james joyce aesthetic theoryry

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James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus: The Theory of AestheticsAuthor(s): Thomas W. GraysonSource: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer, 1967), pp. 310-319Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486651Accessed: 08-04-2016 04:24 UTC

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James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus. The Theory of Aesthetics

by Thomas W. Grayson

A number of valuable and learned commentaries have appeared in the scholarly journals and as book-length studies which treat Joyce's aesthetic theories.1 In general these studies indicate the na ture of Joyce's debt to Aquinas and attempt to show the point or points at which Joyce departs from Thomistic thought. Were the re marks which follow merely an attempt to cover that same carefully harvested field in an effort to glean a few miniscule grains after the winnowing of such diligent scholarship, they would be profitless and vain. Instead, this discussion will apply certain aspects of Joyce's aesthetic theories with a somewhat different emphasis than is usually given them, and, in consequence, a somewhat different reading will be given to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Before turning directly to Portrait and the aesthetic theories, a few prefatory remarks are in order. It has become something of a critical truism to recognize that all of Joyce's fictional works bear a relationship to each other which is much more than coincidental. There is, in fact, a tendency to read his fiction as if it were one con tinuous story?certainly the tendency is to see Ulysses as a con tinuation of sorts to Portrait. The justification for this view is im pressively plausible: Stephen Dedalus, the nominal hero of Portrait, appears as one of the major characters in Ulysses, and several char acters from Dubliners and Portrait appear in the later novel.

Although this approach to Joyce's fiction is not only plausible but necessary in order to gain access to some of the themes the writer was obviously interested in working out, it is not the only valid way to read his fiction. We are, after all, dealing with fictional characters who are presented to us in fictional units (stories and novels) and these units are subject to formal organization or struc ture: each one is an autonomous element which is not really depend ent upon the other stories and novels for its meaning. Joyce's artistic intentions for Stephen Dedalus in Portrait are necessarily different from those he had for him in Ulysses. Though Stephen is a sur rogate for Joyce in both novels, we should not make the mistake of seeing him as a direct counterpart for the author. He is a fictional character, and as such he represents an aspect or several aspects of the author, just as Leopold Bloom does. The fact is that Joyce's relationship to Stephen seems to have been one of almost continuous

310


THOMAS W. GRAYSON 311

flux. After the fourth chapter of Portrait, the author's attitude toward Stephen becomes one of estrangement. It is almost as if Portrait serves to exorcize Stephen from the personality of Joyce, thereby permitting the emergence of the artist.

In illustrating the manner in which Stephen serves to show forth various aspects of Joyce, it is helpful to turn to the definition of irony which Northrop Frye borrows from Aristotle and develops. He says:

The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle's Ethics, where the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the ahzzon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a predestined artist, just as the alazon is one of his predestined victims. The term irony, then, indicates a technique cf ?aying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a more general

way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning.2

In Stephen we find a character who might well qualify as both eiron and alazon. In one relation to Joyce, who "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible," (215) Ste phen has the character of an alazon, a miles gloriosus of the arts. In another relation, he seems to be approximately identifiable with Joyce himself; at various points their knowing and feeling coincide. And in yet another relation he seems to occupy a position at mid point between the alazon and the eiron. In this last position he func tions in the more or less traditional role of the hero of the novel; he is the central element in a kind of prose trope which might be con sidered an "objective correlative." If the term "objective correlative" is to be admitted at all in connection with Joyce's use of Stephen as a character in the novel, it must, of course, be admitted whenever the narrative thread becomes a situation or 3 chain of events which is the formula of a particular emotion, and, therefore, he might func tion in this capacity as alazon or eiron. But it is in this third relation

?that point between the two extremes of trov, Jazon and eiron? where Stephea consistently remains during the first four chapters of the novel. In the fifth chapter Stephen's experiences are not essentially formative, as they had been throughout ti e first four chapters, and Joyce seems to regard him as a suitable victim of irony. Whereas the first four chapters tell Stephen's story in terms of the forces that act upon his life, the fifth and final chapter is primarily the story of his reaction.

Through the greater part of the fifth chapter we see Stephen as alazon. Throughout the fragments cf Stephen Hero which survive, Stephen also maintains the posture of the alazon. He is consistently


312 JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY

"a poet with malice aforethought." (SH, 26) His attitude in Stephen Hero is characterized in the sentence, "The monster in Stephen had lately taken to misbehaving himself and on the least provocation was ready for bloodshed." (SH, 29) In Chapter V of Portrait he reeks of insolence and self-satisfaction. As he allows his mother to scrub his neck and clean his ears, one is strangely reminded of the crocodile being served and preened by the trochilus bird. As Stephen leaves the house and slowly chooses his way toward the university?he is already hopelessly late?he hears the cry of a mad nun screeching from the nuns' madhouse. Here Joyce provides auctorial commentary to reveal the state of Stephen's mind in response to the nun's wailing for Jesus and in response to the world around him in general:

He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness. His father's whistle, his mother's mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth. He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration. (175-176)

As Stephen strolls on toward the university, Joyce or his narrator surrogate continues to reveal the condition of Stephen's mind. In response to the morning light and the smell of the trees in the rain, "his soul was loosed of her miseries." (176) The images that are evoked in his mind are not images of flesh and blood girls but "mem ories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann," and he experiences "a mood of quiet joy." Indeed, all of the images he evokes are literary ones. At this point in the life of the artist the "esthetic image" would seem to be an image useful in filling the vacuum created when the voices of real people are driven from erne's heart?with an execration.

As Stephen surveys the pleasures he will have in contemplating the style of Newman at one point and the dark humor of Caval canti at another, we are suddenly brought up short with a discordant image: "as he went by Baird's stone cutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty." (176)

That part of Joyce still faintly visible in the novel, a persona who narrates the story, tells us here what we are compelled to accept as a truthful revelation of the state of Stephen's mind, and that state of mind is rather confused. Stephen is indulging here in a kind of free association based upon his literary favorites. There is no basis for his being reminded of Ibsen simply because he passes the stone works. That is, the stone cutting works do not, in them selves, have an Ibsen-like quality. Perhaps Stephen associates the



stone with Rubek, the sculptor in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's last play. If so, then Joyce is using a single allusion on two separate levels of association: one for Stephen and one for the narrator. Ste phen thinks of the stone, then of Rubek, the artist, and in doing so he thrills to the thought of himself as artist. This chain of associa tions partially explains his sense of Ibsen's spirit blowing through him "like a keen wind." But in Ibsen's play Rubek awakens too late from the spiritual death in which he had been imprisoned ever since he had finished his magnum opus. He awakens from his "death" only to be swept away in an avalanche of snow and ice. Rubek's "death" had been a loveless condition?much like the condition Stephen is now in?in which he cut himself off from the life around him, and, hence, was sterile to produce any more works of art. The thought of Ibsen's spirit as a "keen wind" provides us with awareness of the intensity of Ibsen's impact upon Stephen, but there is also a strangely macabre quality in die image. The incongruity of this asso ciation is extended by equating the "keen wind" with a "spirit of wayward boyish beauty."

When we reach the metaphors relating to Ibsen, we are stopped short, wrenched out of an apathy which had permitted us to read the preceding paragraph with the light-heartedness and "quiet joy" that has settled upon Stephen. We are compelled to re-examine the para graph with a closer and more critical eye.

Here and elsewhere in the novel we discover a complex fugal treatment of point of view as an isolated and objectified technique of narration, capable of being lifted out of the story line momentarily and scrutinized as a thing in itself, but at the same time utterly in dispensable to the progress of the story?a thing without which the story, as a story, cannot move forward. The counterpoint is worked out in a lambent play between the consciousness of Stephen and that of Joyce's narrator persona, the persona's consciousness operating on a higher level than Stephen's and in a sense commenting on it. By higher level is meant in the direction toward the artist and away from the direction of the alazon.

The persona or mask for the artist allows him great latitude in exploiting the ironic possibilities of narration. George T. Wright says of the mask: "For the mask of drama is not what it is in our ordinary usage, a device for disguising or hiding the face. On the contrary, the mask of drama, or of primitive dance, is clearly intended to reveal more than it hides, to affirm more than it obscures. In these forms the face is not important, but the stylized mask symbolizes, stands

for, something?an attitude, a view of life, one aspect of the uni verse?which is of too great significance for the expressiveness of any human face to be able to convey."3 Here the narrative mask serves Joyce well: it allqws him to establish?for the first time in the



novel?a clearly recognizable distance between himself and Stephen, for here the values implicit in the narrator's commentary are ob viously at variance to those of Stephen; there is a tone which comes close to ridicule which permeates the narrator's report of this morn ing walk. Furthermore, the narrative mask here becomes the closest thing we get to a portrait of an authentic artist in the novel, and that portrait is in keeping with the aesthetic theories Stephen ex pounds to Lynch and Joyce records in his notebooks; the personality of the artist has "refined itself out of existence"; it has "imper sonalized itself;" it is "within or behind or beyond or above its handiwork, invisible." (215)

In the first image in the passage, that of the "rain laden trees," we find the experience itself evoking for Stephen a memory of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann. Hauptmann's female characters are, for the most part, woebegone and hopeless creatures; they are crushed and beaten and overwhelmed by life. In Stephen's transubstantiation of experience the movement is from a concrete and corporeal or sensual image?the rain laden trees? to an abstract or artistic image?Hauptmann's women and girls? and finally to what for him must be regarded as a "pure" experience

?the experience of a "pale sorrow" which mingles in "a mood of quiet joy." This for Stephen is an "esthetic image." The attainment of this esthetic image is through a process which has three stages: experience of the reality of an external world, experience of the reality of the world of art, and experience of the internal reality of feeling. For Stephen this pattern is a consistent one; it is his formula for particularizing emotion.

The persona or narrator, on the other hand, does not seem to be caught up in this process; he is dissociated from it; he is behind or above it. His own emotional response to the situation is one of in difference. He sees and knows and records, and we might well imagine him paring his fingernails.

As Stephen contemplates his walk to the university, he knows that he will think of Newman as he passes the sloblands, Cavalcanti as he passes the provision shops, and Ibsen as he passes the stone cutting works. Stephen can predetermine his emotional reactions with the same certainty he can impose upon the direction in which he walks, and always the process is one which implicitly at least negates and cancels out the external world of reality. Rain laden trees are converted ultimately to pale sorrow and quiet joy through the medium of Hauptmann's art. The sloblands of Fairview will be converted into something which is at once more tangible and more valuable in Stephen's mind?the "cloistral and silverveined prose of New

man." In using the term sloblands for marshes, Joyce is toying with the Gaelic etymology of the word. Denotively the word simply



means marsh or muddy tract of ground, but the connotation of the word suggests that it might designate a place or land for boorish or slovenly persons. There is something of the same wryly risible quality in the "pale sorrow" suffered by the females of Hauptmann. The Pale is, of course, English jurisdictional territory. In Ireland the Pale is English Ireland. Are the pale sorrows of Hauptmann's women sorrows that somehow relate to English domination? Stephen is unaware of this possible implication, but one can't be sure about Joyce. Stephen's word choice of sloblands suggests the pejorative attitude which is residual in Stephen's mind for the world of which those marshes are a part. He prefers the "silverveined prose" of New

man. One senses that the view at Fairview is far fairer than Stephen is able to realize and that the sloblands themselves, though they lack solidity of the kind upon which structures are erected, are far more substantial than Stephen would grant. The same process of cancel ing out the world of things and people is seen in Stephen's treatment of the provision shops?presumably hung with slaughtered beefs and piled high with other viands?and in his contemplation of the stone cutting works. Stephen seems not to see his world- as a world in which one can live?especially if one thinks of himself as an artist.

Stephen's Weltanschauung here is clearly not that of the persona who records these events. The narrator has retained a dispassionate objectivity. Were he to indulge in the free play of mind and emo tion, the undisciplined and self-centered consciousness that Stephen here indulges in, he could not capture and record the scene with all the concreteness and cohesiveness which it retains.

At this point Stephen is no artist nor is he to become an artist either in this novel or in Ulysses where he still flounders and is vic timized by the eddy currents of his own passions and self-aggrandiz ing flashes of intelligence. If this episode is a portion of a portrait, and if that portrait is of an artist, we must conclude that the real sub ject of the study is that all but invisible persona who sees and knows and records. The artist being portrayed is Joyce not Stephen. But the real James Joyce, unlike the guest celebrity of a popular television show, refuses to rise at a command and identify himself. He remains a multi-faceted personality who embraces and contains Stephen and his persona and innumerable other identities.

At this point we can hardly take Stephen seriously as an aesthete if we judge him by his own aesthetic theories. In his long lecture to Lynch, Stephen first defines beauty as that, the apprehension of which pleases. (186) As he extends this position, he says that "beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible." (208) He goes on to say, "The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic



apprehension," and finally, "Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance." (211) By wholeness or integritas he means that the thing must be apprehended as a unified, single thing, seen as a distinct and separate entity. By harmony or con sonantia he means that the thing apprehended must be seen as a thing "complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts." (212) And by radiance or clarita? he means that the thing must be apprehended as the thing it is, that it must be apprehended in terms of its whatness.

It will be clear that Stephen's morning walk to the university af fords him no experience of beauty in the terms that he, himself, uses to define beauty. There is for Stephen no apprehension of any relations of the sensible which can be said to be satisfying. For him there is no clear apprehension at all?only a disjunctive chain of associations which separates the world of sensible phenomena from the world of imagination. To the extent that Stephen fails to appre hend relations, he fails to encounter beauty.

Underlying the Thomistic aesthetic philosophy, which for St. Thomas is merely a minor offshoot of his ethical philosophy but upon which Stephen bases his own aesthetic theories, is the assump tion that the creation is beautiful since it proceeds from God; there fore all things are inherently beautiful. Nowhere does Stephen's theory challenge this view. Stephen even seems to assent to Mac Alister's imputation that his theory is "applied Aquinas." (209) But he does not perceive the inherent beauty of the things which form his world; for him there is no intellection per ?e, no fundamental un derstanding or appreaension of the things v Mch allows him to sec them in relation to other things. In his own quest for beauty, which seems for him to be a kind of spiritual condition of rest, we find Stephen departing from his theories in significant ways, though we do not find Joyce or his persona departing from them.

We recall Stephen's contention that "The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension." (208) We are not told how to accomplish this minor miracle, but we may safely assume that Stephen means that the quest for beauty begins with an understanding of the way in which the mind works, and that "apprehension" is going to be a key to his definition of beauty.

Joyce worked out his theories of beauty and apprehension in 1904 and recorded them in his "Pola Notebook."4 His notebook entry for the 15th of November is headed with the Latin phrase: Pulchra sunt quae visa placent. The Latin is a misquote from the Summa Theolog ica. St. Thomas actually said: "pulchra enim dicuntur ea quae visa placent."5 Joyce's phrase can be translated as follows: 'Those things are beautiful the apprehension of which pleases.' St Thomas's phrase


THOMAS W GRAYSON 117

should be translated: Those things are said to be beautiful the ap prehension of which pleases.' Though the difference seems slight on the surface, it is nonetheless significant. In Joyce's view the sugges tion is that beauty is dependent upon apprehension or intellection and is not an a priori condition of things themselves. His choice of the verb sunt implies a temporal contiguity of the object, the appre hending mind, and the quality of beauty. The question here is not one of verifying an accepted truth through inductive reasoning as opposed to deductive reasoning. It is far more basic than that and raises ontological questions about the nature of beauty. If beauty is inextricably linked to apprehension, it seems clear that beauty is not a quality of things but a quality of the mind which perceives and apprehends. Beauty, then, is the result of human activity. For Aquinas the choice of the verb dicuntur suggests that beauty is pre existent and residual in the thing itself and that the mind which is pleased in the apprehension of this quality simply identifies the quality as beauty. For St. Thomas the question of beauty can never be divorced from a consideration of a final cause. That is, beauty is the quality of "due proportion" which is everywhere evident in the universe. Beauty itself, says Aquinas, "properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause."6 That is, beauty is an ideal form or conception which precedes the resultant apprehension. Beauty, for Aquinas, is clearly a quality of things themselves which results from God's real ization and development of the possibility of an ordered universe? the final cause. Beauty is in the nature of a formal cause which stands in mediate relation to God and man. But Joyce's theories, as they are expressed in the notebook and in Portrait, seem to place a dif ferent construction on the concept of beauty.

As Joyce discusses beauty, he turns immediately to the question of apprehension. He says that apprehension involves at least two activities: cognition or simple perception, and recognition. By recog nition he means: "an activity of decision; and in accordance with this activity in all conceivable cases a sensible object is said to be satisfying or dissatisfying." (CW, 147) His notebook entry for the following day, the 16th of November, introduces a third condition of the act of apprehension. He calls this condition satisfaction. Of this he says:

By reason of the fact that these three activities are ail pleasant themselves every sensible object that has been apprehended must be doubly and may be trebly beautiful. In practical aesthetic philosophy the epithets 'beautiful' and 'ugly' are applied with regard chiefly to the third activity, with regard,, that is, to the nature, degree and duration of the satisfacion resultant from the apprehension of any sensible object and therefore any sensible object to which in practical aesthetic



philosophy the epithet 'beautiful' is applied, must be trebly beau tiful, must have encountered, that is, the three activities which are involved in the act of apprehension in its most complete form. Practically then the quality of beauty in itself must in volve three constituents to encounter each of these three ac tivities. (CW, 147)

If "the quality of beauty . . . must involve three constituents to en counter each of these three activities," it seems clear that, for Joyce, the quality of beauty is not an absolute quality, as it is for Aquinas.

Joyce's theory of aesthetics?and Stephen's?may be said to be relativistic. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this discussion to consider in detail the implications of relativistic phiosophy. Wylie Sypher's discussion of what he calls the "cubist perspective"7 is a brilliant and subtle handling of the artistic implications of "relati vism." In his discussion Sypher quotes Ortega y Gasset:

Perspective is one of the component parts of reality. Far from being a disturbance of its fabric, it is its organizing element. A reality which remained the same from whatever point of view it was observed would be a ridiculous conception.Every life is a point of view directed upon the universe. Strictly speak ing, what one life sees, no other can.The persistent error

.is the supposition that reality possesses in itself, inde pendently of the point of view from which it is observed, a physiognomy of its own.But reality happens to be, like a landscape, possessed of an infinite number of perspectives, all equally veracious and authentic. The sole false perspective is that which claims to be the only one there is.8

Underlying this view is the assumption that reality has an existence which cannot ultimately be separated from the perceiver?that real ity is a continuum which embraces the perceiving mind and the object of perception.

When Stephen speaks of the "act itself of esthetic apprehension" in terms of "wholeness, harmony and radiance," he seems to recog nize the essential linkage between the subject and the object ol per ception, and he seems to indicate that a valid or accurate perception is one which produces that stasis which he calls beauty. Joyce has this basic orientation when he rejects the epithets "beautiful" and "ugly" and contends that the sensible object must be trebly beauti ful which has encountered "the three activities which are involved

in the act of apprehension in its most complete form." (CW, 148) But in the passage we have been considering, Stephen is not en

gaged in apprehension in the sense of its being constituted of three activities. He does not perceive, recognize and become satisfied. On the contrary, he casts most of his perceptions of reality out of his iiourt with an execration. He does not perceive; he engages in



literary fantasy. If we grant that Stephen is an aesthetician, we must do so at the cost of denying that he is an artist or an aesthete.

The passage we have been considering is not unusual in the fifth chapter of Portrait. We see the same tension between Stephen and Joyce's persona in the episode with the dean of studies, in the com position of the villanelle and in the journal at the close of the novel. And it is in terms of this constant ironic posturing of Stephen, the ostensible hero-artist9 of the novel, that we discover Joyce's dramatic form for the particular "esthetic image" with which this novel is concerned. Joyce maintains a clear-sighted perspective of his "sensible or intelligible matter" with which he makes "human disposition for an esthetic end." His subject matter is at once Stephen and himself, for in a very real sense?though not necessarily a biographically ac curate one?Stephen is Joyce. He is Joyce in the sense of being "life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination." (215) He is, just as every other fictional character is, a stylized version of life, or, as Joyce puts it, a "purified" version. The process of purifying life in the imagination of the artist apparently for Joyce is one which depends heavily upon the use of irony.

Kent State University

1 See Thomas E. Connolly, Joyce's Portrait: Criticism and Critiques (New York, 1962), 329-335 for a selected bibliography.

2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 40. 3 George T. Wright, The Poet in the Poem: The Personae of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound

(Los Angeles, 1962), p. 9. 4 James Joyce, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard

Ellmann (New York, 1954), pp. 141-148. 5 Summa Theologica I, a. 5, art. 4 6 Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York,

1947), p. 26. 7 Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York, 1960), pp. 257-330. 8 Sypher, p. 287. 9 The irony of this theme in Portrait is particularly poignant when seen in connection

with the 19th century's fondness for treating the artist-hero as a literary theme.


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