Mature men are completely alienated by the others' versions of themselves: beyond the Lacanain “mirror stage”, their “id” is absorbed into public images. Gabriel Conroy, in The Dead, is a humanist who can well control the universe of discourse in which he moves, both as a fellow lecturer and as a reviewer of books. It is books he can understand and interpret, for himself and for others – a mode of understanding within the cultural order, which is spiritually more rewarding than the financial gains he derives from writing. In the real world, however, moving among people in flesh and blood, he falls victim to painful misunderstandings: he is not confirmed in his ideal versions of others, nor does he recognize himself in the other's versions of himself. Oxymoronic speech is the expression of displaced identities, which no longer coincide with themselves. “She's not the girl she was at all”, he muses in connection with Lily, whom he meets at the yearly party thrown by his aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan. Having discovered that she has outgrown school time, or nursing rag dolls, Gabriel makes a second wrong conjecture about the girl planning to meet her Prince Charming, a fairy tale fantasy she dismisses with a cold, disenchanted comment on decaying masculinity: The men that is now is only palaver and what they can get out of you. Nor does Molly Ivors, his Lancers' partner confirm his expectations of her. The elaborate rules of the Lancers dance, in which various patterns are formed, are much more intelligible to him than the woman who did not wear a low cut bodice, like the one in his anima fantasy, and with whom he enters into political arguments. The most tragic misrecognition is occasioned by his own wife, whom he perceives standing near the top of the first flight of stairs, in the shadow, listening to distant music. What is she a symbol of, Gabriel asks himself, and he figures himself to be the object of her desire. Once more he is wrong, because Mr. D’Arcy's song had reminded Gretta of a man whom she had loved and who had died young. Gabriel manages to extort his name and story from her, finally realizing that the dead man's image in her heart is more powerful than her actual perception of himself. Fantasy worlds have grown autonomous; the fairy tale, the dance, the song fail to match the reality of facts, while memory can colonize someone's personality more forcibly than reality. Gabriel is still mastered by his mother's taste and distastes, Gretta is still moved by the presence of the dead. The dinner ceremony builds the broadest pattern, which is continually exploded by the unruly, unpredictable factual or psychological reality: Both the Morkans' party and Gabriel's after-dinner speech emphasize tradition, continuity, stability, clarity, and a comprehendible universe. Within the setting, individual attempts to rule over their personal worlds of identity confusion, shifting modes of subjectivity, and unpredictable suspensions of conscious thought, the price of all this superficial order is that the Morkan sisters and their guests, in attempting to rule everything that is present, are ruled by everything that is absent. They are ruled by the dead as well as by absent thoughts that they cannot afford to remember. Much of what they say to one another in conversation is compulsively banal precisely because what it is they wish to say is so alarming. What they have forgotten is what remembers them. Conversation is dangerous, Gabriel learns, because it is always an attempted seduction of the Other, and one's sense of self may be subverted as easily as it may be confirmed [42]. The characteristically modernist awareness of the gaps separating natural, psychological and linguistic order informs the process of ego-formation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel which began to be serialized in “The Egoist” in 1914, and was published as a book in 1922. What the play of definite/indefinite article in the title suggests is that it is only in the artist that the process of individualization is completed, as it reaches the ultimate stage in which the self is constructed in the analytical, self-validating and incorruptible form of a work of art. The natural need for revisionist criticism and canonization has lately yielded a spectacular re-reading of the novel as an example of “antimodernism”: The Antimodernism of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by Weldon Thornton, Syracuse University Press, 1994. The approach is a fallacious one from several points of view, betraying a shallow knowledge of philosophy and narrative structure. Freud, Frazer, William James, amalgamated by Thornton into the same mixing pot (p. 68), are very different from one another, and even more distinct from Rousseau, Wordsworth and Goethe in the representations of the self. Even more shocking than this mixture of pragmatist philosophy, intuitionism, French and romantic idealist philosophy is Thornton's classification of the Portrait alongside Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel as examples of the “Bildungsroman”, which does not emerge full blown until the twentieth century, especially the period from 1910-1930 (p. 69). Generalizing from marginal cases, while ignoring the classical examples, Thornton concludes that the unreflective picaresque is almost always presented in first person point of view, while the more interior Bildungsroman is typically in third person (p. 71), at the same time conflating The Rainbow and the Portrait into the same type of narrative discourse as presentation in third person. If we agree that the Bildungsroman involves an entelechy, an underlying developmental movement (p. 73), we cannot see Paul Morrel fitting into this pattern, as he is dominated by his mother's personality throughout, with a dim perspective of freeing himself from maternal bondage after her death, but which the reader never sees accomplished. No continuity, as implied by the concept of “entelechy”, can be traced in the American Wolfe's nostalgic realization of self-alienation from the past, either. While disagreeing with those who would see language as Joyce's sole theme or subject, or who would argue that language comprises the source and substance of his character's problems and failures (p. 117), the author brings forward an argument likely to strike his antagonists dumb: That Joyce did not identify language and reality is made clear by a number of his statements at varous times during his career (Ibidem). Joyce certainly did not, but it is the very autonomy of language in which he builds his characters that separates him from the rest of the company which Thornton has chosen for him. Thornton's book should warn us against the relaxation of the theoretical strain after the excesses, in this respect, of structuralism and poststructuralism. There is a great difference between the Bildungsroman, originating in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, focusing on what Wordsworth calls “the growth of an individual mind”, the imaginary portrait, in which the aesthetic decadents portray the growth of aesthetic consciousness built in cultural matrices, and the modernist artist's portrait (Künstlerroman) as growth of discursive competence. To begin with, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque are not “cognate forms” (Thornton, Ibidem, P. 66). The latter takes the protagonist through a series of adventures in the world of empirical facts, presenting him in an extradiegetic perspective (from the outside). The perspective is intradiagetic in the Bildungsroman, with focus upon the “bon voyage”, as Du Bellay would say, within the character's consciousness. Whereas the “picaro” hero is not far from a delinquent of a minor sort, the hero of a Bildungsnarrative is the embodiment of the time's ideal self-fashioning. Wilhelm Meister is progressively sphered in a different set of values from those of his family, appropriated in separation from it (since the Bildungsroman is not “a search for the father”, as Thornton assumes – Ibidem, p. 70). Dickens makes sure his protagonists' personalities are “built” in separation from the father figure, by making them orphans. Wilhelm Meister says “good-bye” to the feudal world, Copperfield embodies the Victorian ideal of the professional intellectual, capable to discipline and check a romantic disposition. The separation from the family is symbolical of the demise of an old set of values and the assertion of the spirit of a new age. The “imaginary portrait” by Huysmans, Pater or Wilde situate the protagonist within an axiological context, divorced from the sphere of everyday concerns. The hero is faced with the necessity of choosing among values, with the result that the aesthetic value is in Kantian fashion autonomised and absolutized at the expense of all the others. Whereas the Bildungsroman takes the form of what Gérard Genette calls, in Introduction à l'architexte, (Editions du Seuil, 1979) a factual narrative, in which the author is identical with the narrator (A=N), and the events assumed to be real, the “imaginary portrait” emerges as deliberately “counterfactual” (fictional narrative), illustrating an aesthetic thesis, laying in the abyss its own nature as a fiction bracketing reality and opposing it. With Joyce, language is no longer expressive but constitutive; the protagonist is built in language, and the linear narrative is replaced by a spatial form. The arbitrary sequence of flashbacks, anticipations, repetitions or dislocations of the chronological time-sequence are meant to point towards a different order built outside time, of epiphanic moments (moments of being aesthetically apprehended), existing simultaneously in the continuum of consciousness. The structure of events yields to structurality of discourse: leitmotifs, images, symbols, contrasts, repetitions and basic oppositions. Developing from infant language to figurative speech as the very construction of the main character, the discourse of A Portrait is very far from the omniscient narrator's “third person presentation”, which displays the same degree of linguistic competence from the beginning to the end. Joyce's Stephen is a linguistic construct, almost emptied of psychological inwardness, like Wallace Stevens's Crispin as the letter “C”, voyaging in the sea of the text [43]. The five divisions of the novel correspond to major phases in a process of progressive disengagement from the world of experience and emancipation of the mind, which creates out of its own substance a semiological utopia: I. Stephan's boarding-school days; II. His education at Belvedere in Dublin; III. The retreat and penitence after his erotic initiation, and the attempt to mortify his senses; IV. His entry to University and the clarification of his aesthetic doctrine, according to which art is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination, by an artist who creates like the God of creation; V. His decision to leave Ireland to pursue his artistic vocation and, correspondingly, the ability to control the metaphorical level of language: bird and rose as symbols of the work of art, the one “spurning the ground”, as Shelley would say, the other, as Rilke's favourite image of pure “Innerlichkeit” (inwardness), self-identity or Dante’s symbol of divine self-identity, since the petals hide no kernel, no solid lump of reality. Unlike Marius's mind in suspense, built in the isolation of James's pragmatist thought, recording the permanently changing flow of empirical sensations, Stephen is seeking a pattern of order, which Bergson's deeper self can add, in the pattern of memory, to the fluid empirical self, immersed in the “données immédiates de la connaissance”. In L’Évolution créatrice [44], Bérgson does not deny the existence of patterns or forms, it is only that they are empechées par la matière qu'elle porte en elles (embodied, fused with the matter they contain), and at the same time ready to assume their ideal nature (les formes sensibles... toujours pretes à ressaisir leur idealité). As a child, whose language is barely articulated, and whose imagination is shaped by tales (the novel actually opens with “once upon a time...”), Stephen is striving to make sense of the chaotic sequence of incidents, of the atomistic shower of sensations, to reach an understanding of the world and of his place in it. The child starts with existential statements, the Verb bringing the objects of his consciousness into existence: The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. The substances are afterwards qualified by attributes: His mother had a nicer smell than his father.. When you wet the bed, first it is warm, then it gets cold (...) The progressive schematisation of thought, produced by the insertion within a pre-existing cultural order, can be seen in the attempt to order experience through systems of hierarchy which place the subject at the centre of the universe: Stephan Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallius County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe “World” and “universe” are meant to differentiate the ecumenical („inhabited”, socialized) from the cosmic order of existence. “Physis” is what has not been appropriated or constituted by man, Stephan finding himself at the beginning of this potentially infinite phenomenological process of transferring things into meanings. “Names” are not just words but bridges between self and world. They establish identity, differences between “I” and “thou”, “mine” and “yours”. Stephen sees his self as “woven” within a social texture. Physical geography is itself “mapped” by sets of values: nation, family, religion: Stephan Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation, Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation. Stephen's “home” is not a place of harmony and togetherness. Parnell's disgrace and adultery drive a wedge between the two certainties of Stephen's early life: Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism. The overt conflict over dinner caused by Mr. Casey's diatribe against the “princes of the church” and Dante, his aunt, who passionately defends them, brings tears into his father's eyes, while breeding in the child-witness an early sense of the incapacity of politics and religion to answer the fundamental question “What is right?” Another question engages a graceful order of conduct: he may feel prompted, but is it right or proper to kiss his mother, and what is the meaning of a kiss, anyway? School proves as impotent as family environment in gratifying his sense of justice: Stephen is unjustly punished for not doing his homework on account of his broken glasses, the prefect of studies beating him across his hand in the famous pandybat scene. The family order is again disrupted by a forced move to Cork, Ireland: These changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world. Stephen makes a frantic attempt at reestablishing the ties with his family. He uses the money he gets as a prize for writing an essay to improve his family's condition, to make them graceful gifts: He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to damn up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations. But his bank account soon comes to an end, and the whole enterprise proves useless anyway. Adolescent love assumes the garb of romantic literature, which sends him wandering from garden to garden in search of Mercedes (the heroine of Dumas's Count of Monte-Cristo) The Jungian search for “anima” (a man's subconscious ideal of a woman) is conceived of as a mystic experience, whereby he might be “transfigured”, but the world of flesh and blood does not work such miracles. The erotic drive ends in moral disaster, with Stephen stranded in a prostitute's home. The religious language augments the irony of failed intentions, substituting intimations of the sexual orgies on the pagan altars of Greece for the “Transfiguration” scene in the New Testament. He cannot possibly recognize his “Mercedes” in the fallen woman, as people recognized the divinity of the “transfigured Christ”, wrapped up in the light flashing from above: He was in another world, with yellow gasflashes... burning as if before an altar, with people arrayed as for some rites (...). Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easychair beside the bed. Stephen's sexual initiation makes him feel his soul tainted, grown as bestial as his body: fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk. A need for penitence and redemption makes him withdraw for a while from the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of (his) conscience, to reflect on the mystery of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this world. During his “retreat”, Stephen seeks painful nervous irritation, exposing himself to bad odours, noises, fasting, etc. The aggression on his senses cuts him off from the workaday world, lighting his inner vision. However, the vague acts of priesthood, their semblance of reality are very remote from his idea of complete self-fulfilment. The church has a business-like face – acts of piety adding up in a great cash-register – and a histrionic one: love and hate pronounced solemnly on stage and in the pulpit. It lacks substance; it denies passion. The next “temptation”, which, given Stephen's childhood experience, is easier to resist, comes from politics. His college-mate, McCann, passes a very severe judgement on his aloofness, nourished by the aesthetics of Pater, Wilde and other decadents: Dedalus, you are an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a democrat and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future. Engaging in the most rewarding quest – writing –, Stephen heads towards a full realization of his aestheticist view of art, purged of everything alien to it, even of its moral dimension. Stephen echoes James's and Flaubert's view of literature as primarily a question of form, of language, a language which has been purified of the market-value lent by its millenary use by the “tribe”: “One difficulty”, said Stephen,”in aesthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's, in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you”. Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Newman, Pater, Wilde are as many steps on the way to the modernist gospel of the man-of-letter's emancipation from the gospel of realism and pragmatism. Lending a purer sense to the words of the tribe (Mallarmé), the artist works language into an opaque, intransitive medium, reflecting back upon itself. He is not a prophet, possessed of the original, Joanic Word, attempting an imitatio dei (the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation), but an architect, a Daedalus figure, trapping the reader in a labyrinth of words, in a linguistic structure deliberately constructed to bar the way back to the reality of things. One can only escape it by flying, soaring above the unredeemed clay of the “workaday”. Stephen discards his biological and national heritage, being ritualistically reborn as an artist, in the long line descending from Daedalus, at the end of chapter four. He is capable now to create a new linguistic order of the universe, independent from physics: He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours ? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour ? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? At the name of the fabulous artificer, it seems to him that he beholds a winged form flying above the waves, the wings of the soaring Icarus who has made his escape from the labyrinthine reality. The image of ascent is traditionally associated with conversion. Discovering his true self, Stephen adheres to a new Church, of artists, and to a new order of existence – the impersonal language of the work of art, speaking messages from the spirit of (its) age. Rather than original and visionary, modernist art is an exercise in reinscription, a conscious insertion in an artificial order. By creating the Villanelle, Stephen acquires generic identity. The prostitute of the “workaday”, or the “Mercedes” of romantic love are replaced by the female Muse. The girl on the beach is a woman-inspiration-soul, acting like Beatrice for Dante: It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dream. Several images and verbal echoes would point to W.B. Yeats as the model behind Stephen Dedalus (maybe Joyce's own youthful stance, influenced by the early Yeats). In 1901 Yeats had made the following confession: Nobody can write well, as I think, unless his thought, or some like thought, moving in other minds than his, for nobody can do more than speak messages from the spirit of his time. In Rosa Alchemica, Yeats confesses to having felt attracted to alchemy by analogy with the artist's attempt at transforming reality into imperishable, immutable essences. Here is Stephen's “alchemical” poetic at the end of chapter four: a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being. Finally, Stephen's analogues for art are the bird-girl, his angel of mortal beauty, and the rose. However, the rose is no longer Yeats's Rosicrucian symbol of the unity of time and eternity, but the emblem of the a priori nature of poetic language. It seems to stream forth from the heart of the rose which is impalpable, immaterial, absorbing reality into its apocalyptic vortex of words: the roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhymes: ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays turned up the world, consumed the heart of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart. The Yeatsian alchemical reversal from reality to art is enacted rhetorically by the epanodos (or antimetabole, the repetition of words in reverse grammatical order; here, the repetition of “heart”), which accompanies each epiphany [45] or milestone on the road to self-realization. The first antimetabole shows Stephen as a would-be Prometheus, ready to snatch the creative power from gods (in Shelley's version of the myth), disobeying authority in his childish manner: Pull out his eyes Apologize Apologize Pull out his eyes... In the pandybat scene, we can read: But it was unfair and cruel. The prefect of studies was a priest but that was cruel and unfair. The encounter with the prostitute is rhetorically enforced by an emphasis upon the body: “lips... eyes.... lips”. The retreat (an organized contemplation of the four last things: death, judgement, hell and heaven) occasions the following epanodos: radiant his eyes and wild his breath... wild and radiant his windswept limbs”. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce employs the two kinds of “aphasic disturbances” identified by Roman Jakobson (Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances) in the modernist discourse: metaphor (based on similarity) and metonymy (based on substitution). The “mythical method”, as T.S. Eliot calls it (Order and Myth in Ulysses) is less of an analogy than a consistent substitution of chapters in Homer's Odyssey by a twentieth-century transcription of them, with the basic motif proliferating in endless imagistic deferments. The associative process produces a modern equivalent of the baroque amplification (sequences of related images). The novel presents the events of a momentous day (June 16, 1904) focused through the eyes of Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Jewish advertising canvasser, who, like Ulysses, leaves his wife, Molly, in the morning and returns to her in the evening, together with Stephen Dedalus, a Telemachus who makes a substitute for Bloom's dead son as a possible spiritual heir. The novel is divided into three main parts and eighteen chapters [46].
TELEMACHIA 1) Telemachus (Odyssey I). The first chapter of Ulysses is not the story of the bereaved son but the construction of a figure. Stephen Dedalus, the artist who makes a living by teaching history in a school, shares a sort of fortress or decayed tower on the outer fringes of Dublin with an Irish student in medicine, Buck Mulligan, and an English student, Haines. Stephen is in mourning after his mother's death, eliciting from his companions comparisons with Japhet in search of a father or with Christ aspiring to unite himself with the Father in heaven. Stephen is painfully trying to disengage himself from the natural parent state. He remembers having refused to kneel and pray when his dying mother had asked him to, a memory which fills him with remorse. His mother had interpreted his refusal as a proof of his hard temper, but Stephen had only meant to run away from the national church, which was claiming the role of a spiritual godmother. The milkwoman, symbolizing the alma (nourishing) Ireland, appears to him as lost, self-alienated from the ancient spiritual roots. Stephen denies the existence of any meaning in the phenomena of the world, his own face in the mirror being alien to him: Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he (i.e. Buck) and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. His image for Mulligan is cleft, cracked, partial, betraying nothing of the truth about himself, which lies within. Stephen will seek a different sort of nourishment. His prototype is not the Son descending in the flesh, but Hamlet, Shakespeare's fictional creation, making the better son, free from death (unlike Shakespeare's Hamnet, the biological offspring) and corruption. Stephen's love of fine-sounding words is a desperate attempt to recreate himself in an immortal shape, to “rid of vermin”. “Chrysostomos”, the word which obsesses Dedalus merely for its expressive and esoteric sound shape, means “golden mouth (cut)”, a metonymy for speech. In it he discovers a more truthful image of himself for others than the actual, physical reflection in a mirror. Summing up, the related images polarize parenthood as natural process or as artistic creation. 2) Nestor (Odyssey III). The figure of the wise old counsellor presiding over the inquiry into the course of history in the second chapter prepares the reader for a sage discourse. Is the study of history any good in man's pathetic endeavour to accumulate a thesaurus of worldly wisdom? Such fiction is systematically subverted. In teaching history, Stephen realizes that the course of events is purely accidental. There is no way of prophesying the outcome of any action, nor can one discover precise laws of causality, accounting for the materialization of only one out of the many potential events. What would have happened if Caesar had not been assassinated, for instance? We shall never know. Mr. Deasy's discourse is full of inconsistencies, a mixture of the Ulster Protestant Unionist's opportunism with fierce anti-Semitism, of pragmatic cunning (he preaches Iago's “put but money in thy purse”) and rhetorical millenarism (All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God). As there are no laws or necessary relationships in history, there is no truth in its record. Historical writing is a subjective construct, a fiction. Stephen feels he might just as well tell children a “winter's tale”, that is, a tale with sprites and goblins. In abandoning the course of actual events and in engaging in the realm of possibility or fiction, Stephen unconsciously reaches towards some private truth. The story he tells – of the fox burying his grandma behind a bush –, can be interpreted as the release of a pent up obsession: the fox may have murdered her, as Stephen, in disobeying his mother's last wish, might have contributed to her death. Whilst history fails to discover any form of inner legislation, fiction-making is apt to reveal some hidden truth about one's personal history. Stephen proclaims history a nightmare, because it is irrational, while the symbolical projections of the subconscious are the waking state of self-realization. As a matter of fact, later on, in the ninth chapter, in a reply to John Eglinton, Stephen quotes Maeterlinck (Wisdom and Destiny), who maintains that nothing ever happens to us that is not cognate with what lies within us. If Socrates opens his door, he will find Socrates sitting on the threshold and he will become wise. If Judas goes out, his steps will carry him to Judas and he will be given the opportunity to betray. Joyce only ascribes this self-identity and all-inclusiveness (all in all) to inner space and fictional constructs. It is only within a text, which relies upon a self-validating inner legislation, not upon hazard that a character will always find in the world outside what he has conceived of as possible within himself, because a text is a fiction, a possibility, with no empirical frame of reference that might contradict it. Stephen cannot account for the murder of Julius Caesar, but he can interpret to himself his own obsessions. 3) Proteus (Odyssey IV). The prophetic sea-god sought out by Menelaus in Homer is an emblem of the Bergsonian self, both fluid in its permanent shift from actual perception to memory or fantasy, and following a deeper law of associative processes. Although shape-shifting, Proteus does not change his true identity, as a sea-god in the service of Poseidon. Even his gift of prophecy suggests the existence of a divine pattern in the world. Stephen's thoughts ramble from Irish history and politics to memories of his family, from an anticipation of his meeting Mulligan in a pub to his readings of Leo Taxil, but following a certain principle of association. The various images floating freely in his mind are consistently associated according to the basic oppositions of origin and departure from it, true identity and disguise: hoist standing for Christ, naval leading back to Eve, Sytephen's departure from the family nest, a bride's disguise saving a political leader, Mary's pregnancy, the Holy Ghost, Taxil's demystification of the immaculate conception through the pigeon and the actual Sandymount Pigeonhouse Stephen passes etc.
ODYSSEY 4. Calypso (Odyssey V). The chapter introduces Leopold Bloom, the very opposite of Stephen. He is mundane, realistic, business and empirically-minded, committed to physical desire, rooted in the present, endowed with a keen sense of the history of his race and profoundly marked by his family tragedy. Bloom's separation from his wife since the death of their son Rudy functions as the surrogate of Odysseus’s separation from Penelope. Their sexual estrangement has turned his wife Molly from a Penelope into a Circe figure, with extramarital love affairs, keeping secret her love-letters to Blazes Boylan like another Zerlina seduced by the “blazing” Don Giovanni. 5.The Lotus-Eaters being lulled to sleep by the drug they taste against Ulysses's warning is the traditional emblem of escapism. Bloom tries to forget the problems of his marriage, seeking refuge in an exchange of letters with Martha Clifford, in the bodily relief of his bath, in the momentary relaxation from his busy trading life. Joyce's amplification technique enhances the leitmotif by building ever larger frames of non-commitment and depersonalisation: the soldiers automatically following orders in the drill-yard, abandoning their own judgement, the opiating comforts provided by religion, the Oriental inclination to languishing repose. 6. Hades (Odyssey XI). The presence of three characters from Grace in the sixth chapter of Ulysses, saturated with death, is extraordinarily rich in the suggestive potential of the reinscribed figure – a characteristic postmodernist device, discussed by J.F. Lyotard in Discours, figure (Klincksieck, 1974). The contemporary images of death paralleling the Homeric hero's descent into the underworld are the Galsnevin cemetery in Dublin, the statues of dead historical personages, the funeral of Paddy Dignam, whose heavy drinking had been like a sort of death-in-life, or loss of consciousness, Bloom's playful project of advertising a fat corpse as ensuring the fertility of a fruit garden, the gramophone preserving the voices of the dead, memories of dead relatives, etc. The presence of Kernan, Cunningham, M'Coy and Power from The Dubliners, mingling with the characters of Ulysses would point to semiotic constructs as another form of death (sema” tomb”, thing replaced by or entombed into name). Joyce is “digging up” (Dignam) names from a previous text, the new one feeding on a semiological deposit. Signification is self-referential, the language of the chapter becomes meta-discourse, endless reinscription. In Grace, Kernan is depressed because of his failed commercial enterprise, which is the same as Bloom's: a commercial traveller. Heavy drinking in a bar causes him to fall down the stair leading to the lavatory. This moral descent will be reversed through the “power” of words, of logos. The constable summoned beside the man whose clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, asks him his name and address. Kernan is unwilling to reveal his identity, which makes things even more difficult for him. He is saved by his friend, Mr. Power, who unexpectedly shows up, and calls him by his first name, assuring the constable, who straightens up and salutes him, that he will see the sick man safely home. It is his friends' discourse about values – like the culture preserved through time by the Jesuit order that never “falls away”, unlike the changing fortunes of trading –, that Kernan is restored towards a realization of the importance of his lost human dignity. Speech is restorative. The fall from dignity through drinking is echoed by Paddy Dignam's story, who had died of too much Barleycorn, by Mrs. Cunningham's drinking habits, and later by Stephen Dedalus himself, who is rescued from a brothel, in an inebriated condition, and taken home by Bloom. The two sinful men recover their identity through discourse, in the Catechism scene. This is the chapter in which Bloom meets Stephen. The common man misses his son, as the offspring of his loins. Stephen, the artist, thinks of his father as the man with my voice and my eyes. To him identity is something defined in terms of vision and language. He has given up on his biological father, seeking a spiritual affiliation to the universal race of artists, beginning with Daedalus. Bloom can only think of revival within the anonymous circuit of matter (the fat corpse, nourishing fruit-tress). And yet, just as Bernard needs Percival to provide the earthly touchstone for his imaginary flights, so does Stephen, the artist, benefit from his encounter with Bloom, the common man. It is life that offers the artist the material he will work into something permanent – the semiological order of the text, enduring from Homer to Joyce, from The Dubliners to Ulysses. 7. Aeolus (Odyssey X). Speech is breath, but Joyce does not live in the logocentric age, proclaiming, like Shakespeare (see our discussion of his sonnets), the superiority of voice over graphia. Undoubtedly, it is not God's spoken Word that makes discourse in this chapter but speech that departs from its performative or creative function, seeking pragmatic ends: to impress, to persuade, to deal justice etc. In Joyce speech is reported in writing and exposed as shallow and reductionist: journalistic headlines, picture-captions, the speeches of Dan Dawson, Seymour Bushe and John F. Taylor. 8. The Lestrygonians eating Ulysses's companions suggest the victory of beastliness and monstrosity over humanity. Beginning with chapter eight, Joyce seems to be engaged in a tropic mapping of the human body, presenting a universal man, Anthropos, as dismembered and incorporated in one component or other of the fragmented modern world. Here the focus is on the belly and its needs. Bloom's musings over his sandwich at the Davy Byrne bar reveal it as a “moral” pub, because it does not occasion the Pantagruelic meals in the fashionable restaurants. The associations of filth, rottenness, dirt, savagery accompanying man's search for food in all of nature's realms, under the ruling image of the licking warm blood, with man turned into a brutal carnivorous beast praying upon helpless creatures with instruments of torture, concur in the construal of one of the most repugnant images of man in world literature. 9. Scylla and Charybdis (Odyssey XII). The informing idea of this chapter is the difficulty of steering a course between the contradictory demands of realism and idealism. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is quoted in the opening, as an example of the wrestling spirit in search of values. Stephen's Bildungsstory takes him into the straights framed by the Scylla of the hard-boiled realism displayed by his acquaintances engaged in studying medical sciences – the sciences of the body – and the Charybdis of the Theosophy and Platonism of the Irish Literary Society. Stephen's exchanges with John Eglinton, the literary pseudonym of an influential contemporary essayist, W.K. Magee, apparently lead towards a solution, the artist of the decadent school and the custodian of Ireland's National Library discovering a closure between subjectivity and objectivity, as pointed out by Maeterlinck, in the ontology of the literary character. The “recognition scene” from A Portrait is repeated, with Stephen as a flying, Icarus figure, as the artist who has no earthly love, because his fertility is realised as the immaculate conception of art: Bous Stephanoumenos, the noumenal (spiritual) crowning of existence (the ox of the sun is a symbol of fertility in Greek mythology). The fertilizing energy originates in the perceptional self, that visionary “Bull's eye” Lynch makes light of in A Portrait, from which the “aesthetic image” of the things in the world issues forth. 10. The Wandering Rocks. Following Circe's advice, Homer's Ulysses prefers the Scylla and Charybdis to the threatening, wandering rocks, floating on the filthy surface of the sea. The characters wandering about in the brief episodes of this chapter, juxtaposed as a sequence of close-ups in a film, are not rooted in some stable belief or set of values. The idea underlying their dissipation seems to be that an encounter with firm and known adversities is to be preferred to spiritual waste or faltering. Father John Commes, Stephen's learned instructor in A Portrait, takes a leisurely walk, musing on the inconsistencies of great men: Archbishop Wolsey serving the King more undauntedly than God, and being met but with a poor recompense, or Pilate, the trimmer, disgraced in history. Blazes Boylan, the woomanizer, is making one more and gratuitous conquest on his way to Molly Bloom, as if by force of habit. Stephen Dedalus is engaged in a light conversation in Italian with a former master who urges him to resume his singing lessons. The exchange sounds particularly casual and shallow in comparison to the serious engagement with philosophical and aesthetic issues in the previous chapter. The usually grave Bloom, obsessed with history, racial and family traditions, spiritual inheritance, etc. can be seen flipping over the pages of a licentious book, savouring an unfaithful woman's encounter with her lover and buying the cheep novel under the approving gaze of the old man selling it. Soldiers die for the wrong cause, a crippled man is begging for the wrong reason („for England”) etc. 11. The Sirens (Odyssey XII) The fugal arrangement of the chapter is a structural mise-en-abyme of the compositional principle of the whole novel, based upon theme and variations, similarity and counterpointal figures and motifs. Singing and talking of music, the characters themselves sound like voices in a concert touching on the theme of love, of fame, of war, of courtship, of bachelorship, love conquest etc. The sound effects of the richly onomatopoeic language, mainly made up of brief ejaculations, or non-finite clauses, provide the proper sound-track for the topics of conversation, mainly musical (voices, styles, arrangements), in a bar: The leading “siren” is Bloom's wife, a singer, who is probably rehearsing home, while Bolyan, who yields to her amorous call, cuts a dazzling figure as a seducer at the bar. Bloom, the modern Ulysses, is still deaf to her call. 12. The Cyclops (Odyssey IX). The symbolism of the chapter is best interpreted by David Fuller [46] as “fanatic Polyphemus”, someone who is one-eyed, or mentally monocular. The nationalism and xenophobia of the people engaging in a controversy in a bar are such signs of spiritual blindness and intolerance, reaching a climactic point where Polyphemus, who knows nothing of the laws of hospitality and feeds on the human kind, becomes a proper analogue. In this chapter Joyce employs a new narrative form (apart from Molly's interior monologue and the stream of consciousness, blending the character's and the authorial voices): a first-person narrative, whose elementary diction and rude, cynical tone are particularly appropriate. 13. Nausicaa (Odyssey VI). Gerty Macdowell is a heroine of cheap romance, but her blooming youth and innocence offer Bloom a brief alternative to the sexual promiscuity of his marriage. The Nausicaa-Gerty helps him escape from the Circe world into a brief fantasy of guiltless flirtation. Joyce couples his bodily map with a typology of humanity: the virgin and the whore, the artist and the common man, the fallen and the resurrected self. 14. Oxen of the Sun (Odyssey XII). Despite Ulysses’s interdiction, his men eat the sacred Oxen of the Sun. We see this chapter as the counterpoint to The Lestrygonians: whereas homophagy or cannibalism yield a pitiful triumph of a visceral self, man's ontophagy (feeding on reality) is realized as discourse-making (transfer of reality into signs). The chapter is a history of literary styles in English fiction, an evolutionary process like the organic development of the foetus (which serves as a mise-en-abyme). 15. Circe (Odyssey X). The episode enacts a fall and a redemption. Stephen, the tipsy guest of a brothel, is helped to get up and collect his hat and staff (a symbolical gesture of resumed dignity, familiar from Grace) by Leopold Bloom. The mature hero has just had a vision of his lost son, the spiritualized portrait of an Eton boy, with an impeccable suit and a book in his hand. Paternity as spiritual guide replaces Bloom's concerns with sexuality (tempted by Gerty-Nausicaa, cheated by Molly-Circe, humiliated by Boylan, the successful rival, visiting a brothel). He decides to take Stephen to his place.
NOSTOS The “home-coming” is realized in three chapters. 16. Eumaeus (Odyssey XIV-XVI). The figure of the old herdsman meeting the returning Ulysses in disguise informs a chapter which develops further the “recognition'„ theme. Talking of politics, of the present condition of Ireland, Bloom and Stephen cannot reach any agreement, sometimes Bloom missing not only Stephen's meaning but also his words. The one is tolerant, the other, contemptuous. Stephen decides that whatever they might think, there is no efficient action in changing Ireland anyway. And yet the artist will always need the common man's touch with the reality of things, with the feel of history in his bones. 17. Ithaca (Odyssey XVII-XXII). Is there a common country for all men to come back to from their historical of contingent disagreements? Is there a mirror that flashes back an image for others which the spirit recognizes as his own? In resuming the issue of identity launched in the opening of the book, Bloom, who has been exposed to the influence of Stephen, the “teacher”, distinguishes between two images of himself: ipsorelativ (self-relying, the type) and aliorelative or the movable type. The former is the mirror stage achieved through analytical structures, where truth is interior to language: his father and his grandfather's son are one and the same. The latter is self-alienation in the otherness of his biological self: physically resembling his “procreative” mother or father. What Bloom contemplates in the mirror now is no longer the accidental look of his individual face but the books in his library. The “procreative” order is there replaced by the orderly design, the self-validating truth of art. It is time Bloom changed into a narrative about himself, which he tells Molly. The chapter is built in the form of a “mathematical catechism”, as Joyce confesses in a letter, with identity between the one who asks questions about the action and characters in the novel and the one who provides the answers. The author knows nothing certain about the world out there. He can only control his own constructs, whose meanings are shared by all the speakers of his language. A text addresses consciousness as a self-enclosed system. 18. Penelope (Odyssey XXIII). Whereas Stephen and Bloom, emancipated into an ideal spiritual relationship, like the consubstantiality between God and his Son („they have become heavenly bodies”, Joyce says in the same letter), the female element is isolated as the visceral, maternal womb, realized in a long interior monologue, pretty incoherent, without any punctuation. Molly Bloom remembers her love affairs in a language often verging on pornography, obsessively hinging on the sexual element. Joyce has split his Anthropos into two selves: Bloom and Stephen have been rescued from their “eye”, “ear” or “tongue” heresies, and sphered within consciousness, to which Molly has no access. This is Joyce's own description of his heroine in the above-mentioned letter: It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because bottom woman yes. Joyce was not probably a sexist, his representation of feminity in this instance being a psychological and cultural frame (the domain of the “id”). Let us remember that the same “broken syntax” is employed for the human “Cyclops” and for the tipsy humanity singing “areas” in The Sirens. Joyce's consistent association of music with superficiality, the Italian opera buffa, comical love entanglements, cuckoldry, intellectual limitation is very intriguing, and it would deserve more attention. It may have something to do with his fixation on the written word. The book closes with Molly's memory of saying “yes” to Bloom, with the reassertion of the vital, procreative energies of life, among which texts float as worlds apart. The symmetries structuring Ulysses through the pairing of Stephen and Bloom somehow resemble the doubling scheme in Shakespeare's Henriad, with Falstaff miming in low key the actions of the prince and king in the heroic plot, with the difference that Hal’s self-fashioning is replaced in Joyce's novel by the construction of identity as presence within public discourse, where, given the pre-existing and autonomous order of language, the individual is both speaking and spoken. Ulysses differs much not only from other modernist novels, narrated through individual centres of consciousness, but also from A Portrait of the Artist, where identity is the cumulative, spatial continuum of epiphanic moments. Anticipating Merleau-Ponty (The Prose of the World), Stephen becomes aware of the non-coincidence of his past moments of being with themselves. Now his selfhood strikes him not only as perceptual and linguistic but also as temporal: what is given in the present of his consciousness is not the naked past itself but an alteration of it, the past modified by all the visions he can have of it, a distancing which questions the validity of memory and imagination themselves: So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be. The Stephen of Ulysses is therefore in search of authority structures as guarantors of identity, which he identifies in the semiological space of textuality. His actions are repeated attempts at inserting the objects of his consciousness into a self-sufficient symbolical chain. Stephen is not only an artist but also a teacher (the idea itself would have horrified the aesthetes of the fin de siècle), correcting the empirical attitude and situations in which his interlocutors are immersed. He is constructed largely in conversation (the highest and normative form of which is catechism), in an event of mutual understanding and transcendence towards a community of meaning, the only monologue being reserved for the id-centred Molly. In dialogue, le locuteur y comporte un allocutaire, autrement dit que le locuteur c’y constitue comme intersubjectivité. (J.Lacan Écrits, 1971, p. 135). The character's identity emerges as his image for others: What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom ? This image may be accidental or of a more permanent and constructed nature. Stephen refuses to accept the reflection of his face in the mirror as a genuine image of himself for Mulligan, because it only means what Paul Ricoeur (Soi-même comme un autre, Editions du Seuil, 1988) calls “l’identité au sens d’idem”, that is permanence in time as different from changing, variable. But his “dogsbody” cannot escape the plight of vermin. He will therefore seek the ipseité du soi même, which can only be realised in an otherness: un soi-même en tant que autre. When he comes to objectify himself in a narrative, the artist is born. Summing up, the individual can be the idem of his physical presence in the here and the now; ali-ity (self-alienation in physical resemblance to one's parents, for instance); and ipse-ity – the overcoming of alienation in an image which is not oneself but oneself in an otherness of one's own creation, a deliberate (not accidental), constructed (not natural), objectified version. For instance, Shakespeare's texts, which are other than Shakespeare and yet another version of himself, his image for all the coming generations. But the source of this second image is not in himself (like Hamnet, his son, his flesh and blood) but beyond himself, in the linguistic system into which he was born. This is Stephen to John Eglinton: His (Shakespeare's) own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral. (...) The images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or repeat himself. That is, the realm of the idem. On the contrary, Stephen notices that Shakespeare's characters foreground the linguistic system itself: Marina, Stephen says, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. Eglinton misses the point sliding into the order of nature and talking about the “art of being a grandfather”. In Scylla and Charibdis, the same Eglinton, who seems obsessed with the biological chain, mentions Dumas père et fils, whereas Stephen carries the topic over to the Shakespearean text again: unlike Hamlet father and son who are buried by the gravediggers, Prospero offers the better epilogue with poetic justice done – a world not already in existence but constituted by Prospero as prosperous, as closure of subjectivity and objectivity: finding in the world without as actual what lies within himself as possible. Not reality but epilogos, or "logos outside the logos". Here is Lacan again: l'insistance de la chaine signifiante - comme correlative de l’ex-sistence (de la place excentrique). Who has chosen this face for Stephen? It comes from his biological father, de la place excentrique. Stephen replaces it by the signifier, which is not his own creation but a pre-existing linguistic order, constructing him in a subject position. Le signifiant materialise l'instance de la mort. Chrysostomos, the word fascinating Stephen, means "golden mouth": the imperishable order of speech or signs: sema (tomb). The displacement worked by Hamlet as Shakespeare's figural son (a stand-in for his lost Hamnet) is one more token of this incremental symbol. Leopold Bloom himself is in his modest and more modern way another producer of a discoursal space whose signifying battery lies beyond his own individual subjectivity. As Norman Fairclough remarks in Language and Power (Longman 1989, p. 203), the advertisement (...) is public discourse in the sense that it has a mass and indeterminable audience (...) And it is one-way discourse in the sense that the producer and interpreter roles do not alternate - the advertiser is the producer and the audience are interpreters. The language-sensitive Joyce linguistically recorded England's contemporary passage from a society of production towards one of consumption. Advertisements are the discourse of consumerism. If Stephen has broken all historical ties with family, class, nation, so does advertising. Capitalism, Fairclough argues (p. 200), has fractured traditional cultural ties associated with the extended family, the local or regional or ethnic community, religion and so forth. (...) The cutting off of people from cultural communities which could provide them with a sense of identity, values, purposes is what underlies the growth of broadly therapeutic practice and discourse. (...) advertising is of course the most visible practice and discourse of consumerism. Ersatz communities are offered as alternatives to real ones. They build images, construct subject positions for people as members of “consumption communities". If Stephen's girl on the beach is a bird girl, a woman-inspiration soul, Bloom's Nausicaa, Gerty, is the product of consumerist ideology: Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the princess novelette, who had first advised her eyebrowline, which gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height and you have a beautiful face but your nose? The character emerges through quotes from the ads - the language of spurring and creating desire. "Vera verity" is an ironical comment on the world of the ads, which is one of simulacra, of identical, depthless copies. Everything Bloom's imagination touches turns into the language of commercials. The economy of the brief, non-finite clauses, freezing in the materiality of the nominals arrests attention. Like this grotesque phantasmagoria advertising love in a modern cemetery designed for telephone and gramophone facilities, spiced with echoes from Browning and Shakespeare: Love among the tombstones. Romeo Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. This primitive stage of commercially-oriented action, however, will be redeemed in the catechism scene, which returns being to the Ithaca of language. Under Stephen’s influence, Bloom himself starts on the way to subjectivization through the signifier. The first specular scene relates images to outside objects – the ex-sistence. In the next, Bloom takes one more step towards self-recognition in an otherness. His image in the mirror impresses him as that of a solitary (ipsorelative), mutable (aliorelative) man. All along Stephen had been constructing the ipsorelative identity of self-validating analytical language, of which we are now offered an example: “that man's father was his grandfather's son”. The mutability of Bloom is given by the idem of his physical resemblance: From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix. From maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal creator. Bloom also catches the optical reflection of "several inverted volumes”, the specular perspective reversing the real world order: He travels from resemblance to an otherness to self-reflexivity. First, what Lacan calls “the mirror stage” of constructing his image for others, allegorised by the Narcissus figure. It is not his own face in the mirror, this time, but an object belonging to the autonomous order of artefacts: The candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus, purchased by auction from P.A. Wren, 9 Bachelor's Walk. We can catch the faint echo of Stephen's theory of bachelorship as the ideal condition of the artist. What follows is the first example of discourse analysis: the construction of an advertisement according to schemes or stereotyped versions fed into Bloom's memory by his knowledge of the "modern art of advertisement", with due attention paid to the readers' making sense of it: triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility (divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince to decide. Like Stephen, he dreams of “the independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore”. His "golden tomb" is going to be a "narrative about himself". As he tells his story to Molly, he leaves out the events which might have annoyed or embarrassed her, serving it up not as a genuine record but as a verbal repast, fit for the consumption of the two "consummated females (listener and issue)”. The end of the novel is its own nostos or homecoming: its framing as a merchant's adventure story. Bloom is not the sage, the Ulysses figure, his language being one of technology and tradism, not one of discovery or speculation. He is only streetwise, a modern version of Sindbad the Sailor. Words no longer produce meaning or outside reference (ex-sistence), seeking instead a sort of phonetic insistance: Sindbad the Sailor and Tinbad the tailor and Jinbad the jailor and whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailor etc. The last question of the catechisms, "Where?", is left unanswered, because the world has evaporated into a semiological utopia. La subjectivité à l'origine n'est d'aucun rapport au réel, mais d'une syntaxe qu'y engendre la marque signifiante (Lacan: Le seminaire sur “La Lettre volée”). Its property is nullibieté, being the symbol of an absence – the golden tomb. Liberated from the constraints of its signified and referent, the signifier is now a pure phonetic shape: Darkinbad the Brightdaylor is left to contemplate its ipse-ity in the mirror of the text from which all ali-ity (mutability) has been removed.
THE THIRTIES
Christopher Gillie, in Movements in English Literature, l9oo-l94o, defines the thirties as the “critical decade” [47]. It was critical both in the sense of social and political unrest and in that of literature going back to a criticism of life. The first chapter of contemporary English literature is written in between two world crises. The one in trade around the turn of the fourth decade substantially contributed to the outbreak of World War II on the threshold to the fifth. The Wall Street stock market collapsed in l929, and the pound was devalued. Unemployment, hunger marches, overt conflict between politics of right and left thread the whole period, being enhanced by an apprehension of a world run-down, fed into Britain by the grim realities in the dictatorships (the totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia, Germany, Italy, and the Civil War in Spain). It had been much easier for the modernist aesthetes
to put reality into brackets, out of a commonly shared belief that the
sense of the world must be sought outside it (...) as in it there is no
value [48], than for
those who shared a sense of living in a “leaning tower”, on the point
of an imminent collapse. Even H.G. Wells, the “journalistically”-minded
Edwardian, had completely abandoned the quest for scientific progress
and economic improvement towards the end of his life, owing up to a “mind
at the end of the tether” (the title of his last work) in trying to make
sense of the bundle of accidents which were constantly heaping up in a
massy world. It was for the writers of the thirties to drop the tone of
apologetic diffidence, engaging on either side of the barricade – left
or right, Communist or Catholic – or in a curious combination of both
(for example Graham Greene, drawn towards the left, while being a Catholic
convert). It was not that the young generation felt differently about
the meaningless and threatening realities in the world without, but that
they undertook to articulate their condition of modern Jonahs. In his
1940 essay “Inside the Whale”, Graham Greene (b. 1904) started, however, in a more conventional way, with historical romances, and with an idealistic focus on the loner in dangerous situations: The Man Within (1929) could still be constructed from fictional materials. Greene himself confesses that at that time he chose the past as he found it more accessible for being contained in books. When his character decided to look without, he first saw England as a site of warfare: It's a Battlefield (1938). Cotton workers, railway men, the match-box factory build a realist background for the protagonist, Jim Drove, a bus driver who kills a policeman at a political rally held in Hyde Park, when he thinks he is going to hit his wife. Another “primary scene” in Greene's life, the circumstance that he belonged to the intellectual Greenes, while his uncle's family, the rich Greenes, inhabited the Hall, the most expensive building in Berkhamsted, probably offered the binary model for character-patterning in his novels: communist Drove's brother, Conrad, works for the police. Commitments are always precarious; social cohesion, even among those who have no other support in society, proves precarious. The Party will not intercede to save Drove, whose death penalty is finally commuted to life-long imprisonment. A new kind of narrative structure and diction are created for a sort of fiction that cuts to the quick of life. The documented event (the novel is based upon an actual rally which was held in Hyde Park in 1932), the immediacy of the popular songs and the newspaper headlines remind of Dickens's reconstruction of the 1854 Preston strike in a newspaper article, published in “Household Words”. “Journalistic” realism, which progressively contaminates fiction (the most famous example is the American Dos Passos), the cliches of colloquial diction, pointed conversation consort with a cinematic montage technique of cutting from scene to scene, which gives Greene's novels the aspect of shooting scripts. His novels, as a matter of fact, have often got on to the screen. Greene's journeys abroad concomitantly enriched his map of humanity. Irrespective of the changing fashions in the after-war literary scene, Greene continued to explore the unpredictable “human factor”, its contradictions and paradoxes, which lead lovers to betray, the uninvolved to die for causes, the loyalists to change allegiances. At first, the heart of humanity looked black. The Heart of the Matter (1948) is set in a West African colony, on that continent shaped like man's heart, as Greene intimates in one of his travel books. Colonizers and Syrians alike compete for a prize in a contest of “injustices, cruelties, meannesses”, which cannot leave even Major Scobie, the man decided to see justice done, untouched. The heart's “end of the tether” is reached by Wilson who, on going down the passage to a brothel, thinks he has got rid of every racial, social and individual trait, and has reduced himself to human nature. The “human nature” beyond racial, social and ethical considerations is “horror”. In a mass-controlled prison-world not even the acceptance of one's positioning in the socially nested boxes described by way of a cautionary tale by Daintry, the man policing an agency of espionage in The Human Factor (1976), secures a possibility of salvation. The uninvolved Davies dies for being wrongly suspected of a leak of information, while the politically uncommitted Castle, who had never meant to become a communist, ends up in Soviet Russia. Is it only because, as the epigraph of Conrad's Victory reads, “any man in love is an anarchist carrying a time bomb”, or is it because the woman to whom Castle is attracted to the point of sacrificial generosity is a black from Pretoria, for whose escape he has contracted political debts and beside whom he still has to fight racial prejudices? In Monsignor Quixote (1982), the mechanism of institutionalized authority, whether political or religious, has seriously slackened, allowing the two protagonists, a communist and a Catholic priest, to share in the blessed community of the white human heart. The modest father Quixote, who entertains a fiction about his descent from Cervantes's fabled hero, is appointed “Monsignor” by an Italian bishop, to whom he has offered hospitality in El Toboso. Quixote's bishop, who thinks him an old dodderer, gives him leave until he can properly retire. Zancas, whom Quixote has baptized “Sancho”, is to accompany him in his old Seat („Rosinante”) to Salamanca, to secure a bishop's violet socks and “parashah”. Zancas is the communist ex-mayor, who has lost the elections, the “dismissals” of the two protagonists being symbolical of the failure awaiting those who play down the rigid expectations of dogmatic social institutions. The dreamy and tolerant priest finds himself involved in a crusade to recover the purity of faith from a clergyman's money hunt, and the same doubting priest ends up in the supreme act of faith, which is a mass performed without the material presence of chalice and hoist. Man of various commitments can be brought into spiritual communion and mutual tolerance; it is society that sets men against one another, in unnatural, absurd confrontations. The influence of postmodernist recycling of semantic energies can be felt in the framing of the protagonists as “figures” – Cervantes's pseudo-couple in contemporary guise. The “battlefield”, however, is as topical as in Greene's early novels, the “human factor” trying to assert itself against the force field of conflicting ideologies. The other Catholic convert of the thirties, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), sought anchorage in the political right. His conservatism did not prevent him from launching a satirical attack upon the decayed aristocracy, through whom the traditional pastoral England had been lost. It was only in the thirties that the horror of mass slaughter in World War I was fully realized, and the fiction of a pre-war rural England of stable values acted as a sort of counterpoise to the meretricious and violent present. That cultural narrative, developed by the Edwardians as a compensation for a diminishing sense of Imperial grandeur, had now come down to A Handful of Dust (1934), and the only defender of traditional values is symbolically named “Tony Last”. Waugh detracts from his worth as the guardian of the ordered, pre-capitalist society, through suggestions of artificial attitudinising and of an effeminated character. He simply waters down the sarcasm lavishly bestowed on the other characters, treating Last with the mild humour reserved for Donquixotic figures. Tony is deeply attached to his country residence, Hetton Abbey, which he has medievalised, naming its rooms after characters in Mallory's Arthurian romance. Ironically enough, his room is called “Morgan Le Faye” (Arthur's sexless half sister from beyond this word), and that of his wife, “Guinevere” (Arthur's unfaithful wife). He is an antiquated gentleman, posing as an upright God-fearing gentleman of the old school, ceremoniously attending church on Sundays and solemnly treating himself to a glass of sherry in the library in the evening. His frivolous wife, who suffers from great ennui in one of those big houses which are now a “thing of the past”, disturbs the peace of his shelter with the newspaper echoes of London petty events: a new political speech, a little girl strangled in a church-yard, the unusual circumstances of the birth of a pair of twins etc. This is the prelude to the two Englands colliding in the thirties: one dead, the other meaningless. Brenda's visit to London occasions a love-affair with the good-for-nothing son of a modern decorator. John Beaver is, from one point of view, a victim of the circumstances. Since he left Oxford, the economic depression has prevented him from finding a job, with the exception of a brief time spent in an advertising agency. He has possessed himself of a good store of amusing anecdotes, which are his pay for the meals in the homes where he manages to get himself invited. The picture of London social life is depressing, with its conventional round of calls, petty conversations, gossip, immorality, cynicism. Brenda's son, John Andrew, gets killed in a hunting accident, while she is enjoying herself in the London society, where her adulterous affair is regarded as matter-of-factedness. On hearing the report of John being dead, she first thinks of her lover, and it is with relief that she realizes that it had “only” been... her son. The process of atrophy of feelings and dehumanisation is carried to even lower depths in Point Counter Point (1928), a novel by Aldous Huxley, whose cool, scientific anatomising of human perversities lacks the vivid realism of his peers. Brenda's ignonimous behaviour does not kill the chivalrous impulses in Tony. He produces faked evidence against himself in the ensuing divorce trial, Hetton Abbey passing to his rich cousin, Richard Last, who puts an end to all nonsense about “old associations”, seeing to it that he derives good profit from his property. Thinking of the good returns he is going to earn, he turns the stable into a silver fox farm, while Tony's dream of “cream and dappled unicorns” takes him to South America in search of the fabled Eldorado: It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, battlements, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton... luminous and translucent, a coral citadel crowning a hill- top, sown with heraldic and fabulous animals.... Waugh reacts powerfully to a new type of society, still in the making: the society of consumption, which had replaced the one of production, in which traditional values and aesthetic habits are replaced by arbitrary fashions imposed by the mass industry of designers, decorators and advertisers. Tony's “bête-noire”, as he goes down with fever in the Amazon jungle, are not the people who had actually destroyed his life, but Mrs. Beaver, who, in his delirium, has covered his Eldorado in white chromium plating and converted it into flats. He seems to see her hand everywhere, warning Mr. Todd (a maniac who saves him from the mere) to guard his house, built entirely out of indigenous materials, lest Mrs. Beaver should cover it in chromium plating. Mr. Todd lives in a sort of No Man's Land, as the depopulated area in which he is only known to a couple of families is disputed by both Brazil and the Dutch Guyana. Tony finds himself stranded as it were out of space, out of time, spending the rest of his life as Mr. Todd's prisoner, jealously hidden from the eyes of occasional visitors, reading to him from the early novels of Charles Dickens... The nostalgic dream of an idealised past Britain underpins the action of Coming up for Air (1939), a novel George Orwell (1903-1950) published after an attack on Imperialism in the mixture of fiction and documentary of Burmese Days (1934). Oppressed by his tedious life in London, George Bowling feels the impulse to come up for air, that is, to return to the patriarchal pre-war life in Lower Binfield. The Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Bank of England, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, the Pope, seem to be tracking him back to the Eden of his childhood, which, as he reaches it, turns out to be a fallen one, corrupted by urbanisation like any other place in inter-war England. The racy colloquialism, the topicality of political allusions, the realism of everyday details betray, like all thirties fiction, the influence of the American realists of the twenties and the thirties. The death of the individual, the triumph of totalitarianism reach a climactic point in Orwell's dystopia, Nineteen Eighty Four, published in 1949. Orwell's master achievement is not the recital of horrors, which the Gulag literature has meanwhile turned into clichés, but the transference of the confrontation with evil within the human heart. Physical torture counts less than human perversion, generalised warfare, less than participation in the hate world. Language itself goes through a crisis, the social run down replicating itself in a minimalist, illogical, abridged, impoverished, meaningless slogan world. Yet even on this stage of apocalyptic visions, of terror and imprisonment, man can still protect his heart from the evil encroaching outside. The archetypal script of the hero put to the test pits Julia, who cannot be made to join the hate world, against her lover, Winston Smith, who yields to the perverted will of the demonic O'Brien. Apart from judgement, there is also the only possible form of retribution in a dictatorship: people avoid Winston, depriving him of that secretive mutual sympathy, which dares not materialize in gestures and words. Orwell had meant to entitle his novel “The Last Man in Europe”. Unless there is one single man left in the world, there is no judgement, no law, and only beastly non-differentiation. Orwell was as aware of that as Eugen Ionesco in his Rhinoceros. The focus on large public themes brings the poetry of the, “critical decade” into unprecedented intimacy with the fiction of the age. The modernists' exploration of personal states of consciousness takes the form of a “technical” inquiry into psychosomatic illness, like those of the extraordinarily intelligent and skilful W.H. Auden (1907-1973), while the need for experimentation subsides in the refurbishing of traditional forms to which a new colloquial vigour is imparted:... his contemporary knowingness, his skill with references, with slang, with the time's immediate worries went into the production of a kind of social, occasional verse, mostly traditional in form, but highly up-to-date in idiom [49]. In The Orators, Auden programmatically opposes the natural flavour of the language of the tribe to the modernist abstract aestheticism, as the more suitable idiom at a time of crisis. His Poems of 1927-1932 tap the large public themes of the age, with their mutated values. Echoes of the General Strike and political repression steal into Let History Be My Judge and 1929. Contemporary enthusiasm over improved communications at a distance is shown their dehumanising, alienating effect. No Change of Place may mean more expediency but, in communicating through letters or telephone, the concrete human personality becomes remote, abstracted to a voice or a dead graphical picture. Situations are crosslit from opposite viewpoints, sometimes problematized in an ambiguous language. There is undoubtedly heroic majesty in the images of the hovering kestrels, of the curlew's call, subtly echoing The Seafarer, a sense of metaphysical determinism in the hint to the leader's “doomed companions”, who had died in the war, an almost mythical suggestion in the “happy valley” in which the dead heroes sleep like ancient heroes on the Happy Isles. The worth of the enterprise is however lost in the final realization that they had been fighters for no one's sake. The surviving leader receives week-end guests in the house turned into a museum. The domesticity of the lights and wine set for supper, the social rite of going on week-ends are taking the reader back to the unheroic everyday. And yet, the call of a pastoral countryside, in opposition to the monotonous life in the capital, the search for wonder, for heroes in the neighbouring woods emancipate the present from beastly satisfaction of physical survival. The refusal to join the army for obscure reasons can still be seen as a justified act of rebellion against irrational political authority: And bravery is now Not in the dying breath But resisting the temptations For skyline operations. Is military operation any worth, when it does not also mean a defense of values ? The “missing” (dead soldiers) are also being “missed” (nostalgically remembered), the poem intimating, through its ambiguities, that facts are not important in themselves but through their echoes in consciousness. The Poems of 1933-1938 are even deeper involved in exploring relationships between reality and representation in the arts, social appearances and the sublimation of subliminal states, modes of vision and modes of language. It is interesting to compare Leda and the Swan, by Yeats, where the violence of the mythical encounter between mortal and divinity marks the beginning of terrible disasters in human history (the siege of Troy, the deaths of heroes) and the shabby modern look of the seeds of disaster in contemporary history, where politics is no longer transparent or confrontation overt, heroic or chivalrous. In Gare du Midi, a character completely lacking in the glamour of a an official person or even of some mysterious spy, looking like an inoffensive, shabby bureaucrat, may just have infested Brussels with the hidden designs of Nazi diplomacy, while his footprints are covered by the innocent and indifferent snow: A nondescript express in from the south, Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face To welcome which the mayor has not contrived Bugles or braid: something about the mouth Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity. Snow is falling. Clutching a little case, He walks out briskly to infect a city Whose terrible future may have just arrived. Consider is a symptomatic title for Auden's particular phenomenological strategy, which has received little attention so far. The three parts of the poem separate three perspectives on humanity. The first is a cinematic, panoramic vision, a God-like view from above, like that of a pilot or of an omniscient narrator, objectively recording people and things in a winter sports hotel, international tourists gathering for the first garden party of the year, alongside rural pictures of farmers and their dogs. The second part abandons the outside landscape, plunging into the depth of the subconscious, wherefrom the “neurotic dread” gushes forth. This is Satan's world, of self-awareness and repression of inner drives by the social ego. The third part suggests the art form which can best render the poet's own view of humanity, which is not outwardly voyeuristic but psychologically explorative. The split personalities, with “alternate ascendancies” (one self or other becoming alternately dominant) are best rendered by the musical arrangement of fugues. The poem is thus commenting upon its own structure. Miss Gee and Victor are supplementary studies in distorting sexual repressions and psychological processes of transference. The rhetorically divided structure of the Petrarchan sonnet supports a similar division between a poet's reductionist generalizations of experience and The Novelist's generous view of the multifarious aspects of humanity. The poet's partiality for realism inspires his praise of the realist school of Flemish painting. The Old Masters never smooth over life's incongruities, drawing all the threads of its complex texture to one single, unified impression thereof. The scene of martyrdom runs into a corner, while life goes on undisturbed about it, with children skating, someone is eating or opening a window, the dogs go on with their doggy life (Musée des Beaux Arts). The natural, the animal, the human and the divine are all brought into communion, the world is no longer Hardy's “psychological phenomenon”, but a house of many apartments, with life going calmly on in each of them, unaware of the others. The gap however could no longer be completely bridged. Auden's art cannot jump over its own, modern shadow, back to the unproblematic realism of the “Old Masters”. This is not “first-hand” realism but art criticism, an aesthetic statement about the necessary union of thought content and form in art. The Commentary on Shakespeare's “The Tempest” carries forth Joyce's innovation of character created in language by adding to this strategy an awareness of genre. Common people, like Stephano and Trinculo, use the popular ballad form. Ferdinand, the romantic lover, writes a sonnet, Miranda communicates her vision of the pastoral brave new world, in perfect harmony, in a villanelle, Alonso sends a letter of sage advice to his son, Ferdinand, in the Basilicon Doron tradition. Caliban understandably resorts to prose, Auden availing himself of the opportunity to get back at the modernists. Caliban preaches to the Audience on the role of art in the style of...Henry James. Auden is a typical example of the failed attempt to wind back the clock of art history. The deliberate, conscious reaction against modernist attitudes and styles had its limits. Writers could no longer go back to the pre-modernist discursive freedom. The “Counter-Reformation” did not take long. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), the Welsh Bohemian poet and journalist, rejected Auden's intellectualism, while rehabilitating rhetoric. Thomas's main but, however, is high modernism. One of his prose volumes is entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (194o), the polemical exchange with Joyce having started two years earlier, when he had written a poem beginning “Once it was the colour of saying...” Unlike Stephen Dedalus, who produces his artistic language out of a Narcissistic absorption in the self, taking delight not in the colours of the natural landscape but in the rhetorical effects of the poetic idiom, with the actual sea evaporated into “sea-borne clouds”, Dylan Thomas undertakes a process of depersonalization (Now my saying shall be my undoing) while displaying a passionate interest in outside people and things. The figures of the fishing-reel or of the stone unwinding like a reel he throws at the lovers in a park are emblematic of his attempt to practise a harder, disenchanted form of realism. Whereas Stephen's emblem of art is an impalpable, soaring figure (Icarus), Thomas is harking back to the fusion of subjectivity and objectivity, realized through a new kind of poetry. He feels he must destroy the Joycean idiom, into which reality is drowned, annihilated, resurrecting it into forms felt once more to be palpable and alive: The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo? Till all the chrarmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill. World and self re-emerge as twin-born in the seductive, rhetorical obscurity of the forties, maybe emotionally enhanced by the war raving around. The body's alphabet disturbs the language of modernist narratives. His poems are descriptive pieces, deliberately merging, through anthropomorphic imagery, the human and the natural world. A letter dating back to 1933 makes his poetic quite explicit: All thoughts and actions emanate from the body. Therefore the description of a thought or action... can be beaten home by bringing it onto a physical level. Every idea, intuitive or intellectual, can be imaged and translated in terms of the body, its flesh, blood, sinews, veins, glands, organs, cells, or senses... All I write is inseparable from the island... I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart. One such poem, in which the human body is projected on a cosmic scale, is A Process in the Weather of the Heart. The rhetoric at work in it is much more complex than a depersonalizing of the human body while personalizing the body of the world... bringing the two into intimate, mysterious connection [50]. The union is a tense one, of unresolved opposites, which is characteristic of the modernist discourse in general. The connotation of “weather” is change, something reputedly whimsical and unaccountable for, whereas “process” implies a sequence of changes, whose inner law the human mind has discovered and defined. Wittgenstein says that language is an unstable ground. If you look at it from one direction, everything sounds coherent, if you look at it from another, you find yourself in a maze, in a labyrinth. With Dylan Thomas we do find ourselves on such unstable ground. The weather of the eye, a forest of the loins do indeed point simultaneously outwardly to nature's activity and inwardly to events in the poet's own body (Ibidem), but in doing so they are pointing rather to irreconcilable oppositions. That eye capable to see both the quick and the ghosts of the eye has no correspondent in the reflecting surfaces of nature. The heart “yielding” its dead, out of cherished memories or imagination is essentially different from a field yielding a harvest. This seems to be in Thomas the function of poetic language: to unify what nature and the discriminating intellect have set apart. The utopia of a mythical oneness sends him on a quest of prenatal (I Dreamed My Genesis) or post-mortem (The Tombstone Told When She Died) states. A comparison between Milton's On the Day of His Nativity and Thomas's Poem on His Birthday would prove most rewarding in a historical approach to changing literary paradigms. Milton forces a private event (his birthday) onto a mythical scheme (from Christ's Nativity to the Revelation), whereas Thomas deals in a phenomenology of consciousness in a complex, ambiguous way, which prevents the construction of a coherent cultural narrative or a definite conclusion. The labour of the self upon the world produces the genesis of consciousness (man alone can transcend nature, divine the existence of God and realize the meaning of death), and a new type of apocalyptic “exultation”: through death, man is restored to the continuum of nature, is reunited with the rest of being. It is consciousness that condemns man to solitude in the universe, whereas the body is the link with it (four elements and five/Senses). A rhetorical subversion of this confident and literal pronouncement is however still at work, in the separation of “elements” and “senses” into different lines, in the improper matching of natural elements and human emotions: the sea... exults, the whole world... With more triumphant faith, etc. Dylan Thomas is the prophet of a new poetic, according to which the text becomes the space of unstable meanings and open-ended readings.
References: [42] Garry M. Leonard, Reading “Dubliners” Again. A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse University Press, 1993, p. 291. [43] Maria-Ana Tupan, Limbaje si scenarii poetice, Editura Minerva, 1989, pp. 81 and the following. [44] Henri Bergson, L'evolution creatrice, Librairie Felix Alcan, 1924, p. 345 [45] Katie Wales, Op. cit., pp. 51-4 [46] David Fuller, James Joyce's “Ulysses”, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. [47] Christopher Gillie, Op. cit., p. 122. [48] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Tractatus. (6.41), 1921. [49] A. Alvarez, Introduction to The New Poetry, Penguin Books, 1970, p. 22. [50] Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas. Open University Press, 1986, p. 47.
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