Forging, Milking, Delivering..

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These are the famous words of Stephen Daedalus at the end of A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man, right before he, in the final entr of the diar,envokes the old father, old artificer. Let us look at the beginning of theentr for April 26:

Mother is putting m new secondhand clothes in order. She prasnow, she sas, that I ma learn in m own life and awa fromhome and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. Sobe it. Welcome, O life... (Joce 1981: 228).

The realms of mother and father seem to be strictl divided here themother belongs not onl to the private realm, but also to the practicaland emotional one, as she packs Stephen and teaches him simple truthsof independent life, whereas the father appears as a fatherfigure, amthological force to whom the grand promise is addressed. For the same

oung man who had sometime earlier decidedl said to his friend Cranl:I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself mhome, m fatherland or m church (Joce 1981:222), undertaking thishard task seems a logical outcome. The mechanical metaphor even moreso to forge something not created et is quite appropriate for a son ofan artificer. Thus the wordings of these two final entries reveal the tension

of creativit and generativit, as much as the hide the mthologicalundercurrent of the mother figure. Because, as we see towards the end ofthe novel, Stephen is resolute in turning awa from patriarchal institutions,

while the onl mster unresolved remains the mother, as Cranl warns:What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, atleast, must be real! It must be. (Joce 1981:218). Even as a figure, themother is tightl connected to realit, she either cannot afford to be anartificer or is connected to some other sources of creation. Milking, ratherthan forging.

Cows, Birds and Girls

There are critics who warn us that Joce was oung in the time whenthe histor of sexualit was going through a turbulent period. It is thetime of Oscar Wildes trials and the rise of the New Woman, Freudsdiscoveries about human sexualit. All that has found its place in Jocescharacters whose sexualit is often confusingl volatile in its stereotpical


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understanding of male/female roles. In that view, the readings of James

Joces Ulyssesas a sons quest for his father and a fathers quest for a lostson clearl overlook a ver strong and important element of femaleness, aswell as the fact that the ties betweenA Portrait... and Ulyssesare built uponthe motives of femaleness and the mother.

Most of the smbolic networks of the novel are established at thefair-tale like opening ofA Portrait:

Once upon a time and a ver good time it was there was amoocow coming down along the road and this moocow that wascoming down along the road met a nicens little bo named bab

tuckoo...The scene, graphicall and through sound, points to the multiplicit

of female/mother roles in the novel. Joce has been among the major malewriters read as an example of lecriture feminine, also known as Frenchfeminist theory, a postructralist concept of writing from 1970s. It includesliterar production as well as theoretical writings about that production,

which amalgamate philosoph, pscholog and poetr. Hlne Cixous, oneof the most important representatives of the approach, sees writing asperpetual production of difference andjouissance. Writings that emphasize

the pleasure of text are closer to the rhthms of the female bod andtherefore are the poetics of jouisannce named lecriture feminineor, in theclosest English translation, writing the body. Hlne Cixous points to the

ver beginning ofA Portrait, where she discovers the importance of oraliton both the auditive and graphic levels, as much as in the ver content,through the perpetual appearance of the letter O. I insist on the graphic andphonic os because the text tells me to do so, writes Cixous, still pointingto the apparent paradox that with all its italics and its tpograph, the textasks the reader to listen (Cixous 1991: 4). The rhthm and meaning of

the scene take us back to the still undisturbed unit with the mother and,for Cixous, point to the basic conflict of the stor between the mother

who is a great soul but a slave, and who asks slaver of him (Cixous1991: 7).

In her praise of writing as permanent production of differences,Cixous calls women to write, because the, writing through and their bodies,write in white ink. And this white ink, this writing b milk, is present asa subject in Joces novels, within a wide net of smbols /bovinet/, alsoestablished in the opening lines of A Portrait. The moo/cow from the


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beginning is metonmicall connected to milk, breasts, femaleness and

mother. It takes us, for instance, all the wa to the image of the half-nakedpeasant woman who offers Davin milk and invites him to her house in themiddle of the nowhere1. Woman is, we then see clearl, a secret, dangerousother, a creature at the door to life and death, pleasure and doom.

This bovine imaginer, however, has both male and female sides.Suzette Henke investigates the influence of women in A Portrait inthe manner of French feminist theor and argues that female charactersare present everwhere and nowhere in this novel, and never in theforeground. In this wa, Henke reveals a couple of important motifs that

will be continued in Ulysses in essentiall the same manner. Emma, thegirl to whom the vilanelle is dedicated is given onl the initials (E.C), nota full name as in Stephen Hero. Her first appearance in the novel is almostindistinguishable from Eileen, as if a confusion of identities was aimed at.It takes a while to shape out this character and make it visible, althoughit remains dispersed and never reall solid. Her traits are not onl shared

with the oung girl from the Stephens childhood, but also with anothersmbolic female creature, the girl on the beach.2

The famous scene of epiphan at the beach, as well as the precedingscenes, constructs the mthical image which locates the whole novel A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on an archetpal map. young Stephenhas turned down the offer to enter the Jesuit order. He has declined it

wordlessl, with a simple gesture of removing his hand from the rectorshand, at the moment when he recognizes the older mans inabilit torejoice. But then, Stephen himself is not so joous, either. Some time later,he passes a group of priests, invoking the memor of the offer he declined

1 Davin declines he perceives her as somebod elses house, an alread taken territor.

Upon hearing the stor, Stephen thinks of her as of a smbol of Ireland, offering herselfblindl, without thinking. But, these are both male projections. None of the two oungmen see her as a lonel oung woman, left alone in the night. The dont perceive hereven as a well of milk, a nurturer, or mabe onl a future one, as Davin remarks Ithought b her figure and b something in the look of her ees that she must be carringa child. (Joce 1981:165) To both of the friends she is rather a secret, an unknown other,and an other cannot help but being dirt and dangerous in some wa.

2 Henke sas, for instance, that Stephen desires Emma, but fears he would be tangled intothe cobweb of domesticit and that Emma and all the women are secret for Stephen themsterious, dangerous Other. This, we have seen, also stands in the case of the oung

woman Davin told Stephen about.


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and reaches the beach where his friends pla in the water. He looks upward,

toward the clouds which... were voaging across the deserts of the sk, a host of nomadson the march, voaging high over Ireland, westward bound. TheEurope the had come from la out there beond the Irish Sea,Europe of strange tongues... (Joce 1981: 152).

As soon as he steps on the beach, the idea of Europe begins literallto hover above him. His friends underline the mthical reading ofhis own situation. The hail him shouting: Stephanos Dedalos! BousStephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos! In the word pla of his colleagues,Stephen assumes a new, archetpal identit. He is designated as a sacredbull, a sacred animal of the European origin, as well as kin of Daedalus,famous builder and runawa from the Cretan labrinth he himself has made.There is even a cr of drowning3, as a parodic reminder of the Deadalus/Icarus stor. Stephen, however, does take their game quite seriousl andreads their word pla in a non-parodic wa. The net of associations takesus straight to the heart of the craddle of Europe Crete, reviving the storof Europas rape b Zeus, disguised as a white bull.

The white bull was the sacred animal at Crete, and when Pasiphaea felt

lust toward it Deadalus made a wooden cow for her to mate with it. Bothtechneb which nature can be imitated to the point of making an artificialanimal and the generativit b which Pasiphaea gives birth to the Minotaur,the monster, seem to be implied in the shouts of Stephens colleagues.Geopoliticall, Stephens position is at the end of the location namedEurope. If Crete, the place where Europe was taken to, is the beginning,is Ireland here an ending, the edge, the new beginning of the continent?4Crete reversed, its mirror image? It surel is all that for Stephen. Being ona social and geographical margin, Stephen looks upward, looks toward

Europe, longing for it as the continent of his own archetpal and artisticidentit. The geograph of this novel underlining the complex relationtoward location as the main issue of presenting identit as dnamic is not

3 -O, cripes, Im drowned, cries one of the bos.4 Compare it to Rilkes lines about the distorted sk in the Underground world (Orpheus.

Euridce. Hermes.) ...around the other earth, a sun And a silent star-filled heaven turned,

a grief-heaven with distorted stars.


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so much Who am I?, as Where am I?. Where am I on a (some, this)

map... And, what does the map depict? As Stephen himself sas in theopening chapter of Ulysses, thinking of himself as a bo ears earlier: I amthe another now, and et the same , noting that being one is a process,not a state.

For Henke, the girl Stephen sees on the beach is anima, the female partof Stephens identit. She amalgamates the traits of the Christian, Celticand pagan iconograph she is mortal and angelic, sensual and serene.Her ivor tights evoke Eileens hands as well as the Ivor tower, and herbird-like breasts remind him of the Hol Spirit. Vicki Mahaffe notes thatthe encounter with the girl on the beach breaks the essentialist divisionbetween active men who make mistakes and passive, receptive women. Ina wa, she agrees with Henke saing that the bird/girl is not onl a fantasof what Stephen would wish to have, but what he would wish to be. She ais male female creature because she has the male abilit to transcend theenvironment, and the female abilit to escape, to fl awa. Onl throughthe perspective of the girl, can he come to terms with the world.

However, neither Henke nor Mahaffe point to the echo of mermaidsin the girl. She could be a bird, an angel, but still, she is the female danger,a seductive mermaid, a beaut and the beast at the same time. A Minotaur

reversed?This smbolic net is continued throughout Ulyssesas well at the ver

beginning, the old woman bringing milk becomes a focus of metaphoricand metonmic variations in Stephens mind; not to mention Blooms/the narrators comments on the oung woman he meets at the butchersstore. The culmination of this motif is the chapter Oxen of the Sun,

where various stles of chronological stages in the development of Englishare presented as the nine months of human gestation5. The chapter hassimilarities with one of the Joces letters to Nora, in which he compares

the writing of the book, his labor of an author, to Noras pregnanc andlabor (Friedman 1989: 79)6. However, Susan Friedmans notion thatJoces women produce infants through the channel of flesh, while his

5 Susan Friedman points out that Joces extensive plans for the chapter highlight hiscontinuing separation of mind and bod, word and deed, man and woman. (Friedman1989: 79).

6 thinking of the book I have written, the child which I have carried for ears and earsin the womb of the imagination as ou carried in our womb the children ou love, andof how I had fed it da after da out of m brain and m memor (August 21, 1912).


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men produce a brain child through the agenc of language (Friedman

1989: 79) does not catch the dnamic and non-essentalist sense of sexualidentit that permeates bothA Portraitand Ulysses.Although it is true that the chapter depicts the profaning of the sacred

oung men drink and talk too loud in the hospital where women do thisnatural but nonetheless msterious task of giving birth, and as a parallel tobovines belonging to the Sun god being slaughtered and eaten b starvingmen, we cannot stop at the either/or polarization7. Joces heroes at leasttr to be both/and both male and female in this case, to have both maleand female experience. So, if there are oung men who in one momenttalk about Ceaserian section, which is one of those appropriations of

womans childbirthing abilities b medical authorities, there is also ourBloom, whose interest in that subject is initated b hearing about Mrs.Purefos trials, and will have his/her share in the Circe episode. There isalso another Bloom, Moll Bloom, who will at the end of the book deliverexactl what in such a binar reading would belong exclusivel to men words8.

O Jamesy let me up out o this

For Dorritt Cohn, Penelope is a paradigm, locus classicusin the limitedcorpus of the autonomous interior monologue. In Ulysses, it is the onlmoment when the figurative voice totall obliterates authorial narrative.Cohn notes that Joce himself said that Ithaca was an end, while Penelopehas no end, middle, nor beginning. It begins and ends with the word Yesandrevolves around itself. The time is hour none, infinit... This, according toCohns analsis, seems to be just one of Joces numerous mstifications of

7 The ver idea that men create what is sublime words, or the word which can evenbecome god is derrided b the parodic tone of the chapter. On the other hand, the factthat woman gives birth to bod, that habeat corpus is almost a curse, that Bloom himselfsenses and expresses at least twice that women stand at the gates of this world, bringingmen and seeing men off, again underlines the mster of histor as the opposite to themiser of histor from a male perspective. All these nuances culminate in the closingchapter of Ulysses Penelope.

8 Suzette Henke points to the fact that throughout Ulyssesgender identities are undecidable,polmorphic and mobile, the oscilate. In her view, the atmosphere in the Eccles streetno. 7 is so much like a carnival that there can be no solid, firm voice of the authoritarianmale subject.


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his work. Critics tended to literall understand what Joce said on circling

in his letter to Frank Budgen, so that the read Penelope as permanentrepetition, revolving of the same. In such a reading Moll has been oftenseen as a great lump of lust, as Mahaffe claims. Such readings havecompletel neglected the fact that what she speaks is marked b a linearflow of time, unrolling into time through the sequences. The circularitof Molls arguments, including her first and last words, is decisevelcontrasted b the elements which underline her temporal sequences.Primar is the fact that the monologue does describe an event the onsetof her period. This event changes the flow of Molls thoughts, separatingit clearl to before and later. Moll enters into her New moon, new cclein the course of her monologue, and this is a decisevel temporal event, nomatter how mthical are its undertones.

In her linguistic analsis of the chapter Penelope, Dorrit Cohn pointsto the fact that the onl pronoun which alwas has the same referent is I,

while the most unstable are the male pronouns in the third person it isassumed that Moll alwas knows who he is in her monologue, but it isnot alwas clear to the reader.

Thus, we ma note both the fact that this is the onl chapter of thenovel where there is no trace of a narrator, and that the stabilit of the

pronoun I points to Moll as subject is not a usual womans position.Neither is she a usual subject a solid, unmoving center. Not onl doeseverthing flow out of her, from her insides, she herself is everwhere,emanating the world which we witness /pretend to hear. So much of hermonologue concerns other characters that she becomes dissipated anddisseminated through her own speech. Therefore, the circling Joce hadmentioned need not refer to the concept of time but to the subject/objectdnamics of the chapter.

As Cohn also points out, Moll makes ver little movement. Most of the

time she is ling down in bed, which makes her flow of thoughts technicallmore eas. She is ling down and delivering her speech delivering it inthe posture (on the bed) which has been much more convenient for maledoctors, in opposition to squatting, which is the onl other position shetakes throughout the whole chapter. It turns out that ling down is moreconvenient for the author, too, who happens to be a former student ofmedicine. So, what we have here can be read as an extension, an implicitcomment on the Oxen of the Sun chapter we have a woman delivering,giving birth to words.


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Finall, there is one metaphor of femaleness inherent in the ver name

Penelope weaving. Penelopes weaving is a seductive practice, her wa tothread awa from the usurpers, the monsters, to keep her identit secure.It is her wa of seemingl saing Yes, whereas it means a resolute No.Weaving is also a mechanical thing, it is in this wa similar to forging, andlike forging, it is both a highl gendered activit and a metaphor for doingthings with words, language, consciousness. Weaving, texture making, so,as Mahafe warns, it is no wonder Penelope has a pen in her ver name.

But, there is a crack in the coverage of words/thoughts which obliteratesthe voice of the narrator in Penelope there is a moment when Mollthinks: O James let me up out of this, meaning Jesus, but meaning alsoJames. Molls outward passivit is both necessar to make her inwardactivit easer to present, and is in collission with it. Her apostrophe is a crfor deliverance and a cr in deliver, to be saved from the confinment. Shepleads for help let me up out of this! But, what is this? A sexual web ofbeing an object of a gaze, or a textual /textural web she is herself weavingand has been woven into, at the same time? As anwhere in Joce, thereare no definite answers, just a multiplication of questions.

Mahaffe finds analog between Joces words and his life:

Joces fictions certainl grew out to meet the coincidences ofhis own life: the Fates, those original spinners, gave Joce as hismost faithful and consistent, benefactress, a feminist woman ofletters named Weaver. *(Mahaffe 1997: 133).

In a similar vein, I would add that for the author plaing so muchacross male/female sides, it seems remarkable that he was first christenedas James Augusta Joce, which was later changed to James AlosiusJoce. The white ink of Augusta/Alosius writings create a fictional world

where maleness and femaleness are in a permanent pla of differences,

identitities, Yessaing,jouissance, that is - re/jocing...

Reerences

Beebe, M. (1973) Joce and Aquinas:The Theor of Aesthetics. In:JamesJoyce, Dubliners and A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, ed. bMorris Beja, London: Macmillan, Casebook Series, 151-171.


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Bolt, S. (1981/1992). A Preface to Joyce. Harlow: Pearson Education

Limited.Butler, Ch. (1990/2004). Joce the Modernist. In: The Cambridge Companionto James Joyce, ed. b Derek Attridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversitPress, 67-87.

Cixous, H. (1991).Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist,Lispecor, and tsveayeva, edited, translated, and introduced b VerenaAndermatt Conle. Minneapolis: Universit of Minnesota Press.

Cohn, D. (1978/1983). transparen Minds, Narraive Modes for PreseningConsciousness in Fiction.Princeton: Princeton Universit Press.

Friedman, S. S. (1989). Creativit and the Childbirth Metaphor: GenderDifference in the Literar Discourse. In: Speaking of Gender, ed. ElaineShowalter. New york/London: Routledge, 73-100.

Henke, S. (1997). From James Joyce and the Politics of Desire.In: Cole,J. (ed),James Joyce, Ulysses, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man,Cambridge: Icon Critical Guides, Icon Books.

Joce, J. (1981).A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Granada.1981.

Mahaffe, V. (2004). Joce and Gender. In: Rabat JM. (ed), PalgraveAdvances in James Joyce Studies. London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 121-

143.Mahaffe, V. (1997). Reauthorizing Joce. In: Cole, J. (ed), James Joyce,

Ulysses, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. Cambridge: Icon CriticalGuides, Icon Books, 125-133.

Rabat, JM (2004).Classics of Joce Criticism. In:Rabat JM (ed),PalgraveAdvances in James Joyce Studies. London: Macmillan, 251-275.

Received: 1 Jul, 2011Accepted for publication: 1 September, 2011


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