Impersonality and Emotion in James Joyce’s Aesthetics and Fiction

1The most obvious difference between Stephen Hero and the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is their respective length: the 250 pages that are left of the early manuscript, dealing with Stephen’s two years at the university, correspond roughly to 50 pages in the final version.

2This process of drastic reduction takes the two related forms of selection of incidents and narrative concentration. Stephen Hero includes more of the life of Dublin, which is the substance of Dubliners, and of Stephen’s own family life, and this material is largely expanded in the form of dramatic scenes. A characteristic example of the later transformation is the presentation of the fight with the mother on the subject of Easter confession and communion. In Stephen Hero; it is given ‘live,’ through a dialogue charged with emotions on both sides. In the Portrait, it becomes a summary account given to Cranly (also in the form of a scene, but the dialogue is here devoid of dramatic intensity), by a Stephen who is or wants to appear calmly fixed in his resolve ‘not to serve.’ The general significance of the transformation is clearly indicated in the change of the title, from individual ‘hero’ to typical unnamed ‘artist.’ Everything is now made to serve the theme of apprenticeship, in a novel which develops into a Künstlerroman. The centre of focalisation is almost exclusively confined within the consciousness of Stephen, and the subject-matter is life as the object of his experience, filtered and interpreted through his concern with growth, and ultimately his pursuit of artistic integrity.

3Theodore Spencer, in his introduction to the standard edition of Stephen Hero, sees the change as the ‘illustration by practice of the theory,’ gradually evolved and fully presented in the Portrait, that ‘the true “esthetic emotion” is static and the true artist essentially impersonal.’ (15-16)1 This statement combines elements taken from two familiar passages in the Portrait.

4The first is concerned with the reader’s response, in the spirit of the Aristotelian definition of ‘catharsis’ as the effect produced by tragedy on the spectator. Indeed, Stephen starts by recalling the two feelings, pity and terror, that define the tragic emotion in the Poetics. After stating rather oddly that the Master failed to define them, he proceeds to give his own definition: union ‘with the human sufferer’ for one, and ‘with the secret cause of the suffering’ for the other.2 This balance between empathy and sense of perspective is in fact close to the definition actually provided by Aristotle. The difference, however, is that Aristotle sees the two feelings as effecting ‘the correction and refinement’ of the natural passions, whereas Stephen simply asserts that they ‘arrest the mind,’ inducing a state of pure contemplation. This is the essential characteristic preserved when he enlarges the tragic emotion to include the dramatic emotion, and finally the esthetic emotion in general. He is thus enabled to conclude that, in brief, ‘the feelings excited by improper art’ (pornographical or didactic) ‘are kinetic, desire or loathing,’ whereas ‘the esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is static.’ This does not mean that the raw emotions are cancelled or ignored, since they are part of the experience recorded in fiction. But they have to be purified or transmuted by the imagination, and are thus made to affect the reader differently.

5Having defined the specific purpose of art, Stephen can more securely pass on from the periphery, so to speak, to the central question of the artist’s perception and creation. What is required is first some understanding of ‘the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.’ (208) I shall not repeat here what I wrote elsewhere3 about the evolution from Stephen’s early notion of ‘epiphany’ (dropped after Stephen Hero, but still sometimes taken as Joyce’s last word on aesthetics) to the definition inspired from Aquinas of the ‘phases of apprehension’ as ‘wholeness, beauty and harmony,’ and to the chapter ‘Proteus’ in Ulysses. But I wish to make at least a few remarks on the key passage which defines the ‘forms’ (lyrical, epical and dramatic) of artistic creation, and ends on the famous ultra-Flaubertian image: ‘The artist, like the God of his creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ (214-215)

6First, it is clear that all the three forms are genuine expressions of the esthetic emotion as opposed to the primary emotions and reactions (lust, anger, fanaticism) aroused or intensified by ‘improper art.’ It is true that there is a ‘progress’ from one form to the next on a scale of decreasing subjectivity. The lyrical form is the simple expression of an ‘instant of emotion.’ In the epical form, ‘the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself’ and the persons caught in the action narrated. In the dramatic form, the artist finally ‘impersonalises himself’ and is no longer visible or perceptible as the narrator of the world he has created. The three forms, however, can co-exist, at least in the novel, derived from the epic narration and described (by Henry James) as the most flexible of genres. Stephen has his lyrical moments, as in the effusions of his villanelle, and at the end of the novel the narrator retires to let him take stock and state his position directly in the fragments of his diary, the written equivalent of an unmediated monologue.

7His final vow, ‘to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,’ (253) should caution us against a possible misinterpretation of the God-like indifference of the creator. Joyce does not proclaim a theory of art for art’s sake, the withdrawal of the artist out of history into some ivory tower. According to Aquinas, ‘God is love,’ but he has set the world of time on its independent course, leaving Adam and Eve free to disobey, and only proving his love by the offer of redemption through the sacrifice of his Son. Similarly, the artist sees his creation as now detached from him, and does not interfere with it through denunciation or proselytism, but offers the possibility of redemption through imagination and art.

8The redemption is not given, but conquered. In that respect, what we can perceive in the early fragment does not differ from the Portrait. Stephen is caught in a welter of conflicting emotions, torn between love and hate. He struggles to wrench himself from emotional dependence on his mother, to fly out of the net of false loyalty to his Church, and to escape from the nightmare of history appropriated by Irish cultural chauvinism. And the story is his progress, beyond raw emotions, through moments of esthetic exaltation and attempts to establish his true status in the community, until he finds the way of salvation for himself and others. Stephen Hero, as we saw, leaves more space for the inner and surrounding world of raw emotions. But the main difference between the two versions lies in the role of the narrator.

9Dorrit Cohn, in Transparent Minds,4 differentiates between what she calls ‘dissonant’ and ‘consonant’ psycho-narration. The distinction can be extended to the narrated monologue and the forms of indirect speech, but the narrative account of what goes on in a character’s mind taken as the object of internal focalisation is the dominant form of both novels, anyway. The narrator, then, either ‘remains emphatically distanced from the consciousness he narrates’ or ‘remains effaced and fuses with the consciousness he narrates.’ (see 26-33) The difference is not one of mode, but of voice. In the first case, the narrator is heard as a separate voice, for elucidation or value-judgment (which means, in the terms of Joyce, that the creator is not completely ‘refined out of existence’ in his creation). In the second case, the narrator is not only impersonal, but also implicit, manifest not in the text but as the necessary condition and support of it. One must, of course, note that the terms are used technically, without their common associations. ‘Dissonant’ does not imply ‘out of tune with,’ and may cover praise as well as negative criticism. Symmetrically, ‘consonance’ does not mean harmony, but fusion of the two voices into one (of the narratorial into the figural).

10The example of consonance analyzed by Dorrit Cohn is, in fact, taken from the Portrait, and the passage is representative of the type of psycho-narration consistently adopted in that work. But we find the other type in Stephen Hero, with narrative interventions to point out the character’s faults and immaturity, ironically (‘this heaven-ascending essayist’) or straightforwardly (‘the eloquent and arrogant peroration’ [80]). Further on, Stephen’s ‘deep-seated anger’ against the priests who impose ‘spiritual paralysis’ and ‘wax fat upon a starveling rabblement’ is described in the terms dictated within him by his bitterness, but the paragraph is immediately followed by the comment: ‘This mood of indignation which was not guiltless of a certain superficiality... was hardly countenanced by him before he realised the dangers of being a demagogue.’ (146) We note, however, that the critical judgment passed by the narrator is simultaneously internalized by the character as part of his own mental discourse.

11It is interesting to compare that passage with its equivalent in the Portrait where Stephen’s ‘coarse’ anger is mixed with sentimental self-pity at the thought of the girl who will ‘unveil her soul’s shy nakedness’ to the ‘priested peasant,’ his rival, until he finally rises to the exalted mystic vision of himself as ‘the priest of eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of existence into the radiant body of everlasting life.’ (221) What the reader is here expected to take in is that Stephen at that stage, with his mind haunted by fragments of the villanelle, ‘his heart’s cry,’ is right in the middle of the lyrical-emotional phase he has to outgrow. The same situation occurs in Stephen Hero, for in both novels the raw emotion and the difficult process of esthetic transmutation are the central theme. But the special challenge to the narrator in the Portrait is that he limits himself to indirect textual marks, here the tone and style of the internal discourse, to convey what is not consciously acknowledged or internalized: immaturity, egoism (self-serving as well as conditioning aesthetic distance), the temptation of self-indulgent estheticism, and idealization as an escape from the hardships of experience.

12Ulysses associates a great variety of modes. The narrator is constantly impersonal, and most of the time hidden within or behind the text. His presence is felt, however, as a sort of disembodied ‘voice,’ whenever the verbal texture calls insistently for the reader’s attention. Such is the case with ‘The Oxen of the Sun,’ where the tumultuous scene is digested (diegetized) and projected by a voice which follows the metamorphosis of the English language through the centuries—with the bits of sentences detached from all context in the overture to ‘The Sirens’—and even (though the effect here has more to do with the external focalisation) with the deliberate fragmentation and distant vision of ‘The Wandering Rocks.’ This also applies to ‘Ithaca,’ a chapter all made up of questions and answers, for which Stuart Gilbert’s table of correspondences lists the ‘art’ as ‘science’ and the ‘technic’ as ‘catechism (impersonal).’ Contrarily, for ‘Nestor,’ where the ‘art’ is ‘history,’ the ‘technic’ is defined as ‘catechism (personal).’ The reason is that here the lesson is solemnly given by Mr Deasy in his own person and words, with the running commentary of Stephen’s sly ironical remarks and inner reactions.

13This example also illustrates the dominant form of the narrative. The minor characters are mostly perceived externally, in actions and words. The novel (if we leave aside the last section with Molly’s monologue) is built on the opposition between two characters perceived in internal focalisation and as centres of consciousness, and presented in a ‘consonant’ narrative which leaves the reader free to interpret their opposition. Bloom, then, is an outsider seeking recognition and sympathy, basically emotional, and abandoning himself to sentimental reverie (as in ‘The Sirens’), but also capable of humour, and courage (as in the scene with the Citizen). Stephen is an insider trying to free himself from his imprisonment. He is and defines himself as an intellectual, but he has at that stage not yet succeeded in achieving the detached vision of the artist.

14The two characters are not radically alien one to the other. When Bloom in the pub confronts the Citizen and movingly asserts that life is what is opposed to ‘force, hatred, history, all that,’ namely ‘love,’ he is in harmony with Stephen’s meditation on history in ‘Nestor’ and elsewhere. Stephen is intellectually aware of, but not emotionally free from the ambivalence of love, which is both fulfilment and enslavement, life and death, disinterestedness and desire. The main point of the passage controversially ‘restored’ by H. W. Gabler in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ is in the quotation in Latin, made up of two contradictory phrases from Aquinas: ‘Love truly wants something that is good for another and for that reason also (unde et ea) the things we desire (concupiscimus).’5 In each of the two men, the secret places of the mind lie beyong the probing of narration focalised on consciousness. Their inner contradictions only come out when they are acted out dramatically in ‘Circe,’ an episode defined under ‘technic’ as a ‘hallucination.’ Bloom, the odd man out and mild cuckold, indulges in dreams of public recognition and erotic masochist fulfilment. Stephen is visited by the ghost of his mother, and greets her with undiminished guilt and yearning before rejecting again hysterically her emotional blackmail and reasserting his ‘I will not serve.’

15Ulysses is heterogeneous in substance and form, but firmly contained within the frame of one town and one day (even Molly’s monologue, rambling in time and space, is not completely autonomous, since it remains anchored to a bedroom in a given night within the narrative). The germ of Finnegans Wake, however, may be found in the library scene, when Stephen mentally (and unfairly to Blake) reacts against Eglinton’s Platonism: ‘they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.’ (153) Finnegans Wake does not dismiss the ‘here and now,’ in which our experience is necessarily grounded. But that ground has crevices, caves, and even faultlines, ‘through which’ emerge the ghosts of the past (how changed!), and ghostly forms not traceable to any place or period, who mix and even fuse within a single text, which has the qualities of timelessness and ubiquity.

16The risk for the artist is to be less than God-like, and to leave his creation in the condition of the original chaos, in the absence of narrative continuity and with the problem of language arising from the heterogeneity of the substance. But Joyce, like Hamlet, is meticulously methodical in his apparent madness, so that he elaborates a different sort of coherence, through intertextuality in the service of myth.

17Here, the intertextuality, as presence of a text within another, is not limited to literary references, but embraces any text in any language, so that it subverts language itself. The ‘portmanteau word,’ defined by Humpty Dumpty to Alice as ‘two meanings packed into one,’ is both the instrument and the icon of that process. The early definition of the narrative as a ‘meanderthaltale’ packs together elements to be found in the course of three pages (18-20): tale, tall tale, meandering in the ‘tal’ (German for valley), recirculating like Anna/Liffey, perhaps begun by the Neanderthal man, an early ‘Gutenmorg’ before printing, writing signs on the ‘claybook’ (made of clay like Adam himself) where we can ‘rede’ the word or world: for ‘the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, under the ban of our infrarational senses.’ This refers us to Berkeley’s world evoked in Ulysses, where the objects of our sense perceptions are signs of the Creator’s language, ‘signatures of all things I am here to read’. (31) Berkeley’s idealism, however, is certainly not the last word on the subject.

18The inexhaustible possibilities of the play upon words (usually through variations of the vowel sounds on the fixed support of consonants or of a recognizable rhythmic pattern) are used to form a network of connections which are not random, but arranged to keep us (as Blake puts it) ‘From Single vision and Newtons sleep.’ The rainbow as ‘ruinboon’ formulates the central paradox of the felix culpa, the sin in Phoenix Park with the possibility of redemption and of a phoenix-like rising from the ashes. It appears in the sky, nearly at the end of the novel, as the symbol of the Trinitarian unity, resulting (as Newton had demonstrated in his Opticks) from the diffraction into colours of God’s One Light. It is ‘the sound sense sympol in a weedwaydwold of the fire there, the sun in his halo cast,’ and the ‘good safe firelamp’ that answers the prayer to save Ireland, and it brings to their knees both Patrick and Berkeley, the saint and the sage. (611-3)6

19For the coherence of his narrative, Joyce found help in the use of ‘Myth,’ taken here in the general sense of the intervention of what is non-historical in history, what underlies the sequence of events and connects the present with a legendary or divine past. In Ulysses, he had made a traditional use of intertextuality through allusions to suggest analogies with the Homeric architext. Here, Vico’s theory of recurring cycles allows him to superpose and combine different moments belonging to a similar phase. No less important, however, is the gnostic conception of the necessity of contraries, coming to him via Bruno of Nola, and also formulated by Blake: ‘without contraries is no progression,’ ‘opposition is true friendship.’

20This Myth, in its two aspects, manifests Joyce’s changed vision of the present in its relation to history, and gives him the power to come to terms with it. What is evil in Irish politics, paralysed Dublin and family love is not to be ignored or denied, but can be seen and set in a broader perspective, dispassionately.

21The result is also that the narrator and the characters of the fiction are largely dispossessed of individuality. The narrator, as a voice or as the stage-manager for the dialogues, is insistently present, but as a mere shadow hovering behind the text, and manifesting himself in such a protean and unforeseeable manner that any possibility of a single and personal presence is excluded. He belongs to no time and place, or else he escapes detection by constantly changing his mode of discourse (legal, academic, popular, heavily foreign). As to the characters, their impersonality is the result of trans-personalization and cross-personalization. HCE, the contemporary Earwicker, appears (see ‘The Ballad of Perse O’Reilly’ for some of his shifting identities) as the mythic old hero Finn MacCool as well as the mason Tim Finnegan, who himself is a local form of the Humpty Dumpty of the ballad. He is King O’Leary, but also the Norse invader, and the contemporary Norwegian captain. He is for Anna and Isabel a father/husband, and is caught in the mesh of an oedipal relation with his sons, before or perhaps after being ignominiously killed as the Russian General, with the possible option of a rebirth, though Anna fears that the bad old man she loves will have to go through an ordeal, and wants no less than ‘his fury gutmurdhurers to redress him.’ (617)

22The central situation is the relation between Shem and Shaun, who are also impersonated as graceful Chuff and devilish surly Glugg in the game with the Floras, as the Ondt and the Gracehopper in a fable, as Jutt and Mutt, and at the end as Juva and Muta. They are twin brothers, but nonidentical. They stand on opposite sides and quarrel, but they have more in common than they like to think, and they are connected in ways which go beyond the limits of personal communication. Each holds a mirror in which he is trying to force the other to recognize himself in a distorted image, and each represents for the other an object of open rejection as well as of hidden fascination. In his brother’s mirror, Shem can see in himself the faults which were the object of Stephen’s self-directed irony: his pride in isolation, the futility of the task of the penman without some kind of a postman. Shaun tries to evade the vision imposed on him, passing constantly from one role to another: as jaunty Jaun the (almost) conquering Juan, pretending bored indifference as Yawn in the inquiry held by the four evangelists who would make him Cain refusing to be Abel’s keeper. But he returns constantly to challenge Shem and expose him as a Sham, with an insistence suggesting his lack of self-confidence. He is on the side of order, of the establishment. So, his great fault is not to be able to conceive that the letter that matters is not one that passes through the official channel of the post office, but one that was perhaps dropped from the bag into the rubbish heap, from which that letter in the litter, almost illegible, will have to be scratched out by the hen, and interpreted. Chapter 7 is a wild denunciation by him of Shem as a pathetic scoundrel. But just before, at the end of his interrogation by the Apostles in chapter 6, to the question ‘Sacer esto?’ (which is ambiguous, since the verbal form is a future imperative) he answers ‘Semus sumus,’ in the plural. (168) He may wish to be or to become ‘sacred,’ but he cannot by himself become ‘the priest of the eternal imagination’ of Stephen’s dreams in the Portrait. (221) He is (to quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) ‘on the side of the angels,’ and thus in need of the voice of the devil. But the situation for his brother is simply reversed.

23The capacity to rise through the imagination above the passions born from the limitations of the ‘Single vision’ results in what Stephen had defined as the God-like indifference of the artist. Blake may have found through his imagination the ‘supreme delight’ of the ‘fourfold vision.’ But Joyce is neither a mystic nor a stoic. Finnegans Wake does not end on an ecstatic flight or the achievement of ataraxy, but in a slow and painful flowing and passing away. The person who is a form in a given time will not be annihilated, she/he will dissolve to be reborn in another form (the Tibetan Book of the Dead with its avatars is one of the main motifs worked into the text). But she/he accepts the end with nostalgia and regrets for the pains inflicted and born, with terror as well as anticipation, with a resignation which is not without bitterness towards those who take the empty place among the living. This is the mood of the final monologue of Anna Livia ending her riverrun into the sea before she recirculates. But, just as for the young Stephen ‘the soul of the commonest object’ could be ‘epiphanized,’ one of the common washerwomen can have this sense of a painful but cleansing atonement (the return to at-oneness with the whole) after the joys and hardhips of the living. What is felt and conveyed is a deep emotion, impersonal, detached from the self, and tragic in its subdued pathos. It seems, at least, that something of the kind comes out of Joyce’s quiet and unemphatic reading of the end of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle.’