The fragments of Stephen Hero present Stephen’s interest in the occult, not
in relation to Pater, as in Ulysses, but through his reverence for Yeats’s mystical
short stories. In chapter 23, during Stephen’s second year at the university,
he devotes himself to his literary enthusiasms, including Yeats’s stories
from The Tables of the Law concerning Owen Aherne, Michael Robartes,
and mystical excess. At the same time, he pursues whimsical research into
Renaissance Italian writings at a little-used Dublin library. His recollection in
Ulysses of reading ‘the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas’ ‘in the stagnant
bay of Marsh’s library’ (U 3.107–8), which occurs just before the memory
of the epiphanies, refers to this period. In A Portrait Yeats’s characters are
barely mentioned, and in Ulysses Stephen distances himself from other artists
with mystical tendencies. In Stephen Hero, however, he can ‘believe in the
reality of their existence’ (SH 183/178). Identifying with these ‘outlaws’
(SH 183/178) who possess secret wisdom, Stephen can take a stand against
the restrictive conventions of Irish culture. His writing of epiphanies reflects
the same attitude.
In this work, Yeats’s writing provides a turning point for Stephen that is
rendered largely in terms of his character rather than through style. After
reading Yeats’s stories, he protests extravagantly against the restrictions of
Irish culture. As had many English and Irish artists of the 1890s, including
Oscar Wilde, Stephen chooses the road of excess to protest middle-class
conventions. Around the time that he recites publicly from memory Yeats’s
story, ‘The Tables of the Law’, ‘A certain extravagance began to tinge his
life’ (SH 184/179). His uninhibited behaviour reaches a memorable climax
at the end of the next chapter when he interrupts his Italian tutorial and runs
after Emma Clery to propose a night of lovemaking.
‘The Tables of the Law’ and the spiritual aestheticism it represents contribute
to Stephen’s change in behaviour by providing an artistic focus for his
intense anger against Irish culture. That anger emerges in the aftermath of
his sister’s illness and death, for which there are no equivalents in A Portrait.
Despite unconventional views, eccentricities, frustrations, isolation,
and arrogance, Stephen’s public conduct before her death remains largely
within the bounds of convention. Even though he baits Father Butt with
a question about unseemly passages in Twelfth Night (SH 34/28), Stephen
tolerates for a time the contradictions in his culture, which he reacts to with
amusement (SH 35/29). Later, when the paper he delivers at the Debating
Society is attacked, he still responds in a restrained way, then decides gradually
to withdraw without clamour from groups and activities. Prudence and
tolerance serve Stephen well until he realizes that the issues demand a less
restrained response.
In presenting the death of Isabel due to a serious illness in Stephen’s presence
at the beginning of chapter 23, Joyce draws on his realistic epiphany
concerning the decline toward death of his younger brother Georgie (PSW
179). Besides Stephen’s brother Maurice, Isabel is his only appreciative auditor.
By this point in the narrative, he has largely given up not only on the
Debating Society but also on the young people who gather regularly at
the Daniels’ household, for whom he would sometimes play the piano and
sing. Stephen’s playing for Isabel is obviously motivated by neither desire,
which he feels for Emma, nor rebellious, intellectual comradeship, which
he shares with Maurice. There is desperation and determination, as well as
pathos, in Stephen’s pretence that Isabel is not near death. Stephen cannot
save her, but they achieve a special kind of understanding when ‘once or
twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from
the bed had guessed his meaning’ (SH 166/161). In these scenes we witness
Stephen putting on his mask of seriousness for a more humane purpose than
self-protection. It enables him to undertake a work of kindness and establish
communication with an audience that matters to him. Like Isabel, the
success is short-lived, and Stephen’s moods of selfish indulgence recur, at
times in a style that is the precursor for the Paterian ending of part iv of A
Portrait: ‘in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane’
(SH 167/162).
Rather than disappearing after Isabel’s death, Stephen’s reveries and his
commitment to the kind of spiritualized art he finds in Yeats intensify. But
the situation has changed. In a way that is exceptional in Stephen Hero,
Joyce renders the change briefly through style by describing the funeral in
chapter 23 realistically: ‘Standing beside the closed piano on the morning of
the funeral Stephen heard the coffin bumping down the crooked staircase’
(SH 171/167). Given the piano’s regular appearance and its importance in
the previous chapter, the closed instrument reiterates the shift indicated
stylistically by the disturbing news that Stephen’s mother has reported:
‘There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s . . . stomach’
(SH 168/163). After the funeral, Stephen finally breaks significantly with
decorum by choosing to drink a pint with the carriage drivers rather than
having a more genteel drink with the middle-class mourners. The gesture
marks a permanent shift in his conduct, his relationships within the family,
and his attitude toward the family’s Irish social context.
By juxtaposing in Stephen Hero a Paterian style and a realistic style, though
briefly, Joyce presents Stephen’s difficult, contradictory situation and the
opposing extremes of his attitudes in a way that anticipates his extended
use of those styles in A Portrait. But neither style is suitable for capturing
the energy with which Stephen sometimes thinks and reacts in Stephen Hero
and in the later books. That energy emerges as clowning and laughter in
numerous scenes both preceding and following Isabel’s death. In response
to a self-deprecating story Maurice tells him, for example, he ‘exploded
in laughter’ (SH 64/59). He has to resist the impulse to express his antic
disposition to the President when they discuss the censoring of his paper
(SH 99–103/94–7). During a Good Friday sermon, he indulges ‘his gambling
instinct’ by trying to outpace the priest’s various translations of Consummatum
est, running quickly through a list of possibilities, wagering ‘with
himself as to what word the preacher would select’ (SH 125/120). Much
later, well after Isabel’s death, Stephen and Lynch have a funny conversation
about love and sex (SH 195–7/191–2), and he parodies the mechanical
catechism of his Italian lessons by composing his own humorous alternative
Joyce moves in such passages toward presenting Stephen not only as serious
but as energetically engaged in the way he sometimes is in parts iv and v
of A Portrait and in Ulysses. When Stephen deceptively wears a serious mask
to cover a mocking interior response, he has already begun practising the
‘silence, exile, and cunning’ (P 208), announced near the end of A Portrait,
by which he will refuse to serve home, fatherland, and church. But Joyce has
yet to find an adequate style for presenting at length Stephen’s ‘scornful mind
scampering’ (SH 102/97) in active dialogue with itself and its surroundings.
By contrast with the condensed, allusive internal dialogue we have already
seen in the early part of Ulysses, Stephen’s thoughts in Stephen Hero have a
ponderous, awkward quality that does not capture the energy he sometimes
humorously expresses.
His self-reflections regularly take the form of self-doubts in which Stephen
recognizes that he, like his culture, is full of inconsistencies. He thinks about
or experiences vacillations at various times, including a moment near the end
of chapter 22. The contradictions emerge in Stephen’s doubts about himself:
‘Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger
upon every falsehood it contained’ (SH 167/162). Such misgivings are presented
more extensively shortly after the culminating episode with Emma in
a segment (SH 208–11/204–6) that is stylistically unusual in Stephen Hero
because it seems to present at length, though awkwardly, an internal colloquy.
‘An embassy of nimble pleaders’ from the Church state their positions
(SH 208/204), but these ‘ambassadors’ must be internal ones, since Stephen
is involved in ‘reflections’. The implications for Stephen’s character are clear.
He is criticizing and testing himself, motivated by residual fear and insecurity
about continuing temptations to conform in order to succeed. In
short, he has yet to move entirely beyond the crisis of his break with the
Church.
Because he knows he may be self-deceived, Stephen’s self-doubt involves
ambivalences that are different in kind from the ones he despises in his culture,
which is oblivious to them. After Isabel’s death, Stephen’s encounters
with the cultural contradictions elicit some new responses. He realizes, for
instance, that the members of the Debating Society ‘revered’ the ‘memory of
Terence MacManus’, a revolutionary patriot, ‘not less . . . than the memory
of Cardinal Cullen’, an ultra-conservative clergyman who spoke out against
the nationalists (SH 178/173). Earlier, Stephen might have responded with
restrained amusement, but his response now is total withdrawal and sarcasm.
Stephen’s sensitivity to contradictions leads him to literary projects,
such as love verses and epiphanies, that allow him to resist his society by
working with opposing elements in combination.We hear first about the love
poetry, on which Stephen labours instead of pursuing his academic studies,
between the death of Isabel and his infatuation with Yeats’s stories. Inspired
by Dante’s Vita Nuova, he expresses his love in ‘feudal terminology’, but also
‘a little ironically’: ‘This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with
so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal
fealty because we recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy’
(SH 179/174). In his typically ambivalent fashion, Stephen sees both loss
and gain in transforming the idealizing language of love. What it loses in
‘fierceness’ it gains in ‘amiableness’. Stephen humanizes his poetry by tempering
exaggeration with a sense of human limitations. That Stephen takes
this direction just before he discovers Yeats’s mystical stories suggests that
he will not follow the path of ahistorical, visionary fantasies for long. In his
retrospective response to his verses, Stephen recognizes his own excesses. In
chapter 26, he tells Maurice he has burned them because ‘they were romantic’
(SH 232/226). This judgement about his earlier efforts anticipates Stephen’s
thinking about his epiphanies in Ulysses.
Introduced late in Stephen Hero, the epiphanies enable Stephen to proceed
by means of contradiction. In writing them, he can employ both stark
realism and visionary experience in a mode that, like his love poetry, has
the potential for being internally differential. In the representing of a vacuous
reality, the artist recognizes and rejects its defects; in the evocation
of visionary experience, the artist displaces debased, ordinary reality with a
spiritual alternative. In Stephen Hero, however, Stephen never transforms his
dual epiphanic procedure into anything more than a double gesture of defiance.
An exaggerated swerving between extremes could become the vertigo
of madness, as Stephen himself senses. Despite their excessive, narcissistic
qualities, the epiphanies hold out distantly the possibility of juxtaposing and
merging opposites stylistically to present the oscillations of thought and to
generate alternatives for the future. The stylistic mingling can realize Fanon’s
‘fluctuating movement’ as the dialogical interaction of discourses in an internally
divided culture that, by simultaneously looking forward and looking
back, begins to take on new, unpredictable forms. Joyce moves toward
such stylistic and conceptual possibilities only after abandoning Stephen
Hero.
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu