Tuesday

The gift

The gift
from wisdom
recognition
of everything
before. Beheld
respected
advocated, planted
in soil brand
new. An apple
tree to feed its
glade, food for
renewable process.
Sustainability, gifts
for decades forth.
Encounter.

 

How their faces fit

What comes from a hug,
a longing full embrace,
a meandering hand?

Anticipate
pressure
volupté beholden,
Greet her
magnificent teeth in
this new arrangement
of galactic gases like some
divine interplay.

She reminded him to go easy with
fresh lipstick like tomato paste–amoré!
Benefits for both:
strong, firm, intact, belief, disbelief.
Oh wondrous sea!
a mist in the middle,
a shroud of possibility.
Can we be free?
A perfect nose, a subtle touch.
Oh stealth.
To press again
To live one more time.

 

Untitled

Her back like a viola
beneath flowing golden angel hair,
in rendezvous with the silence
behind cicadas on a still August day.

For summer has not begun
but let the trials be gone.
Commencez!  Commencez!
Off with you criticism, you naysayer
oh puritan guilt wagon.

We shall not shirk
for there is work–
yours, mine
how our birth years intertwine.
Cyclically
in perfect fitness,
oh summer she arrives.
Hold on, babe.
Hold me now.

For you are the Reassurance,
proof of an active, passionate, wholesome, and present God.

Asleep at the wheel?

Cocoon 

Safe
soft secure
eyes wide open.
Untouchable
with wings

 A wide horizon
of pink, orange, black–
barrier to your west
window for my east.

O’er pavement with lines
bearings spin, roll, back and forth
a’whir in time
protected by tires and grease. 

Expectant cocoons
a life in wait
emergent we swoon
in patient May blossoms
zoom into June.

What remains to be seen

Blink:  Photopositive~Photonegative  (Eyelid Media) 

Awaken to a morning light
through closed panes of clear glass
consenting leaves of yonder May timber.

Quiet chill meets window,
a barrier for the morning chatter.
No dove, no cardinal, no robin yet,
cackling grackles, ravenettes.

silence

The phone buzzes a hazy, lazy conscience
and opens my eyes, just for a blink,
the pupils receive this treat!

a silhouette
fixed
a shadow, a print

In negative
the frames of the panes
resolve to my closed lids
a new game of empty squares.
The shadow, it dissolves.

The stairs await me—Go!

stares

P H O T O G E N I C

Your eyes obscured by panes for vision
panes that help you view,
a force field immeasureable
without glare.

For I can hold a stare with time
on this parched earth, this solid ground.
Bon marché!  Bon marché!
Tomorrow, we start over.

Worn shoes and flash forward

Shoehorn

To make it fit
like Big Dipper
or little dipper,
all the heels
the clogs
the clomp clomp clomp–
I thought I heard a goat.
The patent f-me pumps that
you wore to work sometimes;
maybe on a Friday.

The trouble with those heels,
that collection there you see,
in the closet behind the mirror,
at the stairwell,
in your Subaru backseat

is how you put them on
day after day
your favorites, your sentimentals–
your unmentionables–
obstacles for your path.

Digging
Arching
Aching–
those heels will bring you down.

I’ve seen them all.

Arcturus Alpha Bootis

She said she had too many shoes, like fifty pair.
Her feet had not grown since the sixth grade.
Sweet toes I am sure,
I have yet to see her feet.
‘Not sure where they take her,
and then one day we meet.

On freedom, a long day, and sitting with James Joyce

Overcoming Guilt for Stephen Dedalus Through an Examination of Aesthetics in James Joyce’s Ulysses

by Charles A. Watson

An Independent Study / Iowa Wesleyan College / May 4, 2014

 

 

Thwarted from his artistic path by grief and the guilt of his perished Irish Catholic mother, Stephen Dedalus had struggled to find his actualized self until he broke from the bonds of family, religious politics, and an unutilized faith and aesthetic need. Unpublished and bordering on failure, Stephen’s anxieties stem from being a frustrated creator. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen carried the pale sorrow of an artist before leaving Ireland for France. In Ulysses he seems adrift in Dublin melancholy, wallowing in the gray ashen guilt of his mother’s passing.

Through this process, his associations, his job as a teacher, and living arrangements had brought him little self-confidence. His impatience comes to a boil tin in Circes of Joyce’s 18-chapter epic of a day. Through Joyce’s narrative devices, this detection plays out through thoughts and mutterings of Stephen’s coded French, Italian, and Latin. Irish and the British political tensions and their societal affect at the turn of the 20^th Century Stephen’s stir discomfort and cynicism.

As a biographical surrogate of James Joyce, Stephen had led a life bound by sacraments and customs of Catholicism with obligations of chastity in his fictional life as a young adult. This character background from Portrait before is critical to grasping his value in Ulysses:

Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with these prayers against the fainting sickness of his stomach. He saw himself sitting at dinner with the community of a college. What, then, had become of that deeprooted shyness of his which had made him loth to eat or drink under a strange roof? What had come of the pride of his spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?

The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.” (Portrait.161)

Stephen questioned all that he had absorbed in these years of parochial education, including his stance on faith:

From what had he set out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden in winding up to the end like a reel of cotton some finespun line of reasoning upon insufflation or the imposition of hands of the procession of the Holy Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zincroofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence? (P.189)

…

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of paper, the coiling and uncoiling calculations of the professor, the spectrelike symbols of force and velocity fascinated and jaded Stephen’s mind. He had heard some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason. O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable” (P.191)

Stephen leaves at the end of Portrait but his return is the precursor to James Joyce’s Ulysses. His silent mourning, his self-exile and cunning are all part of running from the religious family obligations in his homeland and also what restricts him from success. We witness Stephen’s maturity and his knowledge on the arts and humanities, Latin, and philosophy. Through these instances, we realize that Stephen doesn’t fit in Dublin because he is not like sheep, just as Bloom does not fit because he is Jewish. Stephen has led this somewhat pure life avoiding temptation while Bloom is headed for a fall if he doesn’t find repentance, and the 18-chapter epic according to Joyce plays out.

Married to this life of obligations like the Catholic sacraments, Stephen can’t simply turn away. The character requires a solid epiphany. Joyce sets us up for Stephen to encounter these troubles and demons in chapter 15; reflective of the chapter from Homer’s Odyssey in which Circe was a sorceress who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs. This transformation extends through the symbolic imaginings of a dreamscape when events describe more than character subconscious.

“He reaches a point of pale sorrow in Portrait in which he mingled in a mood of quiet joy, Stephen’s esthetic image. The attainment of this esthetic image is through a process which has three stages: Experience of the reality of an external world, experience of the reality of the world of art, and experience of the internal reality of feeling. This is consistent pattern for Stephen.” In choice ironic word selection, Joyce’s use of pale means English Ireland.[i]

Although we don’t see his full grace, we do witness a metamorphosis of Stephen through Joyce’s final dramatic conclusions and poetic prose, suspending these characters in flashback until the final cosmic soliloquies from Bloom and Molly in the final two chapters, Ithaca and Penelope. Joyce’s Ulysses is not a novel of what happened but what is in real time. Joyce achieves this grace and frees the characters from their internal bonds through the two orders of literary time: the dramatic, a single Revolution of the sun, and the Aristotelian epic with no limits of time.[ii] Homer’s Odyssey began less than three weeks before Odysseus landed at Ithaca, but years of flashback after his departure from Troy.

Effectively, Joyce chooses vocabulary in perfect definition with the tale he is creating. He allows the supporting characters to persuade the reader to take a closer look at what was really said in offhanded conversation.

Stephen’s role in Ulysses is smaller than his in Portrait, but still heavily significant. In Chapter One, Telemachus, Joyce provides Stephen’s view of his deceased mother. Stephen had forgotten how to love her because her death forced his return from France and his loss of creative self. He needs to find spiritual affection for his mother. Any reflective memories he has for her become ghostly ghoulish dismay, reminisced by characters such as the antagonistic Buck Mulligan, the milk lady, or Old Gummy Granny.

“The hyperborean from Greek legend were a mythical people who lived beyond the north wind in a perpetual spring without sorrow or old age and comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Der Wille Zur Macht (The Will to Dominate), written in 1896. In its first book, the Antichrist, section 1 is used to describe the Übermensch (superman) who is above the crowd and not enslaved by conformity to the dictates of traditional Christian morality; whereas the moral man who lives for others is a degenerate weakling.”[iii] With this deep-end reference, was it Joyce’s intention that Mulligan is challenging Stephen with a bully’s remark or was he sympathizing? His sarcasm stirs Stephen’s anxiety and dark rumination over this loss, triggering brilliant foreshadowing for this novel of parody and exploration:

—Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.

—The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

—Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you…

He broke off and lathered again lightly on his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

—But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. (Ulysses.1.86–110)

Isolated from his aesthetic ideals for artistic beauty, Stephen cannot find salvation for himself from this grief when Mulligan pulls him into morbid thoughts based on his own perspective from working with cadavers in the hospital underworld. Stephen bears a callous recollection of the uncolorful details of his mother’s existence:

Foiled away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of the squashed lice from the children’s shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iumbilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live. (U1.265–279)

And this is why the lamp in Circes is the perfect instrument for breaking Stephen of his melancholy so he can progress without his mother, without his father. A student of the St. Thomas Aquinas discipline, Stephen defines aesthics as the formulation of three necessary ingredients to beauty: wholeness, harmony and radiance.” (P.211) Wholeness (integritas) means the thing must be apprehended as a unified, single thing, distinct and separate entity; Harmony (consonantia) the thing apprehended must be seen as a thing “complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts”; Radiance (claritas) the thing must be apprehended in terms of its whatness. (P.211–212)[iv]

Stephen’s vision of aesthetics, much like Joyce’s own, reminds us that an event is real. In this way, the ghostly visions of his mother are not real. In Portrait, Joyce introduced Stephen’s anxieties surrounding St. Thomas’ aesthetics of beauty and existence— integritas, consonantia, and claritas—through a conversation between Stephen and another antagonist, Lynch. Stephen reminds him “The rhythm of structure, the sum of parts in harmony, the supreme quality and that matter is but the shadow and the reality in becoming a symbol for actual, meaningful events.” (P.212–13)

Throughout Ulysses, religious symbolisms run in circles, triangular threes, through bronze and gold textures, into the fantasy enclave of a brothel in Dublin’s Night Town. Joyce regularly employs sacrament as metaphor for his character development, fittingly—morally even—under the guise of sacramental activity. Before chapter 15, Circe, Joyce used many subliminal references including: bell ringing and liturgical communal preparation; the chrism of baptism; the oils of anointing and embalmment; and the smell of wet ashes whenever Stephen’s mother is mentioned: Ashes that require the reader to reconnoiter sacramental, holy blessings, and funerals in wet, pale green Dublin.

Joyce’s intention is for Stephen to meet Leopold Bloom through an occurrence at the end of a long day that began for Stephen with a morning shave, Mulligan, and the Milk Lady; and for Leopold Bloom with his reflective time on the toilet before the funeral proceedings for Paddy Dignam. Bloom’s day plays out over many chapters with reflective dialogue between he and shopkeepers, restaurant and bar patrons, fellow mourners, and a few intellectuals. Both characters are adrift in their own sorrow over guilt or missing affection. In Ulysses’ Chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun, set in the National Maternity Ward on this rainy night, a child is born like new language. This coincidence with Mina Purefoy’s labor has been a happening on this day of funeral and the hauntings of the ghost of Stephen’s mother. It is the chapter in which Stephen and Bloom meet after a small acquaintance many years prior:

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there knighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. (U14.123–131)

…

Stephen refilled their cups with absinthe and prayed for their intentions, pledging the vicar of Christ. “Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.” (14U.289-294)

While lacking this beauty until it is proven that she can blossom or change form and if desire and willing are part of aesthetic, the old Irish woman is the thorntree that remains eternal to be honored with reverence. In 1904, both Stephen and Ireland were yet to blossom:

While Stephen recognizes that the “hawklike man” (P.169) bears some resemblance to a “[l]apwing” (U.173), he is persistently subject to a “perverted transcendentalism” (U.341). Thus in the Maternity Hospital, he apotheosizes himself, crying, “I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullock-befriending bard, am lord and giver of their [artistic images’] life. He encircled his gading hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent” (U.339). The self-coronation recalls his earlier transformation of the shouts of his schoolmates into a “voice from beyond the world… Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenous! Bous Stephanoforos!” (P.167–68)

He construes these salutations as a signal of his resurrection “from the grave of boyhood” (P.169), as a hosanna for the birth of the artist, and necessarily, although unconsciously, as a lament for the orphaned mother. Lynch now reminds him, however, of the comic inappropriateness of the crown: “those leaves… will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father” (U.339). This remark, which perhaps explains why it is Lynch’s cap that impatiently rebukes Stephen in “Circe,” further reveals Stephen’s artistic barrenness. In “Aeolus,” “THE WEARER OF THE CROWN” refers only to “His Majesty’s vermilion mailcars” (U, 96), a contrast both between headline and story and between regal presumption and pedestrial circumstance that is painfully applicable to Stephen when closing time at the pubs finds the “King to his tower” but the poet without a “plais whear tu lay crown of his hed” (U.348)

The self-crowned poet is but a particular instance of the larger problematic connection between the self and external experience. The importance of the objective order is implicit in Stephen’s description of Shakespeare: He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: “If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will lend. Every life is many in days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. (U.175)[v]

Like a dream, perhaps from Stephen’s subconscious, Joyce weaves the subliminal details of character psyche leading up to Stephen’s blow with the ashplant effectively destroying the blanket of both temptation and guilt that restrict him from carving his own path. He knows that it’s time to move on. He can’t stay in Ireland. Not for Mother. Not for Father. To Stephen, Ireland is old Gummy Granny, the milk lady, and esthetic ideologies of the Emerald Isle. Even after her death, she represents obligation and the demands of church and Ireland. Joyce makes her the ghost and an avenue into the antichrist so Stephen can find her and free himself of this obligation and submissive horror of guilt. The last lines of chapter 14, Oxen, tantalize, torment, tempt, and invite the reader to ask for more. Who does Joyce portend with these words? The late night district madams segue:

Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the almighty God … He’s got a cough mixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on. (U14.1587)

In Ulysses, mother is represented by ghosts from which a man might want to break free: Ireland, the milk woman, the old lady Gummy Granny. Even Leopold Bloom’s conflicts are associated with a decaying marriage. Throughout much of the story, the flip side of Irish Catholicism and politics are akin to Ireland as a woman making demands. In Stephen’s case, he carries guilt over not praying at his mother’s bedside upon her cancerous death. Traditionally, ironically, iconically, the old woman of Ireland might not be the infallible mother she thinks she is and her young man must continue on his path independently. In heartless voice of reason, the antagonizing Mulligan challenges Stephen to move on past his grief:

—And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or your or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.   (U1.204–209)

Joyce introduces the politics of the old Irish milkwoman, akin to Stephen’s mother, the connection between her enslavement to the Englishman, to her religion, and what Stephen ultimately wants to break from, his creator:

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or upbraid, whether her could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour. (U1.397–407)

Mother will return in Circe, introducing the confrontation Stephen will have with his guilt:

The Mother

(comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes)

All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men…

Repent, Stephen. (U15.4181)

The mythic ancestry of the characters is suggested by the fabric of the novel, its symbolic texture, but the Homeric parallels and others are available only to those who approach the omniscient vantage of the author, the creator… Consequently, Ulysses has been correctly defined as a creation concerned with its own conception. The novel, then, might be said to concern itself with the conditions necessary to the artist before he might imbue the raw data of experience with meaning and form… But through myth the novel extends itself beyond the Stephen-Bloom-Joyce trinity to encompass an institution that becomes the very font of artistic creation.

In the dreamscape of the closet play of Circe, Joyce references Portrait and the temptations of Stephen Dedalus. “Although Stephen is a surrogate for Joyce in both novels, in his debt to Aquinas, we should not make the mistake of seeing him as a direct counterpart for the author. He is a fictional character, and as such he represents an aspect or several aspects of the author, just as Leopold Bloom does.” … The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle’s Ethics, where the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the alazon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a predestined artist, just as the alazon is one of his predestined victims. The term irony, then, indicates a technique of saying as little and meaning as little as possible. Or in a more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning. … In Stephen we find a character who might well qualify as both eiron and alazon. In one relation to Joyce, who “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,” (Portrait, 215) Stephen has the character of an alazon, a miles gloriosus of the arts. In another relation, he seems to be approximately identifiable with Joyce himself; at various points their knowing and feeling coincide. And in yet another he seems to occupy a position at mid point between the alazon and the eiron. In this last position he functions in the more or less traditional role of the hero of the novel; he is the central element in a kind of prose trope which might be considered an “objective correlative,” the actualized man after pursuance of his Odyssey:[vi]

The explanations of his English professor lecturing on Royal persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of names. (P.125) He heard his lecture on sin and the omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the world, the wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths the murders, on condition that He allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of willful sloth. He, the great omnipotent God, could not do so because sin, be it in thought or deed, is a transgression of His law and God would not be God if He did not punish the transgressor. (P.133)

Stephen of course questions these preachings that make up his experience for how can a person thrive with such guilt? Does Stephen live in this sphere of guilt? What event would release him? Even though it beholds the climax of the novel, much of Circe is fantasy because it does not align with those aesthetics of integritas, consonantia, and claritas. However, Circe is art in the method Stephen reminded us in Portrait—progressive and divided among the three forms: lyrical, epical, dramatic. (P.214)

In Do You Kiss Your Mother?, Janet Grayson underpins the significance of the male ego to Stephen’s freedom:

“In Irish story, the Sovereignty of Ireland shares the rule of the land with the hero that will kiss her… the last thing Stephen wants to do (or thinks he wans to do at least) is to serve Ireland. Whether he kisses his mother, E.C., the prostitute, the Virgin, they are all temptresses wishing to tie him to his country and to a life he must reject in order to fulfill his destiny as an artist… The third kiss from the prostitute in chapter II of Portrait represents temptation and all that Stephen detests about Ireland and this is not part of his mistake in Circes. What does the kiss represent to Stephen, who just wanted to be held by the prostitute? He didn’t want the kiss. Perhaps because he just wanted genuine love from his parents. What does a kiss from his mother mean?”

All of this will bubble over in the apocalyptic closet play of Circe, the chapter of the Odyssey that held Odysseus men into slavery for feasting on the pigs. We have to look back to Portrait to understand what it means to separate from all this is Ireland, to become alien. How then does the ancient myth of the hero and the Sovereignty of Ireland underpin Stephen’s rejection? The resistance to the kiss develops in Stephen as a child; it is vaguely connected in his mind first to submission and mockery, then humiliation, then domination.[vii]

Alas, the tale ends with informal trinity and trilogy. Although the primary characters in this novel are miles apart brought together by circumstance, they equal her children. Bloom as a step-child; Stephen as a step-child to Bloom and Molly who lost their only son; and Molly as a surrogate mother for new caring and nurturing creation. The novel leaves us wondering what if these three had become actual friends in Joyce’s tale of cosmic new beginnings. As its chapters are written entirely in different voice, the soul-searching characters of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly are a trilogy and what gives the novel its soul and cosmic symmetry. What’s the difference of the sacrament and just feeling guilty? All this repressed guilt for poor Stephen. Hypothetically, if he had knelt before her, if he had gone to a confession, he might not be in this repressed state of grieving even a year after her death. Instead, to sequester this repression in an odd, unironic but entirely symbolic scene, he lifts his ashplant (walking stick) high and smashes the chandelier. And then Stephen goes outside for the fight.

The mask of drama—what does Joyce say about drama, the highest form of the narrative and literature? The persona or mask for the artist allows him great latitude in exploiting the ironic possibilities of narration. George T. Wright says of the mask: “For the mask of drama is not what it is in our ordinary usage, a device for disguising or hiding the face. On the contrary, the mask of drama, or of primitive dance, is clearly intended to reveal more than it hides, to affirm more than it obscures. In these forms the face is not important, but the stylized mask symbolizes, stands for, something—an attitude, a view of life, one aspect of the universe—which is of too great significance for the expressiveness of any human face to be able to convey.”[viii]

Theatrically, once the severance between Stephen and the church is complete, the ghost of his mother disappears. Poor Stephen, shaking off this repression, he shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness. His father’s whistle, his mother’s mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth. He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration. (P.175-176)

Here and elsewhere in the novel we discover a complex fugal treatment of point of view as an isolated and objectified technique of narration, capable of being lifted out of the story line momentarily and scrutinized as a thing in itself, but at the same time utterly indispensible to the progress of the story—a thing without which the story, as a story, cannot move forward… by higher level is meant in the direction toward the artist and away from the direction of the alazon.[ix]

In his conversation with the school dean near a hearth in Portrait, Stephen quotes his spiritual mentor, Aquinas, with Pulcra sunt qupe visa placent. The dean answered that “This fire before us will be pleasing to the eye.” Then asks, “Will it therefore be beautiful?” Stephen reminds us that “Aquinas also says Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell however it is an evil.” (P.186)

In adherence to the rules of aesthetic quality and the drama of Ulysses, Joyce uses Stephen as his vehicle for apprehension: Anxiety or fear that something bad will happen; learning/acquisition of knowledge; the action of arresting something, to seize or grasp. A Ghost? The Supernatural? There is beauty in the supernatural, the magical, and the Dublin late night underground. These, however, are fantasy events in Circe. They are mythical in nature. Whether they actually happened or were simply dreamstate events.  St. Thomas translation: ‘Those things are said to be beautiful the apprehension of which pleases.’ This is very wide open, in terms of the variety of English language usage Joyce employs throughout Ulysses, and specifically the chapter Circe. “For St. Thomas the question of beauty can never be divorced from a consideration of a final cause. That is, beauty is the quality of ‘due proportion’ which is everywhere evident in the universe. Beauty itself, says Aquinas, ‘properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause’(9) That is beauty is an ideal form or conception which precedes the resultant apprehension. Beauty, for Aquinas, is clearly a quality of things themselves which results from God’s realization and development of the possibility of an ordered universe—the final cause. Beauty is in the nature of a formal cause which stands in mediate relation to God and man.”[10]

The details in the partial drama from the closet play in Ulysses by James Joyce, Chapter 15, Circes:

STEPHEN

Ho!

(Stephen’s mother appears emaciated rising starkly through the floor in leper grey with a wreath of faded with a torn bridal veil, a worn noseless face, green with gravemould. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)

…

Med student Buck Mulligan confirms “She’s beastly dead.” Mulligan meets the afflicted mother.”

THE MOTHER

(with the subtle smile of death’s madness) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

BUCK MULLIGAN

The mockery of it! Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (tears of molten butter fall from his eyes on to his scone.)

THE MOTHER

(breathing up on Stephen softly with her breath of wetted ashes) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world. You too. Time will come.

STEPHEN

They say I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.

…

THE MOTHER

Random guilt

Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering soul in the Ursuline manual and forty days’ indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

STEPHEN

The ghoul! Hyena!

…

THE MOTHER

(with smouldering eyes) Repent! O, the fire of hell!

…

Beware God’s hand!

(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart.)

STEPHEN

(strangled with rage, his features drawn grey and old) Shite!

BLOOM

(at the window) What?

STEPHEN

Ah non, par example! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!

THE MOTHER

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart!

…

(in the agony of deathrattle) Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary.

STEPHEN

Nothung!

(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) (U15.4155–4245)

Don John Conmee says to Father Dolan, “Now Father Dolan! I’m sure that Stephen is a very good little boy!” (U.15.3670) It’s almost as if the scenes of Circe are part of Stephen’s worst nightmare. He wants to be deviant as his ego is small. The rabblerousing Old Gummy Granny enters, “rocking to and fro” proclaiming:

OLD GUMMY GRANNY

Ireland’s sweetheart, the king of Spain’s daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them! (she keens with banshee woe) Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the Kind! (she wails) You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?

STEPHEN

How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where’s the third person of the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow. (U.15.4584–4591)

Old Gummy Granny reenters the scene of this dramatic opera with a chorus of distant voices chanting and names of people from this long narrative interacting in this insane scene. “Dublin is burning.” (U.15.4660)

Upon fighting with the bullish Brits who wish to challenge Stephen over the prostitutes in this closet play, Old Gummy Granny thrusts a dagger towards Stephen’s hand, saying: “Remove hime, acushla. At 8:35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. (she prays) O good God, take him!” (U.15.4736–4739)

Private Carr breaks loose from gathered crowd and knocks poor Stephen Dedalus unconscious to the ground. Old Gummy Granny represents all that is unkind about Stephen’s mother, belligerent and Irish loyalist to the core.

The mother, old Gummy Granny, the milk lady—as characters they have something in common—they lack aesthetic, tact, and empathy. They figuratively control Stephen when what he desires most is to be his own creative self. More explicit than in Portrait, Non Servium in Ulysses is a rejection of Catholicism and its guilt. He shall be freed from the bondage of the Church obligations.

In the following chapter, Eumaeus, that begins the conclusion of Part III of Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom encounter the sailor and listen to his tales of voyage. The sailor, D.B. Murphy of Carrigaloe (Queenstown Harbour), also the novel’s Odysseus, kind of like Bloom, tells his tales with his little woman waiting for him back home in Fort Camden, Fort Carlisle. This surreal description reads like an aftershock after the events in Circe. Stephen appears subdued, saying little but we do get that Stephen has broken from his father as well in Eumaeus. The mariner is telling his tales and asks Stephen “You know Simon Dedalus? … He’s Irish.” Stephen replies “All too Irish.” (U16.375-384) And that is all that needs to be said. There is some connection to the underworld from which we are free: “Klaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.” The sailor tells of what he saw: “giant plants, cannibals hallucinatory little pills in the water, Chinese cooking rats for soup.” (U.16.410–471)

The striking of the lamp is symbolic because a lamp represents beauty and spirit, ideals of Stephen’s that were broken down during his time of mourning. The lamp is also temptation and breaking it destroys the aesthetics of Aquinas’ beauty. It is a cosmic crash into thousands of shreds of all that has come before it. Now it has a new beauty in its shards against the mortar. The boy becomes the man. And thus, he has managed his temptation.

Chapter 16 reveals that Bloom, the outsider, has saved Stephen from this suffering. In a final transubstantiation, Bloom offers solace to Stephen with a bun and some coffee. “This is Joyce’s answer to an ironic climax of consecration as the Jewish man offers communion to the wayward Catholic son. Stephen, who had earlier refused the host, takes this Eucharistic sign from Bloom under his advisement that “if he (Stephen) ate more solid food, he would feel a different man… Less is made of Simon’s influence over Stephen throughout these two works. Bloom offers some hope that the conflicts between the old and young can be mediated and resolved. Without such a referee, the old and young run the risk of elaborating fantasies, less and less connected to reality. The myth of self-invention pursued by Stephen’s generation was in part a response to the failure of their fathers to pruduce a safe, negotiable world. The transmission of wisdom from one generation to the other is a process that can never be fully described—it can only be evoked. Hamlet’s growth in Shakespeare’s play is never really explained: he simply disappears from some of its middle scenes to return as a wiser man. Stephen, likewise, disappears from some of the central episodes of Ulysses, but returns as one of its two focal characters. His developing understanding with Bloom is narrated, but it remains mysterious.[11]

“The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, personalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (P.215)

Just like father; just like mother.

Haskell Block theorized that the task of Stephen “is to poetically interpret the world of his experience and his dreams, using the twin faculties of selection and reproduction to produce new world of richness and of personal meaning. At thus becomes a means of self-knowledge and self-liberation, and by dint of the sheer necessity to create, the artist rejects the world of his environment with a violent Non Serviam”:

—I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, wheher it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.[12]

Stephen is a central character whose young adulthood included Jesuit teachings. He feels guilt, but does not long for reconciliation. He wants to be iconoclastic and express himself in life by his art. All of this personal anxiety about his mother’s death reflects Stephen’s larger concerns of mother as Ireland, church, and the obligations of guilt he was trying to break from. If blood revitalizes Ireland, it created more obligations of this country to Stephen; so why should he fight over a woman with a Brit? His failing to meet these obligations causes guilt, his refusal to meet these through the lamp and the punch release him from these obligations. It is this definition that makes one wonder if Circes was written by Stephen, himself, or at least if that was Joyce’s intention. Afterall, Stephen is the one who speaks and writes in figurative language like William Shakespeare or Danté—all of this, under the guise of a modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. Stephen wants a better memory of his mother than these ghastly descriptions of Joycian eloquence. He wants more for himself on his life trajectory. To improve that path of insertion, he’s going to make some changes. One thing, he won’t be a pawn to Irish custom—purveyor, conveyor, provider—wearing mackintosh and bowing politely under the umbrella of the British Imperialism.

 

Primary Sources

1. Joyce, James.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  By the Estate of James Joyce.  The Viking Press.  New York N.Y.  1964.  Print.

2. Joyce, James.  Ulysses.  Random House, Inc., New York.  1986.

 

Secondary Sources:

1 Gifford, Don; Robert J. Seidman. University of California Press. Berkeley. Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Second Edition. University of California Press. 1988. Pp. 2, 15, 528.

2 Gifford, Pp 15, 528.

3 Thomas W. Grayson. James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus: The Theory of Aesthetics. James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer, 1967), pp. 310-319

4 Grayson, Thomas W. Pp. 316.

5 Craig, Randall. The Tragicomic Novel: Studies in a Fictional Mode from Meredith to Joyce. Associated University Presses. 1989. Cranberry, NJ. Pp. 133–134.

6 Grayson, Thomas W. Pp. 316.

7 Janet Grayson. Do You Kiss Your Mother?: Stephen Dedalus’ Sovereignty of Ireland. Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1982). University of Tulsa. Pp. Pp. 119-126.

8 Grayson, Thomas, W. Pp. 313.

9. Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York, 1947), p. 26.

10 Grayson, Thomas, W. Pp. 317.

11 Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday in Joyce’s Masterpiece. W.W. Norton & Company. New York.   2009. Pp. 238, 241.

12 Block, Haskell M. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, VIII. The Critical Theory of James Joyce. March, 1950. Pg. 180.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For Molly, who I met in church where I was an altar boy; for Mom, who signed me up; for all the priests and Jesuits who showed me philosophy and aesthetics—integritas, consonantia, claritas; for Michele who showed me Jesus; for my father whose spirit I carry with me every day.

Thanks to Dr. Farrell who helped guide me to the lamp and the lens for this study