Josh Edmiston
Everything and Everywhere and After: Stephen-Being
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus is a paralyzed protagonist. Stephen is a character restrained by his surroundings -- the downward spiral of his familial poverty; the second-class qualities of Dublin and the city’s populace as an anthropomorphized afterthought, the chaotic confusion of puberty and adolescence all serve as nets and lassoes, clipping and melting Stephen's waxen fledgling wings. However, by the controlled clarification of these sources of constraint -- by flying ever closer and closer towards his winding labyrinthine problems -- Stephen is able to come to terms with his downcast state. Stephen identifies the tumults of his life while simultaneously contemplating his existence in relation to them, leaving him with a sort of dissatisfied satisfaction which he builds upon and copes with through his ever-changing understanding of the aesthetics of beauty and art, language, and the world.
By means of this coping mechanism, Stephen allows himself to become less and less defined by and against his environment and finds himself to be more and more amidst its centered radiance. Stephen's developing aesthetic musings allow him to grasp and better handle his chaotically confused, distanced feelings towards life and its circumstantial constraints. Stephen Dedalus is a paralyzed protagonist, but it is through his aesthetic contemplations of the various maladies that plague him -- and ultimately the apprehensive embrace of his struggles and his own mortal finitude -- that allow him to not keep life at arm's-length but rather allow him to interact alongside the world and encounter it with perfect aesthetic radiance.
Throughout Portrait, one particular malady that Stephen feels subjected to is a language he finds both “so familiar and so foreign”, one which whose words he has “not made or accepted,” but has merely been forcibly thrown into using by means of uncontrollable circumstances (Joyce 170). As a child, Stephen is repeatedly confused by the intricacies, nuances, and the aesthetics of language. Words like “kiss” and “suck” serve as menaces to Stephen’s understanding of the world, obstacles that attempt to prevent him from decreasing the oftentimes self-created distance between himself and childhood social circles.
However, Stephen loves to contemplate the sound and flow and “jingle of the words” he hears spoken in the conversations and on the streets around him (Joyce, 168). After being asked whether he kisses his mother before going to bed every night, Stephen finds himself in a conundrum, ridiculed for answering both yes and no. He takes a brief moment to identify and clarify the word and muses upon the act of intimacy. In a hybridized narrative and stream of consciousness, he wonders: “What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss,” (Joyce, 27). Although he does not necessarily come to a definitive answer about whether it was right or wrong to kiss his mother, Stephen simultaneously separates the issue preventing him from being 'one of the boys' and then further satisfies his dissatisfaction by analyzing the process of kissing and its aesthetics, recalling his encounters with the world of kissing. Ultimately, Stephen forgets the fact that he was initially “hot and confused” by the boys’ laughter and realizes the utter futility of his own situation, there is little point in being bothered if there is a right answer or not; his mind returns to his physical self and his person returns to the goings-on of which he is amidst.
That same afternoon, we see Stephen trying valiantly to study his Geography lesson. He quickly comes to the conclusion that "[learning] the names of places in America" is going to prove more difficult than he first thought, so, Stephen decides to jot down what he does know: "Stephen Dedalus/ Class of Elements/ Clongowes Wood College/ Sallins/ County Kildare/ Ireland/ Europe/ The World/ The Universe," (Joyce, 27-8). We see Stephen staring at his list and a poem on the opposite side of the paper, musing, wondering if he has missed anything and trying to piece everything together, to set everything around him in place so he can find his part, "where he was…that was he," (Joyce, 28). But by trying to place everything in its specific order, by defining the roles of each element as if definable -- as if divisible -- the magic is lost, "the verses…were not poetry," (Joyce, 28). Again, Stephen's contemplations over his frustrations and his internal aesthetic conversation give him a sort of dissatisfied solace, but more importantly, we see Stephen first realizing that maybe he cannot merely partition himself from the world nor can he simply situate himself against its dichotomies -- he realizes that he is amongst the world, neither just here nor just there, but amongst the "everything and everywhere," (Joyce, 28).
Later, after returning to Clongowes following Christmas break, Stephen overhears a conversation about a scandal involving a few of his fellow students pilfering some wine. The reader sees Stephen, through the narrative point of view, standing "among [the students], afraid to speak, listening," (Joyce 49). His upbringing and schooling have imbued young, God-fearing Stephen with the superior knowledge of all things sinful and he questions -- to himself -- how the boys could morally have stolen from the Church. His sense of dislocation within the context of the conversation is coupled with, and compounded by, the traumatic event of having had his glasses destroyed the day before, so, in both a literal and figurative sense, "the fellows seemed to him smaller and farther away," (Joyce, 50).
While trying to remain a physical element of the ongoing conversation, Stephen separates himself mentally from the situation and 'confusion of being', if you will, that he feels. Stephen rolls and sloshes the word “wine” around his head and his mouth as would a professional sommelier, causing him to imagine the “grapes [of] dark purple that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples,” (Joyce, 54). Through his meditative taste-testing of the word, Stephen seemingly comes to both an understanding of the word as well as an apprehension of why his schoolfellows might have stolen the wine; by mulling the word over within every facet of his being, Stephen dissatisfies a certain emotion -- the disgust and “sick feeling” he remembers at recalling the rector’s breath-- but also satisfies himself by recalling the unpleasant experience of his first communion as “the happiest day of his life,” (Joyce, 54). Stephen ascertains the feeling of repulsion, but then recognizes the temporality of his upset stomach by recalling the joy that he also felt. These momentary ponderings allow Stephen to return to the conversation sans confusing, satisfactorily reinstituting himself into reality in a moment of aesthetic claritas-- like the "sounds of cricket bats through the soft grey air…[saying]: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl," Stephen exits the sense of arrest he felt, entering "a luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure," and rejoins the inevitable whole of reality (Joyce, 50).
In his essay, "The Culture of Dedalus", author and editor, Randy B. Kershner, pulls together multiple critical accounts and cultural studies to give the reader a better perspective on the realities of Ireland, and specifically Dublin, as it pertains to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Before losing track of the novel itself, Kershner discusses the varying influences of turn-of-the-century Ireland not only on Joyce as a writer, but upon how the environmental and economic circumstances are reflected in Stephen's character, both morally and literarily.
One of the many restraints Stephen battles throughout the novel is his social standing. Early in his schooling, we see young Stephen romanticizing his family’s status and picturing himself as the son of "a gentleman," (Joyce, 22). As he matures, however, Stephen is forced to identify and realize the beams and straps that his family's increasing state of impoverishment have unceremoniously nailed and tied to his wings. Crucified and terrorized by the stigmatic discomfort and unsuredness of his true place in the hierarchy of Irish aristocracy, Stephen takes to mentally and varbally belittling those around him whom he can more definitively ‘put in their place,’ per se.
The example Kershner discusses is a scene later in the novel when Stephen is roaming the "rainladen" backstreets and "sloblands" of Dublin, tardily dawdling on his way to class (Joyce 158). He passes Trinity College and notices the statue of Thomas Moore, "national poet of Ireland," (Joyce 162). Having only just minutes before escaped his decrepit and detestable situation at home -- where he was forced to down "watery tea" and munch on "crusts of fried bread" while his father called him a "lazy bitch" (Joyce 157-8) -- we see Stephen take a moment to aesthetically criticize not only the statue, but Moore as both a person and artist. Stephen muses with condescension upon the "droll" statue's "sloth of the body" with its "servile head…" (Joyce 162). Stephen has once again, though, removed himself emotionally from the situation, for he has matured and evolved enough as an artist to "look at it without anger," "free…from the fetters of reformed conscience," (Joyce 162). Stephen aptly identifies "the veils of his own longing and dejection" as derivative of his sense of aristocratic and social displacement and degeneration, but he astutely notes that the statue seemed "humbly conscious of its indignity" which is precisely what Stephen is encountering on a minutely basis during his street-strolls and interactions amongst the city. Stephen separates himself in a moment of artistic and aesthetic analysis and is able to re-commune and continue his walk to the university in quiet solitude, realizing that the statues, the disgusted feeling Stephen carries with him, and the eyes that gaze upon him are, as Mr. Kershner says, "finally irrelevant" (362).
In contrast to Kershner's Foucault-infused theory, however, "Their" eyes are not necessarily the eyes of God, nor the "faceless They…of social institutions," but instead, the eyes are society's fabric, the world and life itself, from which Stephen has so desperately always tried to remain hidden, reluctant to encounter (362). As he slowly comes to grasp his worldly awkwardness and inability to conceal himself throughout the novel, Stephen, much like Moore's expression, "claims" and accepts his endemic "silence, exile, and cunning" and turns these traits and his reveries into weapons in order to liberate himself in a sort of cosmopolitanism from the cares of the newly-formed -- and growing -- "aristocracy of capital," and the worldly contempt that Stephen feels has been holding him back, forced to his knees, displaced (Kershner 364, 367).
Throughout A Portrait, we see these patterns of weaponizing, of Stephen attempting to grasp his cultural, hereditary, and environmental obstacles and turning them, metamorphosing these resent-ridden impediments into conscious opportunities for his artistic and aesthetic advancement, as tools to dig himself out from the hole of his depravity.
Just before the point of view enters Stephen's final phase of journaling (in which he becomes one with the narrative: the story rather than a character within a story), we are exposed to one last instance of Stephen's loathing resentment and confusion during which he must reflect artistically -- "by thinking about things [one can] understand them," (Joyce, 51). Stephen and Cranly are strolling through various townships, both boys discomforted by their recent religion-based discussion wherein Cranly chastised Stephen's fears and ambivalence and his separative attempts to keep the world at an arm's length. Stephen apprehends and corrals the resonating issues he holds with religion and his unwillingness to choose sides, per se, while he simultaneously admires the "air of wealth and repose" and the "scattered lights in the villas" in the world around him which, ironically, seems to "comfort their neediness," (Joyce, 215-6). When the fellows hear a woman singing Rosie O'Grady, Cranly pauses and says, "Mulier cantat." Stephen is instantly transformed-- the darkness and "strife of his mind" is "touched with an enchanting touch" by the "soft beauty of the Latin word," (Joyce, 216). Stephen experiences what he, Shelley, and Galvani essentially call an "enchantment of the heart," (Joyce, 190). For an instant, Stephen is fixated on both the self-imposed judgment of "his own…inferiority to others…[seeing] himself as different in kind," as well as his aesthetic contemplation of Cranly's Latin, "[the woman's] voice, shining like a young star," and the cadence and intonation of each (Kershner, 371; Joyce, 216). In this moment, we see Stephen soaring above his obstacles, fully evolved as an artist, caught in a "luminous stasis of aesthetic pleasure" wherein his fears fade and all of his issues of loathing and self-loathing, disgust and distaste melt away, leaving only the beauty of the art, "the clear radiance of the esthetic image," (Joyce, 190).
As evidenced, the results of Stephen's mental and artistic laborings are often inconclusive: his satisfactions are met with equally ambiguous and distressing conclusions. We see Stephen realize in scenario after scenario that he is merely a participant in the working mechanisms and devices of the world -- an interaction alongside the chaos and unpredictability of life; Stephen has no control, even when he manages to physically or mentally distance himself from situations through pondering aesthetics and beauty. Stephen grapples with the notion that he cannot merely stand apart from his surroundings nor can he merely be within them: he must be among them. In her essay, “Walking in Dublin,” University of Iowa professor, Cheryl Herr, calls this interaction and epiphany of amongstness, "Being-in-the-world."
A critic attempting to show the mingling capabilities of many schools of literary criticisms, Herr chooses to look at scenes similar to that of 'Stephen, Cranly, and the Singing Woman' in a Heideggerian way -- one scene among myriad others depicting Stephen and Co. walking "slowly along the avenues" and sidestreets of Dublin. Herr believes that Stephen's pauses and stutters during his strolls do not merely represent his moments of artistic epiphany, but also indicate his realization of the many "contradictions that structure his society" which repeatedly alter his sense of "embodiment and embeddedness" in his environment; this sense is Herr's "Being-in-the-world," which she calls a "hyphenated Heideggerian locution," referencing the twentieth century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (Herr, 416).
Ms. Herr chooses to devote a portion of her essay to the discussion of Stephen searching for that which will "liquidate" his proverbial Lacanian lack. Herr believes that Stephen's lack -- the object of his search -- changes over time in conjunction with "the rhythm of [his] inner tides," (426). While I agree with Ms. Herr that, at some points in Stephen's life, this missing piece seems to be a female figure, I disagree more generally with this missing feminine role as the assumed object of his search. Stephen's lack is based on his then-current understanding of his Being-in-the-world. Herr even says that Joyce's characters often enter the maze of Dublin "seeking, often aimlessly, a meaning that eludes them," (425). The meaning that eludes Stephen is not always woman, not some physical replacement for his mother or for E C , but ratheris most commonly Stephen's own meaning of himself and his depravity, of his artistic desires, and the meaning of his own mortality. When Stephen sees the bird-girl, he does so amidst a moment of pained reminiscence of his boyhood, yearning for his lost soul and for himself, his Being. Upon sight of the girl, Stephen notes how content she is to stand on the beach "gazing out to the sea" and remarks at her "flesh…of mortal beauty and beauty," (Joyce, 155). So, while Herr draws a valid conclusion that the 'bird-girl' may not be "an end in herself but a primary emblem for Stephen's search," said search is not exclusively for a "mother/girl/woman on the road who either beckons or shows him the way;" (428). Stephen's search is for that contentedness of mind, body, and soul which the bird-girl exhibits and embodies, unaffected by "shame or wantonness" -- the authentic stillness and cognizance that is Being-in-the-world (Herr, 428; Joyce, 155).
With the bird-girl having "thrown open before him…the gates of all the ways of error and glory," Stephen succumbs to a final embrace with the futility of resisting his endemic problems, allowing him to use his reveries and aesthetic artistry as weapons with which to cope rather than doing so by distancing himself from the world or prioritizing himself in relation to society. Herr describes this "mechanism of the disenfranchised" as a "tactic" used by Stephen, taking the term from Irish Studies scholar, Joseph Valente, who took it from de Certeau's essay, "Walking in the World," (Herr, 422). By adhering to this multi-stage tactic of identifying and embracing as a means to overcome, Stephen finds himself in a state of Being-metro-colonial. Herr thinks of this metro-colonial state in terms of a mental-physical mindset, as Stephen "moving through territory that both alienates and attracts" him (423). More than simply a confused mindset, however, one must take this notion of "metro-colonial" to the next level and see it as wholly representative of Stephen's state of Being. Not only is Stephen physically split between his home and his escape, and not only is he mentally split by the confusing swirl of emotions he discovers within himself, but he is also grasping at a state of Being-in-equilibrium. Stephen increasingly becomes equidistant from all aspects of his life, neither holding the negatives away, nor pulling the positives towards himself. This equality on all levels of Being is what truly defines Stephen as Being-in-the-world.
Consequently, through the apprehension and comprehension of his Heideggerian Being and of his various artistic identifications, Stephen manages to manipulate and formulate his craft into a set of possible paths (illustrated to him by the bird-girl) down which he can travel whilst maintaining his Being-in-the-world. Stephen manages to accept and embrace his encounters and interactions with these paths and keeps his Being in the world without allowing the world to affect his Being -- aside from the implied chaotic interaction -- thus retaining a constant state of artistic fluctuation, evolution, and controlled confusion with each state being as ambiguous, unpredictable, and temporary as the preceding and proceeding state(s); Stephen perceives that his states, his social obstacles, and his semi-(un)satisfactory conclusions are as temporary as life itself: each path could be, perhaps, the last not-yet after which there are no more 'not-yets'.
Just as are the actual acts of his aesthetic analyses, this discovery of certain stillness surrounded by predictable oscillation is Stephen's escape -- at once mental, physical, and artistic balance. The horizon of escape, of death is there, waiting; it may elude him for one second or one hundred years, but the perfect aesthetic beauty of Being-in-the-world will come.
Applying Herr's logic, Stephen's developing sense of his own artistry and co-developing notion and identification of his interactive encounters with the "challenges to artistic agency posed by urban modernity," are reflected by his winding, circular motions throughout the novel, like a mouse plodding around and around a cheese-laden labyrinth (416). Despite his seemingly authentic desire to escape, Stephen is trapped by a place offering both his sought-after sins and equally sought-after salvation, stuck in a frustrating coil of wandering and aesthetic wondering. However, it is through these very same wanderings/wonderings that Stephen comes to the perceptive identification of his depravity and of his necessary interaction and encounters alongside the world -- the embracing of his mortally finite role in the unpredictable goings-on of life's enactment -- that he is able to 'escape', or at least find an evolving sense of temporal solace in ambiguous aesthetic conclusions.
In the context of the previously mentioned 'Stephen, Cranly, and Singing Woman' scene, because he has come to an agreement with the temporality of his struggles, the pointless resistance of these same struggles and of life in general, Stephen does not seem to be bothered by the fact that the woman stops singing at one point. In this particular situation near one of the pinnacles of his portrayed development, we see Stephen neither attempting to separate himself from the scene nor do we see him attempting to find his own role within it (as he likely would have in the past). Rather, we see a Stephen who has come to terms with the dank streets filled with an "air of wealth and repose" and the knowledge that the beautiful voice will not sing until eternity. We see a Stephen who does not allow the disingenuous life of Them -- the eyes and the fabric of the world -- around him to affect himself, for this Stephen has embraced his own life's ambiguous unpredictability -- we see an instant of perfect Aquinian claritas: a Stephen Being-in-the-world.
Stephen Dedalus is a paralyzed protagonist. Throughout his young life, we see Stephen continually realizing that his situation and circumstances are not as divine as he had once felt or as had once been led to believe. A Portrait is a rare breed of semi-autobiography -- the novel masterfully conveys a portion of Stephen's life through these instances in which he unearths, lays eyes upon, and identifies his "own superiority or inferiority to others," (Kershner, 371). Stephen evolves his believed and assumed genius through this process of epiphany and realization. As "a man of genius…[Stephen] makes no mistakes," and such genius certainly should not be subjected to and restrained by the subhuman squalor that is the reality of his life (Ulysses, 9:228-29). Instead, Stephen attempts to rise above his environmental condemnation and the confusion of adolescence, looking beyond these would-be barriers, rerouting and re-labeling his temporary misfortunes and the misfortunes of his upbringing, treating them rather as "portals of discovery" to further his aesthetic artistry.
Stephen Dedalus is the embodiment of an aesthetic study: a piece of society who is -- at varying points in his development -- wholly separated as a child, harmoniously constructed yet morally flawed in adolescence, and radiant as a young man. The novel at first portrays Stephen as merely a character within a story and then, as he is slowly molded like a being-shaped glob of still-wet clay, Stephen becomes the story. Stephen's developing and ever-fluid feelings of otherness and his outsider mentality lead him to question art and beauty and even the language he speaks, and these questions and contemplations invariably leave our young hero with a sense dissatisfied satisfaction: satisfied that he understands situations which are potential set-backs, but dissatisfied that these situations exist and that he must exist (and ultimately, cease to exist) among them. Stephen's agreement with, and embracing of, his downtrodden life, as well as his aesthetic musings and his mental appreciation for beauty and harmony, however, give his socially-repressed artistic mind brief moments of room to escape, acting as a sort of proverbial coping mechanism; he simultaneously grows whilst contemplating and is -- at the very least -- ultimately able to become one with his life's scenario, with the aesthetic image of the novel itself, and with his own Being-in-the-world.
At the end of the A Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is a freelance aesthete, an artist-soldier joining the fray, ever-evolving and ever-adopting the best-suited strategy, outfitted with the necessary "silence, exile, and cunning" and accepting enough of the interaction-encounter with his own mortality to become a true genius. His problems and assumed oppressions, artistic understanding and reverence, even his very life, he realizes, are all just sandcastles on the shore: everywhere in one moment and, perhaps, gone in the next. Or perhaps…perhaps not yet.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York: Random, 1986.
Joyce, James, and R. B. Kershner. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006. Print. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism.
Ibid., Herr, Cheryl. "Combining Perspectives. Walking in Dublin." p. 415-29.
Ibid., Kershner, R. B. "A Cultural Perspective. The Culture of Dedalus: Urban Circulation, Degeneration, and the Panopticon." p. 357-77.
