Perspectives on Ireland
II
Near to the wild heart
of life
05January1998
Ah the sweet ambrosia of Joyce's poetic prose, one
can drink it to the dregs and still not have ones fill of it. Joyce it is said
produced nothing but masterpieces, and in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man, he definitely creates one of the greatest works of Literature, or as
Frank O' Conner says, Literature with a capital L. The last time I attempted to
read this particular gem I was bogged down in the hell and brimstone sermons of
the evil Jesuits; trapped in my own distaste for the use of hell as a fear tactic
to influence behavior. This time the whole context of the passage came into sharp
focus, and my initial disenchantment, at young Dedalus' scurrying in fear of damnation
to the confessional box, was rewarded with his comments on the transubstantiation
in the final pages. The process of his own transformation from a youth tortured
at the cold hands of mirthless men into 'the priest of eternal imagination' is
an alchemical work worthy of benediction; old artificer listen up, here is your
lost hierophant.
As Joyce himself said of Ulysses, 'it will keep the professors busy for
years', there are so many moments in the education of Stevie/James which bear
mentioning in regards to our program, my own experiences, and my desire to construct
an educational curriculum, too many indeed for this paper. I guess one should
start where he did, with the sensual world. The texture of this fabric is so familiar
one can see and feel the newness as much as the wear in its creases and folds.
The smells are pungent and substantial; indeed there is still the stench of incense
in my old brain from all the thurible twirling. One of the sonic memories that
will always resonate in my memory now, is the wrapper of a cigarette pack crackling
and smoothing to become the tableau for Dadelus' villanelle, which Scholes
suggests is a re-synthesis of the feminine archetypes of Virgin and Temptress
in the person of Mary. Here the feminine functions, in a dark reflection of Milton's
suggestion that the son being present from the beginning was a reason for the
fall from Heaven and thus a validation of the fall in Eden.
This sensuality broadens into the realm of feeling, and like the senses of the
physical realm there are few emotions he does not cast his hand over in his revelatory
blessing. The cold hands of his priestly prefects at Clongowes, and the aforementioned
use of hell as the great guilt generator at Belvedere; the hot and the cold taps
running running running on. (I am sorry that allusion should be walking, damn
this modernism.). The humiliation of being shoved into the square ditch by Wells
over a snuffbox or the anger at a sharp and painful injustice like being pandied
for broken glasses are powerfully emotive experiences of early social interaction
and education. In direct contrast to the light and airy Christmas dinner in 'The
Dead', the dinner after Parnell's death in Portrait is so tense and strained
it felt not only tangible but also vitally realistic. These memories in earlier
life tend more towards the negative.
By the time he reaches adolescence though he begins to get a feel for more of
the heights his namesake flew. The humiliation he felt at Clongowes becomes pride
at the respect of his peers and instructors at Belvedere. Few moments are as unforgettable
as the first sexual encounter and Stephen's are just as pervasive. As Yeats wrote
in 'He and She', "All Creation shivers/ With that sweet cry." As any good Catholic
knows those are biggies, mortal sins and they will inevitable cause our youthful
high flyer a little plummeting. The most sublime of his evocative encounters,
one that to me is his greatest epiphany, though it is not listed, the bird?girl
on the beach who turns her toe in the water like some Botticellian Aphrodite.
Like some siren silently calling him to embrace his Dionysian nature and forego
the Apollonian austerity of the cloister, he hears the cry and sets the controls
for the heart of the sun. The emotions of adolescence and beyond seem more melancholic
in character, a mingling of the joy at freedom, and the loss at innocence.
It is here, in the realm of intelligence, the terrain of thought and ideal that
his name becomes so apparent as device and overarching theme. Joyce's fondest
words for his Jesuit instructors were that they taught him to put everything in
an order as to make it easy to survey. The languages, the classical literature,
especially Aristotle and Aquinas all formed the template for his maze making.
Out of these twists of logical psychology and moralistic ethics he built an aesthetic
philosophy which was the inevitable key to his release, the wings for his flight
into exile. It is to Milton again that he gives a nod, for it is the motto non
serviam, which is so much of Satan's as well as Stephen's initial rejection
of spiritual authority or autocracy. It is this distance from those corrupters
of Humanity's purer purpose which brings Stephen closer to his father, and like
that other father and his errant son, the young must inevitably grow beyond the
shadow of the elder.
His maze, an aesthetic philosophy of art, or life for that matter is this young
artificer's playing in the clay. He stated it thus, "to discover the mode of life
or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom." I have
read little and understand less enough to make comment on his expression of this
or his arguments in regard to aestheticism. I was nevertheless taken in by the
'Pulcra sunt qua, visa placent' episode, where he expounds to Lynch the
basis for his argument. What follows is of course the villanelle, where we actually
work with the verse with him as he wakes from seraphic flight with dream images
of the Virgin and Temptress united. To say I am familiar with this process is
hubris; to say I use it would be even greater pride than a certain jewel-encrusted
morning star. (It is past three, and I have been at this essay for four or five
hours, longer than nearly all of my previous Tuesday essays.)
Yet, here is the rub in my opinion, isn't the exile he goes into after deliberating
his Easter abstention like the fall of that same bright morning star. The loneliness,
the paradox he and Cranly last speak on, is synonymous with the absence that the
evil Jesuits used at Belvedere to scare our would-be sinners back into line. And
isn't the association of Mary with the morning star, Lucifer's light, a reflection
of her role in the third departing from their father's side in Stephen's villanelle?
The statements about mother's in the same conversation as above seems to indicate
like the 'word made flesh in the womb' that the real creatrix here is not the
old father, but indeed the old mother, the alma mater or fostering mother. What
a wicked maze dear Dadelus has left us to find our way out of, if only we had
wings with which to ascend to the heavens.
One other thing that struck me was the continued impoverishment of Stephen's (foster)
family as he was being educated at what I would think were rather expensive Catholic
schools. Ah but I did like that jibe about Protestantism, "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."