Together, these lengthy and unrelenting sermons constitute a climax in the moral crisis of Stephen’s adolescence, one that will give him literal nightmares of hell, “That was his hell. God had allowed him to see the hell reserved for his sins: stinking, bestial, malignant” (138), sufficiently terrifying to drive him to confession where he will be obliged to tell all. “His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice” (144). The ugly liquid tropes, already invoked in the sermons, represent the extent to which Stephen has internalized the emotionally evocative prose of the priestly language. The confession is successful as it plucks Stephen from his emotional hell and restores him back to normal life where he will presumably be able to enjoy something as simple as eating breakfast again: “White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea. How simple and beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him!” (146)
Chapter IV
Religion, however, continues to play an important role in Stephen’s life. Clearly, both the terror of the retreat experience and the relief of the confession, will not let Stephen break away from the hold religion has on him now. His daily life is now governed by devotional responsibilities, and we are told that “[e]very part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his station in life, circled about its own centre of spiritual energy” (148). The view of this new spiritual life is presented largely through the narrative voice rather than through Stephen’s own perceptions, and although its maintenance is difficult, Stephen appears to feel rewarded by it. “Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver” (149).
The sermon that once transformed every one of the human senses into a locus of hell now commands Stephen to constrain and discipline his own senses, obliging him to make sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch instruments of discomfort rather than pleasure, in order to undo his sinful past. This intense self-discipline, however, slowly begins to be challenged by unwelcome intrusions of “insistent voices of the flesh,” and “the violence of temptations” (152-3). These temptations are disconcerting to Stephen, to the point where he questions whether he has actually repented completely and sufficiently. “I have amended my life, have I not? he asked himself” (153).
This ends the first section of Chapter IV, and when it resumes, Stephen is in a private, serious, and adult conversation with the Jesuit director of his school, who discusses with him not religion per se, but the conditions and specifics of the priesthood, including such trivial topics as clerical dress. Not surprisingly, this conversation, conducted in a “very different” and ostensibly more mature voice than that normally heard by students, comes to the point when the director asks Stephen “Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?” (157). It seems that Stephen’s seriousness and piety, so different from Heron’s, have not gone unnoticed by his priestly mentors, for whom they represent the marks of candidacy to the priesthood.
Given the anguished conversation Stephen had undergone after the retreat, the prospect of priesthood may not seem unrealistic. But a few pages earlier it already becomes clear that Stephen has begun thinking of women again, remembering the first time he had felt “beneath his tremulous fingers the brittle texture of a woman’s stocking” (155)—a thought he would presumably have banished instantly not long before. It is therefore not surprising that he concedes to the director only that “I have sometimes thought of it” (157). The priest goes on to make a case for the priesthood, as Stephen’s thoughts reveal how seriously he has indeed considered this option. But once he parts ways with the priest, he reflects on the “grave and ordered and passionless life” (160) that would await him, and realizes that the “chill and order of the life repelled him” (161). As the narrating voice’s description of his thoughts makes clear, Stephen will not become a priest.
But the secular life that awaits Stephen offers no glamor and little hope. He realizes this when he returns to his home with its “latchless” door, and walks down the “naked” hallway to the kitchen, where he sees the “glassjars and jampots which did service for teacups” on the table, along with “a knife with a broken ivory handle” “stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover” (163). The depressing description of the scene conveys the misery Stephen perceives. And it will get worse, as his brothers and sisters tell him the parents have to move the family once more because the landlord will be putting them out. The children comfort themselves by singing, and Stephen joins them, although he hears in their voices “the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it,” (164), an unpromising beginning of the next phase of his life.
However, the last segment of Chapter IV begins with new hope, as it seems that Stephen may be attending the University. Impatient to learn the outcome of his father’s discussion with the tutor, he takes off and heads toward Dublin Bay, passing classmates diving and swimming and calling to him. But his thoughts are elsewhere, caught up finding perfect words to describe the day—“A day of dappled seaborne clouds” (166)—by means of a narrative voice intensely poetic in its description of the way Stephen perceives “the sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied” (167). And as Stephen looks at the cold naked wet bodies of the diving and swimming boys, he hears them call him not only by his first name but also by his “strange” last name, which now takes on for him the mythical significance of Daedalus/Dedalus, “the fabulous artificer” of Greek mythology.
The name now seems to Stephen a prophecy of “the end he had been born to serve,” “forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being” (169). Stephen has left behind the promise of one vocation to pursue another. Leaving his classmates, he takes his shoes and socks off and begins wading in a rivulet by the sea, where he sees a girl standing “before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird” (171). The narrative voice describes her in simple poetic language, with rhythmic repetitions that mimic the movements as she stirs the water in which she is standing “hither and thither, hither and thither” until Stephen erupts in a cry of ecstasy, “Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy” (171).
His new life has begun, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” (172). He walks along the shore to a nook where he lies down and goes to sleep, waking up to a moonlit evening. The chapter ending appears to offer the lovely beginning of the artist’s entry into a new life.
Chapter V
Given the promising tone of the ending of the previous chapter, it is a shock when Chapter V begins in a Dedalus kitchen, one that is more squalid than the last, with watery tea and yellow drippings, pawntickets that Stephen picks up with greasy fingers, a box “speckled with lousemarks,” and a “battered alarm clock that was lying on its side” (174). The dramatic contrast between Stephen’s inner and outer worlds, the world of his imagination and his material surroundings, has perdured throughout his journey from boyhood at Clongowes to adulthood.
His adulthood is itself questionable when we see Stephen’s mother “scrub his neck and root into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of his nose” (175), as though he were still a child. His father has become coarser over the years, shouting: “Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?”—an insult to which Stephen responds by focusing on grammar, “He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine.”
This preoccupation continues after he leaves the house and heads off to the University. “His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves,” the narrative voice tells us, a tendency evident as Stephen makes “wayward rhythms” like the one begin
ning “The ivy whines upon the wall” (179). But his fascination with language has a social dimension as well, and turns out to be a reason for his unlikely friendship with Davin, “the peasant student” (180) whose “rare phrases of Elizabethan English” and “quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms” (195) intrigue Stephen, even as his worship of “the sorrowful legend of Ireland” (181) conflicts him.
Davin tells “Stevie” about an encounter deep in the country with a young pregnant woman alone in her cottage, who invites him to spend the night. The simple poetic narrative is powerfully evocative to Stephen of rural Irish women, “a type of her race and his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness” (183). Davin is only one of the many figures in the university who conjure up for Stephen the cultural and linguistic complications of Irish social life. While discussing language with the dean of studies, who is trying to light a fire in the classroom, Stephen is distracted from Newman’s use of language by the priest’s use of the word “funnel” in place of the word “tundish.” The priest is English, and Stephen later writes in his journal that he looked up the word “tundish” and found it to be “English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel!” he notes. “What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us” (251).
Subtly, Joyce introduces here Stephen’s awareness of the political suppression of Ireland’s native Gaelic language by the British. About the dean of studies, he thinks: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” . . . “His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech” (189). Not only this Englishman living in Ireland, but an Irish student from Ulster, draws Stephen’s attention to the varieties of language expressions all around him. “Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?” (193) the student asks, and Stephen notes that he pronounces “the word science as a monosyllable” (194).
Stephen’s simple poetic ruminations on the sounds and rhythms of words are slowly becoming political, and by the time he encounters his friend Davin again, this point erupts into the whole Gaelic language controversy. “Why don’t you learn Irish?” (202) Davin asks him, and when he presses Stephen about this, Stephen replies angrily: “My ancestors threw off their language and took another. . . They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made?” (203). To Davin’s rejoinder, he adds, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” It will be many more pages before Stephen’s thoughts reveal that he may already be invoking the mythical figure embedded in his strange Irish name of Dedalus, “the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings” (225).
But Stephen’s focus at this time of his life is less on politics than on elevating his interest in language and art into the theoretical sphere of aesthetics. He wants to explore the fundamentals of beauty in a logical and rational way, and he does this not only by reading Aristotle (“Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have” [204]), as well as Plato and Aquinas, but also by engaging friends and listeners in one-sided dialogues to explore his theories. This strategy of making Stephen’s thoughts spoken and shared rather than private and silent energizes his rather complex and arguably pedantic formulations, while also displaying the elegance of his speech.
Stephen’s first interlocutor is his friend Lynch, a blunt, down-to-earth fellow with his own flair for verbal play, like substituting the word “yellow” for the vulgar “bloody” in his curses. “Damn your yellow insolence” he responds when Stephen offers him a cigarette, because “I know you are poor” (204). But Lynch it not above intellectual engagement. “What is art? What is the beauty it expresses?” (207) he asks as Stephen launches into an aesthetic discussion that formulates his thoughts into their own formal and often symmetrical language. “Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible” (208), he explains. This abstraction is amplified when Stephen points “to a basket which a butcher’s boy had slung inverted on his head.—Look at that basket, he said” (212). Stephen now goes on to analyze the mental perception of the basket as an aesthetic image through a process that he divides into the categories of integritas, consonantia, and claritas borrowed from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Lynch, who is familiar with the terms and appears to understand Stephen’s points perfectly, keeps the lecture down to earth by responding to his analysis with “Bull’s eye!” (212). Stephen ends the discussion by returning to art’s effect on the personality of the artist that “finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak” (215). In a sense, Stephen’s theory of art anticipates some of the characteristics that Joyce’s contemporary modernists like T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound propounded in their preference for Classicism, with its focus on objectivity and impersonality, over emotionally intense Romanticism.
When Stephen and Lynch arrive at the library, Lynch whispers “Your beloved is here” (215). The complicated narrative will make it difficult to figure out what is going on, and we have to assemble the story from different hints here and there. The first one was given earlier when Davin guessed why Stephen dropped out of the Gaelic class. “Is it on account of that certain young lady and Father Moran?” (202). Apparently, Stephen saw Emma talking and laughing with a priest and was overcome with jealousy that has not yet resolved. “She has no priest to flirt with” (216) he thinks bitterly when he sees her at the library, but she nonetheless inspires him to experience what has become referred to as Stephen’s wet dream that night. “Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet,” and he is described as experiencing “[a]n enchantment of the heart” (217). The enchantment and ecstasy of his dream trigger verses that “passed from his mind to his lips” and that result in the production of a villanelle that he is obliged to write on the rough cardboard surface of an empty cigarette wrapper, the only paper he can find.
The contrast between Stephen’s material condition and his poetic exaltation at this moment is epitomized by the narration’s description of his writing in a “roselike glow” that “sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise” (218). This entire episode is a curious dramatization of the aesthetic process that Stephen had just systematically and meticulously expounded to Lynch the day before—the process of transforming emotion and feeling into the music and rhythm of language:
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days. (223)
The poem spreads over six verses, articulating over and over the tension of passion and the anxiety of its fading. As the next section of Chapter V begins, we are given the first indications that Stephen may be planning a departure from his city and his homeland, an enactment of the flight of his mythical ancestor.
The scene begins tellingly with Stephen watching the flight of birds, “a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings” (224), serving as a portent of Dedalus, “the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings” (225). He enters the library to find his friend Cranly, and as they leave, they engage in banter with friends on the porch outside, until Emma at some point appears to pass. This triggers another round of complex feelings in Stephen, less ecstatic and more troublesome than before because they contest the poetic inspiration that had inflamed him to write the villanelle. In his imagination, he now “smelt her body,” “a wild and languid” smell (233), followed by a moment when a louse crawls over the back of his neck and triggers a vision of his own degraded physical condition. “The life of his body, illclad, illfed, louseeaten, made him cl
ose his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair” (234).
His earlier flight into poetic enchantment has landed him back on an aesthetically and romantically eroded earth. “Well then, let her go and be damned to her. She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her” (234).
After more banter, Stephen tells Cranly that he needs to speak to him, and they leave to engage in another dialogue. The urgency behind Stephen’s need to speak to Cranly has to do not with Emma, but with his mother. “I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening” (238), he begins, and concedes that it was about religion. Religion has been a center of conflict throughout Stephen’s narrative—recall the early Christmas dinner scene, his attack by classmates at Belvedere, the scary religious retreat and the nightmares it induced, among others. Stephen’s mother merely wants him to make his “easter duty,” an obligation to receive Holy Communion during the Easter season, and he has decided he “will not serve.” The conversation that ensues is skillful on Cranly’s part, asking questions to prompt Stephen to articulate his feelings about the church, about religion and faith, about his mother, his family, and his circumstances in life.
The questions are simple, and so are Stephen’s answers. They initially review his biography as we have been reading it, his family’s prosperous beginning, the “[n]ine or ten” children that came along, and his father’s failure to cultivate and pursue a profession. Cranly takes this information and uses it gently to point out to Stephen what this kind of life has been like for his mother. “Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said then. Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if . . . or would you?” (241). “If I could,” Stephen replies. This raises more inner conflicts about religion, and the solution is not simple. On the one hand, Stephen cannot be certain whether the communion wafer is or is not the body of Christ, and therefore fears violating the faith by making an insincere communion. But he is also afraid of “the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration” (243).
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