creation and destruction in portrait

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Destruction and Creation in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"Author(s): Elliott B. Gose, Jr.Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1985), pp. 259-270Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25476660 .Accessed: 21/04/2013 14:06

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Destruction and Creation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Elliott B. Gose, Jr. University of British Columbia

What is the relation of imagination to experience, of body, emo tions and soul to inspiration? In this essay I propose to probe the source of creativity in A Portrait, discussing Joyce's presentation of the composition of Stephen's villanelle. But I shall begin by focusing on Joyce's use of chiasmus as product and sign of the creative process, and on the relation of Stephen to the images of the female

which are so important a part of his consciousness. The female looms at the very beginning of A Portrait, as provider

in the moocow and Betty Byrne, but also as a threat in the pressure put on Stephen by his mother and Dante.

His mother said: -O, Stephen will apologise.

Dante said: -O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.

Pull out his eyes,

Apologise, Apologise, Pull out hts eyes (P 8).

Stephen's rhyme takes the simple form of chiasmus, the reversed structure whereby the second two lines mirror the first two. The

young boy is faced with his first dilemma, his first choice between

punishment and submission. The chiasmic structure balances the two themes perfectly even reversing their order in the second

quatrain. Said over by Stephen to himself, the lines represent a choice between placating words coming from inside and threatening actions coming from outside. That same attempt to balance inner and outer is evident in many chiasmic statements in the rest of the novel.

Before taking part in the Belvedere Whitsuntide play Stephen stands outside, seeing the theatre as an ark. He hears a waltz being played inside: 'The sentiment of the opening bars.. .evoked the incommunicable emotion... of all his day's unrest" (P 75). Inner and

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outer are then matched in a chiasmie evocation. "His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying..." (P 75). With and as the center point, "wave of sound" on one side is to "tide of flowing music" on the other as "his unrest issued" is to "ark was journeying." The chiasmie sentences which appear in the second half of the novel will usually be intro duced by the conjunction and, which is also a hallmark of the incremental and repetitious style that renders Stephen's romantic

sensibility. As a symmetrical reversal, chiasmus presents a rhetorical mirror

image. More than one of its appearances in A Portrait is connected with mirroring.1 "The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him"

(P170, my italics). I have emphasized the conjunction which again is the centerpoint of chiasmus.2

In this same scene on the strand, there are two consecutive chiasmie sentences describing the bird girl.

Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some

darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty her face (P171).

In the first of these especially the structure emphasizes the static

quality of the evocation. Like a mirror, a strictly chiasmie sentence will usually not do more in the second clause than reflect back the first. The second of these sentences gains marginally in kinesis by the phrase that violates chiasmus: "touched with the wonder of

mortal beauty." Later in the novel (as at the beginning), chiasmus heralds a much more dynamic opposition.

Chiasmus frequently occurs in scenes describing women. During Stephen's fall from grace into the flesh, for instance, he imagines the

Virgin Mary as the first saviour of his soul:

If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent the impulse that moved him was the wish to be her knight. If ever his soul, reentering her

dwelling shyly after the frenzy of his body's lust had spent itself, was turned toward her... it was when her names were murmured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a lewd kiss

(P 105).

I find chiasmus in the final clause: with "lips" as the centerpoint,

"murmured softly" on one side is balanced by "still lingered" on the other, as "her names" is balanced by "foul and shameful words." Here chiasmus reveals unresolved duality between pure and cor

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nipt. With the shifting of allegiance to the bird girl, sacred and

profane blend, as Stephen is called by an "angel of mortal youth and

beauty" to "the ways of error and glory" (P172, my italics). Critics have noted chiasmus not only in individual sentences in

the novel but in its very structure. Of the five parts into which Joyce divided A Portrait, the third or central one is composed of three sections. Of these, the middle section functions as the novel's center, a point of structural chiasmus and thematic crossover. The actual

midpoint occurs when Father Arnall, in a break between his two sermons, distinguishes between their topics, the "two different forms of punishment" in Hell: "physical and spiritual" (P 127). Earlier he had told his listeners of the physical torments, appealing in graphic detail to their sense of sight, smell and touch. He will go on to describe the spiritual punishments in a comparable manner.

The construction of this section can be called chiasmic because the

pause on page 127 is between two sections which mirror each other

thematicaily : the two punishments are in turn flanked by appeals to God and Christ. This thematic chiasmus could be outlined as fol lows: God as merciful (118), Christ as Redeemer (119), physical

punishment in hell (119-24)-break (125-27)-spiritual punishment in hell (127-33), Christ as Redeemer (134), God as merciful (134).

This reversed repetition at the center of the novel may be seen as

part of a larger chiasmic structure in the work as a whole.3

Although I shall not be investigating that larger structure/1 must mention one motif that provides a balanced opposition between the

parts on either side of Part HI. It has often been noted that Parts II and IV both end with a swoon, Part II with Stephen in the arms of a

prostitute, Part IV with his moving into "some new world" after earth takes "him to her breast" (P172) following his ecstasy with the bird girl. In the former he surrenders his body to the prostitute's dark kiss (P101); in the latter "his soul was swooning" (P172). This contrast can be connected with Father Arnall's opposition between the physical and spiritual. In fact, that contrast at the center of the novel does divide its thematic concerns: the first half is about the

conditioning of Stephen's body and mind, the second half about his

developing a soul.

Stephen says to Davin that "the soul is born" in a "slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body" (P 203). In the first half of the novel, we can see Stephen's fear for or indulgence of his

body, in the second half his striving to develop his soul. It is, for instance, the soul, not the person Stephen or even the artist

Dedalus, that is threatened in the well-known complaint that con

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eludes his statement to Davin. "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight" (P 203). In the first half of the novel, Stephen's body has experienced

worse threats than nets, threats of physical punishment culminating in annihilation.

The dominant emotion that Stephen feels in Parts I and III of the novel is fear. In Part I this fear is usually connected with bodily pain. Part II also emphasizes the body but focuses on its capacity for sensual indulgence more than its vulnerability to harm. It begins

with Stephen's fantasies based on The Count of Monte Cristo and his

image of Mercedes as a vehicle for transfiguring in a "magic mo ment" his "weakness and timidity and inexperience" (P 65). It ends with the realization of this fantasy as Stephen is embraced and kissed by the prostitute. Part IE begins with further emphasis on

indulgence of the body ("Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him"-P 102). But such gross pleasures are soon eclipsed by the fear of physical suffering brought on by Father Arnall's sermon.

In the second half of the book, Stephen is increasingly conscious of the development of his soul.4 The positive consequence of this

development is the scene at the end of Part IV when he experiences a

spiritual relation with the bird girl on the strand. After this visual encounter, he feels that "her image had passed into his soul for ever"

(P172). That image takes the place of the Virgin Mary as his guide. In Part V, Stephen not only speaks of his own soul to Davin but

thinks and speaks of the soul of Ireland as personified in various women he sees (P183,184,193, 221, 238). This connection is joined by one between the soul and art (P 207). The female and art are most obviously associated in Stephen's composition of the villanelle. This

process occupies seven pages in the novel and occurs in four discrete

phases: 1) the initial seraphic inspiration and its lapse; 2) the mem ory of E.C. and anger at her; 3) anger at the priest leading to a unifying aesthetic-religious image; and 4) a fantasy of passion lead ing to the completion of the poem.

Stephen wakes from a dream in which he has "known the ecstasy of seraphic life" (P 217). Reluctantly returning to this world, he imagines "Gabriel the seraph" coming to "the virgin's chamber."

Then he enlarges the vision to include an "ardent roselike glow" luring "the choirs of the seraphim" to fall "from heaven" (P 217). It is important to note that Stephen brings in the virgin only after wak

ing and that even then she does not appear with the capital letter which would identify her with Mary Stephen is consciously trans

forming Catholic beliefs and holy figures, adapting them to his own

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aims. I take Gabriel, for instance, as an analogue for Stephen who is also a fallen seraph, come down to earth after his vision.5 When in the third phase Stephen adopts the role of priest, he will reestablish contact with that higher world.

To return to the first phase, the inspiration for the second stanza is a glow from her heart that becomes a blaze (P 218). The inspiration for the next stage is the incense of smoke from an extinguished fire, "a ball of incense, an ellipsoidal ball. The rhythm died out at once"

(P 218).6 The three stages of the first phase have worked through to initial completion: a growing light, a full blaze, an exhausted smoke.

But having died, the initial inspiration must be revived if a poem is to be written. In the second and third phases, Stephen will twice

employ anger to generate poetry, first against E.C. to whom he is still attracted, and second against the priest who affects to speak for both church and country

In the second phase of composition, Stephen regains his poetic mood through a destructive-creative cycle which may be localized in

two sentences whose relation to each other is, as John Paul Riquelme claims, "essentially chiastic":7

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of ecstasy from his soul. It

broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his memory: (P 220)

After anger breaks up the image of E.C. in Stephen's imagination, the final chiasmie sentence describes how his memory responds

with replacement images. These memories continue this sentence for another dozen lines beyond the colon which I have allowed to end it. The memories are of the flower girl "who had called herself his own girl," of a kitchen girl who sang a country song, of "a girl who had laughed gaily to see him stumble," and of a factory girl who had called back to him, "Do you like what you seen of me, straight hair and curly eyebrows?" (P 220). All of these images are of lower class girls who frankly express their feelings in contrast to E.C. who is a middle-class flirt. Recollecting these "distorted reflections of her

image" seems to allow Stephen's thoughts to return to E.C. with better perspective.

There are, however, two more crucial phases in the process before

Stephen completes the poem. First "his anger against [E.C] found vent" against the priest he heard her speaking with.

To him she would unveil her soul's shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to him, a priest of

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eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant

body of everliving life.

The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and

despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving (P 221).

The next two stanzas of the villanelle follow. Discarding the priest's "formal rite" in favor of the poetic one, Stephen experiences the

imaginative synthesis by which a "radiant image" unites "bitter and

despairing thoughts." The key final sentence is again chiasmic:

"thoughts" are to "cries" as "eucharist" is to "hymn"; the unity is attested by the phrase "eucharistie hymn" in the poem. Here as at the

beginning of the poem, Stephen's imagination adapts Catholic tradi tion and ritual. There is justice as well as sublime passion in his seeing himself "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life." Like the priest offering mass, Ste

phen follows Christ in breaking up the bread of experience and

offering it both transformed by the poet's mediation and transform

ing for those who partake. In displacing his anger onto the priest, Stephen shifts his vision

from female to male. As a result he is no longer dependent on feminine inspiration but achieves male mastery as "a priest of eter nal imagination." In the earlier "female" chiasmus, the image of a woman is dispersed into several "distorted reflections." In the suc

ceeding "male" chiasmus, we witness "bitter and despairing thoughts" and fragmented cries united through a eucharistie image.

At the beginning of the poem, the temptress lures the seraphic vision to earth. But as the poem develops, the poet-priest mediates this process, celebrating an earthly communion which draws down transcendent harmony.

The villanelle is still not complete; just before Stephen composes the last stanza, in which the male and female images coalesce, we

witness the final phase of the creation process. Thinking again of E.C., Stephen finds his anger replaced by a sympathy that is close to

pity. Then

a glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his body. Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep, the temptress of his villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with a look of languor, were opening to his

eyes. Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm, odorous and lavish

limbed, enfolded him like a shining cloud, enfolded him like water with a

liquid life: and like a cloud of vapour or like water circumfluent in space the

liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over

his brain (P 223).

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I believe Joyce is describing in this paragraph not a physical orgasm but what Robert Scholes calls

"spiritual copulation."8 Working through emotional desire for a particular female, Ste

phen has moved to a rarified mood like the one that accompanied his encounter with the bird girl: then '"his soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings" (P172). Just as there the soul found itself in a world of water and cloud, so later the image of the temptress surrounding him with water and cloud leads him to "liquid letters of

speech" which are also "like a cloud" or "like waters." The earlier sense of "fantastic" and "uncertain" is now "the element of mystery."

What has been added is the role and rite of the priest. In Part IV,

responding to the attraction of priesthood, Stephen had imagined himself filled with "secret knowledge" and "rendered immune mys teriously" to the sins of the women who would confess to him

(P159). The poem also offers an immunizing process in which the (imagined) lust of E.C. is accepted but receives absolution in the refrain which ends the poem, "Tell no more of enchanted days" (P 223).

A sensual E.C. subsumes the prostitute who was the means of

Stephen's initial descent into the body and the bird girl who was his first secular muse. Stephen identified the bird girl as his soul exter nalized. In his imagined ardor for E.C, he reverses this process and allows the image of the actual woman to be transformed into "the

temptress of his villanelle," a sublimation of reality into art. Whereas Stephen was the active priest celebrating the eucharist of

art in the previous phase of composition, in the last phase active and

passive combine: "Her nakedness yielded to him.. .enfolded him."

Finally "liquid letters.. .flowed forth over his brain" (my italics). Both doer and done to, he watches the amorphous shapes of language

move through his mind. The male and the female have come to

gether in a passionate union of the poet with his muse.9 This act

presents a worldly realization of the insight Stephen had as he

began the poem: ^n the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh" (P 217).

Stephen woke from a dream to accept the gift of unconscious

inspiration. As his muse for the first phase of artistic creation, he then chose the image of the virgin as temptress. In the second phase the alluring image is broken up in "brutal anger," but "distorted reflections" of it multiply in memory (P 220). Pure spirit (P 217) is replaced by "a hoyden's face" (P 220), the sacred by the profane. The third phase unites fragmented thoughts in a "radiant image." An

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aesthetic eucharist is performed, as "sacrificing hands upraise I The chalice flowing to the brim" (P 221).

Just as the unifying of the third phase balanced the destruction of the second, so the fourth phase can be seen as a corrective to the third, a return, at another level to the first. "A glow of desire kindled

again his soul" (P 223, my italics). In the initial celebration of the virgin, the poet believed that "no man had known or would know" her heart. But in the final rapprochement, he does come to know at least his muse's body; "radiant, warm, odorous" it enfolds him.

Separation and sacrifice are replaced by fusion, in which the poet is at one with the mystery of kindled sou! and flowing language.

The water and cloud which we have seen as key images in the final

phase are also present in Stephen's initial inspiration: "his soul lay amid cool waters" and light illuminated "cloud on cloud of vague circumstance" (P 217). Water thus emerges as an apt symbol of creativity. As cloud it both blurs and suggests what is to be revealed.

As stream it flows amorphously, inviting poet or lover to immerse himself in its free-flowing depth and breadth. As pool it reflects the face of nature, a mirror analogous to the art of chiasmus.

But creation is not all smooth swimming. We have seen that the fires of anger play an important part; so does another complement to water, earth. As lumps of matter it occupies a key role in Stephen's theory of art.

Just before Stephen sees the bird girl, he has a kinetic realization that his classical namesake can be for him "a symbol of the artist

forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new

soaring impalpable imperishable being" (P 169). Later, con firmed in his belief, he tells the dean of studies that he is interested in the question, "What is that beauty which the artist struggles to

express from lumps of earth" (P 189). He voices a partial answer to Lynch: Art is the pressing "out again, from the gross earth or what it

brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to under stand" (P 207).10

It was easy enough for Stephen to plan to express nature on that

day of "clouds, dappled and seaborne" (P167) when he encountered his soul in the "mortal beauty" of the bird girl. But the question is whether he can create when his mood is not spontaneously high. The villanelle scene contains additional evidence for a positive answer.

When Stephen's inspiration flags after his writing out the first three stanzas, he lies "back on the lumpy pillow-The lumps of

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knotted flock under his head reminded him of the lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour" (P 219). All those lumps, of course, allude to the

"lumps of earth" from which Stephen must learn to press out art. The poem has begun with the gift of a dream, the alluring temptress, who here supersedes the bird girl whom his

eyes also worshipped, with whom he enjoyed a "holy silence" (P172). But these two avatars are insufficient because too removed. Stephen knows he must find in crude reality the necessary inspira tion. He discovers it in the emotion of anger which "violently" shatters the image of E.C. to allow other "coarse" girls to enter his

mind. He consolidates it through displaced anger at the priest, anger which leads to his creative image of himself as the provider of the eucharist. He fulfills it in the desire that replaces anger; both

anger and desire are kinetic emotions, but desire for a woman outside allows him to meld with the female soul and muse within, to become intimate with the source of creativity, to enter that area where words circulate and lumps are dissolved in liquid liberation.

I believe that Joyce has provided us with insight into how his own

imagination worked. If we remember that he claimed actually to lack

imagination, we can understand how he stopped relying on those moments of transcendent vision which, like Wordsworth, he pre sumably experienced infrequently in his adulthood. Rather he de

pended on memory, but memory ignited by emotion. What I have called the fires of anger are therefore an important part of the creative process, often tempering or searing the young Stephen. In the Christmas dinner scene, anger is constantly finding expression although it is only once so labeled, as Stephen listens to Mr. Casey

whose face is "glowing with anger... Stephen felt the glow rise to

his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him" (P 38). But at the end of the argument, Dante strides out victorious, leaving Mr. Casey sobbing. "Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his fa ther's eyes were full of tears" (P 39). He soon has cause to fear the anger of priests, when even Father Arnall's face is "red from the wax he was in" (P 48). Then Father Dolan pandies his hands which crumple "like a leaf in the fire" (P 50). The anger of others causes fear of destruction in Stephen, most noticeably in the threat on both sides of the chiasmus at the center of the book: physical torment on one side, spiritual on the other. Anger or rage constantly threaten the vulnerable boy or sinful youth.

In describing spiritual torment, Father Arnall presents destruc tion as loss: "the understanding of man is totally deprived of divine

light and his affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of

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God. God, remember, is a being infinitely good and therefore the loss of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful" (P127; italics added to accent chiasmus). In fact loss is only a prelude to active destruc tion. In his guilt, Stephen sees his end: "One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost. The end: black cold void waste" (P141). This end of the soul is consonant with its beginning. As Father Arnall told the boys, God made each of them "out of nothing" (P 134-35). Not only does God create from nothing; he then must destroy and return to the void that which is

unworthy. In a chiasmie reflection of this pattern, Stephen as artist

destroys what offends and out of that "void waste" creates new life. The sequence of anger leading to destruction leading to nothingness leading to creativity is a key to understanding the physical and

spiritual experiences of Stephen Dedalus.11

Taking the composition of the villanelle as paradigm, we may see the creative process beginning for Joyce in a subjective encounter of the spirit with seraphic powers, a fallen Gabriel drawn to a virgin.

This vision is disrupted by a material image, earth as a ball. Awareness of the lumps in his pillow leads Stephen to images of his

earthly beloved, E,C. A burst of anger at her destroys her image and allows memory to recreate less virginal females. Another outburst of

anger, at a priest, clears the way for a unifying image, "the radiant

body of everliving life." Finally desire leads to union with a female

image identified with the mystery of language itself. At the end of the novel, Stephen tells himself that he goes "to

encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to

forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"

(P 252-53). The soul as smithy is not only the workshop of Daedalus; it is an image of a fiery furnace that destroys an old shape, and of a

beating hammer that creates a new one, in short an image of de struction and creation. In the first release of bodily indulgence, Stephen saw "his own soul going forth to experience" (P103). After reentering and then decisively leaving the church, he viewed his soul as having died like Christ to be reborn transfigured: "His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her gravedothes" (P170). The artist's soul must be subject to annihilation so it can be reborn. Stephen Dedalus has suffered so much terror and fear of annihilation that his only hope for survival is to turn that weakness into a strength. The victim may become the saviour.

Yet Stephen must also become more than either victim or saviour. The artist takes all the anger that he has observed and suffered, and

makes it his own so he can turn it upon what is unworthy, destroy

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that image, observe the chaotic lumps of matter that result and from them create an artistic unity; this new cosmos will characteristically

mirror the process of its creation by assuming chiasmie form. And

finally the artist must base creation on the natural desires that draw him into life. Only by admitting his need to possess and be pos sessed by the female outside can he enter into productive love with the soul within, into that amorphous state which is the matrix of creation.

NOTES

1 The mirror also functions as an image for Stephen's connecting inner and outer

(cf. pp. 53, 71, 78,167, 207). 2 Although the chiasmic construction begins more strictly in this instance than in

the last-with the word "silently* on either side of and-it ends less strictly. If Joyce

had been after full reverse symmetry here, the second clause would read "silently below him was drifting the seatangle." Such imperfect chiasmus also characterizes the other examples I shall discuss. 3 Such a structure is worked out in detail by Evert Sprinchorn. Using the first edition of the novel, which had only seventeen sections, he matches them

chiasmically (1-17, 2-16, 3-15, etc.) with section nine (the retreat) as the center. His essay is included in John Untereckerfe Approaches to the Twentieth Century Novel (New York: Crowell, 1965), p. 23. Working from manuscripts, Hans V\fclter Gabler also sees the retreat as the center and demonstrates the balance of Farts I and V, briefly pairing

PartsIIandlV. The Seven Lost Years of APortrait.. ."in Approaches to Joyces "Portrait," eds. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), pp. 50-51.

4 As listed in Leslie Hancock's Word Index to "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1967), the word soul is used 55 times in the first half of the book, but appears 117 times, or twice as often after p. 127.

5 Female complicity in a divine fall introduces a Gnostic note into Stephen's conception. I have discussed the presence in Ulysses of a fallen goddess (modeled on the Gnostic Sophia and the Old Testament Eve) in "Joyce's Goddess of Generation/ to be included in James Joyce: The Centenary Symposium, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Urbana:

Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985). 6 The disruption is caused by Stephen's memory of a scene in the physics theatre

in which the lecturer contended that W.S. Gilbert's "elliptical billiard balls" should be

"ellipsoidal* (P192). Science corrects art; precision replaces free invention. Stephen was helped then by Moynihan's irreverent response, "What price ellipsoidal balls!" Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!* Stephen's mood changes from serious to "a sabbath of misrule." He sees his professors abandoning their dignity, "ambling and

stumbling, tumbling and capering" (P 192). This brief preview of the Nighttown episode in Ulysses shows one means of disrupting established authority.

7 My discussion of this part of the scene is indebted to Riquelme's impressive

interpretation of it in Teller and Tale in Joyces Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 80-82. For the importance of destruction to creation in Joyce's imagination, see chapter eight, "The Image of the Artist: Destruction, Perversion,

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Creation/ of my book, The Transformation Process in Joyce's "Ulysses" (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980).

8 Robert Schoies, "Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?" PMLA (September 1964), 484-89. Reprinted in the critical edition of A Portrait, ed. Chester Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968). Schoies' approach seems to me on the right track. There is, however, a more reductive explanation, the derogatory or wet-dream approach. See Charles Rossman, "Stephen Dedalus' Villanelle/ ]]Q, 12 (Spring 1975), 281-93; also Bernard Benstock, "The Temptation of St. Stephen: A View of the Villanelle," //Q, 14 (Fall 1976), 31-38.

9 See Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction, p. 78. This union is prefigured in the scene with the bird girl. There, bypassing words, outer female and inner soul were fused. "Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call" (P172). On the one hand her image enters his soul; on the other her eyes call forth his soul. 10 This description is balanced by the one immediately following, which is often taken as Joyce's irony at Stephen's expense. I'm not so sure. "A crude grey light,

mirrored in the sluggish water, and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war

against the course of Stephen's thought" (P 207). "Gross earth" in Stephen's description and "sluggish water" in Joyce's seem to be two versions of the same thing, as indicated by the earlier phrases "sluggish matter" and "lumps of earth.

"

If they only seem to war

against the course of his thoughts, then he needs to discover how they really do not. The "crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water" suggests a

chiasmus of impasse to which the villanelle may provide the answer. 11 As with most other important patterns in the novel, the encounter with the void is prefigured at the very beginning. The list on the flyleaf of Stephen's geography

book by which he orients himself runs from his name and local habitation out to the

universe. "He read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name.

That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?

Nothing" (P16). By implication, not God but nothing lies behind the universe. Once Stephen as artist realizes this fact, his task will be to get in touch with that nothing in order to create something.

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Article Contentsp. 259p. 260p. 261p. 262p. 263p. 264p. 265p. 266p. 267p. 268p. 269p. 270

Issue Table of ContentsJames Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1985), pp. 257-337Front MatterNotes and Comments [p. 257-257]Destruction and Creation in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" [pp. 259-270]Oxen of the Sun: Maternity, Language, and History [pp. 271-280]"Am I Father? If I Were?" A Trinitarian Analysis of the Growth of Stephen Dedalus in "Ulysses" [pp. 281-296]Time and Space (With the Emphasis on the Conjunction): Joyce's Response to Lewis [pp. 297-306]Current JJ Checklist (32) [pp. 307-312]NotesIn Time of Solstice Sandymount Strand, Dublin: Twentieth-Century Stonehenge [pp. 313-316]A "Ulysses" Allusion to Karl Marx [pp. 316-319]The Schema as an Index to Joyce's Narrative [pp. 319-323]The Mallow Concert at Maryborough (U 748) [pp. 323-325]27 April [p. 325-325]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 327-330]Review: untitled [pp. 330-332]Review: untitled [pp. 332-334]

Letter to the Editor [p. 335-335]Back Matter

creation and destruction in portrait

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