Jonathan Orsi
There is a whiteness inherent to blank pages, blank canvases. This whiteness alludes to free from and to limitless possibilities, but it is in a sense a blanketing suffocation of predetermined structure. The artists’ palate is broad but only in respect to the Iris1, and the poet only has words to play with2. New buildings may be erected with radical and unseen forms but they shall forever be made of old stones3. To purge into the future, on must first decipher the past. The forging of Joyce’s Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an act of ritualized remembrance, a re-visitation on time past, re-presented through art in time present and perhaps in time future4. This act of this ritual liberates the art—not in the sense it disconnects or severs the ties to any one point, but that it binds and re-connects to all points.
The old adage, “united we stand, divided we fall” echoes a notable truth through the catacombed hallways of this philosophy. The concept of singularity or original identity even, is limiting in that it isolates an object’s wave, refusing to acknowledge its’ successor and predecessors. In doing so it dismisses any notion of enacted or adopted influence. Moreover, the very concept of originality effaces the most noble of all truths: that past, present, and future are in fact one. When we attempt to categorize or identify any object, we cast a medusa like gaze upon it, reducing it to unmoving stone5.
The portrait at a glance is a static image. Unmoving, defined and confined to its borders. The high edged frame sit heavy on the canvas like prison walls. The incarcerated images vacantly stares and mutely reiterates- silence. But the paintings durable pigments6 have secrets of their own. The eyes of the portrait unceasing follow like those in some faintly remembered Marx brother’s film. And upon this further inspection we can perhaps see that there is far more captured on that canvas than a solitary face. To start, features and imperfections spin stories of genealogies, and childhood injuries. This remembered image is comprised of more than pliable paints. It is the summation of an entire life condensed into one moment recollected.
The portrait then becomes transparant7 and it is through this transparency that the portraits true power shines. Freedom emanates not through originality, instead through unceasing cross referential8 connectivity. Joyce is combative with this notion; he attempts to disassociate himself with all elements of ascription. Stephen wrestles with the tools at his disposal as both items that bind him and simultaneously liberate him,
“The language in which we are speaking is his before it is min. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (166).
This is the central paradoxical juncture that flows throughout the text. Stephen’s only means of original expression are intrinsically grounded to pre-established foundations. Like fighting against a rip tide, the greater Stephen’s effort is to depart, the further he lapses back into the current. Stephen consistently reiterates those constraints he wishes to evade, “You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (179). This is most difficult contradiction that—until the rise...and fall of Finnegan—Joyce cannot seem to overcome. Through this combativeness he is creating and extending an inescapable labarynth9 of identity. At one point in the novel, Stephen’s fried turns to him and says, "it’s a curious thing you know, that your mind is supersaturate in religion which you say you disbelieve” (212). The most difficult contradiction that—until the rise...and fall of Finnegan—Joyce cannot overcome is the
This issue repeats itself ceaselessly and indeed becomes quite tautological and painful. The Ovidian quote that prefaces the novel almost becomes a mantra10 for the novel itself. Turning to unknown arts, Daedalus does perhaps forge an uncreated consciousness, but it’s for the millionth time. This Sisyphusian11 repetition threatens to implode and consume itself12. The central shift then must take place where reader and protagonist cease resistance and succumb to submission.
Elidae, in his work Myth and Reality writes that, “The return to the origins gives the hope of rebirth” (30). This notion is actualize by the novel through its highly conventional, unconventional initiation, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down the along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…” (1). This childhood remembrance—perhaps a first memory—is a return to the origins of Stephen’s consciousness. Michael Levenson in his critical essay Stephen’s Diary notes this point with reference to the books ending, “A Portrait of the Artist ends by reversing its opening. It retraces its own steps and concludes where it began” (199). The entire novel itself is a revisitation of a life remembered. Through this act of remembrance, Stephen returns to the place he started 13 and begins (again) to know it.
His recirculation14 no longer entraps him, it becomes a mechanism of freedom actualized through immortality, “his soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her gravesclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freed and power of his soul, as the great artificers whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable” (149). By embracing the myriad of mythic traditions that encompass him, Stephen ascends the realm of mortality and is granted almost God like omnipotence. Levenson writes, “He is more than his qualities: he is all those forms which his life inheres, the myths which enclose him, the past which begot him, the prospects which await him. This is the heavy burden that Joycean character must bear; it must be all that it has been and all that it might become” (203).
Though Stephen’s attachments and emotions come and go15 like the tide, at the apex of his expression Stephen soars on the wings and remembrance of things past16,
“Now as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophocey…No, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a wingedform flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and have been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging a new in his workshop out of sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?” (148).
Stephen’s character is constantly sized by this exalting power 17 of elation then subsequently purged of his illusion18. It becomes this inhalation and exhalation19 of ether of life and all therein contained.
The closing words of Joyce’s novel, in that moment of contention, the still point, neither moving from nor towards; there is the dance20. It is that moment between contradiction, between breaths; Zero that embodies all. This zero space lingers in limbo in between April 27th 21 and the rhythmic trodding footsteps of a membered moocow. Zero is along the riverrun. And again, fin22, echoing midstream between the “millionth time” and the “uncreated consciousness” lays somewhere in the smithy of Stephens’s soul the sound of silence23, the song of zero.
1. Iris referring to the eye, in that one is limited to what can be perceived. Iris also being the Greek personification of the rainbow, the basic colors from which comprise all othes.
2. A Reference to the character Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, and his cry, “Oh my Lolita, I only have words to play with!”.
3. A Reference to T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets, “Old stone to new building, old timer to new fires.”
4. Elliot’s “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.”
5. A Reference to Dustin’s blog dealing with “the gaze”.
6. Alluding to the closing words of Nabokov’s Lolita, “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
7. A Reference to Nabokov’s book and theme “Transparent Things”
8. A remembrance of a quote by Cees Nooteboom “The world is a never-ending cross-reference.”
9. The labyrinth being that of Ovid’s Daedalus, the labyrinth he created and subsequently became entrapped in.
10. Mantra being a practice of Buddhists wherein they repeat and repeat a phrase or sound to as to achieve liberation.
11. Emphasizing the repletion that is Sisyphus who continually rolled the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back to the bottom.
12. Ouroboros
13. In reference to the closing segment of Elliot, “We shall not cease from exploration…”
14. One of the few decipherable words beginning Finnegans Wake “..brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
15. To come and go is perhaps the most noted theme of Samuel Beckett’s work I have come across and is in many ways the most minimalized interpretation of all life.
16. Remembrance of Things Past the initial translated title of Proust great work also known as In Search of Lost Time
17. An expression owed to Elieda’s own beautiful words and philosophy, “that in one way or another one “lives” the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected.”
18. This notion of illusion deeply explored in Shakespeare’s The Tempest but the concept that it may seize and release you, is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Caliban’s Soliloquy, “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
The Tempest 3.2.148-156
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
The Tempest 3.2.148-156
19. Breath by Samuel Beckett. Also in relation to Ecclesiastics also…everything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZON66BbB0
20. A Reference again to Elliot
21. My Birthday!
22. A cunning reference and inversion to Fin Again (funnagain…I mean Finnegan)
23. A reference to Corin’s beautiful blog.
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