James Joyce and Aesthetic Gnosticism

T H O M A S H. LANDESS

THEPLIGHTof the artist in the modem world has been the topic of too much fiction, poetry, and commentary to require extensive definition. I would only point out what is already obvious to members of the academy: that the haunting sense of alienation attributed to urban residents of the sixties and seventies was precisely analyzed and rendered by a number of poets and novelists even before the turn of the century; and between 1900 and 1950 virtually every major literary figure addressed himself to this question. Among the most important of these was James Joyce, one of the few genuinely influential figures in the development of twentieth-century fictional technique. His three n o v e l s 4 Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake-mirror, as well as render, the significant plunge into the pool of self that has been a predominant subject of the novel since the late Victorian period. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are undoubtedly the most ambitious of Joyces works; for in their radical departure from conventional modes of narration they suggest the triumph of individual consciousness over the traditional ordering of action-the subjugation of time and space by the active imagination in league with the will. To a lesser degree A Portrait o f the Artist suggests the same modernist tendencies,
Modem Age

though its meaning is rendered more often in discourse than in the implications of formal complexity; and for this reason Portrait, Joyces first novel, provides us with one of the purest examples in modern literature of the gnostic impulse as it manifests itself in the artistic imagination. On its most obvious level the central action of the novel is concerned with the intellectual and spiritual growth of Stephen Dedalus, a pattern of development that seems to some critics to include no more than an abnormally painful childhood followed by adolescent rebellion, maturity, and a satisfying sense of true vocation. To such commentators, Stephen is simply Everyboy, his sensibilities heightened by an acute and instinctive awarenss of the created order that surrounds him. But he is something more than a Wordsworthian poet, however Romantic his own conception of himself. For Wordsworth conceived of the imagination as responding to some great force from without (call it nature or call it God); and while Joyces artist has a keen eye for the natural image, he is more interected in the universe of words, for him a realm of existence that transcends the merely given of the created order. In one sense, then, the meaning of A Portrait of he Artist can be found in the progression of Stephen Dedalus soul from the mundane to the

145

supra-mundane, a journey of the spirit that finally culminates in a tenuous flight from the constitution of being itself, a gnostic escape in which the author imperfectly believes and which the reader can finally accept only if he is highly credulous or very young. I say finally accept because this novel is one of the most carefully wrought in all of English literature, and in the tightly woven texture of the narrative Joyce is able to ensnare even the wariest and most meticulous of readers.

PROFESSOR EMCVOECELIN has told us that the central element in all gnostic experience is that of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin; and such an attitude is implicit in the first sentence of A Portrait o f the Artist, for as several critics have noted, through the suggestive use of sounds Joyce has implied an external frame of reference with important meaning:
( I n , , uyvlI a ,.* V s x - b

. _..___ .---- . it aiiu a v c i y tjuud

*----

LIIIIC

was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was a baby tuckoo.2 Although this bit of childish nonsense seems to have been taken from Joyces own experience, it has additional significance in terms of Stephen Dedalus evolution; for in the jumble of words one can discern an allusion to the cuckoo which lays its eggs in the nests of other birdsa3This reference suggests that Stephens story may be read as a variant of The Ugly Duckling in which the young boy, awkward and strange, is raised among an alien brood and suffers painful abuse until he finally matures and then flies away to join his own kind in the community of a finer species. This ancient folk tale in its various versions clearly embodies the potential for a gnostic sense of alienation as defined by Voegelin and others.

The implied image of the earth-bound cuckoo or duckling, struggling among inferiors who taunt him for his failure to conform to their communal norm, is a precise analogue to Stephen Dedalus incipient sense of his own superiority over family, nation, and church. The potential for rebellion against the prison of his world is realized both in the resolution of the ancient tale and in Joyces development of his central action. The bird flies away, transcending the earth to which he has been confined, and seeks his place in the sky where he sings or soars with a grace and beauty beyond the capabilities of those whom he has left behind. f the Artist as a Young Man In A Portrait o Stephen eventually rejects the communal world into which he has been born, a world filled with creatures who are human and hence fallibly annoying to his sensibility. His rejection manifests itself in two ways analogous to the movement of the folk tale. First, he makes a figurative flight into aesthetic gnosis, devising a theology of his own which occupies his attention in the latter portions of the novel. Second, he literally abandons Ireland for the freedome of Paris, which was just beginning to serve at this time as the international gathering place for expatriate artists. It is important to note that the nature of Stephen Dedalus early alienation is further reinforced by the abundant implications of his name. As Stephen he is the counterpart of the first martyr to the Christian faith, stoned to death by Pharisees, the intractable adherents of the old religious order. Stephen is the sufferer of corporate abuse, the visionary who preaches a special truth to a world which responds with vindictive hostility. Joyce does little more with this first name than assign it to his character, but Stephen himself recognizes his identification with Daedalus, whom he calls the old artificer, creator of the labyrinth and escapee from the island prison of Crete. This myth, which, like the cuckoo story, has many potential meanings, may also embody the essentials of gnostic experience. For in JoyceIs version the maze which his hero begins to build is his own aesthetic, a private system whose meaning he partially shares with fellow students, lesser intellects incapable of grasping

146

Spring 1979

its full significance. The flight of Daedalus, however, is obviously an analogue in potentia of the gnostic impulse, particularly when one considers the fact that the mythical artist is accompanied in his ingenious escape by Icarus, whose proud flight too near the sun results in the melting of artificially constructed wings and a consequent fall to his death. In the initial stages of Joyces narrative, the folk tale and the Greek myth coalesce into a single action which prefigures the epiphany of the hero, that moment when he comes to the realization that he has at last put behind him all of the communal concerns which have bound him to the world: Now at the name of the fabulous artificer he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being? His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commin-gled with the element of the ~ p i r i t . ~ This passage, which forms a portion of the novels peripety, renders in unmistakeable terms the religious nature of this important moment in Stephen Dedalus life. In the first place, the figure of the flying man is not a creature of this world but is generated in the imagination of the hero/artist as a result of the spoken word, the name Daedalus. The relationship between the word and the image (word) is immediate, like the leap of an electric spark from pole to pole. The world of concrete

things does not seem to intervene, and in the higher order into which his soul has ascended he is transfigured. The vision of the winged man, whose identification with Horus as well as Daedalus has been noted, is an absurdity that the reader may accept only with a willing suspension of disbelief, despite the equivocal word, seemed. Do Stephens eyes actually participate in a delusion or does the flying form exist only within his imagination? In either case, the moment exemplifies Stephens rejection of the constitution of being which, as Voegelin has written, is what it is, and cannot be affected by human fancies. Hence, he continues, the metastatic denial of the order of mundane existence is neither a true proposition in philosophy, nor a program of action that could be executed. The will to transform reality into something which by essence it is not is the rebellion against the nature of things as ordained by God.5 And indeed both Stephen and Joyce seem to understand this point precisely, when the hero speculates about the origins of his vision as a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols. He has, after all, been reared by scholastics who recognize magic for what it is-a tool of the devil. The allusion to such sorcery as the alchemical, cabalistic, and hermetic traditions is unmistakable and suggests the degree to which the reader is to understand this scene as the rendition of a desire to transform the given world into something more pleasing to the will, and to do so on a higher level of being. On the next page the same idea is reintroduced, in even more specific terms: Yes! Yes! Yes: he would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.6 Here there can be no mistake about what moves Stephen, if not Joyce. He now believes he has transcended the given world and has become God the Father, able to create out o f himself a living thing which is to be the beautiful, impalpable, imperishable logos. Having been affronted by the alien world into which he has been born, he has success-

Modern Age

147

fully escaped into a reality of his own creation where mythological figures can fly above the Irish Sea in response to the implacable urge within him that requires them to do so. And along with the image of Daedalus, his soul also takes leave of its prison, as he sees it, soaring in an air beyond the world. But what can he do with the magical powers he has gained? Can he actually control being, reconstitute it? He believes he can, has always coveted such powers. In the first few sentences of the novel, for example, he sings a childish song about a rose, altering its natural color to green in order to suit his fancy. Later, while still a small boy, he acknowledges the impossibility of the green rose in the world as it is constituted; yet he holds out the promise to himself that perhaps somewhere such a thing might exist. The union of the rose with the color green is a state of being which the poet, the free soul, has the power to create, just as he is able to make the image of Daedalus fly in order to symbolize his own aspirations. Having rejected the constitution of being, then, he is ready ta exercise the new potential thnt ha . hann-..;r-rl t C , A:.. u u ubybu h ., ing his true vocation; and in one of the most celebrated passages of modem literature we see him in the process of performing such magical transformations. He is walking along the beach, in the throes of his newly discovered gnosis, feeling that he is about to be introduced to strange fields and hills and faces, when he sees a girl, in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. During the course of the novel Stephen has been defined in terms of his changing relationships with women, and thus far his attitudes toward his mother and toward the girls he has known are recognizable as normal developments in the life of a young man. But at this point he looks at the beautiful stranger with a new precocity born of his rejection of the world, and in his eyes she undergoes a miraculous transformation:
.I.-.

thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a birds soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish; and girlish and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty her face.8 Again, as with the image of the flying man, what s e e m to be is confused with what is; and an alteration of the order of mundane existence takes place. It is possible, of course, to argue that Joyce is merely making use of conventional metaphor here in an effort to render the excitement of Stephens active imagination. But what follows this extraordinary moment of perception is too charged with abnormal meaning to support such a view, for Joyce makes it explicit that the transformation that Stephen effects is magic and that the girl indeed has been changed (or half-changed) into a winged creature, something like an Egyptian bird god, an analogue to the winged man of the young artists earlier fancy. It is important to note that she is no longer herself at all but has become a creature made in the image of her creator. Whatever integrity she has as an object in the real world gives way to the machinations of the artists will. Therefore the accidental properties she displays are altered in Stephens perception of her and become a significant contribution to the transformation of her substantial being. Thus has the gnostic imagination, freed from its prison, captured and subjugated the phenomenal other-than-self and then recreated it on a higher level in the image of the ego-Eve reverted to the status of rib, with Stephen, the newest Adam, performing the role of God. The girls whom he has known, desired, failed to win or else paid for in the marketplace: these have coalesced into one image and become the passive instrument of the artists stricken pride. As he contemplates her standing in quiet sufferance of his gaze, the passive feminine spirit accepting the form imposed by the active masculine impulse, Stephen is overcome with a fervor which can

. . L

. . 1

: . . - ......-..

CVUlUC V I I U L Y I b I -

.._..,_

She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a cranes and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her

148

Spring 1979

only be described as that of the religious pagan: Heavenly God! cried Stephens soul in an outburst of profane joy. Her image has passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped to the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and The diction in this passage clearly and intentionally suggests the degree to which Stephens experience is to be understood as the founding of anErsatz religion in which he is both Creator and a portion of the recreated order of existence as well. In speaking of the urge to recreate life out of life and in designating Stephens joy as profane, Joyce gives his reader (and himself) some hint of the mischief that his character is up to. However, the young convert has yet to understand the full implications of his religious zeal, though he is, at this point, thoroughly committed to its authenticity. Notice that even in the passages quoted above, when Stephen is immersed in the transformations wrought by his own imagination, the reader never quite loses the sense of an old order still surviving and coexistent with the new; for at this stage Stephen still submits partially to the images of color, shape, and motion which in some respects root his experience in the events of a world of particularity. The awareness of things as they are, however, is increasingly compromised as the novel unfolds; and the latter pages are not dominated by scenes in which Stephens experience of the concrete is the avenue by which the meaning of the action is explored. Instead, Joyce gives the reader a series of Platonic dialogues punctuated by occasional interior monologues, a few fully-rendered moments of dramatic confrontation, and (at the very end) entries in the heros diary which somewhat ambiguously present his thoughts and feelings as he is about to

fly from Ireland. And it is in these passages of argumentation between Stephen and his philosophical adversaries that the author attempts to suggest the final stage of his young rebels development as an artist-a stage in which the youth uses his scholastic training to forge an aesthetics which will serve him as a credo in lieu of the traditional pieties which he has chosen to reject. At first glance Joyces motives in creating a discursive resolution to his action may seem obvious. Stephen wants to be a writer above all else; he must reject other considerations as secondary; and of greatest importance, he needs a well-formulated aesthetic theory in order to undergird his attempts to recreate life out of life. But, as Walter Sullivan has observed, there are more basic reasons for Joyces decision to end his narrative in a flurry of discourse. Mr. Sullivan has suggested the use of the Faustian legend as an analogue to A Portrait ofthe Artist;O and though in his discussion he is substantially right, I would merely like to approach the same structural problems with a somewhat different comparison in mind. In the first place, the desire to be a literary artist is distinctly different from a poets urge to write poetry; and Stephens preoccupation with literary theory as a mode of pure speculation is an important indication of what impulse really lies behind his aspirations. In order to write, poets do not need to understand a welldeveloped literary theory any more than they need to master the discipline of formal grammar, though I suspect the latter would prove more useful than the former, since literary theory of a purely a priori nature might tend to lead the would-be artist away from the genuine problems he needs to confront in the act of composition. I would suggest, then, that Stephen the artist does not necessarily benefit from the aesthetics he insists on devising. Certainly the poetry he offers in evidence would tend to refute such a claim. But Stephen the religious convert absolutely requires this system, because it becomes for him a new theology to replace the old. In lecturing the dean and his friend Lynch on the nature of art and tragedy, Stephen is really satisfying

Modem Age

149

a religious rather than an aesthetic need, and therefore the full implications of this segment of the novel might be better understood after an examination of the faith he has rejected and the manner in which his new religion is defined. The old religion, of course, is not merely Roman Catholicism but a more all-encompassing pietas which includes a devotion to family, Ireland, and the Church. Stephens alternative faith is one in which the artist is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, his own family and community as well as transcendent being. This new vision is born out of the failure of the former orthodoxy, which, as Joyce presents it, has become effete and corrupt, a religion of empty forms and endless hypocrisies. Its priesthood is composed of liars, bullies, drunkards, dullwits, and false rhetoricians. Some of the spokesmen for this moribund establishment speak for Church, some for Ireland, and some for the family; but all are the Pharisees of the status quo. Smug or shortsighted, they propagate the cant of a faith which, through Joyces meticulous rendition, the reader must reject as decadent while applauding the prophet who can proclaim a gospel of regeneration. The moment of that prophet is at hand when Stephen sees (or seems to see) the image of the winged Daedalus and undergoes his ecstatic conversion. The analogue between the development of Stephens New Testament and that of firstcentury Christianity is striking and significant. Forgetting for a moment the idea that Stephen is both creator and incarnate word, let us consider him as a convert become exegete, the St. Paul of his own divine revelation; for in the spiritual journey of Saul of Tarsus is embodied the fullest range of the religious founding that Joyce imitates in this novel, the movement from absolute commitment to the old order to a creative formulation of the theology of the new. As Stephen becomes in early maturity the chief pride of his Jesuit instructors, so was Paul a brilliant and dedicated Pharisee who held the coats of those who stoned the first Christian martyr. Yet on the road to Damascus Paul was struck blind by the brilliance of Christs image and immediately submitted without question to a truth he had previously denied with all his

considerable intellectual resources. At that moment, drained of theology, he gave himself completely to the all-absorbing other-thanself. As I have already suggested, precisely the same thing happens to Stephen Dedalus. Yet for Paul and for Stephen, the moment of ecstasy cannot be indefinitely prolonged, but the significance of the truth revealed is followed in both instances by exegesis, a process in which the reason analyzes and then synthesizes the meaning of the irrational revelation. Paul, after regaining his sight, begins to reflect on the life of Jesus and His reported words; and in his Epistles (particularly in Romans) he spends much of his time quarreling with the old religion, in order to define the new. Yet as a Jew, trained by the party ofcircumcision, his understanding of the new is articulated most often in the terms and rhetoric of the old. And the same is true of Stephen Dedalus, whose exegesis is grounded in the theology of the faith he has rejected. McAlister, he says, would call my aesthetic theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of aesthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction, I require a new terminology and a new personal experience. And so he should, for the two must, of necessity, go hand in hand. Yet the key word in this passage is personal. Pauls revelation could by no means be termed a pure illumination of self. Indeed his ego was largely submerged in the image of Christ (though there are those who say it surfaces from time to time in a kind of fastidious priggery). But with Stephen the expression of self is the ultimate devotional act. If there is any muse, it is his muse rather than the muse; and no one else may lay claim to her. Thus in his arguments with the Pharisees of Ireland he insists on the ultimate supremacy of the so-called creative act, which he believes must take place outside the community of family, church, and nation. As he puts it in one dogmatic statement to his foil Davin, The soul is born first in the moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is

1 50

Spring 1979

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 t,o fly by those nets. Again the image of flight with its echoes of the cuckoo tale, the Daedalus myth, the legend of Horus. But here the mystical experience of flying becomes a trope in discourse, the occasion for a programmatic statement on the creation as defined by the new orthodoxy. And so it goes with Stephen as he contends with adversary after adversary, vanquishing them with an ease that belies the complexity of the positions they advocate. (We might all wish for philosophical opponents so muddle-headed and inarticulate!) Yet in his last encounter, he meets a formidable peer in his friend Cranly, who is able to teach him the limitations of his own arrogant intellect. The occasion of this final dialogue is initiated by Stephen himself, who, despite his frequent declarations of independence, i s deeply troubled by a family quarrel. -With your people? Cranly asked. -With my mother. -About religion? -Yes, Stephen answered. After a pause Cranley asked: -What age is your mother? -Not old, Stephen said. She wishes me to make my easter duty. -And will you? --I will not, Stephen said. -Why not? Cranly said. --I will not serve, answered Stephen. -That remark was made before, Cranly said calmly. --It is made behind now, said Stephen hotly. l 2 Cranly immediately gains the upper hand in this initial segment of the conversation; for not ,only does he maintain his equanimity, but he also puts his finger precisely on the pressure point of Stephens rebellious nature: I will not serve is the devils line, and anyone who refuses to live within the constituted limitation of Gods autonomy i s by definition satanic. Cranly is calm in pointing out the truth because for him it is no shocking discovery: he already

knows his friend well. But the interesting thing about the brief exchange is the manner in which Stephen reacts to Cranlys remark. Instead of being amused or coldly contemptuous, he is angered to the point of responding with a silly and ineffectual play on words. Why should the charge of diabolism so disturb him if he has rejected the Church and its dogma? Cranly pursues this question with Jesuitical skill, determining that Stephen neither believes nor disbelieves in the Eucharist and is unwilling to attempt a resolution of this crucial dilemma, largely because in his intellectual pride he is pleased with the new man he has become. The dishonesty of his position is apparent, particularly in light of the pain he causes his mother in refusing to make his communion. Cranly presses him on the issue, first testing him with a statement that Jesus may have been a charlatan, then noting Stephens manifest shock and asking, And why were you shocked if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the Son of God? When Stephen equivocates, Cranly raises essentially the same question in a more sharply focused formulation: And is that why you will not communicate, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host too may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be? Yes, replied Stephen, I feel that and I also fear it. I see, says Cranly.13 And so do we. The rebellion, the rejection of the old faith, the mystical revelation, the carefully devised theology-they are all part of a fragile and tenuous system that might well fall to pieces under close and persistent scrutiny. But does it matter one is tempted to ask, if Stephen is skeptical in regard to the Church and credulous in his dedication to the religion of art? The answer to this question should be clear from Stephens attitude toward his easter duty and from his later replies to Cranly: his peculiar commitment to art is born of extravagant pride, pride in his own intellectual integrity; yet it is obviously impossible for any honest thinker to enthrone an ideal and absolute freedom in his heart without first disposing of the other question, the truth or falsity of Christian revelation. For if the eucharist is the body

Modern Age

151

and blood of Jesus Christ, then the artist cannot recreate life out of life or refuse to serve. And an unwillingness to pursue this question is no more or less than a refusal to confront the ultimate lie of his life. This attitude, of course, is typical of the gnostic, as Voegelin has pointed out:

is his last. Henceforth he will speak not to others but to himself, in a diary which epitomizes his struggle to sustain the selfillusion. And the last two entries signal his success as a practicing gnostic, whatever his occasional horror at the vision of damnation, an old man with redrimmed horny eyes. In his valedictory he tells us that he will persist in The gnostic thinker really does commit worshipping the God of self and to recreate self an intellectual swindle, and he knows it. out of self in order to devise some object for One can distinguish three stages in the ac- adoration: Welcome, 0 life, I go to encounter tion of his spirit. On the surface lies the for the millionth time the reality of experience deception itself. It could be self-deception; and to forge in the smithy of my soul the unand very often it is when the speculation of a created conscience of my race . . . Old father, creative thinker has culturally degenerated old artificer, stand me now and forever in good and become the dogma of a mass movement. stead.16 But when the phenomenon is apprehended Who is he at the end of this novel? Is he at its point of origin, deeper than the decep-. Daedalus or Icarus? Is this narrative the portion itself will be found the awareness of it. trait of the triumphant artist-as-hero or is it the The thinker does not lose control of himself: portrait of a damned soul? The critics who have the libido dominandi turns on its own work best addressed themselves to this ultimate and wishes to master the deception as well. question, Walter Sullivan and Caroline GorThis gnostic turning back on itself corre- don, disagree on whether or not the author and sponds spiritually, as we have said, to the the hero are to be equated, though both underphilosophical conversion, the periagoge in stand Stephens story as rooted in impiety. Mr. the P!n:cnic 6838C. However, the gnostic Sullivan is firm and terse in his conclusion: movement of the spirit does not lead to the Stephen is Joyce. Miss Gordon, on the other erotic opening of the soul, but rather to the hand, seems to say that Joyces obvious condeepest reach of persistence in the decep- tempt for Stephen continues throughout the tion, whose revolt against God is revealed to narrative beginning with an ironic stance tobe its motive and purpose.14 ward the child and ending with the final paraAnd, as if to prove Voegelins thesis some graphs in which the heros damnation is rendered as deplorable and even tragic. How, thirty-five years before its publication in Science, Politics and Gnosticism Stephen flees then, are we to resolve such an argument in the from Cranly back into the narrow and comfort- light of the novels apparent gnostic implicaable confines of his gnosis, betraying once tions? In the first place, I would argue that if Miss again the deceitful nature of his flight: I will Gordon is correct, then Joyce has misapplied not serve that in which I no longer believe his considerable talents as a rhetorician; for whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in those passages which display the full range of some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as his lyric prose are the ones which celebrate wholly as I can, using for my defense the only Stephens aesthetic ecstasies, while, with the arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and exception of the Cranly segment, he reserves his keenest irony for scenes in which he rencunning. l5 No more perfect analogue to Satan could ders spokesmen for the old order. But more importantly, Joyces structuring of exist in a work of realistic fiction, and thus he retreats from the only discursive encounter of the action makes clear the meaning of his narthe novel in which the question of the constitu- rative. He spends too many pages of his novel tion of being is placed squarely in the path of in denigration of the spokesmen for family, his perilous journey. Significantly, this combat Ireland, and church to untie all his intricate

152

Spring 1979

knots with one scene featuring Cranlys wellexecuted attack. However Miss Gordon-all of us-might wish Joyce to be Daedalus, grieving for his fallen son but himself redeemed, we must finally conclude that at this stage of his career, like Stephen, he has mastered the finer techniques of gnostic self-deception and has been trapped by the artifice of his own creative imagination, the monumental achievement that both tells his lifes story and intimates its inherent tragedy. Free. Soul free and fancy free. Let the dead bury the dead.ls This is the new Christ speaking, StephedJoyce, the redeemer of self; and we the readers who are allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of his inner soul must listen to his voice in hushed adoration. For it is
*This article is based on a paper given at the conference on Gnosticism and Reality, held at Vanderbilt University in April of 1978 under direction of Dr. Richard J. Bishirjian and Dr. William Havard. Sponsors were the Earhart Foundation, the Vanderbilt Research Council, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. This article will subsequently appear as a chapter in a book to be published by the Louisiana State University Press. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1968). p. 9. 2James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Yocurg M a n (New York:

his spirit that has bridged the gap of years and informed the time in which we live. The rhetoric of freedom so prevalent in our decade is only in part the result of the political revolutions of the eighteenth century. The kind of freedom people speak of today is more likely than not the freedom of Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce, which is something more than emancipation from political tyranny. It is freedom from social custom, freedom from family, freedom from tradition, freedom from church, freedom from the other-than-self, freedom from the created order, freedom from God. And if we as a generation believe passionately and absolutely in this beautiful, impalpable, imperishable illusion, we may in part thank James Joyce for our troubling faith.*
The Viking Press, 1964), p. 7. 3See John Kelleher, The Perceptions of James Joyce, The Atlantic Monthly (March, 1958), 86. 4Joyce, p. 169. Woegelin, p. 169. 6Joyce, p. 170. Vbid., p. 169. Ybid., p. 171. 91bid., pp. 171-172. Walter Sullivan, Death by Melancholy: Essays on ModernSouthernFictwn paton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972). pp. 97-113. Joyce, p. 209. %bid., pp. 238-239. Vbid., p. 243. qoegelin, pp. 3233. 15Joyce, pp. 246247. q b i d . , p. 253. Caroline Gordon, How to Read a Novel (New York: The Viking Press, 1957), pp. 210-214. Joyce, p. 248.

Modem Age

153