James Joyce

1882-1941

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!” A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded: and no part of body or soul had been maimed but a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself.

He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.

Joyce, Portrait

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

The image of Emma appeared before him and, under her eyes, the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon her nnocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details

of his orgies stank under his very nostrils: the sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; hismonstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by

harlots with gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession . . . . Their error had offended deeply God's majesty though it was the error of two children, but it had not offended her whose beauty “is not like earthly beauty” . . . . Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart.

Joyce, Portrait

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Confession (1712)

You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Give it up, my child, for God's sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you or where it will come against you. As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one farthing to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I am sure you do

The Three Persons of the Trinity . . . were easier of acceptance by his mind by reason of their august incomprehensibility than was the simple fact that God had loved his soul from all eternity, for ages before he had been born into the world, for ages before the world itself had existed. . . . --I have amended my life, have I not? he asked himself. . . . .

Joyce, Portrait

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatesthonour that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself hasthe power of a priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them, the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come downupon the altar and take the form of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!

Joyce, Portrait

Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556)founder of the Society of Jesus

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

Father John Conmee S.J.

--Have you ever felt that you had a vocation? Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly. The priest waited for the answer and added: --I mean have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desireto join the order. Think. --I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen.--To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour that

Jesuit’s soutane, in Belgium called, les jupes (skirts)

the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself has the power of a priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them, the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!

Joyce, Portrait

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

Hugh Connor as Stephen Dedalus in Bloom

He had seen himself, a young and silentmannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it. . . . He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people . . . . In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed draw n to go forth to encounter reality

He would know obscure things, hidden from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath. He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel bythe lips of women and of girls: but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition of hands his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the white peace of the altar.

The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J. The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, asit would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.

Joyce, Portrait

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”Often, as he sat in Davin's rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friend's wellmade boots that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend's simple ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards [his name] and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill . . . Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland.... His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards this myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawnout a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf.... and of the world that lay beyond England he knew only the foreign legion of France in which he spoke of serving.

Joyce, Portrait 157-8

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

A theory of beauty is by necessity a theory of apprehension, for the creation of a thing of beauty involves so much accident and unpredictability that it cannot be easily or profitably theorized. Insofar as it involves apprehension, then, the artistic or creative process inevitably will operate according to a theory of beauty that, theoretically, is universal.

Tragedy: the distinction between pity and terror and between static and kinetic emotions excited by art (179-80). Beauty awakens an “esthetic stasis” prolonged and dissolved by “the rhythm of beauty” (181). Rhythm redefined as relations within a whole, rather than as a kinetic or temporal process.

Art “is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (182): defined out of Aquinas. Stephen distinguishes between truth, which is beheld by the intellect and beauty, which is beheld by the imagination. Beauty, which is to some extent universal (see example of women), emerges in the relations between stages of aesthetic apprehension (183-4).

Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus”

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

Applied Aquinas and the stages of aesthetic apprehension: integritas, consonantia, claritas (186-8).

The aesthetic image is what the artist “makes” of the apprehended object; cf. Benjamin’s dialectical image.”

The forms of art: from lyric to epic to dramatic forms (188-9).

In the dramatic form, the esthetic image is purified and the personality of the artist is refined out of existence (215).

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74)

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Joyce, Portrait (213)

Gustave Caillebotte, Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres (1877)

Ineluctable Modalities

Séan Keating“Aran Fisherman”

Jack B. Yeats, “The Pier”

14 April: John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. (European and Asiatic papers please copy.) He told us hemet an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes andshort pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said: --Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end ofthe world. I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I muststruggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead,gripping him by the sinewy throat till ... Till what? Till he yield tome? No. I mean him no harm.

Joyce, Portrait 223

““Manly little chap!”Manly little chap!”

when i am king you will be first against the wall

Joyce today, in Dublin