A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (5 page)

But something more is going on here. If ‘suck’ is a ‘queer word’, so is ‘queer’. Until recently it meant (as an adjective) ‘peculiar, eccentric’ or (in slang) ‘drunk’ or (in thieves’ cant) ‘bad, worthless’; or (as a verb) ‘to puzzle, to cheat, to spoil’. The
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
is too polite to record its more ‘eccentric’ meaning of ‘homosexual’, let alone its most recent swerve into a prideful self-appellation of that very group whose ugly taunters spat it out to shame them into hiding or conforming. This late history means that no reader can now read this passage without noting the uncanny proximity in this naïve text of so many ‘not nice’, indeed ‘queer’ words: ‘suck’, ‘queer’, ‘cocks’. But then we ourselves begin to slide into the perverse, the eccentric, the peculiar. Or do we? Later, some boys will be caught ‘smugging’ in the ‘square’ for which they will face the option either of being flogged on the ‘rump’, that ‘vital spot’, or of being expelled—forced outside the circle of the community (of communion and communication). Unruly bodies must be policed either corporally or verbally. But the unruly body is quite precisely what obtrudes into Stephen’s ruminations about language, both about ‘belts’ and about ‘sucks’. In the latter case, the chain of associations—from ‘suck’ to ‘water’ to ‘lavatory’ to ‘cocks’ on which words are written: ‘hot’ and ‘cold’—seems to produce in Stephen a somatic or bodily response: ‘To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and
then a little hot.’ ‘Cold and hot’, ‘cold and hot’, ‘cold and hot’. A rhythm establishes itself, a rhythm like that noted by Stephen when trains pass telegraph poles or go in and out of tunnels or when he opens and closes the flaps of his ears. And with rhythm the body again enters: the most primitive rhythms come in inhaling and exhaling, in eating and excreting, in a ceaseless movement of in and out.
⁴³
‘[T]he train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop’ (10). Of course on the level of the mimetic, of realistic representation, Stephen’s body is even more literally present than we at first suspect. He feels ‘cold and hot’ because, as we will soon discover, he has a fever contracted when he was ‘shouldered’ into ‘the square ditch’, that cesspit or drainage trough from the school’s lavatory (8). But all these words circle back upon themselves and we end up where we began with words and the body mutually invoking one another at every turn. Language comes to be more associated with effluent than fluency. These are ‘queer words’ indeed, and while Stephen senses their peculiarity, he does not fully understand their reverberating effects and meanings. He tries to master their waywardness by delineating clearly his own location, and the ultimate end of all meaning in the final great word-smith, God:

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name
,

Ireland is my nation
.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation
.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then 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. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could think only of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen.
Dieu
was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said
Dieu
then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God. (12–13)

A great deal happens here (and don’t miss the quiet comment about poetic form). Stephen attempts to place himself: I am I; I live here; here is a particular place even if it exists within ‘a very big’ place called ‘everywhere’ or ‘the universe’; even that ‘very big place’ must be situated somewhere: ‘what was after the universe?’ ‘Nothing’, a ‘nothing’ which must itself begin somewhere, must be placed: ‘was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?’ (A belt, perhaps?) Each placing becomes a displacing as the finite slowly moves to the infinite: God. And thinking of ‘only God’ Stephen again ponders the name of the thing. Contemplation of the world to the ends of understanding is for Stephen invariably an act of attempted linguistic mastery, of belting in and containing the thing by voicing its totemic name. But thinkng of ‘God’s name’—the one name which, according to Judaic law, must never be spoken—only gets him into trouble again, for God has more than one name: ‘
Dieu
was the French for God and that was God’s name too’; indeed ‘there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world’. And the vertiginous bigness of ‘everything and everywhere’ yawns. But Stephen reaches to control the splintering through ‘all the different languages in the world’ of
the whatness of this thing, this place, this God: ‘God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God’. God’s
real
name? There is language and then there is
real
language, and the latter resides in God.

‘good old blunt English’

We as readers are charmed by this passage: charmed because of Stephen’s ingenuous innocence, his fledgling attempts to master the incomprehensibitity of God, his easy, guileless acceptance; charmed because we know more than he about these things. Our sophistication reads his simplicity and smiles. He will learn better, we think. And he does. By the time he has learned to divert his religious instructors from the serious matters of education by putting to them ‘curious questions’ about the catechism (89), has suffered the fires and stench of Hell in Father Arnall’s sermon (
Chapter III
), has survived the attempted seduction of him into the priesthood by the Church (
Chapter IV
) and encountered his ‘envoy from the fair courts of life’ (145), the young woman on the strand, he also understands a great deal more about the ways and weight of language. Walking the streets of Dublin,

he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:

The ivy whines upon the wall

And whines and twines upon the wall

The ivy whines upon the wall

The yellow ivy on the wall

Ivy, ivy up the wall
.

Did any one ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy: that was all right. Yellow ivory also. And what about ivory ivy?

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants.
Ivory, ivoire, avorio, ebur
. (150)

By this point words have floated free of the real world—or almost: ‘Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall?’ They remain a source of ‘wonder’ but are ‘emptied of instantaneous sense’ and spellbind his mind. The words ‘band and disband
themselves
in
way ward
rhythms’. It is their history
as words
, words independent of actual ‘mottled tusks of elephants’, that enchants: ‘
Ivory, ivoire, avorio, ebur
.’ You can almost hear him intoning quietly to himself. Stephen experiences here a pleasure both intellectual and somatic: ‘intellectual’ in his mastery of four linguistically distinct ‘ivories’ and ‘somatic’ in the trance they induce, the ‘word’ shining in his brain. This pleasure in multiplicity, in plenitude, in the splitting and splintering of the word into words, is a far cry from the anxiety Stephen felt as a child and for which he sought comfort in ‘God’s real name’.

And Stephen has learned too that ‘heaps of dead language’ come freighted with history, and that history is never anodyne. As he later bandies words with the dean of studies, he points to the difficulty arising in ‘esthetic discussion’ from the fact that meanings of words depend on context; unless one knows ‘whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace’ (157) confusion results. At this point the dean is just about following Stephen’s argument. The conversation that follows is a small ironic masterpiece, and Stephen knows it. In attempting to illustrate his point, he remarks a use of the word ‘detain’ by Newman, that crafter of ‘cloistral silverveined prose’ (147–8), who

says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different.
I hope I am not detaining you
.

—Not in the least, said the dean politely.

—No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean …

—Yes, yes: I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point:
detain
.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough. (157–8)

Stephen’s mastery of the language, the dean, and the entire situation marks him as already a clever, linguistically deft young man, but the dean yet has something to teach him if only by virtue of his own failure to comprehend. The dean is English. Stephen has been pondering this fact in the interstices of their exchange. The dean has been struggling to gain a foothold in this conversation about the virtues of hard work, about literal and metaphoric lamps, and even
(and most foolishly on his part) about art. Stephen runs circles round him, as above. In trying to recover from his embarrassment, the dean returns to the (metaphoric) lamp in the hope of imparting at least a nugget of wisdom:

—To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

—What funnel? asked Stephen.

—The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

—That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

—What is a tundish?

—That. The … the funnel.

—Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

—It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen laughing, where they speak the best English.

—A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must. (158)

Stephen, of course, does look it up: ‘13
April
: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!’ (212). By this point, Stephen’s linguistic understanding has sufficiently advanced that he willingly, if implicitly, acknowledges that there is no tether binding word to object in a one-to-one correspondence: the battle here is not over which word is the real word for the object under discussion. The verbal gesturing—‘That?’ ‘That’—may make it appear as though an object were present: it is not. The indicative pronouns point not at any ‘real’ funnel or tundish but back and forth at one another, at the two words ‘funnel’ and ‘tundish’ freed from their objective referential function. But they none the less enter this discussion with hundreds of years of a very material history trailing in their wake. As Stephen thinks:

—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words
home
,
Christ
,
ale
,
master
, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (159)