devil to buy bread for her starving people; the audience was not willing to wait for her r~demption, God's ways exhibited as stranger and more compas- sIOnate than the Dublin Catholics would allow. Everything points to Stephen's leaving.
The time for exaltation, for really taking to the air, must wait till the very last. Stephen must clear his mind in the presence of Cranly, make a final confeSSIOn and a final avowal. We are very much earth-
66
? ound ~gain; the ~ext is full of dragging-down symbols-the priest m the hbrary readmg-room who closes his copy of The Tablet with an angry sr:ap; ~ranly's hook, Diseases ofthe Ox; the Scott-reading dwarf who IS sald to he the product of a noble but incestuous union (Stephen sees this act in an unbidden visionary flash, matching that earher one of the Foetus-carving student in Cork-the rainy park the swans, the embracing brother and sister); the coarse banter of the students under the colonnade; his own awareness ora lousy body and of thoughts that are 'lice born of the sweat of sloth'? his ambiva- lent bitterness towards his 'beloveti'. But Temple, like an oracle, makes mad and prophetic pronouncements. He says that Giraldus Cambrensis celebrates Stephen's people as pernobilis et pervetusta familia. He quotes the last sentence of the zoology textbook: 'Reproduction is the beginning of death. ' The Church, he says boldly, is cruel like all old sinners. Stephen at last drags Cranly away from the student-crowd. Dixon whistles the bird-call from Siegfried after them: we must not forget the mystery of flight.
Stephen tells Cranly that he has had a quarrel with his mother (the quarrel that is presented as a painful and lengthy narrative in Stephen Hero): he refuses to make his Easter duty. 'I will not serve', sa~s LUCifer-Stephen, giving meaning to the line he has just now misquoted to hlmself-'Brightness falls from the air. ' He is, as the protomartyr, doomed, but his damnation may be more than a meta- phor. It is one thing to fall as Icarus (the father-son identification theme of Ulysses is emerging at the end of A Portrait: 'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead'); it is another to f~ll as Lucifer. Siegfried-Stephen, who understands the song of the btrds and brandishes the sword Nothung at visions of hell, may yet have to go to hell; but he says that he is willing to make mistakes that he is not afraid to make even 'a great mistake, a lifelong mistak~ and perhaps as long as eternity too'. Cranly does not respond to all this as Lynch might have done; Stephen could not say to Lynch what he now says to Cranly:
- I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve
that in which I no longer believe: whether it call itself my home, my fat~erland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of lIfe or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning.
This is, des~ite the brave words, a scene lacking altogether the fine, uncompronusmg, blade-bright confidence of that peripatetic lecture.
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There is desperation in the defiance, a sense that what is being abandoned is being abandoned through pride as much as vocation, that a 'malevolent reality' may well reside in the bit of consecrated bread Stephen will not take, as well as in the whole absurd coherence and logicality of the Church. Above all there looms the terrible image of loneliness, incarnated in the cold sadness of Cranly's face.
- And not to have anyone person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, morc even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.
Stephen says he will take the risk.
Here the action of the novel ends. We must mark time a little
before Stephen's mother puts his 'new secondhand clothes in order' and the self-doomed, unafraid young artist prepares to embark. We need a brief epilogue in which the mood ofexcitement at the prospect of flight can be restored, in which the spirit of the great comic novel to come can be hinted at, in which a new literary technique can be foreshadowed. The diary entries which close A Portrait anticipate, in their clipped lyricism and impatient ellipses, the interior mono- logue of Ulysses. But they also look back to the very opening, the baby Stephen coming to consciousness in flashes of discrete observa- tion. This is right: the cutting of the physical omphalic cord is matched by the cutting of the spiritual. 'Welcome, 0 life! ' says
Stephen, going forth 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race'.
A Portrait is, by any standard, a remarkable novel, though Ulysse;, which carries on Stephen's story, overshadows it and makes both its candour and its technical innovations seem less considerable than they really are. To the young, discovering it in paperback, its modernity may, since it is the spring o f a whole contemporary mode ofwriting, seem unremarkable; the free-loving, drug-taking, agnostic undergraduate may wonder what the fuss could ever have been about. The type of student whom Stephen Dedalus represents, poor, trea- suring old books with foxed leaves, independent, unwhining, deaf to political and social shibboleths, fanatically devoted to art and art
only, is no longer to be found in the cities of the West: he dIsap-
peared in 1939. He is the traditional student, as old as Chaucer, and
literature, as life, must be poorer without him. The rebels of the
post-1945 novel rebel against everything on behalf of nothmg-
against coherent theories of art as much as agamst the authonty of
at all. But at least Lynch listened to Stephen's aesthetic and even asked for some of the definitions to be repeated. Stephen Hera- that abandoned title is a proud one and a just one: Stephen Dedalus is the last of the artist-heroes of bourgeois fiction. The concept of the young man as comic Hamlet or ineffectual rebel remains, but he derives more from Eliot's Prufrock than from Joyce's Stephen- the innocent blushing butt of a hard world assured of certain certain- ties. As Denis in Huxley's Crame Yellow he shambles shamefully out of the picture; as Paul Pennyfeather in Waugh's Decline and Pall or William Boot in the Same author's Scoop, he achieves his triumphs through a kind of trickery or the intervention of the god from the machine. But the rounded portrait of a young man who sins, suffers, and develops a noble f<1naticism is hardly to be found after Joyce: Stephen Dedalus is both an end and a summation.
The book is not just the character: it is also itself-a lyric medita- tion which is also highly organised, in which symbolism is cunningly planted and even the most casual record of seemingly pointless speech or action proves (and this is even more true of Ulysses) to have its place in the intricate scheme-there is no slack, no irrele- vance. The symbolism under the naturalism is not there for the glorification of Stephen, but for the glorification of art. If it were not for this perpetual feeling that every word, every act means more than it says or does, the name Stephen Dedalus would be a mere bit of pretentious decoration. As it is, the final image of Stephen as a priest of the imagination holds. Like a priest of the Church, he is bigger than himself by virtue of the power of which he is an agent. . The egoism is not self-aggrandisement: it is the god inside the priest saying '0,"-I, myself. ' And finally the artist, the maker, is himself a creation of unknown arts-the ignotae artes of the epigraph: he is enclosed by a mystery. It is because of the presence of this mystery that our final response to A Portrait is one of wonder.
church state and family. They are closer to Lynch than to Stephen,
,.
grumbling . about having to smoke cheap cigarettes or no CIgarettes
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? ? ? 6: 'You Poor Poet, You! '
,COUSINSWIFT,'SAIDJOHNDRYDEN,'YOUWILLNEVERBEAPOET. , Stephen Dedalus, walking on the beach in Ulysses, thinks of Swift- one of his literary ancestors-and even, for a brief moment, identifies himself with the great Dean. But he says to himself: 'Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. ' He resists literary condemnation but will gladly enough accept the other kind. Joyce must have been aware of the slenderness of his poetic talent, but it is essential to the Stephen Dedalus image that it be haloed with great poetic promise and even achievement. The only verses that Stephen makes in Ulysses are poor Rhymers' Club stuff; the villanelle in A Portrait is, after the loftiness of the artist's claims, very disappointing. The poems that Joyce published in two separate volumes-Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach-make no great pretensions: they arc not to be read in a' Stephen Dedalus context. They are charming, competent, memorable, but they would never, on their own, have m~de t~e name of their author. The 'poetic' side of Joyce (using the term m its narrowest most orthodox sense) had to be enclosed in the irony of the great ~rosebooks for it to be effective. His verse talent is, in fact, close to that of Swift (Dryden was, of course and as always, right), and this is appropriate for the second man to draw great prose our of Ireland. Joyce the versifier is best in lampoons and m the occasional parodies and private satires he wrote for his friends. ,
We can take Chamber Music in good heart when we have taken itS title. There are coarse undertones: Joyce read the poems to a woman who interrupted the recital to relieve herself, audibly, behind a screen. This oracle named the book. When the book first appeared, in 1907, it brought Joyce into association with the Imagist poets. But the artist who drew his aesthetic philosophy from Aristotle and Aquinas was not one 'to derive his poetic inspiration from c? n- temporary modes of versifying, and there is as little of the Imagls:s in the poems of Chamber Music as there is of Yeats and the CeltiC
70
Twilight. These slight lyrics go back to the Elizabethans and they
are meant to be set to music and sung. Joyce the tenor knew what
was needed in words for music-plenty of long vowels, simple
stanzaIC forms, no great length, umty ofmood, conventional imagery
~ndso ~n.
