University of Tulsa

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. 259-270
Published by: University of Tulsa
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Destruction and Creation in
A Portrait of theArtist 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 and sign of the creative
product
process, and on the relation of to the images of the female
Stephen
which are so a part of his consciousness.
important
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 inmany chiasmic statements in the rest of the
novel.

Before taking part in the Belvedere Whitsuntide play Stephen

an ark. He hears a waltz being
stands outside, seeing the theatre as
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 awave 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). Ihave 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 as the breast of some

soft and slight, slight and soft
dove. But her fair hair was and girlish, and
darkplumaged long girlish:
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.
scenes describing women.
Chiasmus frequently occurs in During
Stephen's fall from grace into the flesh, for instance, he imagines the
as the first saviour of his soul:
Virgin Mary
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... itwas 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 on one side is balanced by "still lingered" on the
softly"
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
as is called an
profane blend, Stephen by "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 between the
opposition
parts on either side of Part HI. It has often been noted that Parts II
and IV both end with a swoon, Part IIwith 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 ofMonte 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
relation with the bird girl on the strand. After this visual
spiritual
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
image; and 4) a fantasy of lead
unifying aesthetic-religious passion
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
and that even then she does not appear with the capital letter
ing
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 from her heart that becomes a blaze (P 218). The
glow 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 a full blaze, an exhausted smoke.
light,
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 a destructive-creative which may be localized in
through cycle
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 "who had called herself
girl
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 amiddle-class flirt. Recollecting these "distorted reflections of her
seems to allow to return to E.C. with
image" Stephen's thoughts
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
their cries arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving
despairing thoughts,
(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 which a "radiant image" unites "bitter and
by
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
as "a priest of eter
feminine inspiration but achieves male mastery
nal imagination." In the earlier "female" chiasmus, the image of a
woman is dispersed into several "distorted reflections." In the suc
"male" chiasmus, we witness "bitter and
ceeding 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, an earthly communion which draws down
celebrating
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
a look of to his
his villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with languor, were opening
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, of the element of mystery, flowed forth over

symbols
his brain (P 223).

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 I believeJoyce 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
has moved to a rarified mood like the one that his
phen accompanied
encounter with the bird girl: then '"his soul was swooning into some
new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by
and Just as there the soul found itself
cloudy shapes beings" (P172).
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 and the bird who was his
body girl
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 into art.
reality
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
a realization of the insight Stephen had as he
presents worldly
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 itmultiply inmemory (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
chaliceflowing 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.
and sacrifice are inwhich the poet is
Separation replaced by fusion,
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
towater, earth. As lumps of matter it occupies a key role in Stephen's

theory of art.
sees the bird a kinetic realization
Just before Stephen girl, he has
that his classical namesake can be for him "a symbol of the artist
anew in his out of the sluggish matter of the earth
forging workshop
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 of earth" (P 189). He voices a partial answer to
lumps
"out again, from the gross earth or what it
Lynch: Art is the pressing
from sound and and colour which are the
brings forth, shape prison
an image of the beauty we have come to under
gates of our soul,
stand" (P 207).10
Itwas 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 flags after his writing out the first

Stephen's inspiration
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 silence"
"holy
(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 tomeld 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. Ifwe 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 In
Stephen.
the Christmas dinner scene, anger is constantly finding expression
although it is only once so labeled, as Stephen listens toMr. 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
"like a leaf in the fire" (P 50). The anger of others causes fear
crumple
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
In a chiasmie reflection of this pattern, Stephen as artist
unworthy.
new life.
destroys what offends and out of that "void waste" creates
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 of the villanelle as paradigm, we may see
composition
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 clears the way for a "the radiant
priest, unifying image,
of everliving life." Finally desire leads to union with a female
body
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 the workshop of Daedalus;
only
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 of de
image
struction and creation. In the first release of bodily indulgence,
saw "his own soul going forth to experience" (P103). After
Stephen
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 as an image for

also functions Stephen's connecting inner and outer
(cf. pp. 53, 71, 78,167, 207).
2 more
Although the chiasmic construction begins strictly in this instance than in
the last-with the word on either side of and-it ends less strictly. If Joyce
"silently*
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 out
Such a structure is worked 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 JohnUntereckerfe Approaches to the TwentiethCenturyNovel (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 Univ. of Pittsburgh Press,
(Pittsburgh:
1976), pp. 50-51.
4
As listed in Leslie Hancock's Index to "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
Word

(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 in a divine fall introduces a Gnostic note into Stephen's
complicity
Ihave discussed the presence in Ulysses of a fallen goddess (modeled on
conception.
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 is caused by Stephen's of a scene in the physics theatre
The disruption memory
in which the lecturer contended that W.S. Gilbert's "elliptical billiard balls" should be
(P192). Science corrects art; precision free invention.
"ellipsoidal* replaces Stephen
was then by Moynihan's irreverent response, "What price ellipsoidal balls!"
helped
Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!* mood changes from serious to "a
Stephen's
sabbath of misrule." He sees his professors abandoning their dignity, "ambling and

stumbling, tumbling and capering" (P 192). This brief preview of the Nighttown
in Ulysses showsone means of disrupting established
episode authority.
7 discussion this part of the scene
of is indebted to Riquelme's
My 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
see "The of the Artist: Destruction, Perversion,
imagination, chapter eight, Image

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Creation/ of my book, The Transformation Process in Joyce's "Ulysses" (Toronto: Univ. of
Toronto Press, 1980).
8 or Esthete?"
Robert Schoies, "Stephen Dedalus, Poet 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 the derogatory or wet-dream See
explanation, approach.
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
(Fall1976), 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, words, outer female and inner soul were fused.
bypassing
"Her image had into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence
passed
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 one immediately which is often
by the following,
taken as Joyce's I'm not so sure.
irony at Stephen's expense. "A crude grey light,
mirrored in the water, and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed
sluggish
to war the course of Stephen's (P 207). "Gross earth" in Stephen's
against thought"
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 the course of his then he needs to discover how
against thoughts, they
a
really do not. The "crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water" suggests
chiasmus of impasse to which the villanelle may provide the answer.
11 with the void
As with most other important patterns in the novel, the encounter
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 was
he: and he read down the page again. What after the universe?
(P16). By implication, not God but nothing lies behind the universe. Once
Nothing"
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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