No More Learning

This very next lent I will unbare My penitent buttocks to the air
? ? The Stones
The glory and mystery of art can lie in the tension b~tween the appearance and the reality, or, rather, between the subject-matter and what is made out of it. The view that subject-matter should be in itself enlightening still persists, chiefly because a moral stock- response comes more easily to most people than a genume ae~th:tlc transport. When Grant Richards eventually got round to pubhshmg Dubliners-as he did on June 15th, '9'4: very nearly the tenth anm- versary of the Bloomsday that had not yet happened-few people were ready for it: the taste was for the didacticism, the pedestnan
moral lessons of a less naturalistic fiction. In Dubliners the reader was not told what to think about the characters and their actions, or rather inactions. There were no great sins, nor any performance of great good. Out of drab ordinariness a purely aesthetic quidditas
A Paralysed City
leaps out.
. . . .
the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself? ' Meanwhile, the dead priest is 'lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast'.
That is the whole story, and it is more an attempt at establishing a symbol than manufacturing a plot: a broken chalice, an idle chalice. The shameful discoveries about the adult world continue in the next
'An Encounter', in which the boy-narrator and his friend Mahony 1';. 7 truant from school for a day. Their heads full of The Union Jack, Pluck, and The Halfpenny Marvel, they meet adventure, but not in the form of the innocent violence of their little Wild West mythologies. A shabby man accosts them, full of perverse fantasies. Mahony runs away, but the narrator has to listen to the man's mono- logue about whipping boys who have sweethearts. 'He described to me how he would whip such a boy, as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him. ' The narrator gets away from the de- mented babbling, calling Mahony. 'How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little. '
'Araby' is the last of this opening trilogy of stories in which the
world is seen from a child's-eye view. Here, though, the passionate
frustration belongs to the boy himself. He is past the stage of en-
countering external mysteries-ritual and dementia-and is now learning about love's bitter mystery through pubescent experience. Here comes the eucharistic symbol: 'I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in. strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. ' We are to meet this symbolism again, in the 'Villanelle of the Temptress' -named in Stephen Hero, presented in A Portrait. In 'Araby', though, the loved one is no temptress but a girl at a convent-school. She wants to go to the bazaar called Araby (this, hke all the public events in Joyce, is historical: it was held in Dublin from May 14th to 19th, 1894, in aid ofJervis Street Hospital); un- fortunately there is a retreat at the convent and she has to be disap- pointed. The boy promises to go instead and bring her back a present. It is the last night ofAraby, he must get some money from his uncle, and hiS uncle comes home late and fuddled. When he arrives at the bazaar it is closing down; the lights are going out.
39
All the stories in Dubliners are studIes In paralYSIS or frustratlOn, and the total epiphany is of the nature of modern city life-the sub- mission to routines and the fear of breaking them; the emanCIpatIOn that is sought but not sought hard enough; the big noble attitudes
that are punct~redby the weakness of the flesh. The first story, 'The Sisters', presents the key-word in its very first paragraph:
Every night as I gazed up at the window I sa~d softly to my:self the word paralysis. It had always sounded stJ:"angely. m my ears,. hke the wor~ gnomon in the Euclid and the word sImony In the Ca~echlsm. . But now It sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and smful bemg. It fill~d me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon ItS
deadly work.
The narrator is a young boy. Behind the window Father Flynn lies dead. The boy, like Joyce himself, is drawn not only to the myst~ry of words but to the terrifying complexities of the rites that the pnest has administered. As for the priest himself-old and retlf~d ~nd dying-the boy's feelings have been a mixture of awed fascmatlOn and repugnance. Father Flynn looks forward . to the unpleasant priests of Graham Greene and the dramallc pOSSlbIl1l1es of the con- trast between their function and their nature. He has been a messy snuff-taker. 'When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured
teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip. ' But now he is dead, and the boy goes with his aunt to see the body in the house of the Misses Flynn, the sisters of the priest. He learns, o:er a glass of defunctive sherry, that Father Flynn's illness began With the break- ing of a chalice, that this affected his mind,: ~. : . And what do y~u
think but there he was,' says Ehza Flynn, slttmg up by himself m 38
? ? ? ? ? The Stones
Gazing up into the darkness I saw my. self as ~ creatuft;! driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned WIth angUlsh and anger.
The seeming triviality of the frustration and the violence of the language which expresses it are, as it were, reconciled by the aesthetic force of the epiphany: here, drawn from commonplace experience, is a symbol for the frustration o f adolescence and, by extension, of maturity too.
The rest of the frustrations and cases of paralysis belong to the adult secular world. The heroine of 'Eveline' longs to escape from her drab Dublin life and she has her chance. But, on the vety point of embarking for Buenos Aires with the man who loves her, 'all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. ' Her heart says no; she sets 'her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sigu of love or farewell or recognition. ' Little Chandler, in 'A Little Cloud', re-meets the great Iguatius Gallaher, who has made good in
London journalism (in Ulysses he has already become a Dublm newspaper-man's myth: he telegraphed details of the Phoenix Park murders to the New York World, using a code based on a Freeman advertisement. This was a memorable scoop). Little Chandler makes the inevitable comparison between the richness of Gallaher's life, all whiskey and advances from moneyed Jewesses, and his own-the mean job, the insipid wife, the bawling child. If only he could make his name with a little book of Celtic Twilight poems, go to London, escape ghastly provincial Dublin. But it is too late. The epipha? y
flowers in the rebukes of his wife for making the brat scream, whIle
his cheeks are 'suffused with shame' and 'tears of remorse' start to
his eyes. The cage is tight-shut.
One need not be a negative and timid character, like Eveline or
Little Chandler to exhibit the syndrome of soul-rot. Farrington, in 'Counterparts', is burly, red-faced, perpetually thirsty, and he fancies himself as a pub strong man. But he has the shiftlessness of all VIrIle Dubliners, and even the job of copy-clerk in a solicitor's office is too much for him. The little heaven of release from actuality. is always the 'hot reeking public-house', the tailor of malt, the dream of high- class women, but the money always runs out, the spong~ng cromes fade away, and heaven is thoroughly dissolved by the time he. h~s reached the tram-stop on O'Connell Bridge. 'He cursed everythmg ,
waiting for the Sandymount tram. 'He had done for himself in the
office, pawned his watch, spent all his money; and ~e had not even got drunk. ' All that is left is to go homeand beat hIS son Tom for
40
A Paralysed City
letting the fire go out. Tom cries: 'I'll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, Ifyou don'tbeatme . . . I'llsayaHailMary. . . . 'ButaHailMary won't do for any of these Dubliners.
Nothing will really do. Lenehan, in 'Two Gallants' as in Ulysses, ca~ries his se~dy scraps of culture round ('That takes the solitary, umque, and, If I may so call it, recherche biscuit I') in the service o f a sports paper and the office of jester to whoever-even a boor like Corley-has, or is able to get, a little bit ofspending money. But even where there is money, and education, and a fair cultivated and cos- mopolitan acquaintance, there is something missing. In 'After the Race' the city wears 'the mask ofa capital' for Jimmy and his Euro- pean friends, who have come 'scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road' in their racing cars.
At the crest of the hi~l at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watc~ th~ cars carcen~g homeward, ~d through this channel of poverty and mactlOn the Contment had sped Its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps o f people raised the cheer o f the gratefully oppressed . . .
There are drinking and gambling and song on board the American's yacht in Kingstown Harbour, but Jimmy is fuddled and is one of the heaviest losers. 'They were devils of fellows, but he wished they would stop: it was getting late. ' It is all folly, and he will regret it all in the morning. At the end of the story-Joyce's only incursion into the world of the moneyed-morning has come. 'Daybreak, gentlemen! '
High ideals are betrayed-not with renegade force but through
submission to compromise, the slow silting away of conviction that,
it seems, only the Irish fanatic can hold. Mr Henchy, in 'Ivy Day in
the Committee Room', says:
'Parnell is dead. Now, here's the way I look at it. Here's this chap come to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it tiIl the man was grey. He's a ~an of the world, and he means well by liS. He's a jolly decent fellow, If you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself: "The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By ~hrist, I'll go myself and see what they're like. n And are we going to msult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? '
It is Parnell's ~nniversary, and the corks pop round the fire in the committee room. The impending visit of Edward VII is folded into the warmth of convivial tolerance ('The King's coming here will mean an influx of money into this country'), Joe Hynes recites a
4'
? ? ? ? ? ? The Stones
poem called 'The Death of Parnell', in which the lost leader is pre- sented as a betrayed Christ. There is applause, another cork pops, and Mr Crofton ~ays that it is 'a very fine piece of writing'. Parnell has joined a harmless pantheon, no legitimate Jesus but an ikon. This is one of the stories that held back publication of the whole book. A libel on the Irish spirit, a too free bandying of the name of a living monarch, an intolerable deal of demotic speech: naturalism had gone too far altogether.
With 'Grace', the penultimate story, the heady wine of religious faith is decently watered for the children of this world, who-as the text of Father Purdon's sermon reminds us-are wiser in their generation than the children of light. The story begins with the fall of man:
Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot ofthe stairs down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise. A thin stream of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
This is Mr Kernan, 'a commercial traveller of the old school which
believed in the dignity of its calling'. He is one of a group of small tradesmen, clerks, employees ofthe Royal Irish Constabulary,workers in the office of the Sub-Sheriff or the City Coroner-good bibu- lous men who are to be the backbone of Ulysses. Mr Power promises Mrs Kernan that he and his friends will make a new man of her husband: no more drunken fallings, regeneration with God's grace. And so, without solemnity and even with a few harmless Catholic jokes, we move towards a businessmen's retreat, a renewal of bap- tismal vows, and a sermon from Father Purdon. It is a manly, no- nonsense sermon, in which Jesus Christ is presented as a very understanding master, asking little, forgiving much.
We might have had, we all had from time to time, our temptations: we might have, we all had, our failings. But one thing only, he said, he would ask of his hearers. And that was: to be straight and manly with God. If their accounts tallied in every point to say:
'Well, I have verified my accounts. I find all well. '
But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the truth, to be frank and say like a man:
'Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But, with God's grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my
accounts. '
42
A Paralysed City
Thus this rather mean city is spread before us, its timidity and the
hollowness of its gestures recorded with economy and a kind of
muffled poetry, its bouncing cheques of the spirit endorsed with . humour but with neither compassion nor censoriousness, for the author must be totally withdrawn from his creation. The book
begins, in 'The Sisters', with the image of a paralysed priest and a broken chalice; it might have ended, in 'Grace', with the sacrament of provincial mock-piety and a blessing for small and dirty minds. But It does not end there. The longest and best story which con- cludes the book . is an afterthought. Dublin may be an impotent CIty, but Ireland IS more than Dublin. Life may seem to lie in exile, 'out in Europe', but it is really waiting coiled up in Ireland, ready to lunge from a wilder west than is known to the reading boys of 'An Encounter'. This story about life is called 'The Dead'.
Everything in Joyce's writing is an enhanced record ofthe author's ? wn experience, ~ut perhaps 'The Dead' is the most personal item III the long chromcle of Dublin which was his life's work. Gabriel C? nroy is a sort ofJames Joyce-a literary man, college teacher, con- trIbutor of a literary column to the Dublin Daily Express, European- Ised; out of sympathy with Ireland's nationalistic aspirations, aware that his o~ culture is of a different, superior, order to that which surrounds hIm in provincial Dublin. He has married a girl ofinferior education (,country cute' is what his own mother once called her), but he does not despise her: Gretta Conroy has the Galway firmness of characte~ of her prototype, Nora Joyce; she is beautiful; Gabriel IS a posseSSIve husband. On New Year's Eve they go to the annual party given by Gabriel's aunts-Miss Kate and Miss Julia-and, as the house is some way out of Dublin, they have booked a hotel room for the night. It is a good convivial evening, full of piano solos, song, quadrilles, food. As Gabriel and? Gretta go to their hotel room in the early hours, a wave of desire comes over him: the possessive wants to possess. But Gretta is distracted. At the end of the party the tenor Bartell D'Arcy sang a song called The Lass ofAughrim, and she is thinking about the song. A young boy she once knew in Galway used to sing it. His name was Michael Furey and he was 'in the gasworks'. He died young. Gabriel asks whether he died of consumption, and Gretta replies: 'I think he died for me. '
The complex of emotions which takes possession of Gabriel's
soul on this disclosure and on Gretta's transport of re-lived grief needs something more than a naturalistic technique for its expres- sion. We see the emergence of a new Joyce, the deployment of the
43
? ? ? ? The Stones
cunning of the author of Ulysses, and experience a visitation of ter- rible magic. As Gabriel analyses his tepid little soul we see that his name and that of his dead rival have taken on a strange significance- Gabriel the mild angel, Michael the passionate one; and that dead boy, possessed of an insupportable love, was rightly called Furey.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cau-
tiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Gabriel becomes aware of the world of the dead, into which the living pass. That world goes on with its own life, and its purpose is to qualify, literally to haunt, the world of those not yet gone. The living and the dead coexist; they have strange traffic with each other. And there is a sense in which that dead. Michael Furey is more alive, through the passion which killed him, than the living Gabriel Conroy with his bits of European culture and his intellectual superiority. Meanwhile, in the all too tangible world of Dublin, the snow is coming down, general all over Ireland. 'The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. ' The west is where passion takes place and boys die for love: the graveyard where Michael Furey lies buried is, in a sense, a place of life. As for the snow, it unites the living and the dead and, by virtue of this super- natural function, it ceases to be the sublunary snow that drops on a winter city. Gabriel's soul swoons slowly as he hears 'the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead'. We have broken, with him, through the time-space veil; we are in the presence of a terrible ultimate truth.
Ellmann's biography ofJoyce tells us, in detail, about the real-life materials which went to the making of 'The Dead'. Gabriel's revela- tion of the community of dead and living was also his creator's, de- rived from a similar jealousy ofhis wife's dead lover, a jealousy which had to yield to acquiescence and a sort of surrender.
By extension, jealousy of a living rival becomes equally futile: it is best to accept philosophically, even gladly; we can even end by deliberately willing
the cuckold's role. When, towards the end of Ulysses, Bloom reflects on his wife's adultery (multiple-the names of her fellow-sinners are fully listed), he considers the responses of 'envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity' and justifies the last of these with thoughts about 'the futility of triumph or protest or vindication; the inanity of extolled
44
A Paralysed City
vi~e; 0 e lethargy of nescient matter; the apathy of the stars'. But,
earher, m the brothel scene, his imagination has called up the . enactme~t of adultery between his wife and Blazes Boylan and he
hImself, In ImagmatlOn, has urged it on:
BLOOM: (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself0 Show! Hide! Show I Plough
her! More! 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.