ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA SCUOLA DI LETTERE E BENI CULTURALI Corso di laurea in Italianistica, Culture Letterarie Europee e Scienze Linguistiche [Exile, Epiphany, and Epiclesis: James Joyce's Uses of Dante in Life and Work] Tesi di laurea in [English Literature/Comparative Literature] Relatore: Prof. Keir Douglas Elam Correlatore: Prof. Angelo Maria Mangini Presentata da: Nicholas Castellucci Sessione Prima Anno accademico 2017-2018 Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................... 7 1. Rebellion ..................................................................................................... 13 1.1. Politics ........................................................................................................13 1.1.1. Joyce's Attitude towards Politics......................................11 1.1.2. Charles Stuart Parnell Clerical Involvement in Politics......................................12 1.1.3. Betrayal.............................................................................14 1.1.4. Two Cities Divided...........................................................14 1.1.5. Death of an Idol/Conclusion.............................................16 1.2 The Church.........................................................................................17 1.2.1. Anti-Clerical Invectives....................................................17 1.2.2. Simony, Collusion, and the Irish.......................................21 1.2.3. Scholasticism, Order, and Apostasy..................................23 1.3. Fatherhood .............................................................................................. ... 24 1.3.1. Paternal Authority.............................................................24 1.3.2. Fraudulent Fathers............................................................25 1.3.2.1. Unexpected Encounters......................................25 1.3.2.2. Frode, the Role of the Priest, and Sodomy..........27 1.3.2.3. Father Conmee....................................................29 1.3.3. Spiritual Fathers................................................................32 1.3.3.1 Mortal Guides........................................................32 1.3.3.2. Cacciaguida...........................................................34 1.3.3.3. Joyce's Insubstantial Father.................................. 35 1.3.3.4. Bloom's Consubstantial Father...............................38 3 1.4. Conclusion......................................................................................40 2. Exile ............................................................................................................. 43 2.1. Physical Exile ............................................................................................. 43 2.1.1. The Voluntary Exile.....................................................43 2.1.2. Exile of a Poet ...................................................................... 46 2.1.3. Dante, Political Exile of the Risorgimento ........................... 47 2.1.4. Joyce and Nora Abroad ........................................................ 50 2.2. Spiritual Exile ............................................................................................. 53 2.2.1. Exile and the Medieval Mind/ A "Passion for Individual Integrity"........................................53 2.2.2. The Homo Viator and the Alienus.................................54 2.2.3. Stephen Dedalus, the Alienus........................................55 2.2.4. "Cunning" as "Ingegno"................................................59 2.2.5. The "Spiritual-Heroic Refrigerating Apparatus"..........60 3. Epiphany ..................................................................................................... 64 3.1. Dubliners .................................................................................................... 64 3.1.1. The Early Epiphanies.....................................................62 3.1.2. The Publication of Dubliners.........................................66 3.1.3. The Dantean Structure of Dubliners..............................67 3.1.4. Paralysis, Simony, Sodomy...........................................68 3.1.5. Gabriel Conroy, the "ignavo" .......................................70 3.1.6. "Araby," Joyce's Vita Nuova.........................................72 3.1.7. "Grace," the Sin of Flattery...........................................74 3.1.8. Conclusion.....................................................................76 3.2. "Epiphany-Hunting".......................................................................77 3.2.1. The Origin of "Stephen Hero".......................................77 3.2.2. "Epiphany Theory" in "Stephen Hero"..........................78 4 3.2.3. The "Vulgar" Epiphany...................................................80 3.2.4. Revelation, The Vernacular, Sermo Umilis/Sermo Sublimis..................................................84 3.2.5. Ingegno and Epiphany....................................................88 3.2.6. Stephen, the Dubliner.....................................................92 3.2.7. Stephen's Contrapasso...................................................94 4. Epiclesis ....................................................................................................... 96 4.1. Schismatic Freedom......................................................................... .96 4.1.1. "Epicleti" and "Epikaleo"...............................................94 4.1.2. Epiclesis and Heresy: the Eucharist as Recollection......97 4.1.3. The Anagogical Interpretation of the Commedia..........100 4.1.4. Dubliners Summoned....................................................102 4.1.5. "Uneasy Orthodoxy".....................................................103 4.1.6. Conclusion....................................................................105 4.2. A Transubstantial Homecoming....................................................105 4.2.1. The Birth of Ulysses.....................................................105 4.2.2. Bloom, the Spiritual Father..........................................106 4.2.3. Bloom, the Jewish "Pagan"..........................................109 4.2.4. Bloom, the Simoniac....................................................110 4.2.5. Conclusion....................................................................113 Bibliography ................................................................................................. 117 5 6 Introduction James Joyce once said of his work: <<with me, the thought is always simple>> though the <<means>> were <<quadrivial.>>1 In contrast to a Hemingway or a Picasso, craftsmen who, in their later years' work, increasingly strove to eliminate superfluity in the way a Japanese calligrapher seeks to economize his brushstrokes, Joyce's evolution as an artist took an opposite turn as he continually refined his method such that it grew ever more circuitous and impenetrable. Readers often meet his quadrivial means with a mixture of awe, fear, scorn, and, at times, outright repugnance. The logorrhea of Finnegan's Wake represents his most forbidding experiment in developing an idiolect that tested the very fiber of the English language and substantiated, albeit quasi-solipsistically, the claims to his genius upon which he had, from a young age, tirelessly, and often gratingly, insisted. Of course, by the time he put himself to composing Finnegan's Wake, his genius was already an accomplished fact in the Western pantheon of writers. To describe Ulysses as "groundbreaking" or a "masterpiece" would almost, therefore, seem coy. Ulysses is more than a great novel; it is, of the modern era, the novel par excellence, that work which T.S. Eliot, chary of fulsome praise, deified as <<[a book] from which none of us can escape.>>2 And so, his greatest written achievement was and still is, nothing less than a portal through which the aspiring writer must attempt to pass through in order to receive that benediction which will allow them to even approach the task. Like Dante's pilgrim passing through the cleansing fire of the lustful, the young writer must also pass through Joyce's purgatorial wall of flame, if anything just for the sake of knowing what language can do and where it can go. Joyce, above all, wanted to be contended with, and finding no one his equal, had to reach back over the span of centuries, to find a worthy mentor. For many, Shakespeare fulfills this role for Joyce, allusions to the poet and playwright's works cropping up everywhere throughout his prose. Indeed, Joyce devotes the greater portion of an entire chapter of 1 Mary T. Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination, Princeton University Press, Guildford, 1981, p. 64. 2 T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, Harvest Books, London, 1975, p. 175. 7 Ulysses, the Scylla and Charybdis to Stephen Dedalus's oddball theory concerning Hamlet and paternity. Many critical excavations of Joyce's oeuvre have unearthed remnants of Shakespeare diffusely scattered throughout his sentences and by now, a comparative study of the two wordsmiths has become a well-beaten path leading one safely into the dark wood of Joyce's prose. It is an entry point having much to recommend itself, and yet, the preponderance of this approach represents a certain injustice. Any student of his work would be remiss to ignore the ubiquity of Dante in Joyce. An in-depth exploration of the two great artists' shared literary pilgrimage involves a singularly curious and splendidly improbable story of virtual tutelage. For Joyce, Shakespeare would serve as the wetnurse to his words themselves, and would, much to my chagrin, win the title of his desert island companion: <<I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare but not for long. The Englishman is richer and would get my vote.>>3 Joyce was not a hesitant soul and the difficulty of the decision is proof of the nearly peerless position which Dante occupied in Joyce's mind. Eliot famously said of the West's two literary forefathers: <<Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.>>4 Joyce would have agreed strongly with the first sentence. To the extent that Joyce was a writer of English, above all, Shakespeare might have nutrified the lifeblood of his prose itself, but to the extent that Joyce was a man who believed himself to be on a unique journey, Dante would provide the Virgilian accompaniment enabling him to bridge the chasm between his life and work. The great bard, father of the Italian language and eternal exile, nearly seven centuries Joyce's senior, lived a life whose touchstones often strangely parallel the life of that meekly theatrical and frequently moody Dubliner. Among their many similarities, Joyce and Dante shared in common an intensely Catholic education, a deep love of reading, a knack for detecting differences in speech and dialect and absorbing languages, a distrust of paternity, a variably contemptuous and sentimental attitude towards one's birthplace, a persistent conviction of being underappreciated, an almost megalomaniacal sense of independence, acrimony towards a corrupt Church, a passing interest in medicine, and, of course, the inescapability of their exilic fates. Some of these parallels were simple happenstance while others were a deliberate outcome of Joyce's Dante-inflected self-ideal. By deconstructing this 3 4 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1960, p.184. T.S. Eliot, Dante in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, London, 1975, p. 205. 8 construction, we readers of Joyce can hope to arrive at fresher understanding of his views on the relationship between his life and work. In the Scylla and Charybdis, Joyce has his alter-ego present an intentionally byzantine line of reasoning in his argument that Shakespeare identifies himself not with Hamlet but with the ghost of Hamlet's father. In defense of his theory he argues that this underlying identification has something to do with Shakespeare's supposedly adulterous wife Ann Hathaway. Stephen's adversary John Eglinton dismisses his theory claiming that Ann Hathaway has no import in the discussion. The prevailing ideology among Stephen's literary acquaintances is that an author's biography is a naively inappropriate heuristic for the study of literature, especially the great works of literature. Stephen ends up, apparently, disavowing his theory, but the reader is left with a feeling that while he perhaps does not wholly buy into each and every one of his premises, he feels there to be some abiding truth beneath the surface of his argument. Stephen, like Joyce, cannot entirely separate the life of an author from the work of an author, considering always how biographical "fact," however much speculative in this case, determine the recurrent tenor and themes of their creations. There is, undoubtedly, no better example in the whole of Western literature of an author's work and life being inseparable than Dante. Even a cursory reading of Dante forces his reader to attempt to account for the facts of his life. Time and time again throughout the Commedia, and even in his more "scientific" works, we are made to reflect upon Dante the man who is and is not simultaneously Dante the pilgrim. The Commedia does not allow its reader a Platonic space in which its poetry may be safely sanitized for purely aesthetic dissection. The sacro poema is much too scored by the painful realities of Dante's personal narrative to lend itself to any tidily impersonal post-modern reading. To read the Commedia is to engage personally with Dante, it is to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with him experiencing, almost second-by-second, what he and his guides experience as if it were happening for the first time. It is the effect Joyce aspires to create in the voluminous account of Leopold Bloom's Hellenic journey from morning to night. The lifetime's work of a close reading of the Commedia, therefore, entails a close reading of the author's life itself. For Joyce, annexed to a close reading of Dante was, therefore, the promise of freedom, a freedom to create himself as 9 he created his art. <<As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies[...] so does the artist weave and unweave his image.>>5 As the archetypal pilgrim, Dante attained the status of both the redeemed Christian vouchsafed a unique vision of God and a symbol of the everyman, the homo viator seeking a safe port in the storm of life. Joyce too wished to be "saved" through his genius and, furthermore, to be recognized as such, but he also desperately wanted to be considered an everyman of sorts. These two desires seemed diametrically opposed, but in Dante, they achieve a remarkable synthesis. Joyce wanted to strike off on his own as much as he wanted a grand homecoming. Unlike Dante, he was never physically compelled to leave Dublin, but in the indifference of his fellow Dubliners to his talents made him feel unwanted, an exile. And so he was to adopt as his own Dante's trial, striking off on his own, improvisationally peripatetic and always at a loss for a place he could truly call his own. Though he would die in Zurich, he would, infrequently, revisit his Dublin, but a sense of his "otherness" would stay with him until the end. The story of Dante and Joyce is more than just a story of influence. It is a story of mentorship, a story of fatherhood and sonship. But it also the story of one writer's love affair with a language, a story beginning at a young age. Dante met his Beatrice at the age of 9, three years younger than Joyce would be when he began studying Italian. Admission to the Belvedere College required three foreign language selections. Having had already developed a proficiency in French and Latin, he decided on Italian as his third language. In a letter written in 1921 to Harriet Weaver Shaw he wrote, "My father wanted me to take Greek, my mother German, and my friends Irish. Result I took Italian."6 His first professor of Italian was a man named Mr. Loup who taught the language to Joyce and one other student at Belvedere. During this time, Joyce was to develop a reputation as a master linguist. An essay entitled "The Study of Languages," in which he extolled the virtues of studying Latin, further cemented this reputation.7 Never one to abandon a talent, Joyce continued his study of Italian with the Bergamasco Jesuit tutor Charles Ghezzi, S.J., who inculcated in the young man a love for Dante and other trecentisti. Additionally, he introduced Joyce to the works of Giordano Bruno and more modern fare such as the work of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Joyce's knowledge of Italian would aid him in the pursuit of another passion, tenor singing. Joyce had 5 James Joyce, Ulysses, Modern Library, New York, 1992, p. 186. Corinna Del Greco Lobner, James Joyce and the Italian Language, <<Italica>>, LX, 1983, p. 140. 7 Ivi, p. 140 - 153. 6 10 a beautiful voice and honed his ability to sing with Dublin's preeminent maestro of the bel canto, Benedetto Palmieri. His concentration on words aided him greatly in establishing himself as an able tenor. The notion of language as music always brought to mind that direct descendant of Latin whose progenitor heard in the vernacular, the language of the man on the street, music.8 Joyce was also a lover of the vernacular, believing spoken language to be the one true gateway to truth. His conversational aptitude in Italian, however much anachronistic it was when he first arrived in Italy, would quickly evolve into fluency and, in a remarkably short amount of time, mastery. While living in Trieste he would write articles in Italian about Irish Politics for the local newspaper and deliver lectures on Irish history in an academic setting. His children he named "Giorgio" and "Lucia" and, when at home, the household language was almost always Italian. Though he was a more than capable speaker of French, his heart belonged always to Italian. And yet, he was not so much enamored with Italy as a country nor the Italian people in general as much as he was with the great vate who made the transubstantiation of his spiritual exile into a physical exile possible. To learn from his hero was to become his hero, and by way of heros, Joyce had precious few in his life. But those men whom he considered worthy of the title "hero" -- Parnell, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Dante -- he upheld as Christlike. These men were rebels, but rebels of a very certain sort, fighting for distinction as giants of indepent thought and action. With the help of these rebels, Joyce was able to attempt to correct those parts of himself which he felt had been perverted by the cruelly oppressive forces of <<nationality, language, and history.>> And among these heros, that figure which shone forth most strongly was, undoubtedly, Dante. In his attempt to see things for what they really were, always taking into account the most seemingly minute interrelations between great religious truths and brute sensory reality, he became something of a prophet in his own right.This is Joyce's audacity: a belief so strong in his own genius that he would accept nothing less than becoming his heroes. In the process, he believed he would be able to acquire something of their seerlike vision and their Socratic gadfly-like talents for forcing people to doubt their most fundamentally held beliefs about the nature of their realities. At the crux of it all is what Roy Gottfried calls Joyce's "misbelief," a religious ambivalence tottering between heresy and apostasy. What Joyce believed was never quite clear, least of all to him. But Dante's unique ability to create and apply an orthodoxy of 8 C. Del Greco Lobner, op. cit., 140 - 153. 11 his own, as religious as it was secular, would prove a valuable walking stick (or "ashplant") for one who was willing to venture out, alone, into that dark wood. By doing so, he hoped to truly live up to his University College sobriquet as "Dublin's Dante."9 9 James Robinson, Joyce's Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2016, p.2 12 1. Rebellion 1.1. Politics 1.1.1. Joyce's Attitude towards Politics The general critical consensus on Joyce is that he was completely indifferent to politics. Frank Budgen, chronicler of Joyce's composition of Ulysses and fellow Zurich-based expatriate, said of Joyce: <<on one subject he was more uncommunicative than any man I know: the subject of politics.>>10 Yeats described Joyce as never having <<anything to do with Irish politics, extreme or otherwise.>>11 Unlike his father who had at one point worked as a secretary for the United Liberal Club in Dublin, Joyce never agitated in the interests of any specific political party and although he expressed admiration for the Home Rule aims of the Fenian Brotherhood and the Sinn Fein Party, his sympathies lacked the fervor of active political participation. When, near the end of his life, his brother Stanislaus pressed him to give an opinion on the Fascist uprising in Italy he responded: <<for God's sake don't talk to me about politics. I'm not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style.>>12 The arch of his life and art would span the most profound technological changes and devastating wars yet known in human history, but the epoch-defining upheavals and crises of the century seemed to bear little upon the mind of the great writer who claimed to be concerned principally with life <<as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery.>>13 Within his personal universe, the novelist of the quotidian and the commonplace had no room for historical monoliths. Focusing his energies upon particularizing the universe of the everyday required attention to the smallest and most seemingly trivial details of our inner lives. For Joyce, the crises and upheavals of our lives were not grandly external affairs but rather episodic interior instances, threaded seamlessly into the fabric of the starkly familiar and 10 Dominic Manganiello, Joyce's Politics, Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames, 1980, p. 1. Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 James Joyce, Drama and Life in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, p. 28. 11 mundane. Beneath the lens of his one good eye, everything appeared, in its ultimate form, thrillingly ordinary. I history was the process by which the totality of human experience was condensed and its by-product converted into easily digestible annals of names, deeds, events, and dates, then political affiliation was nothing more than the ideological stylization of one's attitude towards those taxonomies. Joyce felt that <<the artist should be a passive rather than an active member of the State having at his disposal the agency of beauty and not politics to better and save the world.>>14 When, in the 5th chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Davin pressures him to lend his talents to the cause of Ireland's freedom by enlisting in the nationalist ranks, Stephen responds No honourable and sincere man [...] has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first.15 In this passage, an adversarial young man asserts his independence from any cut-and-dried configuration of political identity. From a young age, Joyce had always aspired to appear a man of fierce convictions whose loyalty to himself and his vision remained untainted by party affiliation and institutional rank. He felt himself fated to become precisely that species of non-partisan vagabond that Cacciaguida, prophesying Dante's exile, describes as <<a party to himself.>>16 1.1.2. Charles Stuart Parnell/Clerical Involvement in Politics It is tempting to think of Joyce as an aloof aesthete who deliberately ignored politics such that he might avoid the threat of trivializing his genius by exposing it partisanship, but to mischaracterize Joyce as entirely apolitical, however, would risk overlooking a key phase of his artistic evolution. Despite his avowed distaste for politics, Joyce would remain throughout his life a serious observer of political developments in Ireland, maintaining always a sentimental bond to the figure of Charles Stuart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary 14 D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 197. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Oxford, New York, 2000, p. 158. 16 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, translated by James Finn Cotter, Forum Italicum, New York, 2000, p. 499. 15 14 Party and celebrated champion of Irish independence. Throughout his career, Parnell fought tirelessly for the rights of evicted farmhands and succeeded in creating an essentially nonviolent agrarian movement formed around the practice of boycotting and social ostracism. Initially reservedly observant during parliamentary meetings, his political project made himself increasingly visible and in due time he had developed the reputation of being a Celtic maverick. At the height of his fame, the revelation of his affair with Kitty O'Shea, wife of one of Parnell's former allies, William O'Shea would lead to his ruin.17 Joyce's earliest known work was political in nature. "Et Tu Healy," written by Joyce at the age of 9, was an invective directed at Tim Healy, the leader of the opposition party responsible for bringing about Parnell's demise.18 While the poem is not extant in its entirety, a version of it appears in the Dubliners story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" in which a canvasser plaintively commemorates Parnell's martyrdom: He is dead. Our Uncrowned King is dead. Erin, mourn with grief and woe For he lies dead whom the fell gang Of modern hypocrites laid low. He lies slain by the coward hounds He raised to glory from the mire; And Erin’s hopes and Erin’s dreams Perish upon her monarch’s pyre.19 This denunciation of Healy and his cohorts as traitors indicates Joyce's precocious awareness of the political situation in Ireland. For Joyce, Parnell's legacy was that of the persecuted messiah destroyed by his own people for the sin of campaigning for their freedom. The pessimism of the poem anticipates Stephen's famously gloomy metaphor of Ireland in A Portrait as <<the sow that eats her own farrow.>>20 The marriage of church and state as it existed in Ireland at the turn of the century bore a resemblance to Italy's political situation in the early fourteenth century. Dante repeatedly grappled with questions of church and state in a number of different Cantos of the Commedia and outlined his segregative political philosophy in the treatise De Monarchia. Like Joyce, he opposed the Catholic Church's involvement in temporal matters and felt that the church should limit itself to tending exclusively to the spiritual demands of its congregation. 17 R. Barry O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell 1846 - 1891, Harper, New York, 1898, pp. 23 - 49. Richard Ellman, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, New York-Oxford-Toronto, 1982, pp. 33 - 4. 19 James Joyce, Dubliners, Bantam Books, New York, 1990, p. 56. 20 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 157. 18 15 1.1.3. Betrayal Much like Joyce Dante was also was suspicious of factionalism and deeply obsessed with the theme of betrayal. The image of Joyce’s cannibalized farrow has a parallel in Paradiso 25 in which Dante describes himself as an innocent "agnello" asleep peacefully in his <<bello ovile>> all the while unaware that he is a <<nimico a lupi che li danno guerra.>>21 Whereas Dante would experience betrayal in his adult years, Joyce's education in betrayal began at an early age. For Joyce, Parnell was <<perhaps the most formidable man that ever led the Irish.>>22 In his book, "The Judas Kiss," Gerry Smyth explains the momentous impact of the Home Ruler's death on the young Joyce: the fall of Parnell, then, instantiates a matrix of traitorous impulses and actions -- some politicalcultural, some subjective and interpersonal; and it's clear...that such a matrix was a crucial component of the artistic vision of James Joyce.23 His own subjectivity and the <<political-cultural>> were, therefore, indissolubly linked in Joyce's mind. For such a mind, one as sensitive to impressions as was Joyce's, the betrayal of Parnell was the same as being himself betrayed. The anecdotal facts of his life would continue to act as the ultimate determiner of his political identity and in the same vein as Dante's "agnello" he would continue to think of himself as an inherently innocent victim irreversibly prone to betrayal. 1.1.4. Two Cities Divided In the wake of its great leader's destruction Ireland was split into two factions. The antiParnellites, backed by the clergy, quickly gained the upper hand over the demoralized Home Rulers, subsequently initiating a state of social stasis that would eventually compel Joyce to abandon his <<dear, dirty Dublin>>24 and search the continent for a locus amoenus within whose embrace he might be able to fully realize his artistic potential. A political divide of this type, one in which the prevailing ideologies of both parties overlap in many areas but cannot be reconciled on one key clerical matter, had its parallel in the separation of the Black Guelfs from the White Guelfs in Dante's Florence. For Joyce, the end result of his country's intestine 21 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander, and Jean Hollander, Anchor, New York, 2007, p. 660. J. Joyce, op. cit., ed. K. Barry, p. 316. 23 Gerry Smyth, 'Trust Not Appearances:' James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) in The Judas Kiss: Treason and Betrayal in Six Modern Irish Novels, Manchester University Manchester, 2016, p. 71. 24 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 15. 22 16 division was a state of paralysis or an interminable petrification not unlike the frozen punishment awaiting those souls in the penultimate antenora of the Inferno.25 This state of paralysis was, in Joyce's world, a condition which the Irish people had not only invited upon themselves but one which they had deliberately exacerbated by reaffirming their bondage to <<two masters...an English and an Italian.>> Joyce shared with the majority of his countrymen the opinion that England's claim to authority over Ireland was illegitimate. The seed of tyranny had been sown as far back as 1155 when Pope Adrian IV, born Nicholas Brakespear, history's only English Pope, issued the bull Laudabiliter that supposedly engaged Henry II in a mission to invade Ireland.26 According to Joyce, the complicity between the English occupiers and the papacy was age-old. <<Joyce complained that throughout history the Papacy never leant a word of support to her most Catholic domain, yet Ireland remained faithful to the papacy.>>27 The indignation he reserved for the English master was, therefore, equally if not more applicable to the Italian master. The warring factions of Medieval Florence brought about a comparable state of paralysis in Dante's polis. Architect of Dante's misfortunes and notorious abuser of ecclesiastical power, Bonifacio VIII was, for the poet, the quintessential archetype of the traitor, betraying both his divine office and his nation in his hunger for power. Like the anti-Parnellites, Bonifacio VIII also colluded with a foreign power, the French, whose ruler Charles, Count of Valois assisted him in his takeover of Florence. With the help of France and the Black Guelfs, Bonifacio VIII ushered in a period of internecine conflict in Florence that quickly led to Dante's exile.28 In Inferno 6, condemned Florentine glutton Ciacco predicts the outcome of the struggle between the White and Black Guelphs in grim terms: E quelli a me: <<Dopo lunga tencione verranno al sangue, e la parte selvaggia caccerà l'altra con molta offensione.>>29 It was the Black Guelphs who cleaved closest to the credo of papal supremacy. Although the Guelphs had, prior to the split, opposed Ghibelline support of the Holy Roman Emperor's claims to the authoritative preeminence of the Empire in the controversy over the Papacy's 25 Nick Havely, Dante, Blackwell Publishing, Malden-Oxford-Victoria, 2007, pp. 23 - 31. D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 10. 27 Ibid. 28 N. Havely, op. cit., pp. 57 - 64. 29 Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, Anchor, New York, 2000, p.118. 26 17 rightful role in secular politics, the rancor stoked in them by the lawlessness of Bonifacio VIII spurred the Ghibellines to side with their erstwhile enemies. However, no political conflict is ever solely ideological, the violence within the divided Papist party having its roots in a family rivalry.30 According to Dino Compagni, the feud between the Donati and Cerchi families, leaders of the Black and White Guelph factions respectively, had arisen as the result of a matter of an unpaid dowry owed to the Cerchi family by Corso Donati who had married Cerchi relative Tessa Ubertini. The Donati had always envied the Cerchi for their superior wealth, and the issue of an unhonored marriage contract was pretext enough for the families to nurture a mutual hatred, a hatred which was not abated by the shared nomenclature of their political parties. Both Dante and Joyce were highly aware of the vicious influence of personal enmity and envy in politics. In the 15th Canto, Brunetto Latini describes these traits as a bred in the bone characteristic of those Florentines whose origins were provincial: Vecchia fama nel mondo li chiama orbi; gent' è avara, invidiosa e superba: dai lor costumi fa che tu ti forbi.31 Pride, envy, and greed were, according to Dante, at the heart of Florence's social discord, the political doctrine of the two parties being ultimately undermined by the pettiness of personal rivalry. A similar vindictiveness, mantled in excessive religiosity, was what brought down Joyce's great leader. Parnell's extra-marital indiscretion was, for those opposed to his influence, the perfect weapon to scuttle his entire political enterprise. op. cit. 1.1.5. Death of an Idol/Conclusion In the last decade of his life, Dante would find his hopes of homecoming rekindled in the figure of Henry VII of Luxembourg, the German sovereign whose short-lived career as Holy Roman Emperor seemed to promise the reunification of the Italian peninsula. However, these hopes would come to naught. After laying siege to the Guelf city of Siena, Enrico VII would be taken by malaria and die before reaching his fortieth birthday.32 What little faith Dante had in the possibility of reconciling with his countrymen and the possibility of a lasting political change in Italy died with the death of his alto arrigo, a heaven-sent leader whose unachieved 30 N. Havley, op. cit., pp. 72 - 74. D. Alighieri, op. cit., p. 280. 32 William M. Bowskey, Henry VII in Italy, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1962, p. 156. 31 18 Imperialist ambitions earn him a special place in Paradiso 30. The failure of his mission Dante explains as the product of <<la cieca cupidigia che v'ammalia>> covetousness blinding the Italian people such that they resemble the <<fantolino che muor per fame e caccia via la balia.>>33 This simile mirrors, in reverse, the metaphor of the <<sow that eats its farrow.>> If the Italians of Dante's time were infants who chose to starve themselves by turning away from Arrigo's nourishing teat, then the Irish were doomed to be devoured by the nourisher herself. For Joyce, there would be latter-day Parnell. Pettiness, greed, religious hypocrisy, and an inveterate instinct to self-destroy precluded the Irish people from enjoying another great leader. Parnell's traitors were the very same mediocrities who Joyce portrays as having infamously cast the net that bound him. Manganiello writes, <<for Joyce, the artist and politician seemed doom to share the same fate in an Ireland "where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove.">>34 Art and politics were inextricably bound in his mind. Joyce, ultimately, saw all politics in the reflection given by the <<cracked lookingglass of a servant.>>35 This is the image Stephen in Ulysses employs to symbolize Irish art, but the image just as easily applies to Joyce's view of Irish politics and politics in general. Rather than ameliorating social issues, politicians further fragmented societies by driving wedges between people. In the case of Ireland, the politicians had reasserted their subaltern status to their oppressors for the sake of immediate gain. With the shattering of his hopes for a free and independent Ireland, the young writer's belief in the power of collective political change was shattered. Only by drawing on the example set by another fiercely solitary poet-prophet would he be able to become a true <<party to himself.>> 1.2 The Church 1.2.1. Anticlerical Invectives The divisive trauma of Parnell's death is expertly captured in the Christmas Dinner scene of A Portrait's first chapter. In honor of his growing older, a young Stephen is permitted to sit at the adult table for the first time in his life. He soon finds his holiday spirit punctured when a political quarrel breaks out between his father, Simon and the Dedalus children's governess, 33 D. Alighieri, op. cit., p. 801. D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 18. 35 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 7. 34 19 Dante Riordan. The governess maintains that Parnell was an adulterous sinner and is, on that charge, unfit to save the Irish people. Mrs. Riordan feels the Church was completely justified in disowning Parnell while Stephen's father, despite his Catholicism, feels that Parnell's infidelity was merely a pretext used by colonialist sympathizers, mostly Protestants, to end the Home Ruler's political agenda. The core of the political debate is the corruption of the clergy and the disagreement indelibly impressing upon young Stephen's mind an idea of the hypocrisy and baseness of those clerics and politicians who sell the souls of their people for the sake of profit. Vitriolic condemnations of ecclesiastical corruption are also a recurrent feature of the Commedia. Our pilgrim Dante, in Inferno 19, exhibits a similarly virulence towards Niccolò III, one of the many simoniacal popes whose contrapasso has him stacked upside-down in a manylayered series of simoniacs, the topmost of whom is subjected to suffer a dance of flames, a parody of Pentecostal fire, upon his bare heels. Dante finds the sin of simony, the buying and selling of ecclesiastical office or entitlements, particularly offensive and the disgust he feels at the sight of these corrupt Popes causes him to risk profaning the Church itself: E se non fosse ch'ancor lo mi vieta a reverenza de le somme chiavi che tu tenesti ne la vita lieta, io userei parole ancor più gravi; ché la vostra avarizia il mondo attrista, calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi.36 When discussing those clergymen who sought to destroy his great leader, Simon Dedalus also risks profanation: <<Sons of bitches! ...When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Lowlived dogs! And they look it. By Christ, they look it.>>37 His rage swelling to the point of outright blasphemy, Stephen's father decries the unholy alliance of religion and politics, adding fatalistically, <<we are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter... —A priestridden Godforsaken race!>>38 36 D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 350. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 34. 38 Ivi, p. 39. 37 20 Mrs. Riordan upbraids him for his foul language and the night ends with a tearful Simon lamenting the loss of his <<dead king>> while Stephen looks upon him <<terrorstricken.>>39 After vowing to refrain from using worse language, Dante seemingly contradicts himself by deploying a word of his own coinage: <<puttaneggiar>>40 to describe the simoniacal practices of the Church. Later in the poem, in Purgatorio XXXIII, Dante proves even more audacious. He speaks of the Church as a <<puttana sciolta>>41 and likens it to the harlot of the apocalypse. (Purg. XXXIII) Joyce was also recorded of having described the Church as a <<whore>> in conversation with the director of the Berlitz School in Pola, Alessandro Francini Bruni.42 To him, whoring oneself, in any context, was to engage in simony. Simony was, in Joyce's mind, not merely a clerical sin but one that could also be equated with <<falsity of purpose>>43 in general. In his essay, <<Day of the Rabblement>> Joyce took to task those exponents of the literary community who compromised their art for the sake of fame and fortune.44 As his brother Stanislaus put it, falsity of purpose was for Joyce, <<the literary sin against the Holy Ghost.>>45 Ever fond of discussing art in liturgical terms, Joyce worried that his own aesthetic religion might not be immune to the disease of simony. He feared that without proper vigilance he too might succumb to the temptation of whoring his vision for profit. 1.2.2 Simony, Collusion, and the Irish Simony was not simply a phenomenon confined to the illicit practices of the Church, but a viral element of the Irish character. In his "Dubliners" stories, Joyce portrays the many facets of his fellow Dubliners' disposition (and by that token, the national character as a whole) through a variety of symbolically charged sketches of daily life. In "Grace" a story satirically modeled on the Commedia's tripartite structure, tells the tale of four friends who attempt to revive and reform the drunkard, Tom Kernan. At a certain point in the story, Tom's friends enter into a discussion on papal infallibility in which they praise the superiority of the Irish Catholic Church as the most pious in all of Christendom. In this story, Joyce caricatures the woefully retrograde attitude of his countrymen who <<in the full tide of rationalist positivism and equal democratic rights for 39 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 41. D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit. p. 350. 41 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, translated by Robert Hollander, Jean Hollander, Anchor, New York, 2003, p. 724. 42 Alessandro Francini Bruni, Joyce Intimo Spogliato in Piazza, ed. Franco Marucci, Ibiskos Editrice Risolo, Empoli, 2012, p. 245. 43 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years, ed. Richard Ellman, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 104. 44 J. Joyce, op. cit., ed. K. Barry, p. 50. 45 S. Joyce, op. cit., p. 104. 40 21 everybody...[proclaim] the dogma of the infallibility of the head of the Church and also that of the Immaculate Conception.>>46 The source of Ireland's paralysis, its drunkenness, its pettiness was, therefore, the instinct for mendacity that the Church instilled in its congregation. Unable to face themselves, the Irish people looked to the Church to act as what Father Purdon in his sermon at the end of "Grace" describes as a <<spiritual accountant>> who exists to <<open the books>> of his flock.47 In speaking of religion in these terms he <<deforms the theological concept of 'grace' by equating it with good deeds in a commercial sense.>>48 The leeching influence of simony was, therefore, in Joyce's mind, the means by which the Irish people were lured into a condition of subservience. By wedding Mammon and Christ, the Irish Church had violated its most cherished principles. "Grace" was meant to be the last story in the Dubliners collection and Joyce's final pronouncement on the irredeemably corrupted state of his city. The cult of commerce lampooned by the story was a phenomenon which attributed to the insidious influence of the British occupiers. Manganiello writes <<Joyce suspected, moreover, that the Catholic hierarchy in England was secretly opposed to Irish independence, because the creation of an independent Irish parliament would diminish the political power and influence of English Catholics under British parliament.>>49 The papacy's tradition of collusion had many historic precedents. In Dante's time, collusion between France and the Vatican eventually led to the relocation of the papacy from Rome to Avignon under the command of Boniface's successor, Clement V who was indebted to Philip the Fair of France to whom he owed his election.50 For Dante, the establishment of the Avignon papacy was the most unthinkable act of simony. Such an act merits Clement V a place in the bolgia of the simoniacs where he is prophesied by Niccolò III to eventually replace him as the latest in the series of condemned popes. Whereas Dante, addressing Niccolò personally, possessed a force of conviction strong enough to aim his blows directly at the corrupt figures in question, Joyce allows his prose to do the work of criticizing the Church. No figure so grand as the Pope himself is given form in any of Joyce's productions, 46 D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 142. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 118. 48 D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 197. 49 D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 140. 50 N. Havely, op. cit., p. 37. 47 22 but rather only minor city-dwelling vicars of the papacy are called upon to play the part of his simoniacs. 1.2.3. Scholasticism, Order, and Apostasy He would maintain, more or less, the same political and anticlerical convictions throughout his life, but his work would always belie a certain ambivalence when it came to open denunciation of the Christian religion, an attitude very unlike that of his brother Stanislaus who was an avowed atheist and far more anticlerical. Noted biographer of Joyce, Richard Ellman writes <<his brother Stanislaus's outward rebellion, which took the form of rudeness to his masters at Belvedere and defiance at home -- his atheism worn like a crusader's cross -did not enlist James's sympathy.>>51 Joyce might not have called himself a believer but he would always, in his work, take pains to convert <<the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a superior kind of human folly and one which, interpreted by a secular artist, contained obscured bits of truth.>>52 And so no charge of falsity of purpose could be leveled at Joyce when he urged his brother to mellow his campaign of opposition. When pressed by Morris L. Ernst to answer the question of whether he was truly an apostate he responded, <<That's for the Church to say.>>53 And when asked by Frank Budgen to explain the Catholic themes in his work he clarified that <<for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.>>54 His Jesuit education had structured his mind to accommodate an encyclopedia of catechistic taxonomies and it was only with great effort that he succeeded in preserving his reverence for scholasticism as a supreme human achievement while developing a personal ethos outside the bounds of Papal authority. Ellman puts it best, saying Joyce saw the intellectual structure of scholasticism as one of the monuments of civilization, a noble product of the human mind -- beautiful not merely in its intricacy and subtlety but also an embodiment of an elevated moral and ethical conception in life.55 51 R. Ellman, op. cit, p. 67. Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 27. 55 M.T., Reynolds, op. cit., p. 17. 52 23 Dante was also a believer in order and, however bitterly critical and hostile to a corrupt Papacy <<[he] still accepted and exalted the Church as an institution divinely created and inspired.>>56 The importance of scholasticism for Joyce was, therefore, the visionary impetus with which it elaborated its ideals. His Jesuit studies had fueled the fire of his imagination by imposing upon it a latticework of classifications. Purposing to move freely within this latticework while not being subjugated to the supernatural authority from which it supposedly derived, he felt that <<Christianity had subtly evolved in his mind from a religion into a system of metaphors, which as metaphors could claim his fierce allegiance.>>57 To be the true father of his race he would have to become not only party to himself, but also priest and father as well. This then would be the establishment of the Joycean tabernacle. 1.3. Fatherhood 1.3.1. Paternal Authority In the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus expounds, in the presence of his literary compeers, his unorthodox theory that Shakespeare identified himself with the ghost of Hamlet's father rather than Hamlet himself. At a certain point the conversation veers towards the subject of the Church and theme of fatherhood: Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and micro-cosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?58 Stephen's theory is met with scorn and derision by his peers, some of his more subtle points being discounted on the charge that biography should have no bearing on literary analysis. But the genius of Stephen's theory consists in its meanderings and the portal provided by Shakespeare allows him to reach beyond his fellow litterateurs whose viewpoints 56 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 17. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 68. 58 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 199. 57 24 are narrowly confined to a received notion of art for art's sake. The <<legal fiction>> of <<paternity>> is the theme that emerges most saliently from his discourse. For Stephen, paternity is, unlike, maternal love, a construction. Composites of paternity recurring frequently throughout Joyce's work under many guises: the pater familias, the cleric, the remote ancestor, etc. If fatherhood was indeed a literary construction with legal implications, then becoming a father for oneself was an artistic task that involved the creation of an identity subject only to the law of one's individual conscience. To throw paternal authority into question was to throw the foundation of the Church itself into question. It is to that end that Joyce feels it meet to identify the fictive fathers constituting the fictive authority to which his will refused to bend. Joyce's relationship with his own father was strained. He alternated between admiring his father's joie de vivre and detesting his habits of drunkenness and his proclivity for moneymaking schemes. Of his own father, Dante makes no mention. We know he was a moneylender and therefore a usurer. It is easy to imagine such a man ending up in the fourth circle of the Inferno where the avaricious push massive weights with their chests, but not even a poet as bold as Dante had the gall put his own father in hell. His silence in regards to Alighiero di Bellincione is, thus, a testament to the lack of regard he bore towards his parent. Only in the realm of his imagination could Dante and Joyce find the appropriate surrogates for their feckless fathers. 1.3.2. Fraudulent Fathers 1.3.2.1. Unexpected Encounters In Inferno 15, Dante crosses paths with an old friend and father figure, Brunetto Latini who is condemned to reside in the girone reserved for those who have perpetrated acts of violence against God. A sodomite, Brunetto must run in circles endlessly with his fellow sinners. Author of the didactic poem Tresor, Brunetto was tutor to Dante during the latter's youth and might have given him an informal education in the arts of versification.59 What sort of curriculum Brunetto used is unclear as is the specifics of his sin, but Dante's admiration for his tutor and fellow exile is unquestionable. In this Canto, its tone celebratory and hopeful, 59 N. Havley, op. ed., p. 130. 25 Dante puts uncommonly little emphasis on the nature of the sin punished. His encounter with Brunetto occurs while he observes the perambulating procession of which he is a part. At a certain point, Dante notices one among the group watching him with the squinted eyes of a tailor attempting to thread a needle. The man suddenly seizes him by his skirt and expresses his amazement at encountering his formal pupil in the world of the dead: Così adocchiato da cotal famiglia, fui conosciuto da un, che mi prese per lo lembo e gridò: <<Qual maraviglia!>>. E io, quando ’l suo braccio a me distese, ficcaï li occhi per lo cotto aspetto, sì che ’l viso abbrusciato non difese la conoscenza süa al mio ’ntelletto; e chinando la mano a la sua faccia, rispuosi: <<Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?>>60 So moved is he to be reunited with his beloved teacher that Dante pays him the most tender tribute imaginable, using words warmer then those he reserves for Virgil or many of the souls in paradise: ché ’n la mente m’è fitta, e or m’accora, la cara e buona imagine paterna di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 84 m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna: e quant’io l’abbia in grado, mentr’io vivo convien che ne la mia lingua si scerna.61 As Brunetto describes the harsh reality awaiting the poet, Dante portrays his former tutor as highly worthy of filial affection. His tutor's own ordeal as exile makes him sympathetic to Dante's plight and his account of the pilgrim's future is a precursor to Cacciaguida's prophecy in Paradiso 17. It is the reality of Brunetto's punishment that gives the Canto its unique power. Dante's compassion for this man who, in his estimation, is <<di costoro quelli che 60 61 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 278. Ivi, p. 280. 26 vince, non colui che perde>>, seems to eclipse the gravity of his sin without exonerating him from his sentence.62 1.3.2.2. Frode, the Role of the Priest, and Sodomy In Joyce's Ireland the parish priest was considered a father to the community, tending to his congregation's spiritual and material needs, but Wells is hardly that. Mary T Reynolds says that seminarian's bad faith marks him, therefore, <<as a simoniac, a fradulent father.>>63 (MTR) Fraud or <<frode>> is, of course, in Dante's universe the most grave of sins. To deceive for the purpose of personal gain is, for the poet, the vilest debasement of God's great gift of reason. For Joyce, fraud first manifests itself as a word inextricably associated with the Commedia: He went on repeating to himself a line from Dante for no other reason except that it contained the angry dissyllable <<frode.>> Surely, he thought, I have as much right to use the word [i.e. frode, trans., fraude] as Dante...The spirits of the patriotic and religious enthusiasts seemed to him fit to inhabit the fraudulent circles where hidden in hives of immaculate ice they might work their bodies to a due pitch of frenzy. The spirits of the tame sodalists, unsullied and undeserving, he would petrify among a ring of Jesuits in the circle of the foolish and grotesque virginities and ascend above them[...]64 The reference to the antenora of ice as a fitting destination for his <<fraudulent fathers>> is proof of the severity of Joyce's contempt towards these deceivers. In A Portrait, Joyce gives a more textured account of his attraction towards the priesthood and his subsequent apostasy. Yet only in this earlier version of the bildungsroman is the reader given a figural manifestation of the fradulent father Joyce once risked becoming. In Stephen Hero, Joyce as Stephen, is not lacking in compassion for these fraudulent fathers, but by no means is he able to accord Wells the same admiration that Dante expresses for Brunetto. In A Portrait, Joyce describes both the lure and the existential threat of the priesthood in dramatic detail. That he might effectively <<damn>> himself by joining the ranks of the seminarians is a governing fear for Stephen. After Father Arnall's excruciatingly detailed hellfire sermon, young Stephen finds himself in a state of mortal terror and decides he has no choice but to confess his acts of 62 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 284 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 44 64 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, New Directions Publishing, New York, 1963, p. 56 63 27 fornication. Soon after the confession, he feels a newfound sense of relief that quickly evolves into the desire to become a priest. In the fourth chapter of the novel, he lays out the uniquely gnostic powers of the divine office: He listened in reverent silence now to the priest’s appeal and through the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach, offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He would know then what was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. He would know obscure things, hidden from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath. He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women and of girls; but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition of hands, his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would linger upon the hands with which he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink damnation to himself not discerning the body of the Lord. He would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent, and he would be a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedec.65 In the priestly vocation, Stephen perceives the unique opportunity to become a father without concupiscently sullying his soul in the process. The clergy holds out for him the possibility of becoming his own father and, therefore, the possibility of occupying an elevated station in life far above the sinful mob. The component of celibacy as a counteragent to the sin of fornication speaks to Brunetto's sin of sodomy. Brunetto is not a clergyman and as stated prior, the exact nature of his act of sodomy is unknown to us. The implication is that Brunetto was a homosexual and for Dante such a sin, although not as apparently poisonous as other sins, remains a sin nonetheless. For Joyce, the unintended consequence of taking a vow of celibacy is to become not a sodomite but one who has removed himself from the ambiguities and anxieties of sexuality, this being a sin inasmuch as it is a rejection of reality. A quest for purity is, therefore, a denial of life and, for Joyce, the sodomite is someone who attempts to give birth to themselves in mad bid for purity. To know the mystery of Simon 65 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 114. 28 Magus's sin is to commit that very same sin. Thus it is his recognition of the falsity of purpose underlying his flirtation with the priesthood which will ultimately deter him from pursuing this goal. Near the end of the novel he questions his dean of studies' commitment to the holy trinity. The dean of studies is an Englishman and his character is, therein, a hybrid of Ireland's two oppressors: the Vatican and the British Empire. He describes the man in a distrusting but sympathetic tone: His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all but given through—a latecomer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set out? ...had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zincroofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence?66 In this passage, a teenaged Stephen assumes the role of older brother to a grown man. His tongue-in-cheek pity for the <<poor Englishman in Ireland>> ironically evokes Dante's pity for Brunetto. He gives the dean of studies the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his faith, but the subtext of his tone seems to suggest that Stephen does not believe that true faith, a personal commitment to the holy trinity, can maintain itself beneath the theatrics of ritual. The <<vain pomps>> of the priesthood are enough to discredit it. Hence, it is the soutane itself and all the mummery that comes with it that a young Stephen finds appalling. The Dean of Studies is a would-be Saint Matthew who has not fully repented, but straddles the line between the earthly and the transcendent. 1.3.2.3. Father Conmee In Ulysses Joyce uses a similar clerical father figure, Father Conmee, to epitomize the pomp and hypocrisy of the Irish clergy. A respected parish priest in Dublin, Father Conmee is a finalized version of Wells, a simoniacal cleric who cares more about accolades than the laws of liturgy itself. The respect paid to priests like Father Conmee was owing to the 66 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 136. 29 enormous influence the Jesuits had in Ireland. For many Irish, the only route to education lied with the Jesuits and this sect <<saw their functions[...]as the education and social training of a Catholic elite that would be prepared to exercise power on equal terms with the Protestant Anglo-Irish ruling caste, and to take the reins when Irish independence was achieved.>>67 Their agenda was, in essence, a political one. Clerics like Wells and Conmee were, on that head, too willing to sell their religious principles for status and power. Joyce, playing Dante, condemns Conmee to be punished in the Circe chapter of Ulysses. It is this appearance amid the phantasmagoria of the Nighttown episode that will activate allusive parallels to the city of Dis in Inferno 10, where heretics and epicureans are encased in flaming coffins. Among those condemned in the Canto, Dante encounters Farinata degli Uberti, the prideful Ghibelline condottiero, and Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, father of Dante's friend and fellow poet, Guido Cavalcanti. Joyce sentences Father Conmee and another priest, Father Dolan, to a punishment similar to that of the Epicureans, having the two priests rise from casket-like containers in a manner similar to Farinata and Cavalcante. Why is Conmee, clearly anything but an Epicurean, condemned? The answer is suggested in an earlier chapter of Ulysses, The Wandering Rocks, in which the reader follows Father Conmee's walk through northern Dublin while the itinerary of the Viceregal's calvacade mirrors his progression. The parodic element of the Viceregal's parallel itinerary accentuates the worldliness of this parish priest whose private thoughts Joyce lays bare for his readers. Conmee is Father Superior of his Jesuit House, a coveted position among the clergy, and a man of great influence both within his order and in the daily political affairs of Dublin. The purpose of his journey on June 16th is to visit a school where he hopes to recommend a place for Patrick Aloysius Dignam whose father was buried earlier that day. As revealed by his interior monologue this ostensive act of charity is actually motivated by what he stands to gain by obliging the boy. Conmee has joined forces with Martin Cunningham, a minor politician at the local seat of the British Government, who promises to help people Conmee's congregation at a "mission" service in which special collections are made. Beyond this more immediate goal, lies the higher ambition of the establishment of an Irish Catholic ruling class. As with the character of Father Purdon in Grace, Joyce puts local politicians and parish priests on display rather than the great personages, clerical or otherwise, who figure in the 67 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 54. 30 Commedia. For both Joyce and Dante <<evil is a complicated matter, not easily recognized, often attractive, and even mingled with good.>>68 Conmee's venality is easy enough to overlook because it is so deftly woven into the fabric of his daily life. His hypocrisy is such that he can read aloud to himself an admonition against involving oneself in worldly matters while knowing full well he is about to use his powers to influence a worldly matter. On paper the help he gives to the Dignam boy might read as a simple instance of being <<father to the fatherless>>69 but, in truth, the motivations behind the act are hardly altruistic. His place in the Circe episode is, therefore, a comment on his willingness to violate his own principles. Conmee does not live up to the standards he has set for himself and although he is not technically a heretic, he is a fraudulent father and his willingness to exercise his influence in matters temporal, define him as something of an epicurean, one who, despite the content of his sermons, lives as if the soul were impermanent, and thereby, as commodifiable as any material thing. Wells and Conmee are both simoniacal in their tendencies and resemble, in Joyce's mind, that <<disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zincroofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence...>>. Though, he does not view them as inherently evil, he cannot believe them to be motivated merely by good intentions. His affection for them does not diminish the gravity of the violation they commit in inserting themselves into the temporal patterns of everyday life. As the champion of the quotidian, however, Joyce does not work himself into the same frenzies of anger when addressing these characters who cannot help but lapse into a preoccupation with mortal concerns. Whereas Dante was a committed Catholic who reacted to simony as a violation of his own soul's doctrine, Joyce, consistently vague on where he stood spiritually in relation to the church, seems to treat these clerics as if he is simply holding them spiritually accountable to the standards of their very own doctrine. 68 69 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 60. Ivi, p. 59. 31 1.3.3. Spiritual Fathers 1.3.3.1 Mortal Guides Joyce said of his poetic guide, <<I love Dante almost as much as I love the bible. He is my spiritual food. The rest is ballast.>>70 This condition of inspirational indebtedness to Dante is common to many of Joyce's peers. T.S. Eliot famously stated, <<Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.>>71 Dante had thus solidified himself as the God of western literature among the modernist poets and Joyce was hardly unique in his veneration of the great deity. But the presence of Dante in Joyce's fiction is unique. Mentions of Dante in Joyce are often playful and even subversive. In A Portrait, one of Stephen's diary entries refers to the uncanny device of his <<spiritual heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri >>72 (AP). In Finnegan's Wake, Dante is referred to as the <<divine comic Denti Alligator>>73 (FW). If Dante is Joyce's Virgil, then he is a Virgil with whom Joyce presumes a certain jocose familiarity. His reverence for his poetic father does not imply the same timid deference shown by Dante to Virgil. Joyce's comic reworking of Dante's most well known tercets, those which have become clichés in Western literature, shows the novelist at his most puckishly irreverent. For example, in the Calypso chapter of Ulysses Bloom's stream of consciousness includes the line, <<O please, Mr. Policeman, I'm lost in the wood>>74 an obvious reference to the opening lines of the Inferno. In the Hades chapter, Bloom, reflecting on Patrick Dignam's funeral, says <<Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of purgatory,>>75 a cartoonish take on Purgatorio 26's <<foco[...] che [...] affina.>>76 Some of Dante's most enduring images, the refining fire of purgatory and the dark wood of sin, are thus give the bathetic Joycean treatment, finding their way into the thoughts of an common-ish man given to mundane aphorism. If fatherhood is indeed a fiction, then Joyce's fictive poetic father is not above being ribbed. Dante's Virgil, on the other hand, never appears as a figure of fun in the Commedia. However, Dante's esteem for his stolid guide does not entail infallibility on Virgil's part 70 Ivi, p. 118. T.S. Eliot, op. cit., ed. Frank Kermode, p. 205. 72 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 298. 73 James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, Viking Press, New York, 1999, p. 440. 74 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 57. 75 Ivi, p. 107. 76 D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 582. 71 32 though his didactic authority often exhibits a narrowly pagan understanding of divinity. Virgil's exclusion from the redemptive power of Christ's resurrection means that his explanations of divine phenomena are often faulty or incomplete. For example, in the 12th Canto of the Inferno, after having reached the banks of the seventh circle, the circle reserved for the violent, Dante asks Virgil to explain the presence of the shattered rocks preceding the boiling lake of blood.77 Virgil's understanding of the cause of the shattered rocks shows a correct temporal and physical understanding (he, after all, actually witnessed these phenomena 53 years after he arrived in Limbo). However, his use of the Greek poet and philosopher Empedocles (ca. 492-430 B.C.) as authority shows his ingrained pagan way of accounting for one of Christianity's greatest miracles, Christ's ransoming of souls committed to hell.78 He continues to explain the event in Empedoclean terms, completely benighted as to the true significance of Christ's sacrifice. Thus, Virgil cannot be trusted entirely, not because he is duplicitous but because he can see only so far into the structure of the afterlife as his pagan reasoning will permit. Dante scholarship has traditionally identified Virgil as an allegory of reason, but the American Dante Scholar Robert Hollander has contested this longstanding assumption by portraying the various ways his pagan misconceptions and errors betray this allegorical reading. For Hollander, Dante's Virgil is not an allegorical figure at all, but a real life personage. In his essay, <<Dante's Virgil: The Light that Failed>> Hollander argues that Virgil's role in the Commedia is not, as is frequently stated, that of an embodiment of reason written into the poem to contrast Dante the pilgrim's intuitional presence, but rather a tragic figure eternally condemned because of the untimeliness of his birth. In addition to Virgil's naturalistic interpretation of the earthquake following Christ's death, Hollander cites various instances in which Virgil misunderstands or allows himself to be bamboozled by Malacoda and his devils in the Circle of the barrators.79 In these moments, Virgil reveals himself to be more mortal than allegorical. Hollander concludes that Dante could have only considered Virgil a brilliant mind who, despite the enduring influence of his writings upon the Medieval mind, is a sort of <<failed prophet.>>80 Even in his Aeneid Virgil proves fallacious. 77 D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 218. Ivi, p. 230. 79 Robert Hollander, Dante's Virgil: A Light that Failed, <<Lectura Dantis>>, IV, 1989, pp. 3 - 30. 80 Ibid. 78 33 Hollander writes, <<Dante's Virgil seems to me to have been considered a failure both in his tragic Aeneid...with its uncertain view of the future of the empire, a view that is countered by Dante's imperial Comedy.>>81 And so Dante's Commedia exists, in part, to correct the shortcomings of the vision contained in The Aeneid and capitalize on the inherent tragedy of Virgil's placement in Hell. 1.3.3.2. Cacciaguida In order to find a suitable father figure, Dante will have to direct his focus upon an epoch closer in time to his own. Enter Cacciaguida, a crusader of whom we have pitifully little historical information. Cacciaguida appears at the midpoint of paradise, where the warriors of the faith live in the form of a crucifix composed of millions of sparks of light. The old crusader detaches himself from the aggregate and addresses Dante in Latin, <<O sanguis meus.>>82 Recognition of their shared blood overcomes the poet with joy. He responds to his great-great grandfather timorously. Cacciaguida confirms his relationship to Dante by saying that he is his <<root>>83 and the proceeds to reminisce about Florence's halcyon days when nobility of spirit and birth reigned supreme. Women were chaste, wives were dutiful, and taste in dress was sober. Cacciaguida explains how the causes of Florence's corruption can be traced back to the miscegenation of these families with non-natives due to the redefining of the city's boundaries. Then comes the most important part of the three Cantos dedicated to Cacciaguida. The crusader ties the theme of Florence's corruption to the fate that will befall Dante. He says that though he will suffer the treachery of not only his fellow Florentines but also his fellow exiles, he will find friends and saviors in the form of munificent lords, Cangrande della Scala in particular. The sorrow of <<lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale>>84 will be almost too much to bear at times, but only by pursuing truth through his poetry will he be able to reach his seat in heaven. Dante bravely accepts his fate and vows to remain a <<ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura.>>85 Cacciaguida ends his speech by saying 81 Ibid. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 400. 83 Ivi p. 401. 84 Ivi p. 445. 85 Ivi p. 441. 82 34 although Dante's words might end up hurting others' feelings, posterity will be sure to reward him for his genius. After Virgil and Beatrice, Cacciaguida is the character in the Commedia given the most space to speak. An entire three and half Cantos are dedicated to Dante's encounter with this ancient ancestor, father of his great-grandfather Alighiero I (who appears in the first terrace of the prideful in the mountain of Purgatory). Cacciaguida is not just any crusader but one who was knighted by the Emperor himself. Unlike Joyce, who had no sympathy for martial causes in the name of religion, the vate considers distinction in the fight for Christianity to be among the greatest of human virtues, second only to sainthood itself. Dante's encounter with Cacciaguida invites parallels with Aeneas' encounter with his own father, Anchises in the Aeneid. Cacciaguida addresses Dante using the Latin expression, <<O sanguis meus,>> echoing Anchises' exhortation to Julius Caesar to lay aside his sword that he might bring peace to Rome. Cacciaguida's Latin introduction, the only tercet of the Commedia entirely in Latin, signals his authority and links him to another authority who is long departed but hardly forgotten, Virgil. Cacciaguida's evocation of the Aeneid thus links him with Virgil and deepens the significance Dante's divine mission. Having obtained the validation of a consanguineous crusader for the faith, Dante becomes ever more worthy of his mission. Beatrice, St. Bernard, and finally the face-to-face vision of God himself will provide the final mandate for his mission, but it is at this important juncture, during his meeting with Cacciaguida, that Dante will have the exact details of his banishment spelled out for him. Dante's fate becomes, for the first time in the poem, not a matter of allegorical suggestion or subtle allusion, but a fait accompli, an actuality, the specifics of which are lifted directly from biographical fact. 1.3.3.3. Joyce's Insubstantial Father Joyce will draw freely from this portion of the Commedia in the Circe episode of Ulysses, but before we investigate the multifarious reworking of the Commedia contained in that episode, it is imperative that we take a look at Joyce's relationship with his biological father. How does the figure of John Joyce bear upon his son's definition of paternity as a <<legal fiction>>? Richard Ellman describes John Joyce as a <<reckless, talented man, convinced that he was the victim of circumstances, never at a loss for a retort, fearfully sentimental and acid by turns, drinking, spending, talking, singing [who] became identified in his son James's 35 mind with something like the life-force itself.>>86 In A Portrait, Stephen describes his father as having been at various points in his life a medical student, an oarsmen, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting policeman, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.87 Ellman states that although Joyce <<reciprocated his affection and remembered his jokes>>88 most of his ten children bore a great deal of animosity towards him. In A Portrait Stephen claims he has, in his heart, disowned his father, <<but James himself had no doubt that he was in every way his father's son.>>89 The atmosphere of the Joyce home was patriarchal. The needs and wants of his sons were prioritized over those of his daughters who found him to be a domineering, unpredictable character, alternately comic and irascible. Among his many children, James was his favorite. Reliance on his myriad but undeveloped talents proved unsustainable, and John frequently found himself and his family in dire straits financially. In addition to his wit and grandiloquence, James would inherit John's improvidence and would be harrowed by financial troubles for much of his life. Alcoholism also ran in the family. His father's frequent drinking bouts had, in his early adolescence, deterred him from becoming a drinker himself, but the student culture of Paris would weaken his resolution and over the course of his life he would, episodically, yield to his alcoholic tendencies. Also like his father, his desire to impress and perform would win him many friends. Owing to these friendships, he would obtain what his father was never able to achieve: recognition as a true genius. In A Portrait, the image of Joyce's father that emerges in the character of Simon Dedalus is that of a self-adulating manqué. Stephen's realization of his father's true nature occurs in the second chapter of the novel in which father and son take a trip to Simon's hometown of Cork. While they trek about the town, Simon, nipping at his flask, weepily reminisces about his childhood and lost friends, egoistically advising Stephen to cultivate the same charisma and charm that have propelled him through life. They visit the anatomy school where Simon was once a medical student. During this visit Stephen happens to see the word 86 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 23. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 204. 88 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 114. 89 Ibid. 87 36 <<foetus>> scrawled in a desk. This discovery plunges the boy into a dark world of pubescent sexual shame. Oblivious to his son's internal crisis, his father brings him to a pub where old acquaintances regale them with tales of his Simon's flirtations and drunken adventures. The effect of his father's sentimentality upon the angst-ridden young man amplifies his anguish and the final impact of the scene on Stephen's consciousness is embittering enough to convince him that his youth is dead. That following morning, Stephen's newly formed image of his father as a failed narcissist is punctuated by the man's postdrinking tremors: They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe’s coffeehouse, where Mr Dedalus’ cup had rattled noisily against its saucer, and Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father’s drinking bout of the night before by moving his chair and coughing. One humiliation had succeeded another—the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father’s friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness.90 The <<ugly likeness>> connecting Stephen and Simon is just that, nothing more, a "likeness." Whatever qualities of charisma or tendencies towards vice John Joyce had transmitted to his son did not, thereby, define their relationship as "consubstantial." Likeness alone was not enough to fill the void upon which the fiction of paternity was founded. <<Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?>> Stephen asks his reader. The consubstantial father must be a figure whose kinship with Stephen passes beyond mere likeness. In order to reach this consubstantial father, Joyce must, therefore, invent a spiritual father, one who will envelop his very being -- one who is neither a mere blood relative, nor a clergyman, nor a martyred political hero. In Karen Lawrence's essay, "Paternity, The Legal Fiction," she explains just what sort of father Stephen is looking for: 90 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 79. 37 once dispossessing his real father, Stephen can trade filiality for fatherhood and biological paternity for literary paternity; being no more a son, he can imagine himself a father creator like Shakespeare whom he calls "the father of all his race."91 Dante might just as easily fulfill that role of <<father of his race>> for Stephen. 1.3.3.4. Bloom's Consubstantial Father Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Ulysses might instantly conclude from this discussion that Joyce's spiritual father is, obviously, Leopold Bloom. Bloom's role as spiritual father will be addressed later in this thesis, but for the purposes of the present topic, it is worth taking a look at Joyce's combinative rendition of two disparate portions of the Commedia. The result of this rendition is Lipoti Virag, the grandfather of Stephen's spiritual father who makes a brief appearance in the hallucinatory Circe episode of Ulysses. Not long after Father Dolan and Conmee's cameos as heresiarchs in this same episode, Bloom calls forth from his subconscious another monstrous figure, his <<basilicogrammate>> grandfather who is introduced <<[chuting] rapidly down through the chimney flue>>92 in a manner recalling Dante's <<per la lista radial trascorse/ che parve foco dietro ad alabastro>>93 that is, the speed with which Cacciaguida descends from the scintilla-composed crucifix. Virag, like Cacciaguida, is a warrior, but is more of a tribal chieftain than a crusader. In stark contrast with Cacciaguida, manifested as featureless glint of light, Virag is an outlandishly dressed <<birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his assegai.>>94 Virag's arrival takes place not in the ethereal heaven of the faithful warriors but in an entirely different atmosphere, the music-room of a brothel in Dublin's redlight district. The Virag portion of the chapter, which takes up six pages, seems to be triggered by Bloom's paternal feelings towards Stephen. Bloom still mourns the loss of his son, Rudy who died before the age of one, and his affection for his newfound acquaintance conjures from the depths of his imagination this remote ancestor who, in a sense, promises protection from the infernal realm in which he now finds himself. Virag, his Jewish Hungarian ancestor, holds in his hand a book which one 91 Karen Lawrence, Paternity, the Legal Fiction in Joyce's Ulysses: The Larger Perspective, ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thorton, University of Delaware Press, 1987, pp. 95. 92 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 481. 93 D. Alighieri, op. cit., trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, p. 386. 94 J. Joyce, op. cit, p. 515. 38 might assume to be the Torah. <<For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book>>95 he says, referring, in Mary T. Reynolds's opinion, to the 17th Canto of Paradiso. Virag then undergoes a variety of horrific transformations. Some of the features he assumes are inspired by Dante's band of demons, the Malabranche, who supervise the circle of the barrators. Virag's contortions recall the arching of the devil in Inferno 21's back: <<head askew Virag arches his back, with hunched wing shoulders>>96 and the manner in which he sticks out his tongue is similar to the salute that the Malabranche give their leader, Malacoda, <<ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta/coi denti, verso il duca, per cenno>>97. The animalistic quality of Dante's condemned is simulated by Virag's <<weasal teeth>> and the <<pig's whisper>> in which he speaks98. At one point he <<raises his mooncalf nozzle and howls>>99. Reynolds says of Bloom's ancestor, <<Virag is not simply a caricature of Cacciaguida. His grotesquerie is all his own and operates within the dimensions of a larger expressive pattern that Joyce found in both the Inferno and Paradiso.>>100 Joyce's pastiche of various elements of diverse Cantos of the Commedia, this melding together of Dante's heaven and Dante's hell is evidence of his unique take on the plasticity inherent in the great poet's method. For Joyce, the Commedia is prime for foraging. Where many of his contemporaries found in Dante a moral blueprint with which they could construct an architectonic poetic universe of their own, Joyce, already mentally steeped in Jesuitism and therefore, uninterested in recovering a system of values from his poetic hero, plunders the Commedia for its most senuously charged imagery. The grafting of the bestial properties typical to the Inferno onto a Cacciaguida-esque creation such as Virag exemplifies Joyce's inclination to level or undermine the hierarchical structure of the Dantean afterlife. Unlike Cacciaguida who appears to the pilgrim in realm of pure light, Virag is a creature of the shadows. Whereas Cacciaguida's beatitude, the reward for his martial excellence in the cause of the Christian faith, is marked by his very form itself, a single spark of light, the warlike associations of Bloom's ancestor are given an ignoble visual correlative in his tribal garb. In the distinction is compassed two opposing views of violence. For Dante, violence is justified if it advances the interests of God's will; Joyce, on the contrary, a staunch pacifist, 95 Ivi, p. 484. Ivi, p. 488. 97 D. Alighieri, op. cit., trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, p.390. 98 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 482. 99 Ivi., p. 489. 100 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 75. 96 39 understands violence as inevitably primitive and destructive irrespective of whatever higher cause impels it. As warriors, Cacciaguida and Virag are typified by the coarseness of their speech, but whereas Cacciaguida makes use of this coarseness to emphasize the cruelty and solitude which will soon typify Dante's fate, Virag's coarseness gives vent to sexually explicit imagery. In addition to being a warrior, Virag is a self-proclaimed doctor and author of "Fundamentals of Sexology or Love Passion." In the course of his prophecy, Cacciaguida gives voice to Dante's innermost emotional states, acting in a similar but fundamentally different vein than Cacciaguida when he attempts to articulate Bloom's most pent-up and unrealized sexual desires. For example, he notices Bloom's fetish for undergarments and women in <<male habiliments.>>101 In "Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust," Colleen Lamos writes, <<although the signs of sexual deviance are clustered around Bloom, he is protected by his ignorance, for the meaning of those signs is left to the sex experts and to his confessors.>>102 Both ancestors are, therefore, avatars of the imagination and midwives to the unspoken. By aiding Dante in his endeavor to speak the truth, Cacciaguida succeeds in ennobling his greatgreat grandson's quest. However, The Jewish Hungarian warrior-sexologist, in contrast, is not able to reach Bloom, failing in his effort to fully denude him of the protective layers enveloping libidinal fantasies. Lamos writes <<Bloom is compelled to admit his lusts, but he does not name them.>>103 1.4. Conclusion Joyce's appropriation of Dantean elements in the depiction of his spiritual father's spiritual father amounts to an act of expropriation. By decontextualizing and recontextualizing these elements, he succeeds in generating an atmosphere where the remote becomes present and the present becomes remote. The moral cohesive of the original structure is removed and what is left is a world defined by relativity. The institution of the Church loses its authority and with it, flung into the void, goes fatherhood itself. Dante's distant crusader forefather is a callback to a more stable time; he is a symbol of order, discipline, and pious simplicity. Dante's legacy 101 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 487. Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 155. 103 Ibid. 102 40 is rooted in this figure (<<O fronda mia in che io compiacemmi/pur aspettando, io fui la tua radice.>>104) With him, he is able to correct the failings of his own father and solder his identity to a force that is both ancient and noble, a force built on both the majesty of empire and the endurance of Christendom. At the opposite end of the moral spectrum exists Virag, a boundlessly mutable, infinitely multivalent sexual chimera whose very appearance causes terror. From him, Bloom receives no words of reassurance, no grand vision of a simpler, gentler time, only a macabrely kaleidoscopic vista into his own latent sexual fears. One might imagine that Bloom's Virag is preceded by another Virag and that Virag by another ad infinitum. He is not, like Cacciaguida, an ethical signpost, but one of an endless succession of monsters from the past. <<History[...] is a nightmare from which I am trying awake>>105 Stephen somberly tells his school's headmaster, Mr. Deasy in the Nestor. In Joyce, the trinity of fatherhood, history, and the Church is spewed from the same void and the whole elaborate apparatus of Western civilization incessantly scrapes to justify the claims of authority attached to each. In rejecting these institutions, not wholesale but systematically and with much trepidation, Joyce throws into question Dante's entire moral edifice. By using Dante's own vocabulary and tropes, Joyce collapses the distinctions constitutive of this moral edifice and in doing so he creates a carapace of skepticism within which he is able to safely navigate that ecclesiastical-paternal network of symbols. Karen Lawrence encapsulates the conclusion to Joyce's dispossession of his many fathers, saying, <<the mystical estate of fatherhood preempts the role of the mother and leaves the artist self-sufficient, free to create his world.>>106 Only by way of the written word itself could Joyce act out his exodus from the void of fatherhood. Joyce saw in language, in logos, a worthy substitute for his fraudulent and insubstantial fathers. Through logos he hoped to obtain consubstantiality with a higher paternal soul, but if the idea itself was fictive, then only in the realm of fiction could a spiritual father assume a definite form. Joyce would have mostly likely agreed with Derrida's assertion that <<the father is not generator or procreator in any "real" sense prior to or outside all relation to language.>>107 If language had established fatherhood then language could be used to deconstruct it, being effectively, a 104 D. Alighieri, op. cit. trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander p.392. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 34. 106 K. Lawrence, ed. R.D. Newman and W. Thorton, op. cit., p. 98. 107 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, p. 149. 105 41 means to subvert the arbitrary powers represented by fatherhood and thereby demolish the barriers of Church and history that stood in his way. Such a task would mean a careful dismemberment of everything he knew, himself above all. The Church had once seemed to hold out the promise of allowing one to become one's own father, but the priesthood's hypocrisy was too much for Joyce to bear. To be a priest meant to be a sort of politician and a sexless one at that. Political self-interest and papal corruption were all part and parcel of the same diseased system. It was this system that had put an end to the one man who might have proven a savior for his people. It was this system that had convinced Joyce he was an exile in his own country. <<My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity -- home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines>>108 Joyce wrote to his companion Nora in August of 1904. Stephen Dedalus most formidably declares his resolution to escape these trammels in his political conversation with Lynch on the steps of their college's library: I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.109 And it is with these tools of <<silence, exile, and cunning>> that Joyce will craft the wings of his flight from Dublin. 108 109 D. Manganiello, op. cit., p. 218. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 291. 42 2. Exile 2.1. Physical Exile 2.1.1 The Voluntary Exile In his famous correspondence with his British editor, Grant Richards, Joyce came to the conclusion that he could not <<write without offending people.>>110 Like Dante, he hoped to redeem his soul and believed that in doing so, he would redeem the soul of his people. The task of redeeming the Irish people rested then on the shoulders of one who remained a true disciple of his own genius, and to express himself without reservation would mean welcoming the risk of causing offense, for only by holding a mirror up to his city and its inhabitants would he be able to accomplish his aim of creating a conscience for his race. He once said, <<I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all cities of the world.>>111 Dublin was an embryo in need of gestation. From its growth would emerge a freethinking, unfettered individual who embodied the greatest qualities of the Celtic spirit. From its growth would emerge James Joyce. And so, to gain the proper vantage point from which he could write about Dublin, he had no choice but to leave Ireland. In an editorial written for the Triestine newspaper, Piccolo della Sera, Joyce wrote: When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.112 Exile was, therefore, absolutely necessary. Although Dublin was to furnish the fodder for his art, it was an environment antipathetic to the act of creation. To go abroad would mean putting a wide enough berth between himself and his subject. It would mean putting together 110 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Viking Press, New York, 1957, p. 61. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 205. 112 J. Joyce, ed. K. Barry, op. cit, p. 123. 111 43 the shards of the <<cracked lookingglass>>. All he needed to leave the island guiltlessly was the imprimatur of his great mentor, Dante. Dante was in Joyce's time the heroic exile par excellence. Many had drawn from the imaginative pool that is the Dantean corpus, but only a man of Joyce's arrogance would have been so brazen as to model his life upon that of the exile. How it came into his head to use Dante, not just his work, but his historical persona as a vehicle of exodus is now worth investigating. The germ of Joyce's notion of a heroic exile can be identified in a 1904 letter he wrote to Yeats's colleague, the impresario, Lady Gregory: I am leaving Dublin [...] I shall try myself against the powers of the world. All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.113 This letter was written shortly prior to his ultimately unsuccessful attempt at studying medicine in Paris and is the earliest example of Joyce assuming the role of self-imposed exile. The grandiose tone of the letter is expressive of the heroic associations exile possessed in Joyce's mind, associations which will be even further glorified in his adoption of a Dantean persona. By participating in the exilic dialogue underpinning the Commedia, Joyce is able to infuse his own life with the rhetorical and Biblically connotative power of the exilic hero. The creative process behind the exile-in-progress is what James Robinson describes as <<Joyce's need to modulate and shape -- to rhetorically fashion -- his absence from Dublin [...]>>114. A growing self-awareness of the rhetorical nature of his exile is evident in a line written in a letter to his brother Stanislaus in 1905: <<I have come to accept my present situation as a voluntary exile -- is it not so?>>115. Robinson interprets this question as indicating Joyce's <<double perspective>> on his exile status: <<It is a doubleness that seems to resonate with Dante's 'uneasy orthodoxy,' anticipating as it does two diametrically opposed possibilities of 113 J. Joyce, ed. S. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 53. James Robinson, op. cit., p. 2. 115 James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellman, Faber and Faber, London, 1975, p. 56. 114 44 interpretation.>>116 In this question, Joyce reveals himself to be aware of the contradiction inherent in his self-proclaimed title of voluntary exile. Rather than trying to resolve the contradiction, he welcomes its rhetorical potentiality. His christening of himself as a <<voluntary exile>> is the author's first great act of self-conception. For Joyce, to understand oneself is to write oneself into being. In the same way he purposed to unwrite the institutions that imprisoned him and his people, would he write himself into being as one who wills himself into being and remains, nevertheless, a victim of circumstances So pervasive was Joyce's consciousness of language that life itself seemed to belong to words. But at no point did Joyce aspire to enclose himself within an ivory tower of language, an exile to the human community in its totality. Somewhere, he believed, there was a community that would welcome him as one of their own. In the 1904 essay which would eventually give birth to the novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce writes about the conflict of community: Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy but traditional and individual relations were at that time pressing their claims and selfcommunion had been but shyly welcomed.117 The protagonist's ambivalence in this passage is expressive of Joyce's fear of utter alienation. He understood that no great art could be created in a vacuum. Hence, the reinvention of the self that exile afforded him was not tantamount to total isolation but brought with it a freedom from the obligations of family, government, and religion. His exile was a clear statement that he refused to compromise his genius for the sake of a comfortable conformity. Still the question remained, how could one call oneself an exile without having been formally banished from a community? The only way to answer this question properly is to explore the various junctures and disjunctures that make kindred and contradistinguish Dante and Joyce's respective modes of exile. In order to understand how and why Joyce chose Dante to fulfill this role for him, it is essential that we take a look at the various iterations of the then contemporary Dantean exilic persona that Joyce would have encountered in his readings. 116 117 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 39. Ivi, p. 37. 45 2.1.2. Exile of a Poet Dante's exile occurred when he was at the height of his political career. An instrumental participant in the local government of Florence, he owed his position of influence to membership in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries. His rise in the ranks of the government eventually secured him a seat as one of seven <<priors>> or head magistrates of Florence. His election to the priorato occurred in 1300, the fateful year in which his pilgrim alter-ego would embark on his journey through the afterworld. Pope Boniface VIII's expansionist agenda had caused a rift between the White and Black factions of the pro-papal Guelphs and the Pope's increasing involvement in Florentine politics only aggravated the already tense political situation in the city. In 1301, Dante might have been present among an ambassadorial party sent to Rome on a mission to harmonize relations with the Pope. But Dante and the Whites' attempts to curtail papal power proved unavailing. In November of 1301, the exiled Corso Donati, leader of the Blacks, entered Florence and carried out a successful coup d’état of the government. The White Guelph regime was subsequently eliminated. Dante's whereabouts during this time are uncertain, but what is certain, however, is the date and the pronouncer of his sentence of exile. On January 27 1301, Dante and three fellow Whites were charged with political corruption by the new podestà of the city, Cante dei Gabrielli di Gubbio, and sentenced to two years of exile from the city. If found within the vicinity of Florence's territories, they were to be burned alive. Soon after the sentence was passed, the White Guelph and Ghibelline exiles met in the town of Gargonza between Siena and Arezzo. Together they strategized the possibility of a return to Florence. The ostracized allies would continue to plot their way back into Florence's embrace, but without any positive result. Dante would retain intermittent contact with his fellow exiles up until their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Florentine army in 1304. The ignominious defeat at La Lastra was the last straw for the vate and soon after the battle he quitted for good <<la compagnia malvagia e scempia,>> striking off on his own, a solitary wanderer dependent on the charity of sympathetic lords, nursing all the while a quiet hope that he might one day be able to return to the city he loved. In 1322, Dante died in Ravenna, where his remains are interred to this day.118 118 N. Havely, op. cit., p. 32 - 56. 46 In the course of his torturous wanderings, Dante produced his greatest works: the Commedia, De Monarchia, Il Convivio, and De Vulgari Eloquentia. A true party to himself, he must have known somewhere in his heart that his exile would glorify him to posterity and provide for countless artists and thinkers a heuristic through which they could interpret their own sense of alienation. Dante's mythical stature was established almost immediately after his death, the breadth and genius of the Commedia inspiring various scholars and writers such as Benvenuto da Imola and Boccaccio to write commentaries (Boccaccio's was to remain unfinished) to the poem. With his Trattatello in Laude di Dante, Boccaccio was the first biographer of Dante and the first to imbue Dante's image with the heroic qualities that would later cement his prophetic position atop the pyramid of the Western canon.119 2.1.3 Dante, Political Exile of the Risorgimento Centuries after his death, Dante's exilic persona would be reworked to valorize the nationalist agendas of writers such as Ugo Foscolo and Giuseppe Mazzini. Robinson writes, <<In its simplest form, the Risorgimento myth of exile held that the birth of the unified Kingdom of Italy would be brought about through the agency of its exiled patriots...>>120. Exile was, therefore, not only a badge of honor amongst Italy's nationalist intelligentsia, but almost a sine qua non for revolutionary aspirations in Italy. The most obvious candidate for the model of exilic nobility was Dante. The development of these writers' political philosophies would thus be nourished by the anecdotal realities of Dante's life. Through the work of figures like Foscolo and Mazzini, the popular perception of Dante would also undergo a profound transformation. Separation from one's homeland was seen, in the Risorgimento myth, as meritorious, but it is in the rite of homecoming that exile is given a special meaning. Those patriots whose duty it was to exile themselves for a time and then make their triumphant return home would, thus, in a sense, make up for Dante's unjust treatment. Many of the great romantic English poets of the 19th century would also be inspired by the Risorgimento myth. Byron and Shelley both drew inspiration from Dante, the latter for 119 120 Ibid. Ivi, p. 45. 47 example using Dante <<to further his own liberal, atheistic project[...]>>121 Shelley was one of several authors who were able to ignore the more inconveniently orthodox aspects of Dante's belief-system and to quote Joyce, fashion himself a sort of <<Dante without the unfortunate prejudices>>122. Byron also subscribed to the Risorgimento ideal of Dante as a political hero, writing a poem called "The Prophecy of Dante": For mine is not a nature to be bent By tyrannous faction, and the brawling crowd, And though the long, long conflict hath been spent In vain,—and never more, save when the cloud Which overhangs the Apennine my mind's eye Pierces to fancy Florence, once so proud Of me, can I return, though but to die, Unto my native soil,—they have not yet Quenched the old exile's spirit, stern and high.123 The fact of Dante's exile emerges in this poem as the key component of his virtuous fascination. It has been said that Byron's lionizing figuration of Dante did the most to shape the image of the exile in the English speaking world. However, Dante Gabriel Rossetti is, arguably, the most definitively influential student of Dante's legacy in the Anglosphere. The British-Italian poet-painter contributed highly to the Risorgimento myth of Dante in his poetry and art. His poem, "Dante at Verona" is emblematic of the Risorgimento take on the poet: So the day came, after a space, When Dante felt assured that there Sunshine must lie sicklier Even than in any other place, Save only Florence. When that day Had come, he rose and went his way.124 121 Ivi, p. 46. J. Joyce, ed. K. Barry, op. cit., p. 73. 123 George Gordon Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970, p. 31 42 124 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McCann, New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 25 -30. 122 48 Joyce's copy of the Vita Nuova was illustrated by Rossetti, its style lending a PreRaphaelite overlay to his conception of Dante as heroic exile. In Joyce's edition of the Vita Nuova were included two introductory essays by Antonio Agresti in which he describes Rossetti's first hypothetical encounters with the figure of Dante, evoking a vignette of the young poet-painter overhearing his father's friends' political conversations and consequently forming an idea of Dante as heroic political exile.125 These essays must have informed Joyce's understanding of Dante. The apolitical, universalist figuration of the vate would ultimately exert more influence on Joyce, but in the course of his sojourn in Trieste, the political characterization of the exile would also play a decisive role in the novelist's self-conception. In separating out Dante the exile from Dante the poet -- in effect using Dante 'against literature' -- the Risorgimento established a dialectic pendulum that inevitably swung back the other way, and came close to knocking down the patriotic statue of the poet in the process.126 The Risorgimento revival of Dante was symptomatic of the nationalist cult of Medievalism. Maurizio Isabella, in his essay, "Exile and Nationalism: The Case of the Risorgimento," says that intellectuals like Mazzini and Foscolo saw the middle ages as a <<great age of political freedom, independence, and economic growth, in which Italian cities led European civilization.>>127 Opposed to the medieval romanticism of the nationalists were the vociani, so-called because of their connection with the Florentine literary magazine La Voce. The vociani were believers in social progress and abhorred the <<cult of the past, which, in their eyes was encouraged by traditional scholarly and academic centers.>>128 The Trieste that Joyce would have known was a city crucially situated at a cultural crossroads. Slavic, Italian, and Austrian, Trieste was a major bone of contention between the irredentist nationalists, who saw the city as rightfully Italian, and the vociani who celebrated it for its cultural eclecticism. For both camps Dante remained, first and foremost, a political exile; however, it was the vociani who fought to protect Dante from what it perceived to be a stiflingly orthodox and culturally hegemonic view of the poet. The vociani strove, therefore, 125 J. Robinson, op. cit., pp. 51 - 52. Ibid. 127 Maurizio Isabella, Exile and Nationalism: The Case of the Risorgimento, <<European History Quarterly>>, XXXVI, 2006, p. 498. 128 Andrea Ciccarelli, Dante and Italian Culture from the Risorgimento to World War I, <<Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society>>, CXIX, 2001, p. 138. 126 49 to generate a secular version of their heroic exile whose aims were antithetical to the Church and nationalism.129 2.1.4 Joyce and Nora Abroad This was the social milieu in which Joyce became immersed and, as Robinson points out, the political-cultural tensions within this milieu must have made him feel <<strangely at home.>>130 Befriending irredentists, vociani, and futurists alike, he quickly detected similarities between the Irish independence movement and the irredentist agenda. The issue of Irish independence appealed to the local Triestines and he would perfect his written Italian by penning a series of editorials for local newspapers in which he discussed the political situation in Ireland. Distance from Dublin softened his resistance to all things Irish and in a lecture delivered at the Università Popolare, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," he eulogizes the enduring genius of the Irish spirit by referencing the homage paid by Dante to an Irish magician in Inferno 20131: Quel'altro, che ne' fianchi è così poco, Michele Scotto fu, che veramente Delle magiche frode seppe il gioco132 The exilic ideal which Dante embodied was thus transmitted to Joyce through the matrix of the cultural-political situation of the Istrian peninsula. Parallels with the political climate back home framed his interpretation of his <<voluntary exile>> and as a response to this newfound understanding, his childhood hero and behavioral model would be enlarged, not only by the exilic configurations of Byron, Agresti, and Rossetti, but also by the various vociani and irredentists with whom he came into contact. Rossetti and Byron's narratives would influence his perception of the exile as poet while the irredentists and vociani would bring his private guide into the public political sphere. What then was the final catalyst of Joyce's departure from that capital of paralysis? From what source did he derive the courage to turn his dream of voluntary exile into a reality? And after his exposure to the political and cultural realities of Pola, Trieste, and later Rome, how 129 J. Robinson, op. cit., pp. 52 - 53. J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 53. 131 J. Joyce, ed. K. Barry, op. cit., p. 108. 132 D. Alighieri, op. cit. trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander p.540. 130 50 would he recover and reinvent his personal spiritual guide such that the meaning and purpose of his exile might surpass the whims that had initially inspired it? In 1904, Joyce was finally fed up with his <<dear, dirty Dublin.>>133 He had found love in a simple, unliterary young woman, Nora Barnacle who had no understanding of his art but adored him all the same and it was perhaps the entrance of love into his life that emboldened him to attempt, for the second time, to find himself abroad. His effort at studying medicine in Paris had been abortive, but it had, at least, earned him a number of friends. Staking his hopes on the charity of those friends, he and Nora pooled what little money they had and together set out for Paris, but not before stopping in London with the intention of prevailing upon his friend Yeats' connections for a job. Unfortunately, none of these connections could offer him anything by way of remuneration. The couple then set out for Paris where a doctor friend was kind enough to give them a hot meal and lend Joyce sixty francs. Discouraged but undeterred, they decided on Zurich. Once arrived in the city, Joyce went immediately to the Berlitz School where he called on the director to ask after a possible vacancy. The director there informed him that there were not any vacancies but, after a succession of mishaps and missteps involving the Berlitz School in Vienna, Joyce was able to secure a position as an English teacher at the Berlitz School in Pola.134 There he met Alessandro Francini, director of the school. The Florentine paints an amusing portrait of Joyce who, with his bizarrely antiquated Italian, appeared as anomalous a figure as one could imagine: Joyce parlava allora uno strano italiano. Stracco convien meglio dire che strano, un italiano ciompo pieno di trafitte e scrofole che se fosse facile immaginare qualche cosa di simile direi che pareva la lingua unigenita figlia deforme di una balia opulenta accoppiata con un manfano di vecchio ciucciato e infistolato. Era, in ogni caso, una lingua morta che veniva a unirsi alla babele delle lingue vive [...]135 When Francini corrected Joyce for using the medieval word for sister, sirocchia, instead of the modern sorella, he responded, <<I learned my Italian from Dante and Dino [Compagni].>>136 Joyce would go on to learn modern Italian from Francini. His progress in the language was so rapid that the Florentine would later recount: 133 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 15. R. Ellman, op. cit., pp. 189 - 201. 135 A. F. Bruni, ed. F. Marucci, op. cit., p. 37. 136 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 193. 134 51 In one year he learned so well that I had to put brakes to his linguistic enthusiasm to leave time for my own program and keep from being pushed too far into the dark labryinth of linguistic curiosities and improprieties137 Joyce, however, was not fond of Pola, aspersing the city as <<a back-of-God-speedplace>> and a <<naval Siberia.>>138 But he and Nora would not stay there for long. The discovery of an espionage ring prompted the government to expel all foreigners from the city and so the lovers packed their bags to leave for the windy port-town of Trieste. Once in Trieste, Joyce made acquaintance with Almidano Artifoni, director of the Berlitz School, who offered him an English teaching job at an advance of forty-five crowns a month. For the next decade, he and Nora would, on and off, call this city their home. Now that he had gained the distance from Dublin he had so craved and was able to, inconsistently, support himself and Nora financially, he could test his exilic hypothesis to see if it would truly afford him the space he needed to imagine and create.139 Joyce's talent for assimilation engendered both respect and perplexity among the Triestines and the recognition he garnered as an intellect through his lectures and newspaper articles helped to expand his social circle. The wide range of company he kept -- irridentists, vociani, writers, poets, professors, and artists --- may have, superficially, fulfilled his need for community, but it did not detract from the appeal of exile. For Joyce, the reality of being an exile meant more than simply being an expatriate. While the role of the political exile was a significant vesture of his persona, it was another exilic symbol, one rooted in the sum of his experiences, that most attracted him. In her landmark study of Joyce's life and works, "The Exile of James Joyce," Hélène Cixous writes that his condition of exile in Trieste became <<no longer simply a separation from a world which he finds intolerable and which will not tolerate him but [...] an absolute exile, mindful of its origins.>>140 This <<absolute>> exile was one that predicated itself upon an impenetrable subjectivity, the kernel of this absolute exile being the knowledge of a self which is within a world yet which has such an acute awareness of so being that it experiences at the same time 137 E.H. Mikhail, James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, The Macmillan Press, London, 1990, p. 51. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 192. 139 Ivi., pp. 193 - 201. 140 Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A.J. Purcell, John Calder Limited, Charlottesville, 1976, p. 241. 138 52 a feeling of not-belonging. Not merely physical, exile then became a categorical condition of Joyce's soul. 2.2. Spiritual Exile 2.2.1 Exile and the Medieval Mind/A <<Passion for Individual Integrity>> Reverberations of absolute exile also occur in Dante's characterization of the psychological impact of social alienation upon the individual, but for him, separation is a state of existence born of an incongruity between the individual and the larger cosmic whole of which he forms a part. It is not an absolute existential condition. In the Convivio, Dante, hearkening back to Aristotle's Politics, clarifies the exact consequences of exile on the medieval mind, writing: e però dice il Filosofo, che 'l'uomo naturale è compagnevole animale.' E siccome un uomo a sua sufficienza richiede compagnia domestica di famiglia; così una casa a sua sufficienza richiede una vicinanza, altrimenti molti diffetti sosterrebbe, che sarebbero impedimento di felicità. E perrochè una vicinanza non può a sè in tutto satisfare, conviene a satisfacimento di quella essere la città141 Banishment from the city meant banishment from the human community itself. The citystate, being the highest form of human aggregation, was therefore, the social embodiment of the human soul itself. To be alienated from this human community would mean a complete fragmentation of subjective identity. In the 17th Canto of Paradiso, Cacciaguida illustrates in the most vividly sensory language, this state of disunity and disorientation: Tu proverai sì come sa di sale, Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale 142 The urgency of Dante's suffering -- emphasized by his meal of too-salty bread and the tedium of ascent and descent in unfamiliar surroundings -- must have been all the more striking to the medieval mind whose inclusion in the continuum leading from the individual to God himself was primarily mediated by inclusion in the life of the city-state. Joyce's taste for transposing Dante's higher registers to the realm of sublunary concerns is evident in the first chapter of Ulysses in which Stephen alludes to Cacciaguida's prophecy 141 142 Dante Alighieri, Il Convivio, ed. Francesco Flamini, G.C. Sansoni, Florence, 1921. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 445. 53 after considering the possibility that his housemate, Buck Mulligan may evict him from Martello tower. <<Now I eat his salt bread>>143 he thinks. Like Joyce, Stephen, freshly returned from his first journey abroad in Paris, is as much an exile at home as he is away; his state of absolute exile cannot be mitigated by physical separation for the fact of his exile is psychologically grounded. Joyce's reenactment of Dante's exile was, therefore, a psychological reenactment and his tendency to identify himself with those figures he worshipped -- Parnell, Byron, Dante -- stemmed from a desire to enter into their precise subjective experience of life and somehow thereby capture these heroes' <<passion for individual integrity.>>144 A studied, sensitive imitation of Dante's struggle for unity in the face of fragmenting dislocation would ensure him the <<individual>> artistic integrity he sought. By feigning to enter into Dante's very mind-state, Joyce furthers the significance of exile, casting beyond Rossetti, Byron, and the Irridentists' political understanding of Dante's influence without losing sight of the political significance of his martyred hero. As an artist, spiritual exile was, both at home and abroad, Joyce's cross to bear. 2.2.2 The Homo Viator and the Alienus In Dante's time, the spiritual exile was not without precedent and was most potently symbolized in the figure of the homo viator, or spiritual wayfarer. In his essay, "Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order," Gerhard B. Ladner defines the two conceptions of <<estrangement>> which typified medieval spirituality. Referring to St. Gregory's Moralia, a commentary on the Book of Job, Ladner writes, <<the fallen angel is the alienus, the alien or stranger, par excellence -- no doubt because he was considered to be the first among beings to be alienated from God.>>145 On the other side of the coin is the viator or the peregrinus, the traveller or pilgrim. Whereas the alienus is estranged from God for his lack of pious love, man as homo viator, is estranged from worldly things, which are themselves evanescent. <<The earth is to the just man what the bed in an inn is to the viator...he will rest in it bodily, but mentally he is already somewhere else.>>146 Ladner claims the distinction between these two types of estrangement to hinge on the symbolic 143 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 20. H. Cixous, trans. S.A.J. Purcell, op. cit., p. 304. 145 Gerhart B. Ladner, Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order, <<Speculum>>, XLII, 1967, p. 234. 146 Ivi, p. 235. 144 54 importance of Christ's sacrifice: through Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, man is transformed from alienus to homo viator. Thus one's life in this world is a peregrinatio, a pilgrimage by way of which man returns to his rightful home in heaven. Dante follows just such a path in his Commedia and in the creation of his pilgrim alter-ego he <<explores the potential of the exilic journey to act as a kind of meta-narrative through which a range of complex spiritual, psychological, and poetic concerns could be encountered>>147. Of all of his works, the Commedia centers itself most prominently on the figure of the homo viator, but the origin of the spiritual wayfarer can be traced back to the Vita Nuova. Like Joyce, Dante alludes to a state of absolute exile prior to the event of his actual exile. In the Vita Nuova, the protagonist's first pivotal moment of separation from his community occurs after the amorous looks which he had meant to be directed at his beloved Beatrice are misinterpreted as being intended for a young woman who happens to be sitting between them. Wounded by this apparent snub, Beatrice later refuses to exchange Dante's greeting after encountering him in the street. Her devastating refusal to acknowledge him causes Dante to withdraw from all human society and bathe the earth <<d'amarissime lagrime.>>148 Alienation from the community within the community is the chief factor in the evolution of Dante's existence as homo viator. It is only later, when he receives his sentence of exile and finds himself physically separated from his community, that his state of spiritual exile will be matched by physical exile. 2.2.3. Stephen Dedalus, the Alienus In A Portrait, a young Stephen, attempting to localize himself in the universe, comes to his first realization of isolation: 147 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 56. Dante Alighieri, The New Life/La Vita Nuova: A Dual-Language Book, trans. Stanley Appelbaum, Dover, Mineola, 2006, p. 18. 148 55 He turned the flyleaf of his geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name, and where he was. Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe149 This hierarchy represents Stephen's first exercise in self-conception. At the heart of the exercise is alienation, and it is in this act of initiating the <<process of writing his identity>>150 that he identifies the germ of his spiritual exile. A Portrait is, in essence, a chronicle of the successive phases of a burgeoning self-awareness that lead the young man towards self-definition. This procession of revelations, all occurring within him but always incited by an encounter with an unattainable object imposing itself on the narrator from without ultimately inspires his vow of becoming alive to <<the reality of [his] experience>>151 which as he will gradually discover, one of absolute spiritual exile. Of the three weapons with which Stephen purposes to effect his liberating act selfdefinition, <<silence, exile, and cunning>>152, <<silence>> is the most primitive. To liberate his soul artistic means requires that he apply himself to the writing of his identity and to write one's identity means having to withdraw from common discourse. Of the many parallels between A Portrait and the Vita Nuova, the most salient involves this act of writing one's identity. In both books, the reader is introduced to a young man whose endeavor to find his place in a discommoding community is unsuccessful and, subsequently, decides he write himself into the world instead. In Vita Nuova, Dante, increasingly aware of his destiny as viator, employs an ingenious tactic of silence when pressed by his friends to reveal the identity of the lady in his latest 149 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 13. J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 61. 151 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 214. 152 Ivi, p. 183. 150 56 poem. Availing himself of this tactic he writes, <<e quando mi domandavano: Per cui t'ha così distrutto questo Amore? ed io sorridendo li guardava, e nulla dicea loro.>>153 By forsaking speech, Dante allows his silence to be <<read>> by his peers, achieving a textualontological symbiosis whereby the performance of silence, smiling and coy as it is, lends further meaning and mystery to his poem while the poem itself stands for the silent figure's innermost identity and, therein, the reason for his silence.154 Silence is a tactic by which he draws his audience ever deeper into the reality of his spiritual estrangement and uses their curiosity as tool with which he writes his subjective self moment by moment. Peregrinatio, the spiritual journey, therefore, begins with silence, self-alienation being a necessary precursor to absolute exile. In A Portrait, Stephen's phases of self-awareness cause him to play frequently with the concept of the alienus. His establishment of himself as alienus, born of an understanding of his isolation, is aided by his silence and throughout A Portrait, Stephen continues to poetically develop this silence. After delivering to his friend Lynch a recondite disquisition on Thomistic aesthetics, Stephen notices his love interest sitting on the library steps. Joyce writes, <<Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of students, heedless of the rain which fell fast, turning his eyes towards her from time to time.>>155 His reaction to her presence is determined by the same methodic silence used by Dante when he encounters Beatrice among a group of other ladies. Stephen's repeated glances recall Dante and Beatrice's glances during their first encounter, but it is the element of silence in this scene that is most markedly Dantean. Separation from his beloved represents his separation from his community, but unlike Dante's refusal to speak, his legible silence goes unread. While Dante's behavior consistently elicits reactions, Stephen's acting out of his idol's silent withdrawal always seem to go largely unacknowledged. The most overtly Dantean portion of A Portrait is perhaps the "villanelle scene" which contains Stephen's first attempt to write a poem. The description of Stephen's creative process has no direct parallel in the Vita Nuova but the inclusion of the villanelle in the context of the larger narrative is a direct imitation of Dante's bildungsroman. The villanelle scene comes immediately after Stephen's encounter on the library steps. Safely at home in his room, the 153 D. Alighier, trans. S. Appelbaum, op. cit., p. 8. J. Robinson, op. cit., pp. 61 - 63. 155 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 281. 154 57 young artist decides to write a poem inspired by the sight of his beloved. The first three lines are the most relevant to the theme of the alienus: Are you not weary of ardent ways? Lure of the fallen seraphim. Tell no more of enchanted days.156 The reference to Lucifer is a reference to that singular Biblical paradigm of the alienus, the fallen angel who represents the fall of humankind itself. The emotional turmoil stirred in him by the sight of his beloved has threatened to destroy his individual integrity and after composing the villanelle, Stephen anxiously imagines her reaction to the poem were she to read it: If he sent her the verses? They would be read out at breakfast amid the tapping of eggshells. Folly indeed! Her brothers would laugh and try to wrest the page from each other with their strong hard fingers. The suave priest, her uncle, seated in his armchair, would hold the page at arm’s length, read it smiling and approve of the literary form.157 The visions animating Dante's poetic compositions in the Vita Nuova are also essential the narrative progression. One episode in the book portrays Dante on a trip to the countryside, a sort of mini-exile, during which he writes a poem that depicts Love <<in abito legger di peregrino>>158 Love-as-pilgrim being a common medieval variation on the homo viator trope. As testament to the vision, Dante writes a sonnet <<Cavalcando l'altr'ier per un camino>>159 the Christian imagery of which implies the redemptive quality of his state of exile, prefiguring the encouraging tone which will characterize Brunetto and Cacciaguida's prophesies of exile in the Commedia. Spiritual exile will, therefore, bestow upon Dante, the homo viator, a raiment of salvation that will guarantee his entrance into heaven. For Joyce, on the other hand, exile is, the condition of being an alienus. As such it brings his protagonist into closer communion with Satan than it does with Christ. Stephen sees the transference of his emotional state in verse as the dispersal of a sort of diabolical contagion. If the composition of his villanelle is the consummation of his "legible silence" than the very act of 156 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 65. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 188. 158 D. Alighieri, trans. S. Appelbaum, op. cit., p. 16. 159 Ibid. 157 58 engaging in Dante's poetic symbiosis of silence and text does not lead to his liberation but, conversely, results in a violation of his beloved's being: He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense of her innocence moved him almost to pity her, an innocence he had never understood till he had come to the knowledge of it through sin, an innocence which she too had not understood while she was innocent or before the strange humiliation of her nature had first come upon her.160 But it is all in his head. The poem is never read by Stephen's paramour. Stephen's assumption of Dante's instrument of legible silence is a self-crafting fantasy which never receives the validation of an actively engaged public. His silence cannot be, as it is for Dante, a preliminary condition to approaching the threshold of a larger Christian universe. The taxonomy through which he hopes to ascend from himself as particular to the universe as a whole will, therefore, have to wait until he crosses paths with his spiritual father in Ulysses. Only then will his conversion from alienus, the cast out angel, to homo viator, come to fruition. 2.2.4. "Cunning" as "Ingegno" The third implement in Stephen's armamentarium is "cunning." Surely Joyce would not have overlooked the Dantean resonances of this third term. A tidy compliment to Stephen's silence and exile can be found in a word used in the opening of Purgatorio: Per correr miglior acqua alza le vele Omai la navicella del mio ingegno Che lasciar dietro a sè mar si crudele.161 "Ingegno" has a number of definitions in the Commedia. "Ingegno" in Inferno 26 is Ulysses' hubristic intellect which leads him to go beyond the divinely instated bounds of human activity <<per seguir virtute e canoscenza>>162. Although the disproportionate inflation of personal ingegno is the cause of Ulysses' damnation, the ingegno is not, for Dante an inherently negative faculty and used correctly, that is, in accordance with the metric of divinely derived reason, it can be a virtue. Mario Trovato writes of Purgatorio's opening: 160 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 188. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 4. 162 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 478. 161 59 <<Ingegno is understood by Dante as the instinctive ability to evaluate and choose a a suitable inventive material and transform it into artistic images.>>163 Trovato continues: <<however [ingegno] must...submit [its choice of material]...to the court of ratio, the final judgment of which takes into account the suggestions given by experience, memory and culture.>>164 The difference between Dante's little bark of ingegno and Ulysses' hulking ship is a question, therefore, of proportion and direction. Proper choice of material prevents the artist from charting their course too far afield of the limitations imposed by God on his creation. The <<mar si crudele>> is the wide and desolate expanse of Ulysses' fruitless voyage towards absolute knowledge, while the smooth course that Dante's <<navicella>> pursues will lead its captain towards a soul-benefiting knowledge. Ingegno is synonymous with Stephen's cunning, but at this point in the novel, Stephen's theories are as yet untested, and so does his untried notion of cunning leave him on a precipice between Ulyssean hubris and Dantean prudence. To follow the path of Ulysses is to incur a similar fate, i.e. a fall analogous to that which Satan suffered. Whether or not the creation of himself in his art will lead to salvation or damnation is yet to be determined. Also yet to be determined is the material appropriate to his cunning. In the next section, the exact application of Stephen's ingegno will be further explored in the context of his Thomistic theory of aesthetics. 2.2.5. The "Spiritual-Heroic Refrigerating Apparatus" Having defined his three tools, Stephen will go on to explain how they form a unitary mechanism. James Robinson writes: In presenting 'silence, exile, and cunning' as the arsenal of Stephen's liberation, Joyce emphasises Dante's continuing presence in the Portrait, underscoring the movement from subjective alienation drawn from the Vita Nuova, towards the 'heroic' mode of Stephen's posited departure into an exile from where, in what represents a restatement of the Risorgimento myth[...] he will 'forge[...] the uncreated conscience of my race.'165 The object of these three tools' simultaneous usage is impishly hidden in a detail in one of Stephen's diary entries near the end of the novel. The entry is written soon after another 163 Mario Trovato, The Semantic Value of "Ingegno" and Dante's "Ulysses" in the Light of the "Metalogicon", <<Modern Philology>>, LXXXIV, 1987, p. 261. 164 Ibid. 165 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 76. 60 encounter with his beloved and his change in tone and voice (from third person to first) augments his final phase of self-awareness: April 15. Met her today point blank in Grafton Street. The crowd brought us together. We both stopped. She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us. She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said.166 The reference to the <<spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus>> contained on the last page of the novel, is jarring. No explanation of its meaning is given, and readers of Ulysses will interpret it as an overture to the countless riddles seeded throughout A Portrait's sequel. The expression is out of keeping with the sumptuous and seemingly unironic consistency of A Portrait's prose up until this point. Derek Attridge in his assessment of Stephen's psychological growth from the end of A Portrait into Ulysses notes the anticipatory shift in tone of his diary entry, stating: When we meet Stephen again in Ulysses, Joyce's new technique of interior monologue [...]gives us access to a mental world that possesses a linguistic and cultural richness (and humor) well beyond anything in the earlier novel.167 Humor, so conspicuously absent from A Portrait, is a central feature, one might say even the very motor, of Ulysses, and the first instance of Joyce's brand of humor, so selfconsciously literary and allusive, is this strange, self-effacing line written in Stephen's diary entry. Stephen is, at this point, still racked by the same anxieties concerning the threat of poetic contagion his imperfect compositions contain but the difference between his postvillanelle attitude and the one present in this passage is that now Stephen is finally allowed to speak for himself, and having been granted the power of selfhood, of being enclosed in an "I" 166 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 289. Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 77. 167 61 he reveals, in a moment of metacognitive irony, that he is aware of Dante's presence in his work and life qua mechanical "apparatus." Simultaneously, he reveals himself to be aware of the sparseness of his poetic output up until this point. By the end of A Portrait, Stephen can hardly call himself a successful epigone let alone an artist. But the question remains, just what is this <<spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus>> and how does it work? The hyphenated duality of the apparatus' function is evidence of Joyce's consciousness of the two exilic traditions which have been variously used to exploit the Dante myth by both political thinkers and artists alike. By combining the spiritual exile of Dante the homo viator with the Risorgimento political exile of Dante the hero, Joyce expertly encapsulates <<Stephen's idea of Dante as the inventor of a mode of alienation which operates through both a 'spiritual' and a 'heroic' aspect>>168 and that when set in motion offers him a <<model for his self-preserving, exilic mode of emotional alienation.>>169 Robinson goes on to say of Stephen that he: presents Dante as originating a mode of alienation that can be instrumentally applied in order to achieve a desired result: a liberating separation into the 'selfcommunion' that, if 'buy shyly welcomed' in the 1904 'Portrait of an Artist' essay , now seems to be wholly embraced.170 What Joyce seems to be saying is that in his youth his tendency to internalize the subjective experiences of his heroes caused him to imagine that the process by which Dante saves his soul and remedies the affliction of his exile is a process that can be used to fashion ones' estrangement from their community into a <<heroic-spiritual>> ideal of exile. However, Dante's poetry is not mechanistic, but essentially remedial; it is an organic response to an unwelcomed set of circumstances rather than a technological instrument with which the would-be artist might stylize and thereby sanctify his emotional states. By introducing the <<spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus>> Joyce casts doubt on both the politic and spiritual conceptions of the Dantean persona. More significantly, he strips his youthful self of the vainglorious pretensions of the <<self-fashioning mode of alienation>>. It is as if Joyce came to realize that, in his youth, he had channeled his energies into creating an artistic persona before actually verifying whether he was, in fact, an artist. The dream of exile 168 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 77. Ivi. p. 78. 170 Ivi. p. 79. 169 62 on which he had hung his hopes of spiritual rebirth then seemed foolish, when in 1907, a few years into his exile, he set himself to revising his earlier work Stephen Hero and realized that the <<spiritual-heroic apparatus>> had not produced the desired result. But that is not to say it produced no results at all. The distance he had put between himself and Dublin had rewarded him with a sense of community that corresponded neither to Trieste as a whole nor his circle of fellow intellectuals, but rather a <<form of intertextual community>>171 connecting him with his literary forebears. In that sense, his reference to Dante's <<spiritualheroic apparatus>> is a declaration of his intent to surmount the self-imposed circumstances of his exile by donating to the "republic of letters" a literary offering that would affirm his membership in that theoretical community. What the apparatus would produce was an unbroken lookingglass, one that would reveal in its reflection the true <<conscience of [his] race.>> 171 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 80. 63 3. Epiphany 3.1. Dubliners 3.1.1. The Early Epiphanies Intimations of exile are present in A Portrait as early as the first page of the novel which opens with a scene simulating the way a child assembles together the various objects in their world. They are objects lacking in discreteness and definition and what results from Stephen's juxtaposition of these objects is a series of impressions which cannot be said to "belong" to a subjectivity appended to a definite "I." Sound and music emerge most definitely from this sensory muddle and one of the first scenes to impress itself on Stephen's mind involves a poem: When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said: -O, Stephen will apologize. Dante said: -O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. Pull out his eyes, Apologize, Apologize, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologize172 The source of this scene can be found in a real event in Joyce's life. In 1891, his governess Mrs. Conway threatened Joyce, then 9 years old, with eternal damnation if he dared visit his 172 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 7. 64 Protestant neighbors, the Vances, again. In late adolescence, Joyce recorded the incident in his diary: Bray: in the parlour of the house in Martello Terrace. Mr. Vance--(comes in with a stick) . . . O, you know, he'll have to apologize, Mrs. Joyce. Mrs. Joyce--O yes . . . Do you hear that, Jim? Mr. Vance--Or else--if he doesn't--the eagles'll come and pull out his eyes. Mrs. Joyce --O, but I'm sure he will apologize. Joyce--(under the table, to himself) Apologize, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologize.173 This is one of Joyce's many <<epiphanies>> brief jottings containing overheard dialogue, descriptions of everyday scenes, or recalled memories. He would later weave these snippets of juvenilia into his fiction, adapting their tone to suit a specific narrative. This prototype of A Portrait's opening sees a young Joyce hiding under a table to escape Mr. Vance's stick. Hélèn Cixous interprets this scene as the author's discovery of Stephen's three weapons: against the stick he adopts exile under the table; against his mother's betrayal, he arms himself with silence; and against the fear of being blinded, he creates, utilising that fear, a relationship with himself, using the craft and cunning of art.174 In less than 10 lines, the teenager introduces, in miniature, the principle themes which will guide his work throughout his life. From the time he began recording his epiphanies, Joyce had assigned himself the task of creating a work of fiction which would be fueled by the poignancy of these epiphanic images; but to mold them into something that attained a fullness of moral scope was his ultimate aim. His main concern as an artist, as expressed by Stephen, was, therefore, the performance of a moral surgery which would revive his people by instilling in them a "conscience." This task and the state of exile permitting its execution implied a certain superiority on the author's part. The creation of a conscience implied the 173 James Joyce, James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellman and A. Walton Litz, Faber & Faber, London, 2001, p. 13. 174 H. Cixous, S.A.J. Purcell, op. cit., p. 298. 65 preexistence of a moral system, himself being the sole worthy exegete of that moral system. Such was the egoistic grandiosity that had given him refrigerating apparatus and such was the egoistic grandiosity that had driven him to now apply the medieval formulae he had learned from the Jesuits to the raw material of his life. And it was Dante who breathed life into these formulae. 3.1.2. The Publication of Dubliners In 1904 George Russell, theosophist and friend to Yeats, had read and enjoyed Stephen Hero and asked him to write a short story for the Irish Homestead. For a payment of one pound, Joyce wrote "The Sisters" which would be the first story in the collection. The story was a success and so Joyce went on to write two more stories: "Eveline" and "After the Race."175 Semi-comfortably exiled in Trieste, Joyce continued to write stories to add to the series, eventually sending them for consideration to the influential London publisher Grant Richards. In December of 1905, Joyce received an enthusiastic response from Richards asking him to sign a contract for publication of the stories. The indigent writer was overjoyed at the prospect of having a published volume of work and in 1906 sent Richards another story, "Two Gallants." Without reading it, Richards sent the story to his printer and received a reply requesting that Joyce make changes to some of its objectionable language. The history of its publication from that point on is a frustratingly interminable tale of artistic recalcitrance, false hopes, frequent setbacks and recurrent disappointment. English law worked against the young writer who admitted that he could not help <<but offend>>176 and who refused to make changes to details which he felt to be crucial to the understanding of the stories. "Two Gallants," "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," and "The Boarding House" were the culprits. In their correspondence, Joyce expostulates with the publisher in order that he might understand the significance of the stories for Irish history: If I eliminate [the objectionable words] what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my 175 176 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 174. J. Joyce, ed. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 83. 66 chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation in my country.177 His repeated appeals would not be enough to overturn English law nor would a letter written to the King of England requesting he weigh in on the matter of a line in Ivy Day that supposedly slandered King Edward VII, who had recently passed, receive a reply favorable to his cause. In 1909, Joyce was back in Dublin supervising the opening of the city's first cinema, when, after having given in to Richards' demands, he received notice that the printer had put off publication of Dubliners for the foreseeable future. Defeated, he devoted himself to perfecting A Portrait instead. It was not until 1913, after receiving a letter from Richards inquiring after the status of the collection that his hopes were restored. The publisher offered him a second contract and in 1914 Dubliners was finally released as a single volume, its accession to the canon of Irish literature proving not only locally groundbreaking, but transforming the short story genre forever.178 3.1.3. The Dantean Structure of Dubliners Explaining the meaning of the book's title to his editor Joyce wrote to Constantine Curran: <<I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that spirit of hemiplegia or paralysis which many call a city.>>179 Each story in Dubliners is a microcosm of that paralyzed polis, each character in each story personifying a specific symptom of moral, social, and intellectual hemiplegia. Together, the stories form an image of Dublin as a whole, their internal framework rife with intertextual mirrorings and allegorical correspondences. The complexity of the stories owes its framework to a Dantean scheme whose moral architecture Mary T. Reynolds elucidates in "The Shaping Imagination." Reynolds posits that the idea of dividing the stories in accordance with a tripartite Inferno structure entered into Joyce's mind as early as February of 1905 after his completion of the 18th chapter of "Stephen Hero," originally meant to be a parody of the Inferno. She identifies six stories in particular which a closely echo Dante's first canticle: "Araby," "Grace," "Two Gallants," "A Little Cloud," "The Dead," and a revised version of "The Sisters." Reynolds goes on to plot each story in relation to its corresponding canto or group of cantos. Dubliners is sequentially ordered in terms of the life- 177 Ibid. R. Ellman, op. cit., pp 169 - 175. 179 J. Joyce, ed. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 22. 178 67 cycle, the stories being separated into three groups representing childhood, adolescence, and maturity. Reynolds's Dantean division rearranges the order contained in this division. Without delineating every Dubliner-canto parallel on Reynold's table, it is worth noting that "Eveline" "Araby" and "After the Race" belong to the category of incontinence, "Counterparts," "A Painful Case," and "An Encounter" to violence, and "Two Gallants," "A Boarding House," "The Sisters," "Grace," "Clay," "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "A Little Cloud," "Mother," and "The Dead," to fraud (with "The Dead" being indexed to the antenora of the traitors specifically). From the mini-Vita Nuova present in "Araby," to the Inferno 3's <<gran rifiuto>> being evoked by the protagonist's frozen diffidence at the end of "Eveline," to the Filippo Argenti-like rage of Farrington in "Counterparts," every story in the Dubliners is shot through with echoes of Dante. So strong indeed is the underlying influence of Dante in Dubliners that the last story, "Grace" is itself a mini-Commedia with the drunkard Thomas Kernan making his pilgrimage from an infernal state of inebriated prostration to a paradisiacal place of forgiveness in the moral cash register of Father Purdon.180 3.1.4. Paralysis, Simony, Sodomy The collection itself begins with the "Sisters." The opening line, <<There was no hope,>> is a reference to the forbidding admonition written above the entrance to hell, <<lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate.>>181 While James Robinson doubts the likelihood that such a simple sentence was meant to recall Dante, it is equally doubtful that a writer as astutely allusive as Joyce would have overlooked the evocation.182 In her essay, "'The Sisters' and the 'Inferno': An Intertextual Network" Lucia Boldrini not only corroborates the Inferno parallel present in the opening line, but also makes a case for the web of intratextual thematic allusions -- strengthened by the intertexual allusions to various Cantos of the Inferno -- that tie the end of "The Dead" to the beginning of "The Sisters." Dante's presence in Dubliners is, thence, not merely schematic, but thematically crucial.183 In essence, Dubliners begins and ends on a note of "hemiplegia" or "paralysis." In fact, so powerful is this theme of "paralysis" that the very word holds a certain fascination for 180 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 156 - 174. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 46. 182 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 8. 183 Lucia Boldrini, "The Sisters" and the "Inferno": An Intertextual Network, <<Style>>, XXV, 1991, pp. 453 465. 181 68 the protagonist of "The Sisters." After receiving news of the death of a priest, Father Flynn who had been something of a mentor to him, the boy reflects on the days leading up to his death, how the priest had foreseen his impending expiration and how the boy had made nocturnal pilgrimages to the man's house during the priest's period of bedridden paralysis: Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.184 Dante's reaction to the admonishing inscription written above the entrance to hell is also paralytic: Queste parole di colore oscuro vid'io scritto al sommo d'una porta; per ch'io: <<Maestro, il senso lor m'è duro.>>185 The meaning of the inscription itself becomes one with its color, as if the danger they denote is also contained in their very form. The boy protagonist of "The Sisters" is similarly struck by the words "paralysis," "gnomon," and "simony," the three words evoking both the infernal inscription and the three beasts who Dante encounters shortly prior to meeting Virgil. The boy's reaction to the three words, however, is not the pure fear Dante experiences, but an admixture of fear, confusion, and curiosity. He is both repelled by and attracted to the strangely foreign quality of these words. When contemplated profoundly, <<paralysis>> in particular represents a portal into <<some pleasant and vicious region>> in which the boy's <<soul [recedes].>>186 Paralysis as a portent of hell seems to contain, for the boy, the promise of a sort of strangely comfortable, yet morally deleterious slumber. The attraction of the word "paralysis" makes the state of paralysis itself oddly appealing and this attraction becomes for the protagonist the pleasure of sin. The many forms of paralysis or near immobility to which the sinners in the Inferno are subjected, while hardly comfortable, are often typified by a certain somnambulant peevishness or what Samuel Beckett called <<the static lifelessness of an unrelieved bitterness.>>187 The simoniacs, for example, are punished by being stacked upside down in pits, forever paralyzed by their crime of trafficking in spiritual objects. The traitors are 184 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 1. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 46. 186 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 2. 187 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 401. 185 69 forever frozen in ice. The sin of sodomy is not punished by a form of immobility but rather constant movement. Boldrini writes The relationship between Dante and Brunetto on the hand and between the boy and Father Flynn on the other is treated in Inferno and in "The Sisters" in a similar manner: while both disciples show their affection for their masters, the latter are condemned for their sins.188 For Joyce, Father Flynn, one of his many <<fraudulent fathers>> is condemned to paralysis because of simony. A certain kinship exists between the two sins: <<sodomy and simony can be paralleled in that both Joyce and Dante consider them to be unnatural practices, physical and spiritual respectively.>>189 Apropos of the link between sodomy and simony, Brunetto makes a point of drawing Dante's attention to the many clerics present among the throngs of sodomites, <<insomma sappi che tutti fur cherci>>190. Brunetto also points to the hemiplegia afflicting the city of Florence by forewarning Dante against the danger of conforming to the city's corrupting influence, <<dai lor costumi fa che tu ti forbi>>191. These "costumi" are the same forces of habit which induce paralysis in the individual. Father Flynn, being a "gnomon" or an unfinished parallelogram, i.e. a spiritually incomplete individual, is also a creature of custom. His spiritual and physical paralysis is the punishment for his conformity to Dublin's corrupting customs and his sin of simony resides in an ill-defined impiety alluded to by the eponymous sisters, <<I'd find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in his chair and his mouth open.>>192 The story ends with one of the sisters' hearsay account of the priest mysteriously laughing to himself in his confession box. 3.1.5. Gabriel Conroy, the "ignavo" The cause of the priest's laughter is one of the many concluding moments of Dubliners that can be open to interpretation and the ambiguity of which is the key component of the adolescent Joyce's philosophy of epiphany. Whatever causes the priest to laugh must have something to do with that <<pleasant and vicious region>> where the boy meets again his 188 L. Boldrini, op. cit., p. 456. Ivi, p. 457. 190 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 282. 191 Ivi, p. 280. 192 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 6. 189 70 mentor and where the two are drawn together in the name of a <<a maleficent and sinful being.>>193 This nebulous world of mysteriously pleasant sin reappears at the end of "The Dead" when Gabriel Conroy has his revelatory moment of self-knowledge. The moment is provoked by his wife's disclosure of the existence of a departed teen-age lover who admired her in her youth. The shock of this discovery makes Gabriel question the degree to which he knows his wife and, as a consequence, how well he knows himself. An entire unexplored world of his inner being suddenly exposes itself in his heart. The unexplored world is the world of the dead and Gabriel realizes that he is, in truth, but a wanderer, a homo viator, despite the illusion of stability in which he had been immersed. The singular reality that seems to affirm his existence, in that moment, manifests itself as an awareness of sin, the same sin that manifests itself in the dreams of the protagonist of "The Sisters." The sensation is described in the same vein as the <<maleficent and sinful being>> of the boy's dream: <<some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in that vague world.>>194 Boldrini finds in Gabriel's epiphanic moment an echo of Dante. Up until this point, Gabriel has been defined by his passivity or what Dante calls, <<ignavia.>>195 The insipidity of this sin is such that <<neither heaven nor hell wants the souls of the 'ignavi.'>>196 Gabriel's acknowledgment of his own passivity thus impels him on a <<journey westward>> in which he will be able to, one hopes, cleanse himself of this sin.197 The beginning of Gabriel's journey at the end of "The Dead" is the incipit of the boy's journey at the start of "The Sisters." "The Dead" ends with an image of snow <<general all over Ireland>>198 a reminder of the traitor-tenanted ice of the Inferno's depths. Dante, having braved this region of ice, has two-thirds left of his pilgrimage to complete, but the surmounting of this first obstacle has taught him the courage that will propel him forward in his quest. It will not be until Purgatorio 27 that he will be abluted entirely of his fear. Gabriel, who has been pining throughout the story to go outdoors and breath fresh air, now finds himself in the woods, a clear reference to Dante's <<selva oscura.>>199 His confrontation with his own sinfulness puts him as close to the beginning of the Inferno as it does to the end. The 193 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 1. Ivi., p. 152. 195 L. Boldrini, op. cit., p. 459. 196 Ibid. 197 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 152. 198 Ivi., p. 152. 199 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 2. 194 71 <<vicious region>> of the boy's fantasies is replicated by the <<impalpable and vindictive being>> who is <<coming against>> Gabriel much like the she-wolf in Dante's dark wood appears to him ready to attack.200 By closing the thematic circle of Dubliners with this synthesized image of the beginning and end of the Inferno, Joyce embroiders the intertextual with the intratextual. Boldrini explains the result of this allusive feat: At first, when the world of Dubliners is first entered, there is 'no hope' of discovering the full significance of the stories; but, as readers reach the end, they will also realize that the 'journey' must be faced once again with increased hope of penetrating deeper into the text.201 3.1.6. "Araby," Joyce's Vita Nuova Whereas Reynolds considers "The Dead" a tale of traitorousness (Gabriel is excoriated at the party for being a <<west briton>> and therefore a traitor to his countrymen), Boldrini's placement of Gabriel in the antechamber of the ignavi does not necessarily contradict this reading and works well with the notion Dubliners' intra-/intertextual cycle. The most clearly intertextual rendering of Dante is the collection's third story, "Araby," a simple tale of a young boy who falls in love with his friend's sister. Love-crazed, the boy offers to buy Mangan's sister a gift from the Araby bazaar which happens to be in town. When he arrives there, a little too late, he finds it falls short of his fantastical expectations. Overcome by despondency, he feels his youth slip away and a new awareness of reality blossom in its place. The story, a condensed version of the Vita Nuova, is perhaps Joyce's most overtly romantic. Unlike "The Sisters" or "An Encounter," the message of "Araby" is more apparently apprehensible. The boy protagonist, who could easily be the same character that narrates the two aforementioned stories, embarks on a <<grail quest>> which ultimately disabuses him of his innocent fixation and in exchange for this loss of innocence imparts upon him a new consciousness of life's vastness. The knowledge he gains is the intratextual equivalent to the knowledge of sin gained by Gabriel Conroy. The initial intoxication experienced by the boy recalls Dante's exhiliration upon his first encounter with Beatrice. The 200 201 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 152. L. Boldrini, op. cit., p. 4. 72 boy describes his love at first sight moment in a mode paralleling Dante's encounter: <<All my sense seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring, O Love! O Love! many times.>>202 Dante's first vision of Beatrice is no less operatic: In quello punto dico veracemente che lo spirito de la vita, lo quale dimora ne la secretissima camera de lo cuore, cominciò a tremare sì fortemente che apparia ne li mènimi polsi orribilmente; e tremando, disse queste parole: «Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi».203 For the Dante, the <<image>> or <<figure>> of Beatrice is a <<prefiguration>> in the Augustinian sense of the word, i.e. <<a foreshadowing [...] of something subsequent, such as the Old Testament prefiguring the New Testament.>>204 In the case of Dante's first vision of Beatrice, the image is a prefiguration of God's love, something similar to the vision of Love dressed as a pilgrim which Dante receives during his trip to the countryside. The vate, never displaying any sexual desire for Beatrice nor confessing his love for her to anyone, always defines his affection in expressly romantic language. Nothing comes of his love for her while she is living, but her soul is destined to serve as Dante's guide through Paradise. Similarly, the boy's despair suggests the certainty of his love remaining unrequited, but this realization may spur the boy towards the creation of art. <<The protagonists of Dante and Joyce's stories lose the girl physically, but ultimately find themselves>> writes Richard J. Gerber.205 For both protagonists, this moment of truth comes at a propitious time. For the protagonists, of Joyce's childhood trilogy ("The Sisters," "An Encounter," and "Araby") there is a hope that they might be able to live with a conscientiousness which they otherwise might not have cultivated had they been deprived of their epiphanic experiences. Gabriel Conroy is Joyce's first mature self-portrait and his first attempt to reckon with the truths he had derived from his state of exile. The apotheosizing self-fulfillment which he had expected to find abroad never quite panned out and in lieu of its occurrence, Joyce's exile bore another fruit, that of wisdom, a 202 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 16. D. Alighieri, trans. S. Appelbaum, op. cit., p. 2 . 204 Richard J. Gerber, "La Figura": Image of Divine Love: The Figure of Beatrice in Dante's Vita Nuova and Mangan's Sister in Joyce's "Araby", <<Joyce Studies Annual>>, 2017, p. 268 205 Ivi, p. 270. 203 73 wisdom in which he found the humility (never an easy virtue for Joyce) to include himself in his infernal architecture. In "The Dead" Joyce asks himself where he fits into his own Dantean scheme and finds himself ultimately on the circular precipice between escaping hell at its egress and falling into it at its point of entry. As an author, Joyce's voice is most consonant with the characters of his childhood stories and as the stories progress into the stage of youth, his voice becomes more tenuous and rebuking, and by the time he reaches adulthood, his tone is that of moral outrage. With the addition of "The Dead" as the collection's coda, Joyce tempers his disgust with the lives of those superannuated Dubliners who have forfeited everything sacred (e.g. the love of the boy in Araby) for the sake of indolent conformity. After his time in Trieste, Joyce and Nora went to Rome where he found work as a bank clerk. The job was dismal and the city itself he found sepulchral. In a letter to his brother he compared Rome to, <<a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother's corpse.>>206 Unhappy in Rome, he begrudgingly admitted to an impossible emotion, homesickness. In reference to his portrayal of Dublin, a letter to his brother says, <<I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and hospitality, the latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe.>>207 Gabriel Conroy expresses a similar sentiment during Christmas dinner: I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of hospitality.208 Ellman says of this passage, <<this was Joyce's oblique way, in a language that mocked his own, of beginning the task of making amends.>>209 3.1.7. "Grace," the Sin of Flattery And yet, before amends were made, by way of a novella whose genius exceeded even the entirety of the other stories combined, Joyce had to, in his own wry manner, give vent to his Dantean spleen. "Grace" is the story that precedes "The Dead" and was originally meant to be the concluding story of the collection. Discussed earlier in this thesis, it is the story of a 206 J. Joyce, ed. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 108. Ivi., p. 110. 208 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 128. 209 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 254. 207 74 drunkard, Tom Kernan who falls down a flight of stairs and is charitably returned to his wife. Recovering in bed, he is joined by his friends who extol the virtues of the Irish branch of the Catholic church and the infallibility of the Pope. These friends convince Tom to join them on a religious retreat where he plans to renew his baptismal vows. Soon after this resolution, the three go to a Jesuit Church where Father Purdon delivers a sermon on the concept of grace. He ends the sermon by comparing the accumulation of good deeds to an account book. Grace is Joyce's first foray into combining the epical with the commonplace. In this case the parody is constructed around the three Canticles of the Commedia.. Tom and his friends are shortsighted and ignorant, the sort of vice-ridden, bourgeois drones which Joyce considered the scourge of Dublin and the source of the city's paralysis. The first part of the story witnesses Tom in a state of abject dissolution. The bottom of the stairs is his <<selva oscura>> and the image of him <<smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards>>210 parallels with the 8th circle of the Inferno in which the sinners are immersed in feces: Quivi venimmo; e quindi giù nel fosso vidi gente attuffata in uno sterco che da li uman privadi parea mosso211 This is the contrapasso pertaining to the sin of flattery. The disingenuous effusiveness of Tom and his friends' praise of the Church defines them as flatterers, a sin which Dante considered only slightly less reprehensible than simony. Father Purdon is the worst of the lot because of his simony. But he is also a flatterer and the worst kind at that. He flatters his congregation by, perhaps deliberately, misinterpreting a text from Luke to make it seem as if Jesus is praising the parable's character of the steward for his financial shrewdness. Purdon proclaims himself to be a sort of average joe who sympathizes with the business-oriented approach to life. Purdon's Jesus understands and forgives our <<little failings>> and remains cognizant of the <<temptations of this life.>>212 His not-so-tacit approval of the mediocrity of these men does not in any way bring them closer to grace but has the opposite effect. The men are further from salvation as ever before and ever more complacently entrenched in their unquestioning mode of living.213 210 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 151. D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 334. 212 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 131. 213 Carl Niemeyer, "Grace" and Joyce's Method of Parody, <<College English>>, XXVII, 1965, pp. 196 - 201. 211 75 Tom attainment of "divine grace" is thus a drastically vulgarized version of Dante's faceto-face encounter with God at the end of Paradiso. Grace, the most enigmatic and mystifying of all the theological virtues, is in this story bastardized to the point that it loses all meaning whatsoever. "Grace" portrays its characters as being beyond all hope. <<There was no hope>> reads the opening line to Dubliners, a line which just as easily applies to Father Flynn's situation as it does to Father Purdon's. If these then are Dublin's guides then surely they are debarred from entering heaven's gates. 3.1.8. Conclusion Only the children of Dubliners have any hope of acting forthrightly on their epiphanies. Whereas a character like Eveline comes close to the brink of flying free from Dublin but is paralyzed at the last moment, one feels that the narrators of "Araby" and "The Sisters" are already on the path to something like self-fulfillment. Being themselves early incarnations of Stephen Dedalus, their awareness of the morally askew, at least temporarily, indemnifies them from the rampant corruption and blind compliance of men like Tom Kernan. These children are closer to paradise than even Gabriel Conroy who, because of his ignavia, or lack of moral and spiritual commitment, suffers from an indolence that betrays his intellect. Despite his education, his ignorance of his own wife's inner life and the lives of his compatriots, brings him closer in spirit to Tom Kernan than it does to children of the first cycle. He is not yet without hope, but he is aware of the world in which he has lived up until this point and from which, with some effort, he can strive to escape, i.e. the world of the dead. The liminal space of Gabriel's moral conundrum, to the degree that it encompasses more than simply the antechamber of ignavia, is only known to Dante in the form of the <<selva oscura>> from which he most unambiguously escapes. The question of Dante's salvation is decided from the very outset of his journey, Beatrice's appearance in Inferno 2 guaranteeing as much. For Joyce, on the other hand, the question of salvation is itself a thorny one. Whether such a state is even a reality is, in his mind, highly debatable and so the threshold upon which Gabriel stands is the threshold of belief itself. <<The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward>> reads one of the final lines of the story.214 This is his pilgrimage away from the source of the sun and towards the land of the dead where, perhaps, 214 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 152. 76 he might be able to salvage something of his soul. Joyce, having made attempts to create a conscience for his race, now finds it incumbent upon himself to regain his own conscience. Gabriel's epiphany is Joyce's epiphany. Many more epiphanies occur in Dubliners: Eveline's balking at the brink of exodus from Dublin, Little Chandler's realization of his artistic impotence, James Duffy's misconceived conviction that he himself is the cause of Mary Sinico's death. What is an "epiphany" for Joyce how can the concept be applied to his Dubliners stories? Joyce never called his stories "epiphanies" but rather "epicleti" a misspelling of the Eastern Orthodox ritual of epiclesis which corresponds to the Eucharist in Catholic liturgy.215 An indepth exploration of the meaning of epiclesis in "Dubliners" and the rest of Joyce's work will form the final part of this thesis, but first an exploration of the concept of Joycean epiphany is warranted. Since the emergence of the "Stephen Hero" manuscript in 1945, the topic of epiphany in Joyce's work has been a matter of controversy. The discovery of Joyce's "epiphany theory" has led many scholars to apply the concept of epiphany as a key heuristic through which one can unlock the many mysteries of Joyce's writing. 3.2. "Epiphany-Hunting" 3.2.1. The Origin of "Stephen Hero" "Stephen Hero" began as an essay. In 1904, Joyce submitted the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist to the Irish literary magazine Dana. The essay, mixing selfaggrandizement with self-irony, was Joyce's first major effort at creating a serious work whose import went beyond the hyper-refined aesthetic of his recorded epiphanies. The style of A Portrait combined elements of the essay and the short story resulting in a self-conscious account of the artist at work, ascending to the summit of creation by defining his place atop it. Ellman writes: At the age of twenty-one Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him.216 215 216 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 150. Ivi, p. 144. 77 The process of describing the artistic process itself would continue to engage him for the rest of his life. Due to the essay's riddling prose and sexual content, it was rejected for publication by John Eglinton, the pseudonym of W.K. Magee, upon whom Joyce would revenge himself by casting him in the role of his effete adversary in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses. Joyce's rage at this rejection would prove productive and by February 10, 1904, he had finished the first chapter of Stephen Hero. His theme was <<the portrait of the renegade Catholic artist as hero>> and his hero was <<the defector from religion and the insurgent artist.>>217 And so Stephen D(a)edalus was born. 3.2.2. "Epiphany Theory" in "Stephen Hero" Stephen Hero features the same bumptious, self-regarding schoolboy who will become the protagonist of the 1914 A Portrait. Stephen Daedalus considers his verses so brilliant he thinks they should <<be numbered among the spiritual assets of the State.>>218 He <<[professes] scorn for the rabblement>>219 and has a <<commandment of reticence.>>220 The element of irony that Joyce perfects in A Portrait is absent from Stephen Hero, but the appeal of the novel's earlier form is derived from the presence of an unvarnished Stephen Daedalus, one who seems to give unobstructed utterance to the young writer's pre-exilic hubris. Stephen Hero is the true portrait of the artist as a young man as he conceived of himself while still a very young man. The novel centers its focus, among other things, on Stephen's obsession with Ibsen and Dante, his adventures in brothels, his refusal to sign a petition for world peace, and a handful of images which would be inserted into "Ulysses." One of the portions of the book which would carry over, nearly intact, into A Portrait was Stephen and Cranly's (Lynch in A Portrait) discussion of aesthetics. Fresh from a failed attempt to woo a love interest, Stephen divulges to his friend that he has been keeping <<a book of epiphanies>>221 His latest epiphany treats of a young woman he saw sitting on the steps of Belvedere's library. The <<trivial incident>>222 inspired him to write a poem, the 217 R. Ellman, op. cit., pp. 149 - 153. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 86. 219 Ivi, p. 102. 220 Ivi, p. 127. 221 Ivi, p. 159. 222 Ibid. 218 78 "Villanelle of the Temptress." He then presents an unsolicited definition of "epiphany." This definition, cause of so much debate in Joyce scholarship, is as follows: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.223 Morris Beja, in his book, "Epiphany in the Modern Novel" paraphrases this definition in order to further clarify it: [Epiphany is] a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from one object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind—the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it.224 What follows is an explanation of the three Thomistic qualities necessary to the creation of art. <<The three things requisite for beauty are, a wholeness, symmetry, and radiance.>>225 In Aquinas's Latin the three qualities are integritas, consonantia, and claritas. To see an object as one thing distinct from all things is to perceive its wholeness or its integritas. The next step in the formula is to apprehend the object as being made up of various parts which are in harmony or consonant with one another. This is consonantia. The final criterion is the knottiest for Stephen. For a long time he had been unable to work out just what it was, but finally concludes that <<claritas is quidditas.>>226 In A Portrait Stephen further elaborates on the meaning of "quidditas" by translating it as the "whatness" of a thing or that which <<makes it outshine its proper conditions.>>227 In summation, the artist first perceives the congruity of the thing, then perceives its being made up of individual parts, and finally perceives <<its soul...which leaps to us from the vestment of appearance.>> And thus the object <<has achieved its epiphany.>>228 He concludes by saying that even an object as mundane as clock could be considered epiphanic. The end result of this process, its synthesis into epiphany does not appear at all in the mature novel and some scholars, most notably Robert Scholes, have gone as far as to aver 223 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 160. Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, University of Washington Press, Washington, 1971, p. 18. 225 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 161. 226 Ibid. 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid. 224 79 that Joyce abandoned the concept entirely. And yet the concept is so fundamental to Stephen Hero that, once known, one feels its phantasmal presence in A Portrait. Harry Levin in his "James Joyce: A Critical Introduction" was the first to shed light on epiphany, advising readers of Joyce to ferret out epiphanies in all of his major works, <<Listen for the single word that tells the whole story. Look for the simple gesture that reveals a complex set of relationship.>>229 Irene Hendry, in her seminal essay "Joyce's Epiphanies" argues that Joyce's genius does not consist in his supposed "discovery" of epiphany, which was an idea already rife with antecedents when Joyce wrote Stephen Hero, but rather stems from his application of a <<systematic formulation to a common esthetic experience.>>230 Hendry detects epiphanies scattered everywhere throughout Stephen Hero, A Portrait, and Ulysses: <<factory boys and girls coming out to lunch; the witless laughter of an old woman; the screeching of a mad nun; a servant singing; the salutation of a flower girl.>>231 3.2.3. The "Vulgar" Epiphany Joycean, Robert Scholes warns against this sort of "epiphany-hunting."232 For Scholes, Joyce's recorded epiphanies, those included in his mature works, become mere "incident[s]"233 when contextualized within the world of the over-arching narrative and what survives of Stephen's definition in the process of transplantation is merely the aspect of <<vulgarity of gesture.>> As such the epiphany is no longer a spiritual moment but, <<a piece of prose, subject to criticism like any other.>>234 To support his thesis that Joyce repudiated the epiphany theory, Scholes cites one of Stephen's diary entries at the end of A Portrait in which he criticizes the epiphanic entry preceding it as <<vague words for a vague emotion.>>235 His dismissal of the entry on the grounds of its vagueness would then seem to indicate a more mature artistic sensibility on Stephen's part, one that is alive to its limitations and understands the necessity of not merely apprehending a momentary vision but also fashioning it into something artistic. Scholes equates this new turn of mind, this epiphany of 229 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, New Directions Publishing, New York, 1960, p. 29. Irene Hendry, Joyce's Epiphanies, <<The Sewanee Review>>, LIV, 1946, p. 451. 231 Ivi, p. 453. 232 Robert Scholes, Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?, <<The Sewanee Review>>, LXXII, 1964, p. 66. 233 Ivi, p. 75. 234 Ivi, p. 76. 235 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 214. 230 80 the uselessness of epiphanies, as evidence of Stephen's having <<worked himself free of Platonic idealism.>>236 In the wake of this attempted demolition of epiphany, Florence Walzl exerted efforts to reinstate epiphany's supremacy in Joyce scholarship by expanding the concept to encompass the entire symbolic edifice of Dubliners. The collection had long since been considered by scholars such as William York Tindall <<a great epiphany and the container of little epiphanies, an epiphany of epiphanies.>>237 By determining the relevance of the original religious significance of epiphany in Joyce's work, Walzl addressed what so many Joyce scholars had only mentioned in passing. "Epiphany" comes from the Greek word for "appearance" or "manifestation."238 During the early Christian era, "epiphaneia" evolved to mean a, <<visible manifestation of a hidden divinity either in the form of a personal appearance, or by some deed or power by which its presence is made known.>>239 Epiphany is also used to refer to the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January which is associated with the star that guided the Magi to the newborn Christ. Walzl says that Joyce borrowed the symbolic meanings constitutive of the epiphany cycle in preparing the structure of "Dubliners." In addition to an array of symbols, each season brings with it certain motifs and colors. Most importantly, the cycle was, in the middle ages, not simply ceremonial but also a <<universal time scheme>> which paralleled the <<career of Christ.>>240 Walzl combats Scholes by maintaining that Joyce not only used the religious concept of <<epiphany>> as a supporting framework for Dubliners but also adopted the concept as a <<mode of characterization>> in his <<narrative technique.>>241 The life cycle of "Dubliners" in its three stages of childhood, adolescence, and maturity is, therefore, an allegorical representation of the epiphanic seasons and, in that vein, an allegory for the life of Christ. Liturgical epiphany is at the heart of Joyce's masterpiece and a significant clue to an understanding of "Dubliners" as it relates to his grander vision. But if, on the other hand, Scholes's theory is accurate, the vulgarization of epiphany still does not reduce the concept to naught. Joyce's aim to depict life <<as we see it before our 236 R. Scholes, op. cit., p. 70. William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1995, p. 11. 238 Florence Walzl, The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce, <<PMLA>>, LXXX, 1965, p. 436. 239 Ibid. 240 F. Walz, op. cit., p. 437. 241 Ivi, p. 438. 237 81 eyes>> involved a careful domestication of the transcendent. Like Dante, he wished to lay bare seemingly inaccessible truths to the extent that they could be made to speak to the senses. But an affirmation of the importance of epiphany in Joyce's work begs the question of whether or not the experience is vouchsafed to the artist alone. Is the recognition of an object's ultimate claritas equivalent to the process of transmogrifying the object into a work of art and, consequentially, an epiphany or is the experience of a completed epiphany available to any mortal regardless of their artistic capacities? Stephen claims that it falls upon the <<man of letters>> to record these experiences. In that respect, it would seem that the experience of epiphany can only be properly identified by someone endowed with the ability to give shape to it. However, none of the men and women of the Dubliners possess Stephen's Thomistic credentials. If the boy in "The Sisters" and Eveline and Mr Duffy do, in fact, experience epiphanies then it is no use distinguishing between the "real" epiphany of the artist and the "false" epiphany of the non-artist. <<There is a touch of the artist about old Bloom>>242 says Lenehan of Leopold and the same observation easily applies to any of Joyce's characters. For an artist to exist <<within or behind or beyond or above>>243 their art is, for Joyce, to word the unuttered, the mediating presence of the artist being just that, a mediating presence. But so long as Stephen is not able to produce art he is no more an artist than Little Chandler is an artist; nor does Gabriel Conroy's declaration to himself that he is <<an artist>> and that his words are not, therefore, <<hollow and meaningless>> make him artist.244 But does Joyce, undoubtedly an artist, by repurposing his epiphanies give them a greater validity? He does not seem to offer any unequivocal response to this question. Zack Bowen writes Stephen tries to rationalize and comprehend the relationship of truth to beauty in his aesthetic theory. In doing so, he attempts to describe the substance of his epiphany process and place it in the perspective of the integrity and truth of his own revelations.245 The <<integrity and truth of>> Stephen's or anyone's <<revelations>> is the claritas of an object. What pours forth from the epiphany is claritas and claritas should be understood as 242 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 225. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 171. 244 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 99. 245 Zack Bowen, Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach, <<Journal of Modern Literature>>, IX, 1981 - 1982, p. 110. 243 82 being one with truth. Bowen proffers as an example Stephen's poetic alteration near the end of A Portrait of his vision of a girl on a beach. This anonymous figure is transformed into a bird-girl whose appearance betokens Stephen's migratory destiny, that is, his flight from Dublin and into exile. A parody of the scene occurs in Ulysses when the sight of Gerty McDowell on the beach sexually arouses Bloom. The inspired banality and occasional boorishness of Bloom's internal monologue lack the high-flown poetry of Stephen's musings, but in a sense the very commonness of his thoughts gives them an accuracy unknown to Stephen's conception of truth. The "truth" of Stephen's epiphanies is often more beautiful than it is "true" while the beauty of Bloom's mundane observations is often truer than it is beautiful. The exact equation is never achieved. Time and time again Joyce's characters experience epiphanies that do not result in any sort of fruitful reevaluation of their lives.246 In Dubliners, the majority of his characters will continue their lives of paralysis, indifferent to their epiphanies. Epiphanies seem to represent some ultimate truth residing in the subconscious, but in reality they have little more validity than the original experiences from which they stem, or, for that matter, the recognitions of other epiphany holders in Joyce's work [...]247 The validity of epiphanies is not, therefore, in Bowen's mind, commensurate with the advisability or the practicability of the lessons enclosed therewith, nor is the beauty of the ideal generated by the experience a reliable signal the ideal's truthfulness. But the epiphany cannot, in those respects, be called "invalid" nor "useless." The "use" of epiphany, as Joyce learns after having evolved beyond his "Stephen Hero" persona, is its capacity to allow the author to enter into communion with others, or in other words, to be initiated into a human community. What the artist provides by unraveling epiphanies is an image of humankind as it is, not as it should be. The epiphany is, therefore, public property, but Stephen is not wholly misguided when he says it is for the <<man of letters>> to interpret it. The poet is charged with this task not because the poet sees what others do not, but because they are willing to say that they see it, and spend quite a lot of time putting pen to paper in order that others might acknowledge these visions themselves. This generative experience is, for Stephen, in essence, vulgar. Does he intend with this word "vulgar" to cleanse himself of the polluting influence engendered by the raw and formless material of immediate reality? Or does he mean to say 246 247 Z. Bowen, op. cit., p. 109 - 110. Ivi., p. 113. 83 that the epiphany, is, at its core, vulgar even after it has been given form? At an earlier time in his life Joyce might have adhered to the former viewpoint, but it is clear from Dubliners that, Joyce the exile grew fonder of the latter viewpoint. The "vulgarity" of a vision does not take away from its sublimity, but rather gives it greater meaning. The vulgarity in Dubliners is not -- or not always -- the grotesque or malformed, but rather the language spoken by everyday people and, on a larger scale, the language of everyday life itself. 3.2.4. Revelation, The Vernacular, Sermo Umilis/Sermo Sublimis This is Dante's "volgare," the vernacular, the idiom of the streets, the language with which one can communicate ideas, even the most esoteric, in accordance with common understanding. "Divulgazione," dervied from the word "volgare" is the process by which knowledge is translated into the vernacular. In his essay, "Dante and the Poetics of Religious Revelation," William Franke argues that the most revolutionary aspect of Dante's approach to history and knowledge, that which Dante calls scientia, is his ethical impulse to share this knowledge with the world -- the world being for him all the souls of Christendom.248 Franke writes Dante took upon himself the task of vulgarizing clerical knowledge and so of placing the nourishment of a divine scientia as well as of human wisdom, theretofore reserved largely for sterile fruition by the few learned in a dead language, on tables for general cultural consumption by all whose natural desire to know survived uncorrupted.249 And so it was urgent that he spoke to as many people as he could about as many things as he could in the most accessible way possible. To comprehend the urgency that impelled Dante to write his poetry in the vernacular, one must know something about his interpretation of history. In Dante's medieval mind, <<truth is time-trascendent>> and governed by a theologically determined sense of history.250 To borrow a hackneyed turn of phrase, time is <<history in the making.>> Divine truths, presaged by scripture and revealed through symbols apprehensible by our sensible intuition, are born out by historical events themselves. To whom is knowledge and/or truth of these events granted -- the historian, the prophet, or 248 William Franke, Dante and the Poetics of Religious Revelation, <<symplokē>>, II, 1994, pp. 103 - 116. Ivi, p. 109. 250 Ivi, p. 104. 249 84 the <<man of letters>>? In Dante are all three of these titles are combined. Dante's <<prophetic spirit>> captures the coming into being of an event while it is in his capacity as historian that he is able to "read" the meaning of the event. However, only by means of his poetic license is he permitted to make his reading "readable" at a mass level. The "legible" form of history can only be disclosed to one who satisfies the qualifications of historian, prophet, and poet. But, above all, he must also have a self-sufficient faith, perfect in and of itself, which cannot be contingent on the historical, the prophetic, nor the poetic. Only then will God reveal himself in his inexhaustible wholeness. Without faith, all that is revealed to the poet amounts to an exact replication -- in historical time -- of scripture's truths, but not the Word of God, the logos, which reveals itself not through predictable self-fulfilling patterns but through the contingency of events themselves. The Commedia is the epic in which prophecy, history, and contingency are reconciled. Cacciaguida's prophecy in Paradiso 17 tersely summarizes the exceptional visionary essence of Dante's prophetic gift: Così vedi le cose contingenti anzi che sieno in sé, mirando il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti251 In simple, unadorned language, Cacciaguida emphasizes contingency's centrality to revelation, time dissolving into a single point and the ineffable meaning of history revealing itself all at once. And yet the importance of the revelation lies not in the prerogative of the receiver to receive it but in the ability of the receiver to transmit it. It is in the act of transmission, or better yet, divulgazione that the revelation gains its true meaning and, effectively brings into being the Word of God. The knowledge transmitted therein is not a fixed and stable body of axiomatic information, but a persistently mutable echo of divinity itself. Thus Dante reveals the essential instability of knowledge. <<For a historical being to judge that anything is thus and so is to overstep what can be strictly warranted on the basis of its own epistemic condition as constantly in flux.>>252 Unlike the fossilized grammar of ecclesiastical Latin, the vernacular is always in flux, meaning it is always evolving to adapt itself to the needs of an ever-changing world. For the cloistered scholar, the vulgar is what Eric Auerbach calls the sermo humilis253, a simplified 251 252 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 441. W. Franke, op. cit., p. 111. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Edward Said, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1953, p. 72. 253 85 mode of expression used to address the illiterate commoner, a style recalling Joyce's technique of <<scrupulous meanness>> with which he wrote the "Dubliners." Opposed to sermo umilis is sermo sublimis254, that is, a heavily rhetorical form of elevated speech used in tragedies and appropriate to the portrayal of great men and great deeds. As Dante ascends from the deeps of hell into the spheres of heaven, sermo umilis gives way tonally to sermo sublimis as the ignoble slang laden argot of the lower-level sinners transitions into the highly Latinate language of theological revelation. However, the language remains, despite its Latin bent, the vulgar and as such it remains, in essence, sermo umilis. Dante's break from antiquity is thus effected through the fusion of sermo umilis with sermo sublimis. Put simply, by writing in the vernacular he makes a clear statement that no Christian is precluded from joining in the banquet of knowledge, that feast in which all souls feed of the <<pan de li angeli>>.255 Of course Dante is not the first to bring the two forms into conjunction. St. Augustine writes about the initial perplexity he experienced upon being exposed to the simplicity and baldness of Biblical language. Auerbach comments on Augustine's first impression of the sacred scriptures, <<non aveva ancora capito, egli dice, che la loro apparenza esteriore era umile, ma il loro contenuto era sublime e velato di misteri.>>256 After living with the text for some time, Augustine begins to find his way among the arcane meanings hidden behind the veil of so much plainness of speech: Perciò, al fine di purificare la mente umana di questa sorta di falsità, la Sacra Scrittura che si adatta alla mentalità di bambini, non ha evitato tutte le parole da ogni categoria di oggetti reali attraverso le quali, come per nutrimento, il nostro intelletto possa ascendere gradualmente alle cose divine e trascendenti.257 He goes on to raise issue with the pompous rhetorical style that hides its meanings <<sotto il velo dei misteri>> and <<neppure allora ha l'aria di che possa allontanare le menti un po' tardi e rozze come alle volte il povero non osa avvicinarsi al ricco.>>258 With this distinction between the high and low style in mind, Auerbach makes the claim that Augustine's writing advances the development of "realism" combining as it does two styles such that it might articulate the relationship between the sacred and the profane which lies at the heart of the 254 E. Auerbach, op. cit., p. 151. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 34. 256 Erich Auerbach, Sacrae Scripturae Sermo Umilis in Studi su Dante, trans. Maria Luisa De Pieri Bonino and Dante Della Terza, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2005, p. 170. 257 Ibid. . 258 E. Auerbach, trans. M.L.D.P. Bonino and D.D. Terza, op. cit., p. 171. 255 86 Christian message. He cites one Augustinian image in particular, found in his Sermons as the most exquisite symbol of this leveling of styles: <<[la] fiamma che scaturisce da un bicchiere d'acqua fresca.>>259 In this image, an everyday object taking on extraordinary properties recapitulates the grandeur and degradation of the crucifixion. The artist who will bring this genre of image -- i.e. one born of the coupling of the earthly and the divine in a language both authoritative and austere not despite but because of its "vulgarity" -- to its stylistic apex is, of course, Dante. In the 8th chapter of Auerbach's Mimesis, he describes Dante's revolutionary virtuosity of style saying, <<the themes which the Comedy introduces represent a mixture of sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity is monstrous.>>260 This mixture of styles is reminiscent of the language of The Bible, a text which was also considered solecistic when <<measured by the standards of antiquity.>> To the degree that the style of the Commedia is in keeping with the Biblical tradition of commingling registers, the achievement of such an expressive modality can be understood as the vehicle of revelation itself. To support his authority as theologico-historico-prophet-poet Dante had the entire suprastructure of scholasticism behind him, its Aristotelian classifications and encyclopedic approximations of absolute ideals demarcating out an apposite space for his personal revelation. The clocklike machinery of Dante's cosmic teleology may not be exactly what Joyce had in mind when he has Stephen refer to his <<spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus>> but that the elusive locution lends itself to such a reading is unquestionable. Through an allegorical-aesthetic conversion process Dante is able to turn his personal, ineluctable revelation into its rationalized symbolic counterpart and make it available for mass consumption. Stephen would like to get the machine to do the same for his epiphanies, but his knowledge of Dante and scholasticism is not enough to form his world anew such that it might properly dignify his visions. Whereas Dante was able to create a perfect alignment between his symbolic personages and the scriptural topoi ubiquitous in the medieval psyche, Stephen is unable to achieve such a symmetry between the form of his mind and the structure of the world surrounding him. Thus, he and his epiphanies remain in a state of suspended animation, the meanings of these epiphanies never quite disclosing themselves. 259 260 Ivi, op. cit., 175. Id. p. 184. 87 3.2.5 Ingegno and Epiphany Stephen is always wrestling with the raw material of his epiphanies as he attempts to give life to an image that might rival the unassuming sublimity of Augustine's flaming cup. After expounding upon his three artistic criteria, Stephen touches upon some of the questions which he has been asking himself in his attempts to apply his theory: "Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? [...] If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood [...] make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?"261 Stephen is that man comically <<hacking in fury at a block of wood>>. The question of whether the finely made chair, a reference to the quintessential example of the Platonic form, is tragic or comic, on the other hand, concerns what register of language, sublimis or humilis, is most suitable to describe that object or, any banal object, such that it might become epiphanic. The particular and the universal -- an earlier chapter of A Portrait shows Stephen trying to relate himself as a particular to the universal writ large; now, having rejected the calling of the priesthood and fully devoted to reinventing himself as an artist, Stephen exercises himself to find the universal (the Platonic cow form) in the particular (the block of wood). Epiphany, in Stephen Hero, is the liminal space between the two. In A Portrait it is the enythmeme, or the unstated premise, of the syllogism by which the transformation is accomplished. Stephen is working backwards, trying to wrest the divine from the banal without any expectation that the divine might of its of its own volition impress itself upon him extraneously. Is it his lack of faith or the simply fact of being born in the wrong era that prevents Stephen from receiving one grand revelation of the Dantean variety and instead having to make due with so many atomized "mini-revelations" of his own minting? These mini-revelations seem to be leading him nowhere, but his artistic strategy, in contrast, is something of work of art in its own right. Previously, the topic of "ingegno" was introduced. Ingegno, as we discovered, corresponds to Stephen's "cunning." It is that faculty which apprehends the three stages of artistic objectification and then polishes the resultant object. It is the tool <<hacking in fury at the block of wood.>> Mario Trovato's description of the cogitative procedure of ingegno, a concept whose origins are Aristotelian and whose scholastic connotations were defined by John of Salisbury in the Metalogicon, has resonances with Stephen's description of artistic 261 J. Joyce, op. cit, p. 251. 88 apprehension. Ingegno, as discussed earlier, is for Dante, the intuitive ability to excise a specific object from the sensuous welter of empirical perception.262 The designated object of ingegno is then <<the sensato, or a concrete object perceived by the external organs.>>263 Once the ingegno isolates its object, it <<abstracts the inorganic or insensata image, which is an intelligible, though, particular sign of knowledge from which the agent draws the idea or the universal form.>>264 All human beings are born with a certain measure of ingegno which, generically understood, is the faculty which stocks the minds with the archetypal images necessary to the identification of everyday objects. John of Salisbury investigates another sort of ingegno, that which has as its object ars, art. An ars-oriented Ingegno, in its widest range of application, is << a gift given to man to help him start the gnoseological process leading to art, the supreme expression of human activity. >>265 The employment of ingegno to this end is what gives an artist the proper discernment that allows them to decide what is and what is not an object suitable for artistic transmutation. The arena within which these valuations take place is delimited by ratio, divine reason.266 In Paradiso 4, the activation of the ingegno is central to Dante's query concerning the reasoning behind the assignment of the souls in heaven to their respective spheres: Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno de la celestial c'ha men salita. Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno, però che solo da sensato apprende ciò che fa poscia d'intelletto degno Per questo la scrittura condescende a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano attribuisce a Dio e altro intende267 262 M. Trovato, op. cit., pp. 258 - 266. M. Trovato, op. cit., p. 259. 264 Ibid. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid. 267 D. Alighieri, trans. trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 87. 263 89 Ingegno extracts the material which furnishes itself as the clay to be shaped by intellection. It is also tantamount to the activity of intellection. The most refined ingegno when directed, in compliance with ratio towards the highest substance, God, can produce, in effect, the most exquisite of revelations. This image is always imperfect, but only because the faculty of human cognition is imperfect. Biblical language, the sort of plainly succinct yet often enigmatic phraseology that so baffled Augustine, is the most potent form of language to which ingegno can give to the eternal principles of God's law. The aesthetic dictates segregating sermo humilis from sermo sublimis are thus disregarded in favor of a higher order of expression. However, when misapplied ingegno can also lead to perdition. This is cupido ingegno that sort of self-interested thirst for knowledge which led to Ulysses’s shipwrecked ruin at the foot of Mt. Purgatory as described in Inferno 26. It is cupid ingegno which causes Elisha to attempt to see an object disproportionate to the powers of his visual faculty: E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi vide 'l carro di Elia al dipartire, quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi, che nol potea sì con gli occhi seguire, ch'el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire 268 This thwarted ascent to heaven recalls another attempt by another abuser of ingegno to reach a point beyond his limits. Icarus meets a fate similar to Dante's Ulysses when he flies too close to the sun. The father of Icarus and the inventor of his wings is, of course, Daedalus to whom Stephen owes his surname. The last line of A Portrait is an invocation to the great artificer who, in contrast to his son whose romantic impulsivity and distaste for convention more closely resembles Stephen's personaltiy, represents the skilled and painstaking craftsman who Stephen aspires to become. Stephen's thirst for knowledge, in the end, brings him to the brink of self-destruction and at the beginning of Ulysses he finds himself to be a fallen Icarus rather than an accomplished Daedalus. In the Telemachus episode of Ulysses the reader encounters a Stephen whose brooding thoughts crucially separate him from the 268 D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 478. 90 incipient artist eager to encounter <<the reality of [his] experience.>> He is submerged in a world of infernal vagaries, the incessantly metamorphosing shadows of his aborted artistic ambitions. James Robinson writes the nesting of his thought within a poetics of futility and stasis suggests that, just as with his 'silence' and 'exile,' his 'cunning' or 'ingegno' -- the final tool in his Dantean inventory -- has been blunted.269 And though his ingegno still spurs him to believe <<signatures of all things I am here to read>>270 it has no material upon which it can productively work itself. His failed attempt at self-realization, the clearly reflected self-portrait of the artist which he had believed exile would grant him, has brought him to a point where he habitually fashions and re-fashions his own image without any tangible artistic result, the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus having left him high and dry. He scoffs at his epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale.271 The same tone with which he dismissed the <<vague words>> of his diary entry at the end of A Portrait is, in the Sandymount Strain monologue of Ulysses's first chapter exploited to great effect. This is Joyce's first grand experiment in the "stream of consciousness" technique and, in another sense, the climatic consummation of epiphany itself: an epiphany of the uselessness of epiphany. Stephen observes, <<seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs>>272 images of his shattered dreams' detritus. Epiphanies, those which were meant to have saved him, have not only misled him but have also brought him to a state of utter inanition. In a similar sense, the wings of his cunning. those wings which were meant to have blessed him with flight, are now the "blunted" instrument of an ingegno feeding upon itself like an uroboros. 269 J. Robinson, op. cit., p. 108. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 37. 271 Ivi, p. 41. 272 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 37. 270 91 3.2.6. Stephen, the Dubliner Indeed Joyce said to Frank Budgen of his youthful alter-ego, <<[he] no longer interests me to the same extent. He has a shape that can't be changed.>>273 His opprobrium for all things Irish and the reproachable aloofness of his behavior have caused him to suffer the enervation of the unsung poet. And so Joyce subjects him to the only contrapasso suitable for such a sin: an endless wander through his mind's labyrinth. A truncated version of his story, as it is contained in Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses might envisage Stephen a category of Dubliner not unlike the ineffectual Little Chandler of "A Little Cloud." Surely, he would be a vastly more educated sort of failure than Little Chandler, but he would be no less a Dubliner on that account. Stephen, who had once yearned to fly beyond the nets cast upon his soul, now finds that the net restricting him is not simply the handiwork of his tre fiere: <<nationality, language, and religion.>>274 Instead, his imprisonment in Dublin or (psychological enthrallment to Dublin) is as self-imposed as was Joyce's exile. He realizes that he is not trapped in a net, but a Daedalean labyrinth. "Dubliner" can, therefore, be interpreted as more than a mere demonym; it is a condition, a category, and an assigned fate. The baroque artistry with which Stephen has crafted his own demise makes him appear all the more ridiculous than those other Dubliners who mostly meet their doom blindly. Epiphany is, for most Dubliners, a brief glimpse into the reality of their condition, but for a young man as keenly perceptive as Stephen, his epiphany must be more a mere glimpse. And so Joyce, playing Dante, has assigned Stephen to a certain malebolgia, one of his own making. His sin is the sin of literary simony, <<falsity of purpose>> a form of fraud by means of which one sins, not against God, but against oneself. Stephen is a simoniac because he has devoted his given gift of linguistic imagination to the invention of a persona, or moreover, to the self-deification of his ego at the expense of his compatriots. In A Portrait, he fears <<the hawklike man whose name he bore>> and in the same sentence likens him to <<Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing his narrow ibis head to the cusped moon.>>275 Years hence he will invoke the same God's name in the midst of the agonized thoughts which intersperse the dialogue in Scylla and Charybdis's Hamlet symposium, <<Coffined thoughts around me, in 273 F. Budgen, op. cit., p. 105. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 171. 275 Ivi, p. 190. 274 92 mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned.>>276 Now Thoth appears not as a harbinger of flight, but as an inhabitant of the necropolitan library where Dublin's intelligentsia pontificate aimlessly in the fashion of the magnanimous pagans wandering the grounds of limbo. The mention of <<coffined thoughts>> and <<mummycases>> also calls to mind the city of Dis the inner circle of which houses heretics and epicureans.277 It is in this city that the proud Farinata degli Uberti and the rueful Cavalcante de Cavalcanti rise from flaming coffins to address Dante. The pride of Farinata who, upon realizing he has been noticed, stands erect with his chest out, <<com' avesse l'inferno a gran dispitto>>278 is reflected in Stephen's bumptious disdain for Dublin's hemiplegia, a condition from which he also suffers. That Stephen's disenchantment with himself has not robbed him of his innate pride is testified by his response to an overheard insult made at the expense of his dying mother by his rival and housemate Buck Mulligan: Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly: —I am not thinking of the offence to my mother. —Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked. —Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.279 During the conversation in the Scylla and Charybdis, his thoughts are peppered with mentions of <<a horde of heresies>> and the <<African heresiarch Sibellius>>.280 Thus Stephen's pride is the pride of the heresiarch and not long after reproaching Mulligan for the narcissistic wound his words left, he celebrates himself as an <<Illstarred heresiarch>>.281 Throughout Ulysses, the reader observes Stephen occupying a number of different infernal tableaus. The endless re-fashioning of his self-image is always performed against the backdrop of a recurrent hellscape, the musical progression animating it culminating in the psychedelic turmoil in Nighttown. Stephen's in the midst of these hellish images is not the sudden stroke of awareness that occurs in so many of the Dubliners, but rather a long, drawnout, and possibly endless process of raveling and unraveling and <<so does the artist weave 276 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 186. Ibid. 278 D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 186. 279 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 8. 280 Ivi, p. 199. 281 Ibid. 277 93 and unweave his image.>>282 Auerbach, referring to Farinata and Cavalcante in the context of Dante's categorical hierarchy of sin might as well be talking about Stephen when he says, <<we behold an intensified image of the essence of their being, fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions.>>283 This is the moment of epiphany, the moment in which an action or lack of action condemns an individual to live out their unique essence. Auerbach calls this, <<a specific eternal situation>> which is <<fixed it in [God's] eternal judgement.>>284 Like the virtuous pagans of Limbo, Stephen seems forever condemned to idle, enervated and purposeless. 3.2.7. Stephen's Contrapasso The scheme with which Dante metes out punishment involves a highly complex synthesis of classical and Christian readings. In simple terms, Dante's concept of contrapasso, a compound word derived from the Latin terms "contra" and "patior" which combined mean <<to suffer the opposite>> is equivalent to the punishment fitting the crime.285 The punishments of the Inferno are, thus, illustrative. The sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets of Inferno 20 have their heads twisted in the opposite direction of their bodies' movement, causing them to walk backward; the avari and prodighi of the seventh circle battle with boulders as the former attempts to get rid of their boulder and the latter attempt to hold onto it; the sinners in the lake of the murderers are condemned to swim in depths of the blood they shed on earth. In Joyce's Dubliners, many of the characters' fates are a form of contrapasso as well. Eveline, at the end of her eponymous story, balks at the moment of her departure from Dublin, and so seals her fate as one Dublin's frozen souls. Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud" comes to a realization of his own pusillanimity and in his wife's words of consolation towards their crying child, he hears a confirmation of this weakness. The coin which Corley reveals to be the acquisition effected by his guile at the end of "Two Gallants" is a symbol of his enslavement to lucre. In text Joyce breathes life into his characters and in text he consigns them to a fate of eternal suspension within a single moment, object, or even a word. The <<scrupulous meanness>> with which he describes these moments, the register of sermo umilis, gives even greater emphasis to the punishments. By crystallizing his characters within 282 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 86. E. Auerbach, trans. Edward Said, op. cit., p. 192. 284 Ibid. 285 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. xxii. 283 94 the amber of these individual moments, Joyce achieves the Dantean effect, as described by Auerbach, of having his readers <<behold [his characters] in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives on earth.>>286 In the case of Dubliners, the characters still reside on earth, but it is in the static clarity of their textual figuration that their essence shines through. Thus, the horror of contrapasso is, for Dante and Joyce, not simply the torment of paralysis or repetition, but a response to the way each character lives out his or her unique essence in a state of eternal paralysis or repetitive action. Thus Dante and Joyce remove these characters from the world of contingency and place them in a space where life does not extenuate their essence. Stephen's essence is labyrinthine and his contrapasso, that of wandering the labyrinth of his own genius, is more obvious than the most obvious of Dante's punishments. But now that we have, ostensibly, determined Stephen's eternal fate, two questions arise: 1) Is Stephen, like so many of Dante's souls, truly damned or does he have some hope of salvation? 2) By what authority does Joyce pass judgment on the souls of his fellow Dubliners and by condemning them does he simply mean to selfishly revenge himself upon his <<betrayers>> or is there a higher aim to his art? The first question I intend to answer in the last chapter of this thesis, but the moment has finally come for addressing the second question. 286 E. Auerbach, trans. Edward Said, op. cit., p. 26. 95 4. Epiclesis 4.1. Schismatic Freedom 4.1.1. "Epicleti" and "Epikaleo" In A Portrait Stephen imagines himself to be <<a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of every-living life.>>287 Joyce himself stated to his brother that his artistic activity was much like the Mass itself insofar as he attempted to give an <<intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life>>.288 The Dubliners can, in this light, be viewed as acts of transubstantiation through which the lives of their characters are eternalized. By reading and rereading these stories of characters whose essence is eternally calcified in the textual representation of a single moment, the reader derives a certain spiritual nourishment. With the description of his stories as "epicleti," a word of his own coinage, Joyce is also trading in on the root of the word, "epikaleo" which can mean <<"invocation," "name," "summons," or "accusation''>>, these latter two definitions also connoting a summons before a court.289 Joyce's Dubliners stories are both transmutations and a summoning of these characters to stand trial before the court of humankind. What we take from an initial reading of the stories, that is prior to detached analysis is what we read into the stories insofar as the stories depose their characters, many of whom seem to directly address us in the confessional style of Dante's souls. How we respond to this deposition, measuring out its tragic proportions and, consequently, deciding just how much empathy to devote to the characters is a testament to our own distance or proximity to the epiphanic essences of their characters. However, the transubstantial quality of these stories consist in their capacity to push us beyond our initial reactions of pity, revulsion, or repugnance and force ourselves to ask why these characters and their stories have elicited these reactions in us. The active power of these stories is then their 287 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 260. S. Joyce, op. cit., ed. R. Ellman, p. 104. 289 Alexis James Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, 2001, p. 89. 288 96 capacity to occasion an epiphany on the part of the reader who is cast in the role of a Dantean pilgrim surveying a gallery of lived moments. Just as Dante's reactions to the souls of the afterlife vary in accordance with the extent to which the facts of his own life's story reflect or deviate from the acts determinative of a soul's place in hell, purgatory, or heaven, the severity of our cathartic responses to the Dubliners stories is commensurate with our own selfabsolving systems of moral reasoning, making pilgrims of all of us. 4.1.2. Epiclesis and Heresy: the Eucharist as Recollection If the implications present in Joyce's use of the term "epicleti" ran only as deep as a strictly allegorical interpretation of Dubliners would allow, then its appearance in his letter to his editor, Constantine Curran might appear a mere touch of intellectual ostentation. His predisposition to bombast notwithstanding, Joyce coined "epicleti" with a higher aim in mind, one that will further develop the analogue he sought to establish between his life and work and the life and work of his poetic guide. A clue to his motivation can be found in Stephen's fascination with heresiarchs. As stated prior, Stephen's thoughts are teeming with references to Catholic liturgy and Church history. Heresies, in particular, exercise a strange fascination for the young poet, Arius and the <<subtle African>> Sabellius figuring foremost among his meditations. Both Arius and Sabellius were excommunicated by the Church because of their unique definitions of the trinity, both of which denied or redefined the concept of the consubstantiality of the father with the son, a tantalizing proposition for Stephen who wants nothing more than to cast off the yolk of fatherhood. Stephen's fascination with heresy speaks to Joyce's interest in the Eastern Orthodox Mass which he attended in Trieste and which he described to Stanislaus as <<strange.>>290 Reflecting on the experience, he wrote to his brother, <<while I was attending the Greek mass here last Sunday, it seemed to me that my story 'The Sisters' was rather remarkable.>>291 "The Sisters" is, of course, the opening story of the collection, and remembrance of it in this context connects the story to the Greek rite. The Eucharistic theme of these stories is critically intertwined with the topic of heresy. In order to understand the reasons behind Joyce's adoption of the Greek rite of the Eucharist in defiance of its Roman counterpart, it is essential that we grasp the crucial difference between the two rites. Both rites reach their climactic moment in the transformation of one substance 290 291 Roy Gottfried, Joyce's Misbelief, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2008, p. 63. Ibid. 97 into another, but it is in the act of invocation that the Eastern rite contradistinguishes itself from the Roman rite. The doctrine of transubstantiation that Joyce had learned from the Jesuits considered the words of the Eucharist in and of themselves as the very act of transubstantiation. That is to say the enunciation, This is my body is not a simple statement of the self-same identity of two substances but is in the occasion of its utterance the instantiation of the transubstantiation itself. In the Eastern rite, the continuity of the Eucharistic process becomes arrested by the request to the Holy Spirit to execute the transubstantiation, effectively altering the meaning of the stages leading up to the transubstantiation. Roy Gottfried explains the crucial difference between the two rites in "Joyce's Misbelief": the point of the Western Orthodox claim against the East is that this invocation by the epiclesis has the effect of diminishing the Institution itself into a description of the Last Supper rather than a transformative and ongoing moment in and of itself.292 The epiclesis is one of the most conspicuous fault lines defining the schism between the two orthodox traditions. What is at stake is the ontological significance of the Eucharist itself. <<An epiclesis is schismatic because, from the Catholic point of view in the liturgy of the Mass, it is a narrative of a previous event rather than the event itself.>>293 By recasting elements familiar to Joyce as principle facets of Catholic liturgy in a primarily narrative role, epiclesis appeared to offer abundant possibilities for mimetically metamorphosing religion into art. Taken to its extreme, the epiclesis is a "representation" a "similitude," or a "metaphor."294 The language of the epiclesis is that of recollection, or the reenactment of an event. Joyce plumbed the depths of the recollective interpretation of the Last Supper by finding its thematic furtherance in another schismatic tradition, the Anglican Mass. In this tradition, as described in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the grammatical tenses used in the account of the Last Supper interact in order to describe <<events that take place in a past of two time frames.>>295 His discovery of a vernacular exemplification of a "historical-" or "narrative-" based conception of the liturgy, therefore, abeted his rupture with the Catholic Church and serves as a springboard for Joyce's experiments with nested time frames in Dubliners. Whereas the act of breaking bread and giving it is described with the gerund in both the Latin and Greek 292 Ivi, p. 67. Ibid. 294 R. Gottfried, op. cit., p. 70. 295 Ibid. 293 98 liturgies, in the Anglican tradition an interplay of the simple past and the past perfect disrupt the simultaneity of past and present. Gottfried writes: the stories of Dubliners are similarly narrated as events taking place in two pasts in regression, with the narrative occurring in the immediate past of the narrator and the memory of a more distant past in which the actions performed took place in the past perfect before being narrated in the simple past of the narrator in the act of narrating.296 "The Sisters" is, for example, narrated through the lens of this dual perspective. The mystery-ridden quality of the narrator's memories (replete with strange terms such as "gnomon," "simony," "Rosicrucian," "feints," and "worms" and the malapropism <<rheumatic wheels>>297) is a consequence of the partial occlusion caused by the gap in time frames. The potential for misremembering, projecting into the past, or complete confabulation on the part of the narrator thus creates a dissolving perspective that allows for multiple readings of the same stories. This is the nature of Joyce's epicleti, the process by which he suffuses his stories with an air of mystery by creating a certain discordance between time frames. The boy's repeated visits to the window of Father Flynn's house is described with the pluperfect, <<I had passed...I had found.>>298 He also makes use of the conditional past perfect: <<if he was dead, I would see.>>299 These tenses contribute to creating the effect of a representation within a representation, that is the same effect which the pluperfect achieves at the end of "An Encounter" when the narrator says <<I had always despised him a little>> in reference to his childhood friend Mahoney.300 Even in "The Dead," the intrusion of Gretta's deceased admirer's memory into the story symbolizes a summoning from the past. Uncanny in tone, these stories mean to draw forth the unfamiliar from the commonplace and reclaim the rites of religion for an art that aims to revive the mystery lying at the center of everyday visions. A similar form of nesting time-frames occurs in many Cantos of the Commedia in which the souls of the departed recount pivotal moments of their earthly lives. The Commedia itself is a recollection and its Cantos are, in turn, containers of recollections. Characters like Farinata degli Uberti, Francesca da Rimini, Pier della Vigna, the troubadour Sordello, and St. 296 R. Gottfried, op. cit., p. 77. J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 1- 8. 298 Ibid. 299 Ibid. 300 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 14. 297 99 Bonaventure are all summoned to give an account on their own lives and/or the lives of others. In the case of a Pier della Vigna, the biographical anecdote is colored by his own self-pity, causing the reader to feel that perhaps they are not receiving the "whole story." The souls of the Inferno often reveal the nature of their abominable vices in the way they attempt to justify their conduct on earth to one who might relay the stories to the living. The way they tell their story is a symptom of their very sin. 4.1.3. The Anagogical Interpretation of the Commedia We have already established that the characters encountered by the pilgrim have met their fates at a certain moment along the unfolding path of an elaborated characteristic essence. How they choose to present themselves to Dante through testimony of their deeds and/or misdeeds is, therefore, the clearest expression of their singular essence and the justification for their designated place in the afterlife. The matter of interpretation, of interpreting Dante's souls own, at times, disingenuous interpretation of their earthy lives is vital to the comprehension of the Commedia as a whole. The highly protean language itself -- densely thicketed with purple verbiage in the case of Pier della Vigna's address to Dante, slang-larded in the circle of the panderers and flatterers, refreshingly candid in the heaven of the crusaders of the faith-- can often feel like an obstacle to unveiling the meaning behind the carefully constructed metaphysical atmosphere which works to sensuously vivify the Dantean afterlife. The air of mysterious ambiguity that Joyce sought to generate in his stories, by means of a heretically inspired artistic technique, is everywhere apparent in Dante's hell where nothing appears to be quite what it is. In an effort to remedy the confusion surrounding his great work, Dante, in his famous, and possibly apocryphal, letter to Cangrande della Scala, refers to four different levels of interpretation necessary to the comprehension of his "poema sacro": the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.301 The literal simply refers to the superficial apprehension of an image as nothing more than its description, the allegorical interpretation looks to the higher principles for which a symbol stands, the moral interpretation finds the ethical meaning behind the symbol, and the anagogical refers to the final mystical meaning of the symbol. Every symbol in the Commedia can be subjected to this four-fold heuristic. In 301 John Saly, Dante's Paradiso: The Flowering of the Self, Pace University Press, New York, 1989, p. 11. 100 "Dante's Paradiso: The Flowering of the Self," John Saly applies this interpretive grid to the three beasts encountered by Dante at the beginning of the poem: In the literal story these animals are simply what they seem to be, wild beasts[...]in the social-political allegory[...]they are emblems of the Florentine city-state, the Kingdo of France, and the worldly power of the Papacy[...]in the moral allegory they represent the habitual vices of lust, anger, and greed[...]in the anagogical interpretation we seem them in permanent states of mind and soul, such as selfwill, pride, and fear[...]302 It is the final anagogical interpretation which most concerns our exploration of Joyce's artistic strategy. All four levels of interpretation are integral to an understanding of the Commedia, but this last level is the most important. Dante's four-fold method is not an invention of his own and in his time was well-known in the realm of Biblical exegesis. By promoting the method, he is implicitly authenticating the divine provenance of his masterwork. The word "anagogical" comes from anagoge meaning an upward movement, the entire trajectory of the Commedia being an ascending movement culminating in Dante's faceto-face encounter with God Himself; every phase of his journey can thus be understood metonymically as an aspect of that final image.303 The anagogical is the most important level because it deals with direct revelation. It is the most general interpretative mode and the one that views Dante not as the political exile nor the Dolce Stil Novo poet, but the homo viator, a peregrine everyman confronting eternal human realities. The foreign Medieval elements of the poem which can be alienating to the modern reader are forgotten in this interpretation. The anagogical Dante belongs to no particular time period. The truths his poetry actualizes are constants of the human spirit. Anagoge is the Word of God revealing itself in historical time. Interpreted anagogically, Dante's personal revelation is, thus, our revelation. At this point <<there is no more Dante or reader, there is only us, this common essence.>>304 Dante and the reader are mutually transubstantiated. The anagogical interpretation closes the circle of the four-fold method by directing the reader's focus to an immediate experience. The immediately general truths of anagogical revelation are, in a sense, as immediate as the surface reality of the literal interpretation. 302 J. Saly, op. cit., p. 19. Ivi, p. 21. 304 Ivi, p. 22. 303 101 Dante's guides and the characters themselves make their own attempts at interpreting the allegory of their lives or the lives of others and in doing so engage in the process of interpretation which commonly takes place outside the text. By nesting narrative within narrative (e.g. the story of Lancelot qua catalyst of Paolo and Francesca's fatal kiss), tenses within tenses, and styles within styles, Dante creates a centrifugal (or depending on the direction in which one chooses to read the Commedia, centripetal) movement of interpretation which is perpetual. If the meaning of a symbol is unclear at first blush, further interpretation fleshes out that meaning, not in a directly linear manner, but rather to the degree that we recognize the concerns of Dante's characters, be they damned, penitent, or saved, as our own concerns. The true meaning of a symbol is always "ineluctable," but it is in its quality of ineluctability that it becomes most apparently true. What Dante calls the bella menzogna,305 the beautiful lie cloaking the true meaning, should not be understood as a useful didactic vestment to sloughed off as soon as its inner meaning is apprehended. On the contrary, its surface shape is, in a mystical sense, the most faithful reflection of its inner meaning. Pier della Vigna's symbolic manifestation as a dry shrub can be understood as a merely pragmatic metaphor, but in its anagogical form, it is also an ontologically permanent reality contracting the distance between the physical object and its constituent sign as it exists in the mind of God. The concept of the contrapasso gives a visual language to the ineffable without demanding that the meaning acquired withal precede in importance the sheer power of the vision itself. The two-way correspondence of image and word, therefore, effects a certain kind of transmutation, or, as Joyce would have it, a transubstantiation, in which the material of the senses becomes one with the divine Word. 4.1.4. Dubliners Summoned To perform a similar feat of eternal creation is precisely what Stephen aspires towards when he speaks of himself as <<a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of every-living life.>> Gottfried calls this act of transubstantiation Joyce's <<metaphoric substitutability of art and real life.>>306 No detail of the Dubliners should lose its importance upon iterative analyses. The only "wrong" reading of these stories is, then, one that would organize the component parts of the story in order of their 305 306 J. Saly, op. cit., p. 24. R. Gottfried, op. cit., p. 73. 102 relevance to a singular sought-after meaning and discard whatever details do not conform to this reading. The aforementioned definition of epikaleon as a form of "summoning" becomes clearer when we think of Joyce's act of summoning his characters to tell their stories more or less in their own words, whether in first person or in the free indirect style. We should not infer that Joyce's summoning of his characters to speak for themselves guarantees the authoritative honesty of their accounts, but it does guarantee an honesty of reaction on our parts. Like Dante, Joyce exploits this interpretative mode to bring his reader into closer communion with his stories' characters whose presence in the text is simultaneously objective and subjective, their unique epiphanic essences being revealed in the margin left by this asymmetrical relationship. Unlike Dante, however, the moral scheme of the Dubliners does not clearly explicate the exact nature of each sin contained therein nor do we feel that this hemiplegic procession of souls somehow reveals anything about God's plan. Instead, it is Joyce himself, rather than God, who plays the part of the final arbiter in these matters, pervading the text with his invisible presence, <<refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.>>307 This is Joyce, the <<priest of the eternal imagination>> whose revelation is not an otherworldly vision but a thoroughly worldly one, and whose transubstantiation involves not the translation of an ineffable revelation into legible signs, but rather into the putatively legible facts of mundanity into an occult language of eternal mystery. 4.1.5. "Uneasy Orthodoxy" By adopting epiclesis as an artistic strategy, Joyce is able to transcend the caprices of fragmented epiphany, affirming his distance from both the Roman Catholic Church and the fraudulence of the priesthood while dignifying his artistic métier as an extreme expression of a foreign heretical practice remaining within the sphere of Christendom, a practice which, it is worth noting, made claims to historical primacy of liturgical tradition. The mimetic potentiality of the epiclesis afforded Joyce a sense of freedom from a univocal Jesuit/Roman orthodoxy while also allowing him to avoid falling into his brother's stalely adversarial reaction-formation variety of complete apostasy/atheism; hence, Ellman's statement that <<Christianity had subtly evolved in his mind from a religion into a system of metaphors>>.308 307 308 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 256. R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 58. 103 Most importantly, epiclesis also acts in the invocatory mediating role of officiating the transmogrification of the everyday into the everlasting. Joyce's unique heretical stance communicates intimately with what James Robinson calls Dante's "uneasy orthodoxy." It was Dante's resolute conviction of the superior piety of his Christian vision to that of the hardline decretalists of his time that attracted Joyce. In his treatise De Monarchia, Dante delineates a radical political philosophy pivoting on the premise that the Empire and the Church should be separate forces, the former deferring to the latter on purely ecclesiastical matters and the latter remaining entirely outside the purview of temporal politics. According to Dante, the Holy Roman Emperor's secular power was derived directly from God and was not in need of papal approbation so long as the ecclesiastical establishment was paid due homage by the Empire. One of the most controversial aspects of this treatise was its questioning of the supposed infallibility of the Pope. Stephen displays the same sort of exegetical dissension as Dante when he gainsays Mr. Deasy's teleological contentions in the second chapter of Ulysses: —The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: —That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! —What? Mr Deasy asked. —A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.309 Stephen's God is the God of exiles. In his mind, Stephen's belief in a radically alternative God, one who is quite far removed from Mr. Deasy's paternal demiurge, makes the boy a species of heretic, and yet Stephen's entire aesthetic theory possesses a certain orthodoxy of its own. This explains Joyce's fascination with heresiarchs. The creation of an "orthodoxy" of his own, one which he felt truer to his artistic vocation or to the sheer experience of real life was directly determinative of his life's work. And so he had no recourse but to become a heretical rebel. Epiclesis vehiculated his rebellion, sanctioning his art as a representational analogue of religious experience while protecting it from the despotic authority of the Catholic Church. 309 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 34. 104 4.1.6. Conclusion Epiclesis is the hard-won bounty of Joyce's exile. The <<spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus>> had not performed the alchemical function of converting his epiphanies into a perfectly proportioned Apollonian monolith to his own artificial genius nor had it changed him into the emulative paragon of the heroic exile. Evolving beyond epiphanies, he found that he had finally acquired a greater treasure, that of an experience and wisdom with which he could leaven the dough of his fractured yet now tempered dreams. Epiclesis was the oven, and in it, he would effect his greatest transubstantiation. The journey of Stephen Dedalus towards his spiritual father is one of erasure, the refining <<out of existence>>310 of his textual persona through its assumption into the womblike vortex of a supreme symbol of paternity, Leopold Bloom. The journey is an epikaleon, a summoning of Stephen by Bloom. Throughout this pilgrimage recurrent echoes of Dante's travels will aid Joyce in his endeavor to rid himself of his alter-ego by providing him with a Virgilian model of reason to counterbalance Stephen's romantic angst. 4.2. A Transubstantial Homecoming 4.2.1. The Birth of Ulysses In June of 1915, Joyce arrived in Zurich where he became a double expatriate. After 11 years of exile, Trieste had become his home. His literary output during that period included "Chamber Music," "Dubliners," the revision of "Stephen Hero" into "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and the play, "Exiles." Not long after arriving in Trieste, he received a letter from Yeats' American friend, Ezra Pound. Pound informed him of his connection with a number of literary periodicals and asked if he would be interested in contributing to any of them. In response, Joyce finished the last chapter of "A Portrait" and sent it together with "Dubliners." That same year Grant Richards wrote to him curious as to the fate of "Dubliners." It seemed his luck was beginning to change. In Pound, Joyce found a lifetime patron, and it was perhaps this new friendship that heartened him to begin the novel that would change the face of English literature forever, "Ulysses." Joyce had first conceived of the idea for "Ulysses" in 1907 as an addition to his "Dubliners." It was to be a short comic story of a day in the life of a Dubliner whose prosaic meanderings ironically parallel the journey of Homer's 310 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 252. 105 great hero. Joyce eventually expanded the scope of the story to include, as a model, the 18 episodes of the Odyssey, choosing for his protagonist the grandson of a Jewish immigrant to Dublin. After completing the first two chapters, he dispatched them to Pound, writing, <<it is a continuation of "A Portrait as a Young Man" after three years' interval blended with many of the persons of "Dubliners".>>311 The first chapter, Telemachus was published in the journal "The Little Review" in March 1918. Subsequent chapters were to appear in "The Little Review" and "The Egoist," which had previously serialized "A Portrait." The history of the novel's publication from that point on is a long contentious story of scandal and censorship culminating in the historic decision made by the United States District Court of New York in 1933 that deemed the book inoffensive, making the US the first country in the English speaking world to publish it. It would not be until the 1960s that Joyce's own country would follow suit.312 The available portions of Joyce's novel instantly established him as a literary genius of the first rank. T.S. Eliot said of "Ulysses": <<I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.>>313 Himself a classicist, Eliot approved of the transposition of ancient tropes into the realm of the drably modern. Surely the many references to Dante in the novel would not have eluded him. From Stephen's reference to the <<maestro di color che sanno>> in Proteus to <<nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita>> in Scylla and Charybdis314, the Commedia calls out to the reader from within the text, peeking through cracks in the prose. Dante's presence in "Ulysses" is not merely allusive nor is it exclusively confined to Stephen's recondite musings. The role that Dante fulfills in "Ulysses" is instructive and directive; one that capitalizes on the nuanced relationship connecting Joyce the man to the poet's exilic persona and Joyce the artist to the poet's body of work. 4.2.2. Bloom, the Spiritual Father With the aid of Dante, Homer, Shakespeare and a host of other minor literary forefathers, Joyce would bring Stephen Dedalus back home and, in the course of the journey, come to a 311 R. Ellman, op. cit., p. 329. Ivi, p. 491. 313 T.S., Eliot, ed. F. Kermode, p.175. 314 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 37. 312 106 fuller acceptance of his own exile. Themes of exile, simony, betrayal, sex, envy, religion, and politics are variously confronted at different points in the story. What ties all of these themes together is fatherhood, the legal fiction with which Joyce wrestled his entire life. In Eumaeus, the reader can detect a Dantean resonance in the manner of Stephen and Bloom's father-son walk together towards Eccles Street: <<As they walked, they at times stopped and walked again, continuing their tête à tête [...] about sirens, enemies of man's reason, mingled with a number of topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind [...]>>315 Reynolds points out that <<their actual association is brief, only 92 pages, or one-eight of the book, and the Virgilian aspect is overlaid in a context that also gives Bloom the role of Dante.>>316 Bloom's transition into fatherhood begins midway through the Oxen of the Sun and progresses into the Ithaca chapter lasting until Stephen's departure from Bloom's home. Much as Virgil's guidance is cut short at the end of Purgatory, the conversation between the two men is anti-climactically brief. Virgil is, of course, well aware and accepting of his limitations, making it known to Dante that he will not be at his side in Paradise. Dante only directly addresses his guide by name one time in the entire Commedia. When he first encounters Virgil in the selva oscura, he asks him, <<Or se' tu quel Virgilio [...]?>>317 Bloom calls Stephen by his first name only one time near the end of the Circe chapter while trying to wake him. The young man sings lines of Yeats' <<Who goes with Fergus?>> to himself and Bloom, ignorant of the concluding lines of the poem, says <<In the shady wood>> unconsciously completing the allusion to the pilgrim's first encounter with his guide.318 Stephen's leave-taking at the end of Ithaca is equally Dantean. Virgil's instantaneous disappearance so shocks Dante that he helplessly repeats his name three times. Stephen also disappears from the story as suddenly and conclusively as Virgil. Joyce observes his feelings of loss: Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Farenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.319 315 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 618. M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 35. 317 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 6. 318 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 565. 319 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 689. 316 107 Reynolds's points to the assonance of the passage as an echo of Dante's triply repeated refrain of "Virgilio." <<In Joyce's two sentences the "o" is reduplicated like an echo lost in infinity: alone, Bloom, cold, below, or, zero, Reaumur.>>320 An echo of the Inferno occurs in the Eumaeus when Stephen and Bloom meet an old sailor who tells the story of a shipwreck meant to evoke Ulysses's disastrous voyage in Inferno 26. In this chapter the spiritual father and son walk always to the left, the direction always taken, with two exceptions, by Virgil and Dante. At a certain point they stop to observe a pile of broken cobblestones, an image similar to that of the rockfall caused by the crucifixion in Inferno 12. Like Virgil, who gives an incomplete, pre-Christian explanation of the rockfall's cause, Bloom is also a non-Christian. <<Something of Dante's syncretism may be present as well in Joyce's selection of details.>>321 For instance, Stephen's impression of the pile causes him to <<remember that this had happened, or had been mentioned as having happened, before.>>322 Stephen temporarily takes on a paternal guise when he speaks of the soul with Bloom in the Eumaeus. His discussion puts him in the position of Statius expounding to Dante the stages of embyronic generation. Bloom's opinions coalesce with Stephen's argument <<though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth.>>323 His restriction from the realm of pure abstraction is reminiscent of Virgil's inability to ascend any higher than the peak of Mt. Purgatory. Statius, a convert to Christianity, discusses notions which are inaccessible to a pagan such as Virgil who can only conceive of things in purely rational terms. <<The discourse of Statius, Virgil, and Dante [...] has been called Dante's most notable portrayal of poetic fatherhood and sonship>> writes Reynolds.324 Dante's hesitation to call Virgil father is loosened the more his guide refers to him as <<figliuol>>325 Here he sets a precedent that allows Dante to gradually display his affection for his guide. Virgil is chiefly a teacher, but his role grows to include the title of protector. Bloom is also protective as he chaperones Stephen out of night-town. At his most ulyssean, Bloom's heroic traits dwarf his spiritual son's youthful image of his own self as "Stephen Hero." Joyce told 320 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 38. Ivi, p. 39. 322 J.Joyce, op. cit., p. 600. 323 Ivi, p. 618. 324 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 39. 325 D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 278. 321 108 Frank Budgen, <<As the day wears on Bloom should overshadow them all.>>326 The first image we receive of Dante in the Inferno is that of a frightened and diffident child. Virgil recognizes his state of crisis and tries to nurture the helpless child in him, adjuring him to be strong: Dunque: che è? perché, perché restai? perché tanta viltà nel core allette? perché ardire e franchezza non hai?327 Stephen's circumstances are similar to Dante's in the selva oscura as evidenced by his <<battling against hopelessness>>328 in the National Library. Later in the Oxen of the Sun, Bloom, perceiving the boy's depression, laments the squandering of his brilliance <<for that he lived riotously with those wastrels.>>329 Stephen's famous disquisition on Hamlet in Scylla and Charybdis places the theory of fatherhood at the center of the novel. This is a moment of exposition in Ulysses that gives the reader a glimpse of the novel's engine at work. It is not coincidental that Bloom almost encounters Stephen during this scene. His initiation into the action of Stephen's day will either substantiate the theory or deny it. The novel itself is, on that point, a bringing to bear of Joyce's own feelings about paternity, almost an experiment in filiation for his own benefit. Joyce does not make Bloom summon Stephen but provides the conditions for such an act to take place. In this sense he treats his creation as a living or lived presence in the same way Dante brings to life Virgil the man and not Virgil the medieval magician. <<Bloom will follow and watch over Stephen in the pattern of Virgil responding to the call of Beatrice. The writing of Joyce's book thus becomes by analogy an act of filiation.>>330 4.2.3. Bloom, the Jewish "Pagan" The reason Bloom is allowed an autonomy denied to the rest of Joyce's characters is due to his Jewishness. It is because of this Jewishness, a tenuously held identity for Bloom who is technically a Catholic convert, that he can fulfill the charge of the spiritual father for his ward Stephen. Although he hardly flaunts the fact, he is first and foremost, a Jew and not a Dubliner. As such, Bloom, not by disposition but by his very nature, is tethered to the source 326 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 41. D. Alighieri, trans. R. Hollander and J. Hollander, op. cit., p. 32. 328 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 204. 329 Ivi., p. 42. 330 M.T. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 43. 327 109 of all the monotheistic religions. He is that void on which fatherhood is founded, the antipode of the <<madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe.>>331 Here Joyce parts ways with Dante, who had little to nothing to say about Jews in his Commedia, locating in his Ulysses the germ of a pre-Christian worldview via which he might become one with the governing mysteries of life itself, i.e. the supreme act of creation, the transformation of nothing into something, that which the invocation of epiclesis initiates. On the one hand, Joyce seems assign value to his protagonist's pre-Christian aura, his Jewishness creating a feeling of wonder and perverse reverence among Dublin's intellectuals. (<<The wandering Jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with a clown's awe.>>332) On the other hand, this aura marks him as something of a scapegoat in his community and seems to have something to do with his cuckolded status. In his argument with "the citizen," a blustering alcoholic embodiment of Irish paralysis, Bloom asserts that God himself is a Jew infuriating the citizen to the point that he lobs a biscuit tin at him. Thus Joyce careens farther afield than Dante in his heretical orthodoxy, finding infinite possibility in Bloom's "paganism" rather than Dante who sees his Virgil as casting an instrumental but finite shadow of sober, ratiocinative prudence. 4.2.4. Bloom, the Simoniac And yet Bloom is not a world apart from his fellow Dubliners. In many ways, he is the most parochial of men, the sum total of his knowledge and tastes amounting to no more than what it can procure him in a material sense. His affection for Stephen may be kindled, in part, by admiration for the boy's intellect and, in part, by the residue of paternal love left by the memory of his departed son, Rudy, but factored into his motivation behind inviting Stephen to his home is also the possibility that he will be able to use Stephen's connections to Dublin's literary scene to further his wife Molly's opera career. Bloom's thoughts are saturated with considerations of cross-benefit analysis. His work is advertising and his mind is of a very modern cast insofar as the potential profitability of any given situation is often the primary director of his thoughts. In his essay, "Bloom, The Father," Theodore Holmes go so far as to say of Joyce's hero, <<in his efforts to reduce everything to his material advantage he has forgotten his humanity.>>333 He continues his argument saying that we moderns are so inured 331 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 199. Ivi, p. 209. 333 Theodore Holmes, Bloom, The Father, <<The Sewanee Review>>, LXXIX, p. 241. 332 110 to this sort of cross-benefit analysis mentality that we do not even notice its sovereignly motivating role in Bloom's thoughts. Bloom's thinking involves a far colder and far less Socratic form of reason than that which Virgil supposedly symbolizes. Unlike Virgil, who is compelled to acknowledge the strictures disallowing his inclusion in God's plan, Bloom's calculating mindset knows no bounds. Its arena encompasses all of creation in its predisposition to reduce everything to a question of efficiency. For example, upon witnessing a vagrant, presumably disease-stricken prostitute, he reacts by reflecting on how the government should provide for sex workers by ensuring their sanitation and requiring that they be licensed. <<In the face of stark degradation and odium [Bloom's] overweening concern is that everything should be kept physically tidy and clean.>>334 Bloom's obession with efficiency and order is not meant, however, to reflect poorly on the Jewish people. There is enough of the British and Irish character in his way of thinking to convince the reader that Joyce's censures are directed at the inhumane paltriness of capitalism. He does not intend his protagonist, a half-Jew, to be interpreted in the vein of a stereotypical Shylock, but instead means for the reader to appreciate just how much Bloom has imbibed a capitalist worldview. So many aspects of Bloom's life and the lives of his fellow Dubliners are dictated by the maledetto fiore which Dante identifies as the cause of Florence's anomie.335 The flagrant hypocrisy of Mr. Deasy's lecture to Stephen is that he denounces the Jews for sinning <<against the light>> in one breath and in another breath lauds the British, saying an Englishman's proudest boast is <<I have paid my way.>>336 Bloom's mentality is identically molded. In the Aeolus chapter, the Roman and British empire are compared to the wandering Jewish tribes: 334 Ivi, p. 246. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 227. 336 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 34. 335 111 -- What was their civilization? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an Altar to Jehova. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and hesaid: It is meet to be here. Let us build a watershed.337 The word <<cloaca>> recalls the the 27th Canto of Paradiso in which St. Peter delivers a bitter jeremiad on the defilement of his gravesite upon which the Church was founded: fatt'ha del cimitero mio cloaca del sangue e de la puzza; onde 'l perverso che cadde di qua sù; là giù, si placa.338 The contrast between the opportunistic and small-minded aspirations of Empire and the quiet dignity of Jewish piety implicates Bloom whose ill-defined relationship with Judaism makes him susceptible to an Imperialistic, capital-oriented mentality. The same fixation on money and power is responsible for the contamination of St. Peter's tomb. << 'l perverso>> is, of course, Bonifacio VIII, Dante's simoniac par excellence. Simony makes a sewer of all things sacred and the <<cloacal obsession>> Joyce refers to in his description of the Roman and the Englishman is a form of simony. Bloom is all the more culpable than the Roman and Englishman because he belongs to a people who have fought for millenia to preserve the sanctity of their sacred writ. By colluding with the oppressors of the Irish people, he is, therefore, a simoniac. In the Eumaeus, Bloom's response to the catechistic question <<Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?>> has him tabulate his response thus: The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third, every normal human being of average vitality and appetite producing annually, cancelling byproducts of water, a sum 337 338 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 126. D. Alighieri, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, op. cit., p. 713. 112 total of 80 lbs. (mixed animal and vegetable diet), to be multiplied by 4,386,035, the total population of Ireland according to census returns of 1901.339 And so feces, money, and numbers come to symbolize a diabolical trinity. Even in the highest spheres of Paradise, Dante cannot refrain from excoriating his enemies. Mentions of sewers and blood in heaven may seem to verge on blasphemy, but such is Dante's rage that he must take advantage of having St. Peter as a mouthpiece to denounce the Pope who many believed to be the Anti-Christ himself. By the time Joyce wrote Ulysses, his rage towards Dublin and Dubliners had mellowed, but his belief in the paralysis endemic in Dublin had not changed. The content of Bloom's thoughts are enough to qualify him as simoniacal, but Joyce, forgiving the sinner, but hating the sin, does not see his protagonist as the embodiment of evil. Bloom's sin is complaisance, or a form of ignavia. Though he espouses all the "right" views, it would never even occur to him to take any real action against the forces of evil. <<On his lips is the apostleship of all the latter-day humanistic creeds: love, brotherhood, peace, equality, internationalism, universality of thought and emotion.>>340 And yet he goes about his humdrum existence keeping always an eye to his own advancement, all the while waging a campaign of indifference to his status as a quasi-pariah and cuckold in his community. On the surface, he is as far from a Hellenic hero as one could imagine, and yet, for Joyce, he is no less a hero because of his flaws. 4.2.5. Conclusion <<There is a touch of the artist about old Bloom.>> Joyce's Ulysses is very much the true portrait of himself as an artist. He bears the same relationship to Bloom that Dante bears to his pilgrim alter-ego. He is and is not his creation. Dante is narrating the events of the Commedia from the point of view of someone who has already undergone those very same events. The voice is that of someone who has already been saved and is reliving the stages of his life which preceded his moment of salvation. Joyce, on the other hand, is witnessing a journey towards something like salvation as it unfolds, in real time, in a twenty-four hour period. The end of Paradiso and the end of Ulysses are both, therefore, moments of transubstantiation. The moment that Dante finally lays his eyes upon God is the very moment of his transformation into that which he had not been and could not have been prior to that very moment. It is this 339 340 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 670. T.Holmes, op cit., p. 244. 113 act of transubstantiation that grants him the power to tell the story of everything leading up to it. In this sense, the Commedia is cyclical, as implied by its final image of a glowing circle symbolizing God himself. Ulysses is also a cyclical story inasmuch as the entrance of Stephen into the inner sanctum of Bloom's home represents his salvation but also the recommencing of his exilic journey. The meeting between Stephen and Bloom is a meeting between a simoniac and a heresiarch and a heresiarch and a simoniac. Stephen has all but left his church and has all but squandered his literary gifts on barroom chatter while Bloom has ostensibly turned his back on his Jewish origins and sold himself to the world of advertising. Both characters are guilty of the same generic sins that define the entire collective run of Dubliners. Both have surrendered to a certain hemiplegia, but they wander yet. Their sins are the sins of all Dubliners, but they are not quite Dubliners in the proper sense. At times, they would appear to belong to a certain tier of Joyce's Dantean architecture, and yet, Joyce cannot bring himself to be as severe as Dante by damning them entirely. It would seem that their epiphanic essences are far more pliable that those of other Dubliners. Thus we witness in Bloom and Stephen's reunion, the destruction of Dante's edifice. Joyce seems to be saying he can no longer pass judgment on his fellow human, but must instead make an effort, one that may prove unavailing, to save the only character who he feels deserves any hope at all. Stephen, the voluntary exile, in his wanderings crosses paths with Bloom, who by dint of being a religious outcast, is, where-ever he goes, an absolute exile. The spiritual-heroic apparatus is revealed to be fallacious. No formula can ensure an artist romantic integrity. Life needs to be lived before it can be converted into art. But it is perhaps his contact with Bloom which will, in the end, make a true artist of Stephen. The hero Stephen imagined himself to be is exactly who Bloom happens to be by chance. It is Bloom's belief in decency, as anemic a belief as it may be, that separates him from Stephen. Though much of what he thinks is highly indecent, Bloom does, in his own quiet way, strive to be decent. His apparent decency may be drenched in hypocrisy, but Joyce seems to portray him in this light not as statement of moral condemnation, but to show his reader that Bloom is about the best one could aspire towards in a society as unfeeling and impersonal as our own. Thus he may be able to exorcise from Stephen the many demons of his <<agenbite of inwit>> by shifting the boy's focus away from his own persona and towards the soul-sown tapestry of the world as a whole. Through Bloom Stephen thus encounters finally, the <<reality of [his] experience.>> The encounter does not grant him his hoped-for artistic sovereignty; instead, the experience disabuses him of his selfishness and reminds him of the importance of accepting the world as 114 it is and accepting one's place in it. Stephen has no real place in the world; he is an eternal exile, but having met Bloom, he can continue on with the knowledge that he is not the only exile in the world. All humans are the homo viator, no more nor less Stephen because he fancies himself an artist. This epiphany, the most important of all Joyce's epiphanies, is not so much inspiring as it is sobering and vaguely hopeful. If Stephen can be saved, then all of Joyce's Dubliners can be saved. They are not, as are many of Dante's souls, beyond redemption, but are essentially purgatorial beings, silently working in their own way, perhaps as unconsciously as Bloom, towards reaching the summit of heaven. The summoning of Stephen by his spiritual father is an epiclesis, a transmutation, but it is an incomplete transmutation. The mimetic capacity of epiclesis means that Joyce denies himself the true power of the Catholic priesthood, that is, the ability to actually convert one substance into another. When Dante claims he saw what he saw, we as readers are to assume he means it. With Joyce, the reader never quite knows where he stands. The transubstantiation he effects is, therefore, one <<founded upon incertitude, unlikelihood>> one that does not actually guarantee any lasting change of substance in the character of his heroes. The point at which Dante believes his soul to be saved is the point at which Joyce confronts the void itself. Perhaps even Bloom's spiritual fatherhood is a fiction. Only the reader can decide. The conclusion of Ulysses could not be any more different from the end of Paradiso's 33rd Canto and yet there is one crucial note of similarity. In the Penelope, the tightly regimented prose of the Ithaca's catechism gives way to the freely fluvial, unpunctuated poetry of Molly's inner monologue. As she lays in bed thinking of her past lovers, she reminisces about the first kiss shared between her and <<Poldy>> almost seeming to consider the scene as just one of a series of different dalliances, not any more or less significant than the others. And yet, her description is not wanting for tenderness and affection. Her love for Leopold, though fraught with betrayal, endures: he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.341 This tumbling stream of repeated yeses achieves an affirmative effect unknown in the rest of the novel. Its sincerity is not to be doubted. This is the amor matris which Stephen 341 J. Joyce, op. cit., p. 850. 115 uncertainly posits as <<the only true thing in life>>342, the great mystery to which epiclesis points. <<Love, says Bloom. 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