Portrait: Stephen's Catechism?

I'm not sure what to say about the rest of section three of this book. There is a significant quote at the end of the book where a friend of Stephen's asks him why he doesn't become a Protestant if he is so unhappy with the Catholic church. Stephen's answer is,

I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

Here is the problem: Stephen's Catholicism is illogical, incoherent and at odds with actual church teaching. Most importantly, his understanding of the role of Christ in human redemption is off and he seems to have been very poorly catechized.

As I say, I'm not sure what to make of this. For example, while Stephen's understanding of Catholic teaching is wrong it's far from uniquely wrong. One of his more significant errors is to cast Christ as stern and forbidding and Mary as more easily accessible as if we needed some sort of go between between us as sinners and Christ. You really could not get Christ more wrong than that.

But maybe that was what young James Joyce was taught. There are few branches of the Catholic church quite as messed up as the Irish church and perhaps this is a reflection of that.

I guess the question is this: Does Stephen get it wrong because Joyce himself got it wrong or does Stephen get it wrong because Joyce intentionally made Stephen that way? Either way, I have never seen criticism handling the issue.

Portrait: On Retreat

I'm not convinced that many people read section three of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with much care. I think mostly because the prospect makes them a little queasy. They know what they want to believe so they skim it looking only for clues to back that up. What they are looking for is evidence to back up an anti-Catholic view that says poor little Stephen was brutalized by a horrific priest who terrified him with visions of hell.

But there is very little evidence for that view and quite a bit of evidence for something else. Actually, there are great piles of evidence to the contrary. So much that one of the things that troubles critics is why the retreat and vision of hell is sooo long. And that is agood point because if all Joyce wanted to do was portray a cruel priest needlessly scaring children, he could have done so in much less space and have done so more effectively too.

 The biggest problem with the claim that the priest needlessly scared Stephen and his students is that no one but Stephen seems particularly worked up about it. We don't actually get much of a look at the others, this being a solipsistic little book, but what we do see suggests that they laugh it off.

Now the natural question at this point would be to ask why poor Stephen is so vulnerable. But we don't really have to ask: he is vulnerable because of his sexual pathologies.

For Stephen doesn't need to be told he has sinned. He is, on the contrary, loaded to the gills with guilt about seeing prostitutes. At the same time he has had opportunity to kiss girls he knows but is unable to carry it out. One suspects they thought him an odd little boy and quite possibly gay.

Consider, for example, the rather odd entry of "Emma" into the story. We don't know much about Emma other than her name. She hardly seems to exist outside Stephen's fevered imagination.

The image of Emma appeared before him, and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils. 

The key phrase here is "if she knew" for she doesn't know. She doesn't know of any connection between herself and Stephen for the simple reason that there isn't any. Stephen has defiled her without anything happening between them. How?  Most probably by going to prostitutes instead of living up to what her "purity" (at least as Stephen imagines it it's hard not to suspect that the actual Emma soaking her mind and panties with lust as most teen aged girls do).

But watch what happens next. Stephen moves to a  sort of Garden of Eden fantasy of he and Emma together:

In the wide land under a tender lucid evening sky, a cloud drifting westward amid a pale green sea of heaven, they stood together, children that had erred. Their error had offended deeply God's majesty though it was the error of two children ...

In some ways that makes sense but in other ways it is odd. For how did Stephen's sin against Emma (and God) become the error of two children? She has done nothing. Everything that concerns her and Stephen exists only in Stephen's imagination. Which is why, of course, it's all so flexible but it should trouble critics one hell of a lot more than it has that he makes her, and other women, into sinners so easily. Stephen has a problem with girls: he cannot imagine sex with a woman he could love and he cannot imagine love with a woman he can imagine having sex.

And it is after that little imagining of Stephen's that the Preacher brings up Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Stephen doesn't need his mind perverted by and fire and brimstone slinging preacher, he is already quite sick enough of his own volition than you.

********************************

Also of note in this section is that the Preacher brings up Satan's rejection of God:

What his sin was we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his ruin.

Stephen himself will make that exact move later.

 Finally, we get a moment in the exact centre of the novel when Stephen tries to go to confession:

No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had done and thought, sin after sin. How? How?

—Father, I ...

The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession. But not there in the chapel of the college. He would confess all, every sin of deed and thought, sincerely; but not there among his school companions. Far away from there in some dark place he would murmur out his own shame; and he besought God humbly not to be offended with him if he did not dare to confess in the college chapel and in utter abjection of spirit he craved forgiveness mutely of the boyish hearts about him.

Notice that it is shame holding Stephen back. He really wants to confess but he cannot do it in his own school.

Shame is not guilt. that seems to me to be the very important distinction that Stephen doesn't get. Does Joyce?

Portrait: Heresy

On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:

-- This fellow has heresy in his essay.

A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his hand between his crossed thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about his neck and wrists. Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.

A short loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease.

-- Perhaps you didn't know that, he said.

-- Where? asked Stephen.

Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.

-- Here. It's about the Creator and the soul. Rrm... rrm... rrm... Ah! without a possibility of ever approaching nearer. That's heresy.

Stephen murmured:

-- I meant without a possibility of ever reaching.
 
It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and passed it across to him, saying:

-- O... Ah! ever reaching. That's another story. 

The key words here are "It was a submission". A submission that appeased Mr. Tate. But does Stephen really renounce his heresy? We already know from his response to the boy who asked him if he kissed his mother that Stephen has a tendency to say the the thing his interlocutor wants to hear.

I mention this because this isn't Stephen's last brush with heresy. We get two more early in Section 3. Stephen has just thought about his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and his participation in the little office. First, a bit of explanation. The "office" is a series of prayers that all priests, nuns and monks say every day. A lot of regular Catholics say it as well. (I do.) The "little office" is an unofficial and parallel set of prayers devoted to Mary.

Okay, here is Stephen's first heretical statement:

His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners.

That's exactly backwards. In Catholic teaching, sin can make it harder for us to see God but nothing can cut us off from God's sight or his mercy.

The second bit of heresy is already appearing in the above for Stephen means Mary when he says "the refuge of sinners". As he continues,

Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who approached her. If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent, the impulse that moved him was the wish to be her knight. If ever his soul, reentering her dwelling shyly after the frenzy of his body's lust had spent itself, was turned towards her whose emblem is the morning star, bright and musical, telling of heaven and infusing peace, it was when her names were murmured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a lewd kiss. 

Mary is a saint and she is the most special saint but she remains a human being. She is not the refuge of sinners. Jesus is. Mary can help you find the refuge of sinners in her son but she cannot (the fervent wishes of a lot of misguided Catholics aside) be that refuge herself.

But this is a familiar move for Stephen. Confronted with real women, he prefers the idealize fantasy woman and gravitates between thoughts of her and prostitutes. He makes the same move with Ireland, which he likens to a woman. Again he prefers his idealized fantasy to the real thing.

The problem here is not that Stephen prefers fantasy to reality, although that is not exactly healthy. The problem is that Stephen relentlessly plays tricks in his thinking that make it impossible for any real woman, real country or real God to ever satisfy him.

It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation.

Is Joyce willfully constructing a character or is he haplessly loading Stephen down with his own failings? Or to put it another way, Is Stephen Dedalus just James Joyce?

I think he isn't. I think Joyce has created the character and created the flaw that goes with it. Stephen shares a lot of Joyce's failings but Joyce knows this and has some distance on it. Why do I think this? Three words: Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Section 3 opens with Stephen in the classroom thinking of sex with prostitutes while he is supposed to be working,

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

What fragment of Shelley's? (By the way, notice the "outward and inward", does he really do both or is it all just inward?) For the answer to the Shelley question, we have to go back to section 2 and  how poor Stephen reacts when he is forced to see his father's ineffectual pride in the face of financial failure:

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. 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.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless...?

He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving. 

That fragment is an interesting choice for it is a lot like Stephen's "accidental" heresy of believing that he can never approach God. It is also interesting in that Shelley not only committed heresy in a pamphlet he wrote at university, he was expelled for it. Further Shelley, like Joyce, ran away from home to live with a woman. Shelley, unlike Joyce, also ran away from an existing marriage but we might say that Joyce ran away from Ireland.

Joyce is not simply turning his life into autobiography. He has created a sort of alter ego that allows him to confront his personal demons. Ultimately, I think that is a less interesting or useful project than most modernists took it to be but it is conscious on Joyce's part.

An aside for fans of Brideshead Revisisted, notice how Stephen's sin is the same as Julia's:

What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homage to the Allseeing and Allknowing. 

I don't think that is an accident. I think Waugh was answering Joyce with Brideshead which is also a portrait of an artist as a young man. And although many will regard this as heretical, I think Waugh surpasses Joyce as a novelist and that Brideshead surpasses Portrait.

Portrait: Solipsism?

Published in 1963, Sendak’s book is in may ways the bridge between old-fashioned children’s stories in which kids battled with real-world demons and new-fangled children’s stories in which they largely do battle with their own inner demons. It’s the perfect fairytale for our psychobabbling, navel-gazing age, in which tackling one’s own psychological foibles counts for far more than going out into the world and actually doing stuff.

That is from a rather good  trashing of Maurice Sendak by Brendan O'Neil.  I'm not sure that he's right in identifying anything special about it as it seems to me that te same charge could be leveled against Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh and The Wizard of Oz. As I beat my way through  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I find myself wondering if Joyce is any better or is he just another incidence of a modern disease in thinking.

I'm going very slowly reading and then rereading every section. As I go along the question I keep asking is how different is Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce. It seems to me that that question will ultimately decide whether this book really is as important as the critics think it is. If Stephen Dedalus is just a proxy or projection of Joyce's then I think we should treat this book as amusing but unimportant.

Here is how O'Neil winds up his dismantling of Sendak

Strikingly, Where the Wild Things Are has no adults in it. Well, almost none. We never actually see Max’s mum in the book (though we hear her words once) and in the film she’s fleshed out as a divorcee who is too busy canoodling with her boyfriend to pay any attention to her child. That’s probably the most telling thing about Sendak’s story: the absence of adult actors to shape or guide Max’s behaviour. He’s all alone, feeling his way through his own anger towards some kind of mental balance.

Portrait is a lot like that.  Adults only enter into it to the extent that they can represent Stephen's demons. His father, who probably has the largest presence of any adult in the story, seems really to be there to represent Stephen's own nightmares of how he might turn out: a blustering, impotent bankrupt.

Joyce is not unaware of the problem. He writes as if Stephen were dealing with both the inner and outer demons but I'm more and more convinced this is a cheat.

How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the waters had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

Both sides are acknowledged here. There is the outer:

He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him  ...

and the inner

... and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him.

The problem as I see it is that these two sides are just Stephen's (and Joyce's not incidentally) inner demons dressed up to try and look like two different things. The first is just Stephen acting out the demon he has first represented in his father and, like his father, spending himself into poverty in the attempt. The second is a fraud for where are his parents in this story. Do we ever get a picture of them as separate human beings? We don't. All we get is what they mean to little Stephen who doesn't like when his mother cries and doesn't like it when his father cries. And they fare better than his siblings who are nothing but faceless, nameless blob.

(Even his masters at school, the girls he falls in love with, the prostitutes he goes to and his friends seem only to exist as ways to draw out Stephen's inner demons. Any independent existence they might have is not recorded here.)

This is not unique to him. A I noted last summer, Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It completely expunges the author's five sisters and significantly distorts his brother in order to fulfill Maclean's solipsistic moral vision.

Portrait shares something else with Maclean and that is that it combines apostasy with a powerful sense off loss. Maclean was an apostate of both the family religions: Protestantism and fly fishing. Stephen Dedalus is an apostate of both his family religions: Catholicism and Ireland. But even as they issue their non serviam they mourn their "loss" and try to recreate the thing they have lost in fiction.

And that makes sense for what is modernism but a desire to have our cake and eat it too by both rejecting and mourning the loss of the ancient worldview?

And that is all fine but if all we do about it is to immerse ourselves in ourselves we are just frauds. We are just replacing one kind of mythology for another.

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.

 From here we go to Stephen's religion.  And we should ask the same question of it: Does Stephen's Catholicism have any real existence outside of his mind in this book or is it just a projection of his inner demons too?

Portrait: What is it with Stephen Dedalus and girls?

There was a punk tune in the late 1970s that is so obscure that I can't find it on You Tube. It really exists because Amazon has it. Anyway, the chorus of the song was,

Let's face it, the boy can't make it with girls

Every time I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I think of that song. Stephen Dedalus just seems to be one of those guys who is hopeless with girls. In Chapter 2 of the novel we get a series of impressionistic sketches of Stephen having various encounters with girls. The most telling of these is his encounter with "Mercedes", a girl who doesn't exist. This is worth reading at some length.

When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseilles, of sunny trellises, and of Mercedes.

Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. Both on the outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this landmark: and in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself, towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying:

—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He has created this imaginary ideal only to reject her. And this ideal seems to be at the heart of his vision of art:

He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

Regular readers will know that I don't put a lot of weight on feminist criticism but this passage aclls out for one. Notice how much responsibility this puts into the woman's hands. She has to do for Stephen what God the father did for Christ on the mountain top. What woman could meet this standard?

The answer, of course, is none. Young Stephen has an encounter with a nice girl riding home from a party on the tram but can't actually kiss her. (Joyce wouldn't appreciate this compliment, but it is a good enough scene for Meet Me in St. Louis.) But he can't kiss her even though he can clearly see that she wants to be kissed. Instead, he goes home and tries to write a poem and fails.

More importantly, Stephen wants this transformational connection to take place outside  normal social channels. The actual reality of Ireland (and "woman" and "Ireland" tend to be interchangeable in Joyce) depresses him. He can only write about an idealized Ireland from afar. He seems to feel almost the same about women except for the woman who can just come across with sex without all the social niceties and complications that get in the way.

This is a pretty standard teenage boy fantasy. What makes Stephen different, although not unique, is that he takes this typical teen boy fantasy and projects it up into the heavens. In the process, he impoverishes real women who can only pale next to the idealized woman and impoverishes Ireland which can only pale next to the ideal Ireland.

So next he goes to hookers. Only he doesn't really. The Stephen who ends up with the hooker is a bizarrely will-less creature who just gets pulled in. And notice how the hooker seems to fulfill the vision Stephen had for the imaginary Mercedes but that he wouldn't let the girl on the tram be.

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

Look, I'm a man and I have done my share of sexual sinning and would take back shockingly little of it but never have I seen sex as a transfiguring experience. 

The question is, Who believes this? Stephen obviously but what of Joyce? By the time we get to Ulysses, Joyce gives us a picture of Stephen the sinner which is more clearly condemnable. Stephen's refusal to kneel at the bedside of his dying mother is clearly a heinous act and his resistance to attempts to reconsider the matter are telling.

In Portrait we will also see Stephen try and face his sins and repent for them but something goes very wrong? I'll be honest, I don't know. And I haven't seen anyone else answer the question either.

Portrait: Ellipsis

The use of ellipsis—leaving out parts of the narrative—is a feature of A Portrait of the Artist as  Young Man. That said, "ellipsis" is a misleading word. In sentences, we use an ellipsis when we are confident that the reader either does not need or will be able to fill in what is missing. If I say, "Rudolph invited the whole gang, Donner, Blitzen ..., to his party", I do so confident that you know the names of the other reindeer. That is to say, we both know how the sentence would be filled out if I did fill it out. Or else I use ellipsis confident that you will never miss what is being left out. No such assumption can be made in the case of the sort of ellipsis that Joyce uses. We can guess, of course, but I think we have to be very wary of filling in too much.

To repeat what I said a while ago about Waugh, to get Joyce you have to read only what is there and not project patterns of your own onto the text.

Here is an example of what I mean. The edition I am using features and introduction by Richard Brown whom we are told is at the University of Leeds and the author of James Joyce and Sexuality. I don't know or care enough about contemporary scholarship to know whether he is any good or not but he has enough of a reputation to have been asked to contribute an introduction. Commenting on the ellipsis between Stephen's visit to the infirmary and Christmas dinner with his family, Brown says this:

He [Stephen] is pushed into the school's 'square ditch', bringing on a bout of fever and an early return home. (Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition)

But there is no evidence in the novel to back this up. Young Stephen imagines in his fever that he might be sent home but we never find out that he is. Given that the story resumes after the ellipsis with Stephen at Christmas dinner, the more likely assumption is that he got better, stayed the rest of the term and then came home. But the important thing is that we don't know. The story is not the stuff Joyce left out but the bits he put in.

And if we pay attention to that, the thing that is going to jump out at us is that all three of the sections in book one end with a mourning for severe moral retribution. In the first, very short, section, we end with Stephen being told to apologize or an eagle will pull out his eyes by Dante. (This is a punishment not unlike the kinds that Dante the poet imagines in the Inferno.) At the end of the second section, Stephen imagines a martyr like death for himself and sees the brother mourning the death of Parnell through feverish eyes. In this third section Mr. Casey is reduced to crying for Parnell by the sever admonitions of Dante. In the final section, Stephen will triumph over an oppressor by bravely going to the rector to make his case after he was unfairly punished.

And in between there are a number of ellipsis.

We shouldn't make anything too neat out of this.

Sex, sex sex and Ireland
Since Mr. Brown has opened the subject of sexual politics, let's consider that a bit.

"Dante" apparently comes from young James Joyce's inability to say "auntie". The Dante in this story is not, as I suggested in an earlier post, his Aunt but nurse for the Dedalus children. This Christmas dinner is the first that Stephen has been allowed to sit with the adults and not with the rest of the children. Are we supposed to think of Dante the poet when we read of Dante the nurse? How could we not?

But what does she say about the sexual politics of the story? Women are very much associated with the home and with Ireland for Joyce and yet there is a disturbing misogyny that runs throughout Portrait. Women are idealized and they are demeaned. Consider the comment on Dante that Stephen makes to himself while assessing the argument he has just seen:

But why was he [Mr. Casey] then against the priests? Because Dante must be right then. But he had heard his father say that she was a spoiled nun and that she had come out of the convent in the Alleghanies when her brother had got the money from the savages for the trinkets and the chainies. 

Here we have what is perhaps the most pathetically empty moral trope of modernism: if the other side are hypocrites then we can dismiss them without having to be any better ourselves. And notice how heavily the case has been loaded here. We might sympathize with Dante if we thought she had been sent into the convent because her family were too poor to support her and then came out when the family came into some more money (a not uncommon occurrence in those days). But the story Stephen's father has told him forecloses even that possibility for empathy by letting us know the money was obtained dishonourably.

And Dante is the only woman in this book with a voice. All the other women are either domestic and emotional like his mother or whores like the women he goes to for sex later in the story. That she is an object of fear is telling.

The other thing that happens is that these idealized women are also a symbol for Ireland. Young Stephen, like Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" keeps associating the woman he loves with Ireland. And like Gabriel, he only seems to be able to get really excited about ideal women at some distance as well as an ideal Ireland that is somewhat at a distance.

The love that only dares drop hints about its existence
And then there is Oscar Wilde. Here is the way Joyce opens an essay on Wilde:

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. These are the high-sounding titles that with youthful haughtiness he had printed on the title page of his first collection of poems, and in this proud gesture, by which he tried to achieve nobility, are the signs of his vain pretences and the fate which already awaited him. His name symbolizes him: Oscar, nephew of King Fingal and the only son of Ossian in the amorphous Celtic Odyssey, who was treacherously killed by the hand of his host as he sat at table. O'Flahertie, a savage Irish tribe whose destiny it was to assail the gates of medieval cities; a name that incited terror in peaceful men, who still recite, among the plagues, the anger of God, and the spirit of fornication, in the ancient litany of saints:'from the wild O'Flaherties, libera nos Domine". (Oscar Wilde: The Poet of 'Salomé')

The connection with Stephen Dedalus here is obvious. His fate also seems spelled out in his name—the deacon who became first Christian martyr and the builder of mazes who became entrapped in his own only to escape by some marvelous means of his own devising. But what of homosexuality?

What? Well, if we go back to the text, one of the things suggested in the final section of the first part, where Stephen is vindicated by his audacity in going to rector, is that a number of boys who are about to be expelled or punished may have been engaged in mutual masturbation. We never know for sure, it, "smugging", is just presented as a possibility. And it is further suggested that one of the boys is likely to be leniently punished for reasons that are sexual in nature.

Where does all that fit in with Joyce's rather ambivalent picture of sexuality in the home?

Note what Joyce says of Wilde's sin:

Whether he was innocent or guilty of the charges brought against him, he undoubtedly was a scapegoat. His greater crime was that he had caused a scandal in England ... But the truth is that Wilde, far from being a perverted monster who sprang from in some inexplicable way from the civilization of modern England, is the logical and inescapable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university system, with its secrecy and restrictions.

And we can add, what Joyce was perhaps too squeamish to say, that it was also the inevitable byproduct of boys-only boarding schools such as Conglowes*. And it is deadly combination, this sexual shame that everyone shares and yet we cannot resist joining in when some convenient scapegoat is found to saddle with all our sins. Sometimes literally deadly.

Why mention this at all? Partly because Joyce keeps hinting at it in the final section of book one. But also because it parallels what happens to Parnell. Parnell's sin is like Wilde's He was not the only adulterer in Ireland and yet he was made a public scapegoat.

Final thought from the essay Joyce wrote about Wilde:

His own distinctive qualities, the qualities, perhaps, of his race—keenness, generosity, and a sexless intellect—he placed at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the Golden Age and the joy of the world's youth. But if some truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms rather than syllogisms, to his assimilations of natures as foreign to his as the delinquent is to the humble, at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.

Is that also true of Stephen Dedalus? I think yes, it is. Of course, I think that is true of everyone. But we get no genuine sense of the loss that goes with sin in this book, a point I'll come back to. It's only in Ulysses that we see Stephen aware of his loss and sin. Here we just get the sinning and not the sense of being a sinner. Being Irish, Joyce sometimes seems to only be able to think of sin in sexual terms. He's right about the Irish having sexless intellect but they also have a notion of sin that is deeply eroticized.




* It is also the inevitable byproduct of girls-only boarding schools and summer camps but that never seems to bother as much does it?

Portrait: What time it is?

Fans of The Sun Also Rises will remember that near the opening Jake and a woman he has picked up go by the newspaper office where Jake works and she asks why the office has a whole bunch of clocks on the wall. Jake explains that the clocks are set to the time zones of different cities all over the world. She is incredulous and amazed at this. As she might well be as this was a very modern thing. For centuries people had lived without any awareness of other time zones for the simple reason that it took so long to send a message from one time zone to another that it didn't matter.

This internationalism is also a theme of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Young Stephen wonders how God's name can be "God" in English and "Dieu" in French. That is the kind of concern that arises when different cultures, like different time zones, are brought closer by better technology. He does not worry that his name is "Stephen" in English and "Etienne" in French. Why not? Because only God has a place outside the world to be contemplated equally by all.

Why would you set up a bunch of different clocks to tell yourself what time it was in different places? Only because you believed there was a frame of reference from which all these different time zones could be compared. Getting into and out of different frames of reference is a big modern thing. But what is the frame of reference that encompasses all other reference points? Is there such a frame of reference? The frame of reference point so comprehensive that all others can measured according to it but it cannot be measured according to any other? Why God is.

There is an in-joke in The Sun Also Rises, by the way, and it is that if we try and date the novel by using internal references. that is if we try and find the equivalent of clocks in the text telling us what time we are in, we find only a cloud of confusion. Some internal evidence tells us one year and other internal evidence tells us of another. It seems that Hemingway did this on purpose but who knows.

Which brings me to young Stephen in the infirmary. He has a fever and we follow his thoughts as he looks at the empty school grounds and then wonders why Brother Michael has not given him any medicine. Then he starts imagining he sees waves and then he sees Brother Michael on the deck of a ship who announces to the people that Parnell is dead.

Okay, it's a dream where Stephens various thoughts get crossed in his confused fever. Okay, but which parts of the dream are real and which are the products of the fever?  Did young Stephen look out through a feverish haze and really see Brother Michael mourning at the news of the death of Parnell and that real event was incorporated into his dream? I don't have the foggiest idea but lets go with a while and see where it gets us.

Parnell died on Tuesday October 6 1891. (Young James Joyce was a student at Conglowes from 1888 to 1892.) Let's suppose the news gets to the school on Wednesday October 7. That would put the opening day where Young Stephen is on the football pitch on the 6th and the day he is in the infirmary on the 7th. And there would be a nice parallel here in that Stephen's illness, like Parnell's death, is preceded by an injury visited upon him.

Okay, what other internal evidence to we have to go by? Well, we have the countdown to Christmas holidays that young Stephen is keeping:

Sitting in the studyhall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away; but one time it would come because the earth moves round always.

 Okay, let's do the arithmetic. From October 6 to 31 is 25 days. November uses up 30 more. That leaves us 21. Is December 21 a reasonable time for Christmas vacation to begin? Yes it is. I don't know what days they historically got but this is close enough to be credible.

Young Stephen is just starting school which makes him a few years younger than Joyce himself. This is true even if I am wrong in calculating the year as 1891 for we can say with certainty that it is at least 1891 for Stephen is aware of Parnell's death.

A mystery
Final thought for today. First a caveat: Conglowes would have used the 1570 Breviary and don't have a full copy of that so I can't say what follows with certainty. That said, there is something odd about the "night prayers" Stephen says.

Stephen goes to chapel for what are described as night prayers. And Joyce tells us that "his memory knew the responses:

O Lord, open our lips
And our mouths shall announce Thy praise.
Incline unto our aid, O God!
O Lord, make haste to help us!

Well, sorta. The actual opening with responses would be like this:

Dómine, lábia mea apéries.
Et os meum annuntiábit laudem tuam.
Deus, in adiutórium meum inténde.
Dómine, ad adiuvándum me festína.

But perhaps you think, "So what?" because all Joyce has done is to provide us with the translation. Okay, but those opening responses go with Matins a prayer said between midnight and dawn. Now that prayer could be said at night, although technically it belongs with the start of the next day as the name "Matins" suggests.


And later Joyce gives us the final prayer as follows:

Visit, we beseech Thee, O Lord, this habitation and drive
away from it all the snares of the enemy. May Thy holy
angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace and may Thy
blessings be always upon us through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

And that prayer definitely goes with Compline, which is the last prayer said before bed.


So one of two things are happening here. Either,

1. There was something very different about the Divine Office according to the 1570 Breviary, or
2. Joyce got it wrong (the mistake cannot be Stephen's).

I don't know.

Portrait: Is young Stephen Dedalus good? Likeable?

After the opening, we quickly move to young Stephen's being sent away to school. This is a standard sort of passage in a coming of age story and it had been written hundreds of times before Joyce had his shot at it. Like the classic moment in western movies when there is a river crossing or a funeral, or the first kiss in a love story, there is a whole lot of stuff that necessarily comes along with it.  Stuff like this:

 He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Eiurope

The World

The Universe

And pretty soon he will be worrying about infinity. Every kid does this and more than one author has stuck this into a story of childhood. This isn't weakness or cliché on Joyce's part. We expect and even demand that this sort of stuff be in such a story. To not find here would be like a western movie without a gun duel or a romance without a marriage at the end.

The boy away at school had already been written often enough by the time that Joyce got to it that there were already established variations on the basic story. The one he gives us is of the sensitive boy who would never be good at games.

He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.

Lots of stories feature this sensitive type. To pick the most obvious example, there is George Arthur in the old chestnut Tom Brown's School Days who is very much like Stephen right down to the battle with a fever.

Only George Arthur is actually at risk from the fever. Young Stephen is merely ill and the possible death is all part of his narcissistic fantasy. And I'm sorry but it is narcissistic. Perhaps not unusually so—what child has not fantasized about dying and all the people coming to their funeral. What makes it narcissistic is that we all forget, when indulging in this sort of thing, that we wouldn't be there for the funeral.

And while it is normal to have this experience, we do have to wonder about this sort of event being an important part of someone's moral formation. That little Billy felt this way at eleven is fine but if twenty-five year old Bill is still telling himself and others this story to explain who he is and why he became that person, I think we're entitled to think maybe something has gone wrong. For whatever reason, Joyce chose to tell us this little sequence and to leave out a lot of others from Stephen's days at Clongowes.

Stephen will even become very pious just like George Arthur but only for a while. He'll eventually become an artist instead of the sensitive religious type. And it is the being an artist rather than any capacity to produce art that matters here. It is artist as a way of life that matters. Heavily influenced by George Moore and Oscar Wilde, Joyce is one a of a whole bunch of artists who promoted this new way of being.

Historically, the big difference is that the sensitive religious type represented by George Arthur has not been much liked while the sensitive artist type represented by Stephen Dedalus has been much admired. Admired by intellectuals that is; most guys hate the type.

Stephen's encounter with Wells does not reflect well on Wells, of course, but Stephen doesn't show much character here either:

Then he went away from the door and Wells came over to Stephen and said:

  —Tell us, Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?

Stephen answered:

  —I do.

Wells turned to the other fellows and said:

  —O, I say, here's a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed.
The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said:

  —I do not.
Wells said:

  —O, I say, here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to bed.
They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed.

Yes, Wells is bullying Stephen but this is mild bullying of the sort that every child should be able to deal with. It's the way Stpehen deals with it that bothers me. He doesn't worry about kissing his mother and whether there is an age a boy should move past that (a question he might answer no to in private defiance of Wells) but rather tries to come up with the answer that will get him approval from other boys.  

How much did Joyce buy into the sensitive artist type himself? That is hard to say and it may not matter. What I mean is that this isn't a fact to discover so much as a lens to read the novel through. You can choose to identify Stephen with Joyce and read this novel as the promotion of a way of life. Or you can read Stephen as a creation and step back and examine him for flaws and question whether one should live the way he does.

I take the second approach. I think, Okay, he is young and small—he is a first-year boy after all—but what is he going to do about it? Hiding and not trying, as Stephen does, strikes me as normal enough but it also strikes me as something to grow out of. I think the sensitive artist type who endures school, never gets even moderately good at games and maintains a sense of self worth by feeling morally superior to bullies is a morally repulsive type all too typical of this ghastly age and, at this point at least, Stephen Dedalus seems like an all-too-typical example of one of these runty little twerps.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Coming to terms with Joyce

I'm going to be eggheady today.

And why do the thing by half measures. Let's start with Gottlob Frege (Pronounced roughly like a question and answer, Q: "Got lob?" A: "Fray gay!") In 1894, Frege wrote one of the most devastating reviews ever of a book by a now mostly (and deservedly) forgotten philosopher named Edmund Husserl. But while neither Husserl nor his book are of much import anymore, what does matter is a "disease in thought" that Frege diagnosed in Husserl.

The disease is roughly this: A belief that you can analyze consciousness in order to discover, correct or reconstruct logic and understanding. The problem, as Frege noted, is that you begin your analysis already equipped with a logical strategy and, to no great surprise, it always turns out that "consciousness" is structured pretty much the same way the logical strategy we employ to analyze it is. If you are concerned with religion, you will find an inner temple, if you are concerned with sex, you'll find your inner porn theatre, if you are concerned with logic, you will discover an inner computer and so forth.

So we can see right from the beginning that Stephen Daedalus's project:

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

is doomed from the get-go. There is no reality of experience nor is there any smithy of the soul outside of the one that Stephen projects into it. All Joyce was ever going to find was the assumptions he started with. Which is why his fiction gets progressively more incoherent the further he gets from Dublin. So long as Joyce has to run up against real Dubliners and the actual logic of their social life all goes well. Once he gets into some library on the continent with his maps and schedules, it all gets kinda crazy.

But oh, how that man could write. No one in their right mind would read all the way through Finnegan's Wake but you can crack that book open anywhere and be sure that you will find a stretch of beautiful writing somewhere on the page you land on.

So it seems to me that the question is this: If the project Joyce (or at least Stephen Daedalus) thought he was engaged in was doomed, what did he actually achieve? Because that good stuff is very good even if the project he was pursuing was impossible. And not just him but a whole lot of other twentieth century modernists.

Take the opening of A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man. It is a brilliant opening and hugely influential.

Once upon a time and a  very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens boy named baby tuckoo ....

You want to read that story. You still want to read it after the next paragraph when you learn that this is a really a story about that story that young Stephen's father told him rather than the thing itself but you are a bit disappointed because the story of the moocow and baby tuckoo sounded like it was going to be good stuff. Maybe it only feels this way because the story itself tells us that once upon a time was a "very good time" and we like that. Telling your readers that there is good stuff ahead hooks them in.

From there we bounce to other childhood memories such as wetting the bed and then we leap with a bang into boarding school where young Stephen has a rough time. How rough? It's hard to say. The story tells us it was really rough but the suspicion begins to kick in pretty early that Stephen is a bit of a pussy boy so we either pull back or jump right in depending how susceptible we are to the pussy-boy world view.

But are we seeing young Stephen's consciousness here? Does this way of telling the story get us into his mind? Or are we seeing a way of telling a story?

Everyone gets bullied at school. There are no exceptions. But there is a huge difference between the kid who is still telling the story of how they were bullied and how devastating it was years later and the person who has moved on to tell other stories. This is "a" portrayal of the artist as a young man as done by someone who is no longer a young man. On that view, the fragmented account of early childhood is not the way kids actually experience life but rather the disjointed bits pulled from the memory of an older man trying to reconstruct something long lost. And this reconstruction will necessarily take the form of the assumptions he brings to it. This is not the boy but a creation of the boy and that creation has a structure and logic from the adult writer projected into it.

Here is another even better opening sentence from Joyce:

Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.

That is in medias res with a vengeance. And what res are we in the middle of? You really want to know. You know something about Lily and her social class and we know that we are reading her thoughts because she uses language "incorrectly". Only not really because even though it is logically incoherent to say she was literally run off her feet, we still know what she means.

If we keep reading this story (The Dead), we see something else fascinating. The story features a writer named Gabriel Conroy who has verbal encounters with three women and he comes off a poor second in all three encounters. And it is a very courageous thing that Joyce tells it that way. In that portrait, the writer or artist is not the hero. (In this respect, Dubliners and Portrait work as a binary pair.)

Here is Lily again:

"Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming."

and

"Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy?"

and

"I'm done schooling this year and more."

and

"The men that is now is all palaver and what they can get out of you."

In each and every case, Lily's language is "wrong" but ever so right. In the second example above, to pick just one, she uses the word "again" to mean "still". The Irish I grew up with in Saint John, New Brunswick spoke that way. We'd say, "it's wonderful cold this morning" meaning "It's very cold". Or we'd say "Hello for Jimmy Coghlan" meaning "Hurray for Jimmy Coghlan".

And it's not just a way of speaking, it's a way of telling.

That, it seems to me, is Joyce's great strength. He had a wonderful way of telling. Even when what he was telling was incoherent or, at the very least, more trouble than it was worth to follow, it was wonderfully told.

In any case, I'm rereading Portrait and will blog my way along. This is my way of saying right up front that my goal is not to find Stephen or Joyce's purpose in telling the story but something else that I think better than that.