ANEXO III. DESCRIPCIÓN TÉCNICA DE LAS ACTIVIDADES
6. ARREGLO DE TEJADOS E INSTALACIÓN DE NIDOS ARTIFICIALES
W E L D O N T H O R N T O N
From The Antimodernism of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a young Man. © 1994 by Syracuse University Press.
W
e turn now to Joyce’s novel, illustrating the distance between Stephen’s modernist view of the world and of his psyche, and Joyce’s fuller and richer antimodernist perspective. This chapter explains how indistinguishable the structures of the novel are from those of Stephen’s psyche, and focuses on certain structural features that reveal how deep into Stephen’s mind the Cartesian subject/object dichotomy has penetrated.Joyce’s Portrait depicts the development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to his more or less self-confident late-adolescent flight from Dublin in pursuit of his calling as an artist. Stephen is a typical Bildungsroman hero- sensitive, intelligent, continually trying to discover what life holds for him. Every experience is for him a potential gateway to life’s meaning, a possible revelation of “the end he had been born to serve” (P, p. 169). He is typical also in that his development is a true Bildung, a process of individuation arising both from distinctive, innate traits of his psyche and from the influences of his milieu.
In the face of structuralist and poststructuralist claims that the individual is no more than a nexus of cultural patterns and structures—“a locus where various signifying systems intersect” in Sylvio Gaggi’s apt characterization of this view—I must emphasize how Portrait testifies repeatedly to the distinctiveness of Stephen’s “individuating rhythm,” to how different he
is from others in his cohort who have been subject to very similar cultural forces.1 I agree with H. M. Daleski and Stanislaus Joyce that Stephen’s
development involves the realization of potentialities inherent in his psyche, rather than simply a response to his environment. Daleski says “in A Portrait of the Artist, unlike Mansfield Park or The History of Henry Esmond, for instance, it is not so much the child’s circumstances as his consciousness that determines the sort of adult he becomes and colors his whole personality. The child’s consciousness is the ‘embryo’ of character that Joyce starts with and then sets into dynamic relation with circumstance” (Unities, p. 175). Daleski goes on to quote Stanislaus’ remark that when Joyce set to work on the novel, “the idea he had in mind was that a man’s character, like his body, develops from an embryo with constant traits. The accentuation of those traits, their reactions to hereditary influences and environment, were the main psychological lines he intended to follow, and, in fact, the purpose of the novel as originally planned” (MBK, p. 17).2 Stanislaus’ specification
of both “hereditary influences and environment” as factors the embryo of character reacts to shows that he does not identify the psyche with either of these contributory influences.
Baruch Hochman’s fine essay “Joyce’s Portrait as Portrait” (The Literary Review 22 [Fall 1978): 25–55) also addresses these issues. Emphasizing Stephen’s development throughout the novel, Hochman points out that “Joyce does not render a merely passive process. Stephen, to be sure, does incorporate elements of his environment. . . . But the internalization is not passive. It is an appropriation, a taking and a making his own” (p. 30). Hochman stresses as well the self-identity that persists throughout the novel, saying “Portrait renders the disparate ‘Stephens’ of the successive moments of his experience. yet it renders the same Stephen, who is identical with himself even as he undergoes the sea-change of biological, emotional, sociological and intellectual development” (p. 27). He also speaks intelligently to the complex question of the relationships between self and culture, pointing to a paradox that the novel keeps before us:
One of the novel’s governing themes is the primacy of culture—of all the words and images and ideas in which man is so entangled, that his “nature” cannot be discerned in its bare primordiality. yet there is an important sense in which the thesis reverses itself. It can be said, if I am right about the priorities governing this novel, that the entire mass of cultural material has no vibrancy, hardly any meaning, except in Stephen as constituted: from his muscles and his guts, as we are asked to envision them, up through his rational and imaginative faculties. What animates culture and its images is, if not perceivable “nature,” then knowable personality. (p. 51)
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In the preceding chapter I proposed that the structures of the Bildungsroman reflect the Bildung, the development, of its protagonist. Essentially this same point about Portrait—that its structure is a function of Stephen’s development—has been made by a number of critics; Thomas F. Staley, in a review of studies of the novel’s structure, points out that “all of the studies agree that the central structural principle in the novel is informed and even controlled by Stephen’s own spiritual growth and development.”3
This means that virtually every study of Stephen’s psychological development simultaneously involves claims about structural elements, structural patterns, in the novel. While some of the patterns critics have proposed seem contrived or imposed, most of them are plausible: the number and variety of patterns that have been brought to light both testify to Joyce’s genius and suggest how large an array of structural elements can enter into the “individuating rhythm” of one individual’s psyche.4
I would make two general points about the novel’s structures. First, so fully is this characteristic of the Bildungsroman realized in Portrait that it is questionable whether we can discover any feature of the book’s structure that is not simultaneously a feature of Stephen’s psyche. Certainly every motif (or complex) that we trace through the novel (e.g., birds, hands, rose, cow, red/ green) is not simply a strand in an aesthetic fabric, but a component of the young man’s gestating psyche, and analogously, each of the various structural patterns that we detect in the novel is simultaneously an aspect of Stephen’s individuating rhythm.5
The second point is that virtually all such structural/psychic patterns exist as subconscious elements of Stephen’s psyche, since Stephen is not consciously imposing—or even aware of—these patterns. That is, when we trace these patterns and motifs we render explicit something that necessarily exists implicitly in Stephen’s psyche. Thus any such analysis of structural patterns inherently refutes the tabula rasa image of the mind and the Enlightenment ideal of total self-awareness.6 The subconscious nature
of the patterns is more likely to be insisted on in Freudian or avant garde psychoanalytical readings of the novel—which suggests an “antimodernist” conception of the psyche in such readings—but it is equally the case with all readings that propose underlying structures or patterns within Stephen’s development.7 Compared to the extensive subconscious dynamics of his
psyche revealed by these studies of structural patterns, the degree of self- awareness and conscious control of his psyche that Stephen can achieve is relatively small, though not trivial.
While every structural pattern within Stephen’s psyche thus involves implicit elements, the pattern or rhythm that I wish to focus on here is very deeply implicit. This pattern derives from his having internalized the Cartesian dichotomy between res extensa and res cogitans, and is reflected in
his construing his experience as oscillating between poles that can best be described as inner/outer, subjective/objective, private/public. This implicit orientation on Stephen’s part results in an underlying oscillatory pattern that manifests itself through successive chapters of the novel—and to a lesser extent among episodes within the chapters—and that undergirds most of the other structural patterns described by earlier critics.
* * *
Joyce’s Portrait dramatizes Stephen’s struggle to discover some principle by which to live. In each of the first four chapters Stephen responds to some call, some impulsion, which seems to manifest the life-principle that he is seeking. Consequently, each chapter involves a pattern of rising action or intensification, ending in a climactic scene that dramatically exemplifies his current sense of what is most real and most compelling in his experience. In the first chapter, this climactic scene is his appeal to Father Conmee; in the second, his visit to the prostitute; in the third, his confession to the priest; in the fourth his vision of the wading girl. Each of these scenes epitomizes for Stephen some newly-realized sense of what is most real in his experience and consequently of how he is to approach life. The fifth chapter significantly modifies the pattern of the first four, for two reasons. First, Stephen’s discovery of his artistic calling at the end of chapter IV is valid, so that no more must he undergo dramatic rediscoveries of his life-course. Secondly, simultaneously with his discovering his calling as an artist, Stephen asserts a qualitatively greater degree of self-awareness and self-determination— this is what he construes his soul’s “aris[ing] from the grave of boyhood” (p. 170) to involve—and this new attitude toward himself is the basis of a significant shift in his demeanor, and consequently in our attitude toward him, in chapter V. In this final chapter Stephen faces the less dramatic but more complex problem of coming to understand what his artistic calling involves—a problem that he has not solved by the end of the novel.
Let me briefly label the life-approaches that Stephen pursues in the first four chapters, offer a generalization about them, and then elaborate. In chapter I, Stephen undertakes a social approach to life; in chapter II this social approach collapses and is replaced by the sensuous approach; in chapter III this proves unsubstantial, and Stephen engages in a religious approach to life; in chapter IV, he finds the religious approach to life unacceptable, sees his true calling as that of artist, and embarks on the aesthetic approach to life.
My generalization about these successive life-approaches derives from my earlier observation that the Bildungsroman often depicts the protagonist involved in an oscillatory movement between poles of experience. Stephen exemplifies several types of oscillation, but the most fundamental is between
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modes of experience he construes as inner or subjective, and those he senses as outer or objective, thus reflecting his implicit division of his experience into outer and inner. That is, in chapter I Stephen’s social life-response is to forces that he senses as coming from without him. In contrast, the approach that he assumes in chapter II, is a response to forces that he feels to come from within him. And as the schema indicates, there is a regular oscillation back to outer orientation in chapter III, and once again to inner orientation in chapter IV. But while this dichotomization of reality into subject and object, private and public, reveals how deeply into Stephen’s psyche the Cartesian split has penetrated, Joyce by various means shows this dichotomization to be simplistic and un-veridical. It is by no means always easy for Stephen to construe his experience in these terms, since all human experience implicitly involves a fusion of “inner” and “outer.” But this pattern of oscillation is necessary to Joyce’s dramatization of the coming of age of an intelligent young man in a modernist, post-Cartesian intellectual milieu.8 Nor is it
accidental or trivial that Stephen’s artistic calling (in chapter IV) comes to him on an inward (i.e., subjectivist) phase of his orientation. As we shall see, this reflects his innate predisposition toward an inner-oriented, symbolist view of art, and it consequently sets the terms of his reading of his problem of artistic identity and the relationship of the artist to society in chapter V.
The pattern I have just outlined is represented in the accompanying Figure. The schema shows that each of the first four chapters involves the surfacing of a distinctive approach to life on Stephen’s part—an approach that is suggested by the rising line for each of the chapters and is epitomized by a climactic event just prior to the end of each chapter.9 The descending
lines in chapters II, III, and IV represent the subsequent collapse of the life- approach or orientation climaxed in the preceding chapter. Chapters II, III, and IV, then, have a chiastic structure, since they involve both the erosion of the preceding approach, and the emergence of a new one, accompanied by an enantiodromic swing between the Cartesian inner/outer poles.10 Each of
the successive climactic peaks is higher than the preceding one, to indicate that for Stephen each successive view of life supersedes what he now regards as an insufficient or mistaken earlier view. That is, in chapter IV, he does not see his aesthetic calling as simply one other possible alternative, but as more profound and fundamental than the preceding life-orientations, which he feels he is now transcending. Each of these middle chapters, then, involves the falling away of one approach to life, accompanied by the coming into being of a “more comprehensive” view. As the diagram suggests, the climax of chapter IV is the true climax of the novel—the highest peak—in the sense that the calling that Stephen discovers there is his true calling: he is by his nature intended to be an artist, not a priest (chapter III), nor a devotee of sensuous experience (chapter II), nor one of “the fellows” (chapter I).
The agenda of chapter V is quite different from that of the earlier chapters: Stephen is intended to be an artist, and so there are no more roller- coaster rises and falls of life-orientation; what remains is the tougher and less dramatic problem of Stephen’s coming to understand what an artistic vocation requires of him. But as I have suggested, the terms in which he construes his artistic calling are established by his having come to his artistic vision on an inward swing of his psyche, reflecting his commitment to the symbolist, aestheticist conception of the artist. While this view is challenged by several experiences in chapter V it is not replaced by any new counter vision, leaving Stephen still entrammeled in a subjectivist view of art and the artist at the end of the novel. And while the Stephen that we see in Ulysses has been forcibly reoriented toward the material world by the trauma of his mother’s death, and he has begun to cultivate a more realistic view of art (epitomized by his Parable of the Plums that stands in such contrast to his villanelle in Portrait of the Artist), he has not yet achieved the reconciliation of these presumed opposites that will enable his emergence as an artist.
Let me now clarify how Stephen’s various life-approaches in the first four chapters of the novel manifest an oscillation between Cartesian poles. Once he gets beyond his infancy (pp. 7–8), Stephen’s life-approach in chapter I is essentially social—i.e., it is a reaction to public, “objective”
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demands that he experiences as coming from outside himself. The primary forces impinging on Stephen during the Clongowes experience are from the society of his school, and during the Christmas dinner scene the young boy is subjected to forces arising from the public elements of politics, religion, and family. Though he does already have a distinctive, characterizable psyche quite different from that of his fellows at Clongowes, Stephen does not yet have any clear sense of his own self, and so he is continually buffeted by various influences and demands from a variety of directions—all sensed by him as arising from somewhere beyond or outside him. Perhaps the most constant note of this chapter is Stephen’s puzzlement as to what is going on around him, and how to respond to it. This is epitomized by the questions put to him by Wells about whether he kisses his mother before bed; Stephen finds that either answer is wrong, and finds himself ridiculed by “the other fellows.” His bafflement is manifested on a deeper and more traumatic scale by the terrible argument at the Christmas dinner table, and finally by the pandybatting. When he is pandybatted by Father Dolan for something that seems thrust upon him for no fault of his own, he is puzzled and disturbed over what the appropriate response to this injustice should be. Finally, at the urging of the other boys, he decides to pursue the regular social-hierarchical channels available to him, and to take his complaint to the rector. A passage late in chapter I shows how strongly Stephen’s coming to this decision is influenced by the importunities of his (older) fellow students:
—I wouldn’t stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldyhead or any other Baldyhead. It’s a stinking mean low trick, that’s what it is. I’d go straight up to the rector and tell him about it after dinner.
—yes, do. yes, do, said Cecil Thunder.
—yes, do. yes, go up and tell the rector on him, Dedalus, said Nasty Roche, because he said that he’d come in tomorrow again to pandy you.
—yes, yes. Tell the rector, all said.
And there were some fellows out of second of grammar listening and one of them said:
—The senate and the Roman people declared that Dedalus had been wrongly punished.
* * *
yes, he would do what the fellows had told him. He would go up and tell the rector that he had been wrongly punished. A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history, by some
great person whose head was in the books of history. And the rector would declare that he had been wrongly punished because the senate and the Roman people always declared that the men who did that had been wrongly punished. (pp. 52–53)
This passage suggests how fully Stephen’s response to this crisis is socially formed and generated, and it involves a verbal motif that epitomizes the social nature of the forces at work on Stephen—the motif of “the fellows.” This apparently bland, general term occurs frequently and at important intervals in this chapter. For example, section I.iv (pp. 40–59) opens with “The fellows,” and over the next two pages, six paragraphs have the phrase either as their opening words or in their first sentence, and the last paragraph of the chapter begins with the phrase.11 young Stephen’s punishment and even
his crime have been pressed upon him from without—he feels no real sense of guilt—and now he pursues the socially-instituted mode of appeal because his schoolmates urge it upon him (“yes, he would do what the fellows had told him”—p. 53.21), and because there is a public pattern for it in history (the senate and the Roman people—pp. 53.10, 53.26, 54.9), which seems to Stephen to involve a reality far more substantial than his fledgling soul. As a result of this urging by his peers, Stephen, in fear and trembling, makes his way through the corridors of the school to Father Conmee’s office and