The making of the modern artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen [1. publ ed.] 1443841811

Citation preview

The Making of the Modern Artist

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen

By

Ernest L. Veyu

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen, by Ernest L. Veyu This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Ernest L. Veyu All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4181-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4181-8

For Lydia and Ernestine, in love and great expectations.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi The Positioned Modern Artist, Postcolonially Read Mbuh Tennu Mbuh Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One................................................................................................. 7 Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25 Society: The External Mould Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Otherworldliness and Rebellion Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 59 Towards Artistic Vision Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 79 Challenges and Self-Representation Conclusion................................................................................................. 97 Bibliography .............................................................................................. 99

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my gratitude to the following persons for their critical input to the realisation of this volume. Prof. Edward Ako’s perceptive remarks, Prof. John N. Nkemngong’s insightful comments, Dr Tennu Mbuh’s whys and the Preface, Dr. Kevin Ntoh’s suggestions and Prof. Samuel Atechi’s proof-reading, which made the book better than it could ever be without them. My wife, Christine, gave me the strength and encouragement to complete the book. Isaque, Lydia and Ernestine, my son and daughters, took it well when I went away to work on this book. I am grateful to them. Finally, I would love to express my gratitude to all who helped me in other ways, but whose names I have not mentioned here. Thank you very much.

PREFACE THE POSITIONED MODERN ARTIST, POSTCOLONIALLY READ

A troubling aspect of the politics of modernism for a twenty-first century reader was its reliance on traditional attitudes which had previously been represented as primitive. With insights from Freudian psychology, the modernist artist began a painful but relieving process of walking back into and retrieving the dark recesses of his or her being. From this ambiguous position, it was tempting to conclude that “primitive” and “civilized” instincts were reconciled; but this was mostly an intellectual step that served only a symbolic convenience, and in which case the modernist artist remained a positioned phenomenon in the erstwhile embodying discourse of modernism. Examining this partiality from the works of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, one has to be reminded of the chasms of race, nation, and class that divided the two writers and were repeatedly exploited for various selfish, if at times illuminating, aims. A casual question may be asked to know why we are still concerned with the canonical British writers when new realities in every sector make them almost a thing of the past. A simple answer to which I have already alluded will be that the dialogue between the traditional and the modern is an ongoing one that continues to address new shades of cultural meaning so that what is almost a thing of the past renews itself in overlapping cultural spheres. Part of our concern with canonical writers is proof of a reawakening in the way English modernism in particular is being revived in African scholarship today, a trend that is already an established tradition in other parts of the former colonised world. An interest in the imaging of the artist revives the debate about the identity of the artist in society and how ideological formations may or may not authenticate his or her position. Combining Joyce and Lawrence in this way may raise the eyebrows of the partisan critic. But I believe that a common denominator for the two is the varying ways in which they weave subaltern visions into the centre pillar of English modernism. Although critics like Michael Bell

xii

Preface

have argued convincingly that Lawrence endorsed a “parallel modernism” to that of his sophisticated and more technically favoured peers, including Joyce, there is no denying the fact that the basic drive to question traditional values and representations underlies what is only apparently opposing. One way of understanding this complexity is to envisage a workable relationship between Joyce and Lawrence with regard to basic subject matters beyond the often exaggerated consequences of the Oxbridge vs. Lawrence complexes. Inasmuch as the one camp exhibited a condescending comportment toward Lawrence and the class aesthetics that he represented, it is also true that the latter’s reactionary conceit was equally positioned. Beyond the feuding sentiments, however, both Joyce and Lawrence may emerge from a “fraternal” study as sharing a common concern with the way art as both subject and object problematises – just as it could reconcile – the propaganda of the respective blocs. Joyce’s rejection of an enabling Ireland coincides with Lawrence’s eventual awareness that “Englishness” had been compromised by the very persons and authorities who pretended to affirm it. By comparing England in particular to a sinking ship from which he had to escape before the apocalyptic moment, Lawrence was drawing attention to the crucial need for artistic vision to stay unsullied. The struggle of the artist in both Lawrence and Joyce testifies to this affirmative need. Like Lawrence who claimed that he was not only English but that his vision was Englishness, Joyce confessed through his hero that “[t]his race and this country and this life produced me [...] I shall express myself as I am”. That two writers who were technically opposed could reconcile at the basic level reveals the staged provenance of modernism. The difficulty of pairing Joyce and Lawrence is thus resolved through a recognition that their art upholds a dialogue that is far more enabling than the politicised differences that are often used to polarise the writers. A common denominator that relates to their respective constituencies, it is easy to see how art is used by both of them as an anti-establishment proposition for change. For Joyce, art was functional at a personal and aesthetic level. His writing and the artist-figure who mediates this, is never unaware of his contested origins in what was supposed to be a United Kingdom. But Joyce’s artist character offers a new, recalcitrant utterance, one that defines his colonised status within the setup. He is forever impatient with given definitions, the domestication of these, and how they are subsequently parodied into religious and nationalist clichés of irrelevance. As a consequence, he is always bolting both physically and imaginatively, and remains a troubling personality within the national

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen xiii

halo. Aesthetically, however, there seems to be a compromise that may easily lead to accusations of betrayal against Joyce. For, while he denounces a conservatism that is structured to stymie singular opinion and identity, he simultaneously embraces a modernism that experiments with new speech codes without translating these into the postcolonial text of his roots. The language of modernism instead appealed to a new conservative formation, new only because it relied on new cognitive perspectives, and in the case of Joyce in particular, this also meant being severed from the realities of contested Dublin to which he would return only through the mediation of letters. It will be necessary to compare Joyce’s approach with that of a compatriot like W. B. Yeats, whose modernist excursions were rooted to a local space and consciousness from which the universal was then determined. Whether it was the Innisfree or Byzantine landscape that he was prospecting, Yeats was never far away from indigenous values which could then be universalised contextually. It was his imagination that strayed after complementary concepts, not himself finally, reconciled to his turbulent locality. It may be argued that Stephen Dedalus attempts as much at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his hope “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”. I find a conceptual flaw here in first imagining the revival in his soul, and then hoping to realise it in exile. Even if we understand the soul to be the seat of creative power, it is likely that his art in exile would have followed the same pattern as we see in Samuel Beckett’s characters after Murphy, who increasingly addressed a European and not an Irish universality. This process of creative adaptation is one which Yeats was rejecting in his own revivalist approach to the problems of Ireland. Exile is a convenient space for an artist who believed at the point of leaving Dublin that only those without a conscience could live there; and in A Portrait, Stephen will lament the fact that “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow”. How then does the restive artist in Joyce envisage communal hope beyond this escapist valorisation of exile? One major way will be to draw on a symbolic aesthetic that was crucial to modernist experimentation. For instance, the debate over the functional relevance of Tennyson and Byron is vital to an understanding of what I see as a postcolonial reading of Joyce. The romantic fantasies of Tennyson appealed to the authoritative nuancing of national and artistic self-imaging. As Poet Laureate, it was clear that Tennyson had been recognised and compromised at the same time, institutionalised in a way that Joyce could never be, while his official status prevented him from straying into imaginative byways of ideological nationalism. Byron, on the other hand, was a poetic nuisance whose

xiv

Preface

physical disability was not only symptomatic of the rioting within, but was more than compensated for by his ego-bursting arrogance. This latter characteristic resulted in the nay-saying aesthetic that predictably led him across the conscripting borders of British conformism. Joyce was aware of how the parallel emotions represented by his forebears clashed dangerously in him. Refusing to endorse Tennyson, he does not, however, align with Byron in the end because it is one thing to abandon a reductionist system and another to adopt a militant posture against its nascent globalising ideologies such as Byron was to do during the Crimean war. Even if personal emotions of love were responsible for this attitude, we should also remember that one of Yeats’ page-turners, ‘Easter 1916’, was in many ways a tribute to love’s elastic frontiers. The same escapism is evident in Stephen’s critical orientation in the later part of A Portrait. He celebrates the classics but in doing this he is also adjusting rather comfortably into the authoritative critical voice which postmodernism was to react against. The intimidating modernist manhood, so to speak, was a variation of centrist attributes which the modernist writer and critic were supposed to be challenging. In the same voice, however, Joyce rejects Christian and nationalist decoys but also affirms Plato and Aquinas, and adjusts his own position to theirs only minimally. By defining art as “the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end”, Stephen drags us into the familiar modernist jargon that was reviving classical thought. The “new terminology and a new personal experience” which modernists like Stephen searched for, was only an anagrammatic ruse that led to a cul-de-sac where the postcolonial subject was dumped. From my own postcolonial perspective, then, art and criticism which manifest and resolve themselves only in the senses becomes more of the problem than a solution. Stephen’s ultimate but complicit vision of beauty – the image of the girl in midstream – shatters his bonds of adherence and transforms him into the rebel whose goal should be redemptive at a personal and communal level. Again, I suggest a comparison with the Maud Gonne symbol in Yeats’ imagination, and how the lover-poet transformed that elusive symbol into a nationalist dirge which still echoes even today in “devolutionist” diplomacy from Number 10 Downing Street. But Joyce’s vision negates the Ireland for which Stephen pledges his soul, and liberates him instead into a selfish “soul” whose aesthetic confluence will be in exile where he hopes “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”. At a modernist level, therefore, we understand and appreciate Joyce’s artist as an excellent wordsmith for concepts that disavowed the traditional

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen

xv

sphere to which modernism itself clung. He is the antithesis of prude Victorianism, but only so because nineteenth century England was also reacting against its conscripting past and simultaneously devising global conquest on Christian oars. That Joyce understood this duplicity and tried to distance himself from its smear is clear enough from Stephen’s alienation from the social codes of behaviour. But what is disturbing is the way he patterned artistic iconoclasm along the very conservative mentality that was championed in the creative and critical spheres by T. S. Eliot. The distance between Dublin and London – just as that for Eliot between Illinois and London – as opposing poles of attraction is nullified through an intellectual connivance and the bolting artist is finally seduced into a fraternity that celebrated the very fact of his “enslavement”. I have already signalled the conflict between Lawrence and Joyce, especially when partisan criticism led by F. R. Leavis and Eliot exploited it toward respective poles of rural and bourgeois tendencies. Both Lawrence and Joyce were in many ways roots writers, but while they also aspired beyond their roots, it was Lawrence, more than Joyce, who returned imaginatively, again and again, as John Worthen has remarked in many instances, to the pre-industrial setting of British society, at least from the memories of his childhood in Eastwood. Lawrence had also gone into a form of self-exile that took him literally across the world in search of lost values by which Anglo-European and even Western consciousness could be revived. In the works which he wrote in transit, Lawrence transforms art into bitter propaganda against Western ideological prefiguring, denouncing the complicity of Christianity (particularly its Roman Catholic variant), democracy, and capitalism on the neo-colonial world represented by Mexico. But this is not to say he favoured socialist or communist advocacy: rather, he was for a mutual respect for the Other’s worldview, textualised in the controversial novel, The Plumed Serpent, and more significantly dramatised in the visual representations in the novel. These are denunciations of the prefigured ego, which Lawrence had actually celebrated in his earlier, pre-travel works, notably in The Rainbow and Women in Love. The image of Will Brangwen is an interesting point in Lawrence’s experimentation with art as it looks back to the past and future representations in his work. Writing between 1915 and 1922 when The Rainbow and Women in Love were published respectively, we have to wait until after Lawrence left England and Europe at the end of 1922, to have significant discursive insights from him on his stance regarding the problematic of art and the artist. In Sons and Lovers, already, it was clear that Paul Morel’s art, which attempted to capture the protoplasm in a leaf,

xvi

Preface

was anticipatory of Lawrence’s famous impatience with “the old stable ego of character” and preference for “allotropic states” of consciousness. This is the transitional moment which Will sketches, a struggle for utterance between the expression of traditional and modernist forms. He is almost helpless against time and age which have connived against his youthful exuberance and he finally withdraws into convenient Christian archetypes. Will’s effort to envisage his domestic and matrimonial life in terms of a parallel with Adam’s privileged creation in the book of Genesis makes Lawrence’s art vulnerable to the same conservative pull as Joyce’s. It is an orientation that reflected the contested patriarchalism, which Anna attacks in The Rainbow, and underscores a supremacist race attitude which Lawrence himself adopted toward the Irish, the Jews, and the Blacks. His visual representations speak to this pre-travel arrogance, which is ironically repeated in Lady Chatterley’s Lover due more to the pressures of Lawrence’s deteriorating health, his imminent death, and a kind of last gasp need to reaffirm identity. Whatever arguments that have been advanced for and against Lawrence’s obsession with art in his work, it is obvious that he saw its literary and visual representation as the ideal context to problematise the indeterminacy of life. Cézanne was a great inspiration in this direction and in appreciating his painted apples we see Lawrence struggling for his own unique form from Paul Morel’s leaf, through Will’s doomed Adam, to Gudrun’s largely misunderstood and misrepresented work. Significantly, Gudrun’s vision exposes textual and authorial interests which Lawrence’s discursive writing on the subject highlighted. She can be viewed in this sense as already anticipating the relativised space of artistic representation and critical acknowledgement, which postmodernism was to introduce against a modernist immanence that had degenerated into a Vorticist conspiracy with industrialisation. The Lawrence who vehemently opposed the abusive mechanisation of industry together with the possessive instinct that was associated with it, was apparently unaware of the destabilising force of vision which Gudrun possessed, thus validating his famous caution for us to trust the tale more than the writer. Gudrun appeals to me as a sidelined character whose attempt to articulate what is intimate to her and her creator is compromised by consciously assertive positions of political correctness in art. The contradictions that are identifiable in the concerns of both Joyce and Lawrence with art and the artist are still significant to postcolonial readings of these writers. They were questioning the empire’s authority both at home and abroad, tracing internal colonial issues that defined the bigger picture of global dominance. The artists that Joyce and Lawrence

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen xvii

empowered in their works may be limited by the way they exhibit conceited opinions even when it is not necessary, but they also focus our attention on the way a postcolonial bias for and against them is inevitable. —Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

INTRODUCTION

The English novel came up as a distinct genre in the eighteenth century and has since then imposed itself and won a place in the literary world. It pre-occupied itself with man as a social being, and so became oriented in the concern for the human society. William J. Long in his book English Literature tells us that the aim of the first novelists was to tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women (345). The novelists sought to present human life in fiction as closely as possible to the lived experience. The novel had to do with a fictional presentation of plain human life, with as much truth to nature as possible. Consequently, realism became fundamental to the novel form.1 John Parry in his Guide Through English Literature thinks that the beginnings of the English novel as we know it today, came from writers who sought a popular audience. The masses were the target of these novelists and their work was as consequential as it represented and affected the life of man in society. Thus, the novel was not only expected to be a near exact representation of man in society, but also had to be appealing to the largest audience possible. The novelist was expected to have a basic knowledge of society. Such was the advantage that Daniel Defoe had from having an intimate contact with society as a journalist. Diana Laurenson and Alan Swingewood say the novel for him was a “report on the state of society witnessed through the eyes of particular individuals” (176). Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was concerned with an attempt to portray human society as much as he could. Henry Fielding (1707 – 1754), had a deep knowledge of life, gained from his varied experiences, which helped him to present genuine pictures of the men and women of his day. The nineteenth century English novel, like that of the eighteenth century, remained concerned with man as a social being, and kept its moralising role. For example, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), of all English novelists in the era portrayed the English society in his novels the most and sought to reform it. Norman Page thinks that Dickens’ job experiences 1 This refers to the mimetic role of literature, where literature is seen as an imitation of real life.

2

Introduction

as reporter helped to account for his acute powers of observation of speech habits and his capacity for reproducing them accurately (143). For George Meredith (1843 - 1909), the novel is a more private thing, in which he concentrates on the psychological study of motives. Henry James (1843-1916), who is said to be more interested in ideas than in people, carries Meredith’s concerns a step further. He is, along with H. G. Wells (1866 –1946), generally acknowledged as the father of the modern English novel. Wells uses the novel as the instrument with which to announce that which is new. The quest for the new is in itself an element of the modernist period. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) continues along the same pattern as Wells, but with a greater poetic touch to his fiction. Coming after Conrad is E. M. Forster, (1879-1970) who is most concerned with the individual and his responses to propriety and tradition. We now come to Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), who is one of the most important modern English novelists. For her, says Boris Ford, the novel is essentially an art form; “a re-creation of the complexities of experience, not a criticism of life” (260). As far as she is concerned, life is a subtle and complicated succession of experiences, and fiction must be adapted to catch the “tones, the light and shade of experience” (260). Irma Rantavaana opines that the reader of Virginia Woolf gets the impression that she creates in the same way as the painter, who proceeds with colours, adding touches here and there, and further says: Her work seems to rely largely on the subconscious, to be a series of ‘little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck in the dark…After a great deal of concentration and massing together of images, suddenly, in a moment of intensity, the right word, the right shape or colour, is hit upon, and in the act of creation a mystical awareness of the wholeness and unity that there is behind the phenomena, becomes all-absorbing (124.)

In the relationship of artistic novelty to social changes, Douglas Hewitt says Virginia Woolf’s thinking proves important because of her emphasis on the need to move away from the public to the private, from the social to the introspective and from the political to the individual. This, Hewitt says, fits well with that rejection of the public sphere which characterises many of the artists who are central in all accounts of modernism (130). Another novelist writing about the same time as Virginia Woolf is James Joyce (1881-1941). He writes almost only of Dublin. We read that he devises ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin, so that they become microcosms, small-scale models of human life, History and Geography. He writes about Dublin in such a way that it represents all of human

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen

3

experience (Abrams 1961). James Joyce is not interested in a wide range of characters, and does not adhere to the novelistic tendency to tell a story such that the reader is eager to see what comes next. He is “anxious to share what his characters share in their environment as showing their individuality” (Hewitt 150). We find about the same trend of thinking in D. H. Lawrence (18851930). John Worthen tells us that Lawrence decided to be a writer of the artistic kind, and that this choice imposed upon him a separation from his community, family and parents (The Early Years 132). As a growing artist, “Lawrence fought towards artistic identity by consciously overturning conventional forms in his work” (Mandell 9). In “Why the Novel Matters” Lawrence says the novel is the “bright book of life” (288). The novel for him is the vehicle for both emotional release and social change in its most ordinary but sensitive form (Mbuh 17). David Lodge in The Modes of Modern Writing describes the works of Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence as experimental or innovatory in form, displaying marked deviations from pre-existing modes of discourse, literary and non-literary (45). Their fiction is concerned with consciousness and also with the subconscious working of the human mind. Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf, prefer to paint pictures of other artists in their novels which, we earlier said, are now regarded as artistic products. Majumdar and McLaurin observe that “the modern novel is becoming a painter’s literature” (82). Furthermore, the novelist, for the first time in history, decidedly makes company with painters, musicians, dancers, carvers and all the rest who express one form of talent or the other. A revolution has taken place in most of these arts, especially painting, and the novel follows suit. Essentially, the novelist is preferably called an artist, and the novels art deemed to be works of art. Remarkably, the novelists during this period preferably write about characters who are artists. The biographical nature of the novels emphasises the artistic concern, since their subjects are artists. It may be necessary to point out a number of characteristic features of the modern English novel which make it dissimilar to the traditional novel of the 18th and 19th century. To begin with, the traditional novel, as already pointed out, is preoccupied with the presentation of the lives of ordinary men in society. But when we come to the modern novel, especially as far as Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence are concerned, the focus moves to a greater concern with the individual. Furthermore, the traditional novel is concerned with society at large and how to reform it. The modern novel on the other hand is concerned with the individual and how the personality functions. We also

4

Introduction

find that whereas the traditional novel seeks a popular audience, the modern novel is actually written for a select intellectual few. The traditional novelist intends the novel to serve a moralising role in the society. But with the shift in values in the modern society, there are hardly any set moral values to uphold. In this light, the modern novel is never meant to serve any moralising role. Its role is to create a consciousness in the readers about what life is, rather than what it ought to be. Furthermore, the shift in societal values means, as D. H. Lawrence rightly said, that modern life no longer needed any absolutes. If then there are no absolutes, there is equally hardly a reference point. This lack of a reference point implies the loss of a sense of direction, so that even the artist, in the modern novel is seeking for new values. He consequently becomes very experimental, in search for new and suitable methods of presentation which suit the new situation. The traditional novel on the other hand is less experimenting, since it belongs to a more stable social context. Another trait characteristic of the modern novel is that its language tends more towards poetry. The traditional novelist’s labour for simplicity and clarity are absent in the modern novel. In fact, one would think that modern writers like Woolf and Joyce intentionally make their works difficult to the untrained mind. Typical to the novel form is the novelist’s desire to probe into the mind of the characters. But the psychological penetration observed in the lives of the characters of the modern novel far exceeds what happens in the traditional novel. This is perhaps because unlike the traditional novel where action is given a lot of importance, the modern novel is not very much concerned with it. The modern novelist is more interested in the individual’s state of mind. Following from the modern novelist’s concern with the mind, comes the great use of the stream of consciousness technique in the modern novel. This is also possible with the modern novel because it is being written at a time when a lot of discovery has taken place in psychology, especially around the work of Sigmund Freud. After reading the novels of say Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and a host of other 18th and 19th Century English novelists, one gets used to a certain pattern in the presentation of their material. There is what may be called a tradition of the novel that these hold to, in almost all of their works. But when for the first time one lays hands on a work of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, one comes face to face with a marked departure from that tradition. There is a difference evident in their handling of subject matter, narrative techniques and in the manner of presentation.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen

5

The causes of these changes have been found in the rise of social philosophies such as Darwinism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Developments in science and technology have also contributed a great deal. Evidently, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence are modernist in lots of ways. One modernist characteristic of their work, say A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie, is that it offers a thorough critique of the key social institutions that seek to shape the life of its central character[s] (143). However, within that common denominator Joyce and Lawrence are remarkably distinct, and sometimes opposed to one another. True to this, critical opinion has by and large found more differences in their approaches to modernism than similarities. This tendency to find more discrepancies than points of convergence in the two acclaimed modernists is rendered more so by marked differences in their upbringing, education, social status, associations, personality, temperamental differences and artistic styles. In Paul Delaney’s article, “A Would-Be-Dirty Mind”: D.H. Lawrence as an Enemy of Joyce” he tries to explain why “Lawrence and Joyce must be counted among the great pairs of literary enemies.” In his brief essay, he identifies two major points of contention: realism as a method and sexuality as a subject, to illustrate the antipathy between the two artists. He explains that: “Real life,” for Lawrence, means striking through the mask of culture to get as close as possible to “the thing itself.” Joyce, on the other hand, accepts that reality is inescapably textual. Stephen’s maxim that absence is the highest form of presence argues that representations are more potent than whatever they are taken to represent. In sexual relations, Joyce dwells obsessively on indirect or incomplete modes of consummation; he is fascinated by everything that may intervene between desire and performance.

It strikes us, however, that irrespective of the differences, and quarrels with one another, they seem to come to an implicit consensus about the writer as an artist and the artist as character in their novels. For different reasons, very likely, they seem to go for the artist and his/her life-style as the option par excellence for the twentieth century. This common interest on the artist for Joyce and Lawrence became an investigative interest to us, and we set out to find out the artist portraits they showcase in their works, especially in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Rainbow respectively.

6

Introduction

A laid-back reading of the novels points to a pattern in the life and work of the Joycean and Lawrencian fictive artist. Generally: -

He or she is initially immersed in the life of their community; family, church, other social institutions and the nation as a whole. Questions, rebels and casts away his/her former adherence to establishment, its values and demands. Sets out on a self-discovery pursuit, which ends in the establishment of an artistic vision, and Produces works of art that are a reflection of the above, and which often turn out to be ideologically and experientially autobiographical.

The outline above becomes the informing pattern by which we shall be examining the artist figure in the chosen works of Joyce and Lawrence. However, we shall begin by looking at critical opinion on the subject of the artist in relation to the chosen authors and texts.

CHAPTER ONE CRITICS ON THE ARTIST IN JOYCE AND LAWRENCE

James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, alongside Virginia Woolf are presumably the pillars of the modern English novel. They have, in varying degrees constituted a centre of attraction for a large number of critics who have approached their works from different perspectives, sometimes with contradictory opinions. The works of Joyce and Lawrence are perhaps the most controversial in terms of style, subject matter, notion of reality and the role of the novel ever since the advent of the novel as a distinct literary genre. They could be taken for harbingers of the new kind of the novel, or simply as those in whose hands the traditional English novel died. Some critics think that these writers best represent the truth of modern reality, but others think they are not genuine artists and that their works fall short of art in one aspect or other. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Rainbow written by Joyce and Lawrence respectively, have received considerable critical attention. There are those who think these novels are not worth the name and those who think they are the epitome of the art of the novel. The opinions differ but the books are important enough to draw massive attention. A lot of the critical literature on the artist focuses mostly on the artist as living and practising in real society. Not much has been written on the artist as characters depicted in the novels. We shall begin by looking at critical material on Lawrence as an artist, and the artists he creates in his fiction, particularly in The Rainbow. We realise that for most of the available critical considerations on D. H. Lawrence and The Rainbow, the major concerns have been on whether Lawrence is an artist or not and whether The Rainbow is a work of art or not. In this argument F. R. Leavis, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley and David Cecil have gone a long way to prove Lawrence’s standing as a modern artist, as against Edwin Muir and T. S. Eliot who at first hand dismiss Lawrence as an artist mainly because of the lack of discipline in his work.

8

Chapter One

The other aspect of critical concern is on Lawrence and sexuality. Singrid Undset, Dedria Bryfonski, Sharon K. and Edward Garnet have addressed this aspect in which they evaluate Lawrence’s obsession with sex in his novels as well as the relationship between sex and art. Edward Garnet even thinks that Lawrence’s pre-occupation with sex is a more constructive concern than industrialisation. F. R. Leavis and John Middleton Murray have also done a good deal on Lawrence and his attitude towards the Industrial Revolution. As concerns Lawrence’s art in The Rainbow, Emile Delavenay and Robert Kiely have undertaken to evaluate his success in this novel. Hesitant though, they call it a work of art, as against F. R. Leavis who praises it and says it only falls short of perfection. Richard Aldington on his part looks at Lawrence as heretic and rebel. In about the same concern, Mbuh Mathias Mbuh looks at Lawrence’s rebellion as the outcome of conflicting identities. Aspects of Lawrence’s relationship with his society have received elaborate attention from Leonard S. Klein, Herzinger, Raymond William and Carol Ferrara Treacy. Treacy in particular goes ahead to look at the Lawrencian artist in his novels as different shades of Lawrence and tries to fit them within the culture of the artist in English literature. Apart from character sketches here and there as in Leavis’ Thoughts, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, and Treacy’s Art and the Artist in D. H. Lawrence, not much has been done on Lawrence’s artists as portrayed in The Rainbow in particular. Aldous Huxley considers Lawrence as an artist by all standards. He says it is impossible to write about Lawrence except as an artist. Secondly, “the fact of his being an artist explains a life which seems, if you forget it, inexplicably strange” (Qtd. in Andrews 41). In his opinion, an artist is characteristically strange in relation to expected social conduct in a particular society. But strangeness is only an aspect of the varied characteristics that go to make the artist. From reading the letters of Lawrence, Lord David Cecil says they possess the special merits of good letters; directness, intimacy, unselfconsciousness, vitality, and could be a startling evidence of Lawrence’s artistry. He remarks that in the letters, Lawrence is always talking of himself, which explains why his novels are most often a projection of himself (40). Here again is a feature characteristic of the modern artist. His art is often his experiences reproduced in diverse ways, as it is always the case with modern artists. Diana Trilling finds that Lawrence’s male characters are reduced to vehicles for his doctrine. They are similar to Lawrence in terms of his life experiences. His leading male characters are

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

9

regularly slight, wiry, fierce, home-centred men of the working class. Like Lawrence, they think of life as a test, a challenge to be faced up and overcome (1). There are however controversial critical positions as to the standing of Lawrence as an artist. Edwin Muir is one of such critics. In his understanding, an artist must be very disciplined in the handling of his material. Consequently, in his denial of Lawrence as an artist he says, artistic discipline does not in any way preoccupy Lawrence. To Lawrence, what mattered was what he saw or felt. Muir, however, acknowledges that what Lawrence saw and felt was of extraordinary interest (40). Muir’s acknowledgement that what Lawrence felt and saw were of extraordinary interest suggests that there was something distinct and different in him, which could be seen in his novels, poems and short stories. We want to think that the presence of discipline is one of many distinctive marks of the artist, and that one need not exhibit all that generally characterises an artist to merit the appellation. Yet we must acknowledge that there is no air-tight definition of what characterises the modern artist. Critics have hardly come to a consensus about it all. T. S. Eliot’s opinion is that Lawrence is not a pure artist because he never succeeded in making a work of art (Qtd. in Draper 359). In After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, Eliot takes a more critical look at Lawrence, calling him a heretical demoniac, who by class, education, and religious upbringing combined with his penchant for false prophecy, made himself to something of an anti-Christ (58-61). However true this maybe, we do not think that talent and genius, which are at the very base of the artist’s personality are class-bound. Background, of course, is important to the moulding of the artist, but it does not make the artist. We may dare to say that T. S. Eliot, who in many circumstances thinks more clearly and liberally, is being class-conscious in this critical position against Lawrence as artist. This is most likely the case because his later reception of Lawrence as artist is more on the positive end. Eliot later acknowledges that his former opinion about Lawrence was not balanced and in 1960, stood in defence of Lawrence as artist against the charges of obscenity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He also wrote the preface to Father William Tiverton’s1 book on Lawrence. In this preface T. S. Eliot calls the book “a serious piece of criticism of Lawrence of a kind for which the time is now due” (Leavis 317). It took Eliot a good deal of time to accept Lawrence’s other-worldliness, characteristic of the modern artist. 1 Tiverton is an Anglican priest who recommended Lawrence as a good Christian and a positively improving author for Christians.

10

Chapter One

Lawrence was certainly too much unlike what society was used to at the time, and produced art that was strange for the time being, to be accepted there and then. In 1950 Richard Aldington published Portrait of a Genius But… calling Lawrence the world’s rejected guest. In trying to explain the artistic genius of Lawrence, he argues that Lawrence indisputably has genius because in the mere twenty years of his manhood, his experiences and his creative output were intense and continuous. He further insists that Lawrence has unique perceptions and an unmistakable aptitude both in living and in writing (x). In a very pro-Lawrence manner, F. R. Leavis in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist wages war against Lawrence’s detractors indiscriminately. He dwells on the novels and tales of D. H. Lawrence with the aim of proving Lawrence’s genius as an artist. He holds adoringly that Lawrence is the great creative genius of our age, and one of the greatest figures in English literature (17). Leavis brings out an important dual feature of the artist. He rightly holds that an artist must have genius, but that genius alone is not enough; he must be creative. This is perhaps why he goes a long way to examine lots of passages from Lawrence’s work to prove their artistic quality. In his retort to those critics who argue that Lawrence is not an artist, he practically exaggerates Lawrence’s genius and creativity. Eliseo Vivas on his part believes that Lawrence is something beyond merely being an artist. In his “The Two Lawrences”, he says on the one hand, Lawrence is an artist and on the other a prophet. He thinks that the problem with Lawrence is that in the artist’s role as the antennae of the race, he “thrust his long, tremulous filaments into the future and brought back to us a report of what we were gradually to find as the years went by” (113-114). To him, the artist both x-rays the present and foretells or foresees the future. His only problem with Lawrence is that he over-did the forth-seeing aspect of his genius as artist, thereby overlapping into prophecy. Another publication which helps to establish the artistic worth of Lawrence is R. P. Draper’s D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, which provides a number of important critical reviews on Lawrence as an artist. Kingsley Widmer on his part in “Lawrence as Abnormal Novelist” thinks that since Lawrence is not consistent as a thinker, artist or man; discrimination is very essential, without which studies in Lawrence are nonsense, if not something worse (220). He further holds that no simple affirmation or negation as to whether Lawrence is an artist or not will do. When Virginia Woolf reviewed The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence, she called Lawrence an original (Qtd in Draper 141), adding that his work was

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

11

disquieting, as the original work of a writer often is. She had not been drawn to read Lawrence early enough because of the derogative comments made of him at the time (Qtd in Draper 93-96). Mbuh Mathias Mbuh in his study of Lawrence holds that the domestic and social conflicts akin to Lawrence’s childhood and adulthood are the main concern in his art. He says that Lawrence seeks to infuse a new selfawareness into social consciousness. Beyond biographical evidence, he undertakes a study of Lawrence’s works to highlight the complex phenomenon of conflicting identities (1). In this study, he brings out an aspect of the artist’s working material; his own experience, from birth to the time of his artwork. What also stands out in Mbuh’s work is that in the artist’s development, he is constantly in a battle with himself as an individual, distinct and different from those around him, in a society where he is hardly an integral part. Lawrence’s novels are characteristically sexually explicit. To some critics, Lawrence is obsessed with sex, and to some others, his works are obscene. Sigrid Undset holds that Lawrence is the prophet of an altogether sexual religion, which makes his art to give offence and alarm to a public accustomed to seeing something literary (Qtd. in Mbuh 47). Dedria Bryfonski and K. Sharon justify Lawrence’s frank sexuality and his unconventional life on the grounds of freedom of expression. They argue that Lawrence is highly moral in his writing. Lawrence’s sexuality, they point out, is a constructive force as opposed to industrialisation, which is the other of his major concerns (342). The characters of Lawrence always live and function within a sphere of sexual passion. These characters suffer because they have to pass through much and endure much in attaining or missing their passionate sexual desires (Garnet 145-146). With Lawrence as artist, as well as the fictive artists in his works, sex and art are intimately related. In this relationship, sex is believed to enhance art. In this book we think that what is essential to the artist is passion. By passion here we mean a strong emotional drive. In Lawrence’s case, as with many other artists, preoccupation with sex is the easiest emotional excitement they find. Others revert to alcohol and to other drugs as a means of sharpening their perceptions. One of the things that was important to Lawrence and which time and again appears in his writings is industrialisation. He was bitterly opposed to industrialisation. It is for this reason that John Middleton Murry calls him enemy of civilisation. Murry equates the progress in industry to a step ahead in civilisation and considers Lawrence as an enemy of civilisation since he hated the growth in industry. To Murry, Lawrence is “the

12

Chapter One

conscious and deliberate, yet passionate and potent, enemy of modern civilisation” (235). Leavis takes up the discussion, and is particularly pro-Lawrence when he looks at the ill-effects of the machine. He holds that the machine has more disadvantages than advantages to man. He refers to the case in The Rainbow, where the emergence of the Brangwens from their memorial rustic traditionalism towards the possibility of the intelligentsia means progress in civilisation, producing industrialised Eastwood, thereby breaking the blood intimacy that existed before, and installing a greater sense of emptiness in the Brangwens (11). We do not think that progress in civilisation in itself is an evil. But in as much as the artist is concerned, we know that he loves nature and that an urban setting with its peculiar problems is not conducive enough for art. As we shall see later, the artists under study characteristically withdraw from urban settings preferring to work in rural areas. In his assessment of Lawrence’s The Rainbow, F. R. Leavis says The Rainbow is not a perfect work of art (101). He adds that although it falls short of complete success, it is certainly a major work of a great writer (101). Emile Delavenay considers The Rainbow as Lawrence’s first attempt at total artistic creation (344). By way of the achievement of Lawrence in The Rainbow, Delavenay continues to say, “Lawrence has attempted two things: to break away from the old conception of character and to find a new form for the novel, different from the old linear narrative development of most of his predecessors” (381). This highlights one of the tendencies of the artist in the modern English novel, in which the artist is characteristically experimental, as with Lawrence in the handling of Character in The Rainbow. Even in the form of The Rainbow, Lawrence is not conventional. Allan Friedman looks at newness in The Rainbow in relation to its recurrent exploration to the reductive process in relation to time (Qtd. in Whelan 221-222). Robert Kiely goes on to say that in company with the other writers of the modern period, Lawrence is not less concerned with art in his creative work. But unlike Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, he is rarely at his best when preoccupied with art. Often, his emotions intrude and destroy the balance (94). The modern artist is also something of a heretic in the sense of dissent from a dominant theory, opinion or generally accepted beliefs. Aldington fits Lawrence within this tradition of the artist as heretic when he writes that: D. H. Lawrence was a good example of the English Heretic. In England, contumely, persecution, fierce solitariness show the man of genius…Think

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

13

of Swift exiled to Dublin and shaking the government with his pamphlets, …Shelley a public scandal, Byron the world’s exile…Not la gloire, not the triumph of a doctrine or a party, but the vindication, the assertion of a man’s own soul in the man’s own way – that is the English heresy. And if you want a tradition for Lawrence, there it is (Qtd. in Treacy 213.)

To Treacy, the modern artist is an alien to society. He is no longer a part of society, trying to reform it (242). He has lost faith in his fellow man. In “Art and the Artist in D. H. Lawrence” Treacy writes: “Lawrence assumes the most alienated role, that of brigand or outlaw. His books will be a revolutionary’s bombs; and he will hurl them back to England from all points of the globe” (242). As an artist, says Treacy, Lawrence is an alien in his own homeland, an exile for most of his adult years and a modern Odysseus (243). Lawrence was in many ways an outsider even to the other artists of his time and culture. He did not mix, as one would expect, with those of the same basic trend of mind. He lived apart, in a shrine of art, a priest of art as he called himself. For instance, Virginia Woolf expected much from him as an innovator, but he kept his distance (Herzinger 28). Leonard S. Klein says he was not on the whole sympathetic to, or even very interested in the avant-guard movements of his time. He holds that if we try to relate his innovations to those of his contemporaries say, Hulme in England or Appolinaire in France, we should be struck at once by his apparent isolation, in the way he worked things out for himself (26). Lawrence was always working alone and his first loyalty was to his art. He did not need the carnal contact that was going on in the avant-guard movements. He believed in himself and thought he would reach out into harmony with them only through art. To him, the essence for true art is that it should convey the emotions of one man to his fellows (Warren and Moore 226). Raymond William in Culture and Society argues that if in his own life Lawrence rejected the claims of society, it was not because he did not understand the importance of community, but because in industrial England he could find none. He adds that Lawrence was not a vagrant, to live by dodging; but an exile, committed to a different social principle (205). The vagrant wants the system to stay as it is, so long as he can go on dodging it while still being maintained by it. The exile on the contrary, wants to see the system changed, so that he can come home. This latter is Lawrence’s position. Turning to the artists in Lawrence’s fiction, Treacy says that in Sons and Lovers the artist, Paul Morel, is one struggling for selfhood, refusing to succumb to the death-urge within him, rather ready to take a new life in town as a free man; an artist. He has the talents and the skills needed to

14

Chapter One

create a quickness of life in his paintings. In The Rainbow, Lawrence places the artist, Will Brangwen, in a critical conflict between art and family love. In yielding to his wife, Anna, Will sacrifices his gift as an artist (243-244). In Women in Love, the artist, in a fragmented society of post-war disintegration is seen not as one who heals, but as needing healing. In Aaron’s Rod, the artist is completely alienated from society, but close to nature and can find fulfilment of the spirit through physical love in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In The Forked Flame, Daleski looks at the artist as a rebel. He remarks that Ursula starts life in revolt to her mother. She is aware that she is a separate entity in the midst of an unseparated obscurity and decides to live a life different from all around her. Of all the Brangwens, it is in Ursula that the desire for an individual fullness of being is shown at its most intense (107). She wants to stretch the female self to the maximum in her relationship with Skrebensky. In Engelberg’s “Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman,” the artist, Ursula, brings her whole self into every new experience. With her failure in religion, she next puts her faith in love, never retreating from a new experience. She is the modern artist in search of new experiences. Will Brangwen as depicted by Lawrence in The Rainbow, is characteristically a restless modern artist. Treacy’s analysis of his character highlights the fact that Will jumps from modelling in clay to beaten and chiselled metal work and then to water colouring (142). As with Will Brangwen, the modern artist hardly expresses his or herself in only one mode of art. Lawrence majored in the novel, but also wrote poems, plays and many short stories. James Joyce wrote novels, poems and a play. Virginia Woolf’s writing was something of a blend of prose and poetry. This may also be seen as the modern artist’s refusal to adhere to the cannons of the different genres of literary expression. We now turn to critical literature on James Joyce’s works and his depiction of the modern artist. Joyce has been variously appreciated in terms of his life, his writings and his view of literature and the arts in general. We shall look at some of the critical works on him and Stephen Dedalus, as depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Research in relation to the critical reception of Joyce has been carried out by critics such as Harry Levin, Richard Ellmann and Jeffrey Segall. Just as with D. H. Lawrence, a lot has been done on Joyce’s relationship with the world around him, exile, and solitude. Thomas Kinsella and Spoo have tried to situate Joyce within the Irish civilisation and relationship with Irish men of letters like Shaw and Yeats. Critical material on the

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

15

autobiographical nature of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of his narrative style abound. Critics like Levin in “The Artist”, Haskell M. Block in “The Critical Theory of James Joyce”, and Dorothy Van Ghent in “On A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” have given a lot of attention to Stephen Dedalus as an artist in Joyce’s A Portrait. However, they generally write on Stephen Dedalus as Joyce in disguise. Stephen Dedalus hardly has an identity of his own as an artist, independent and different from James Joyce. Harry Levin in his preface to James Joyce: A Critical Introduction assesses the critical reception of James Joyce from ostracism to canonisation. He remarks that the time lapse between the controversy with Joycean methods and their acceptance is pretty short, and that his reception must be regarded as given, not wrought from fierce debate (XII – XIII). He holds that criticism on Joyce was delayed, especially in America by political infighting and ideological disputes. In the thirties, with the Stalinist influence calling for novels of socialist realism, Joyce and the rest of the modernist writers were looked upon as decadent, selfindulgent, elitist, and obscure. The New Humanists whose interest crested in the late twenties coupled their retrograde social and political views with a moralistic indictment of modernist art. Notwithstanding these, Levin notes that Joycean studies soon entered scholarly circles (120). When the Stalinists describe Joyce’s artistry as decadent, self-indulgent, elitist and obscure, one may consider their description as being correct. The modern artist is indisputably an embodiment of the description above. The difficulty in the reception of Joyce is common to many modern artists. This rejection is not necessarily because of the artist’s irrelevance to society, but because of society’s typical objection to anything that appears outside of the expected standards. We must note that in many ways, the modern artist is very much unlike the acceptable artist of the time, and is generally rejected at first touch, both because of life-style and the kind of art produced. Jeffrey Segall in “‘Ku’lturbolshewismus is Here’: James Joyce and the Anti-Modernist Crusade in America, 1928 – 1944” begins by looking at the reception of James Joyce by fellow modernists such as Pound, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. For example, he makes mention of D. H. Lawrence who complained that the last part of Ulysses was filthy, the dirtiest, and the most obscene thing ever written (538). Segall mentions that Pound had misgivings about Finnegans Wake, but that on the whole James Joyce’s fellow artists, despite the fact that he always maintained an estrangement from his modernist contemporaries, accepted him (538). The estrangement of the modern artist is not necessarily away from the non-

16

Chapter One

artist lot of society. As with James Joyce, the modern artist may sometimes withdraw even from his or her fellow artists, for artistic reasons. Among the forces that stood the way of the growth and expansion of Joyce’s work in America, was the influence of Irving Babbitt’s book, Rousseau and Romanticism where the ideal of critical art represented a counterpoint to the disorder of modern life so distressingly documented in modernist and naturalist fiction (Segall 539-40). Jeffrey Segall further makes reference to Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald MacLeish who, calling for a literature that celebrated American values, attacked the modernists, charging them with irresponsibility in America’s greatest hour of need (547). But Archibald MacLeish was always tolerant to James Joyce out of acquaintance and admiration. Joyce was sometimes at the centre, sometimes at the periphery of attacks directed against the modernists during the 1930s and 1940s. In her essay “Sex and Confession in the Joyce Cannon: Some Historical Parallels”, Mary Lowe-Evans says that in James Joyce’s A Portrait, he employs and exploits the manifold meanings of confession. She refers to Stephen Dedalus who at one time is a fornicator seeking absolution from a priest, and at another he is confessing a new faith in the world of the flesh to his antagonistic classmates (576). This study presents the artist as a person in conflict with himself, to the extent that he may sometimes harbour what may seem to be opposites. The artist, as he evolves, may change positions on one or more issues with experience, and without apology. The modern artist is often in search of a new place where to stay and work. Often he is an exile and something of a vagrant until he finds a place where he feels free. Joyce in particular was a restless man continually changing his abode in the same city, due to circumstances, but also on account of his nature (Power 30). Dorothy Van Ghent in “On A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man observes that the single predominant physical activity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the activity of walking. Stephen Dedalus’ movements take him into new localities and consequently into new experiences. His mind also moves correspondingly into new spiritual localities that subsume the older ones and readjust them as parts of a larger whole (Portrait 68). Furthermore, at the end of the book, Stephen is prepared at least to set forth on the “dappled, seaborne clouds” that float beyond Ireland and over Europe. He wants to find out what comes after the universe (74). In “Joyce’s Attitude Toward History: Rome, 1906 – 07”, Robert Spoo comments on the impact of Joyce’s many journeys. He argues that because of Joyce’s movement from place to place, he becomes something of a

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

17

historian in his writings. Spoo states that from the earliest Dubliners stories to Ulysses, history in one form or other, fills the pages of Joyce’s works. He mentions that from James’ visit to Rome he begins to reconsider his native city in new and significantly historical terms (482). In this light, Herbert Gorman refers to a letter Joyce wrote to his brother from Rome wherein he regrets having given Dublin lesser worth than it deserved; “Sometimes thinking of Ireland, it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners, at least) none of the attraction of the city” (170). Thomas Kinsella’s “W. B. Yeats, The British Empire, James Joyce and Mother Grogan” is an evaluation of the “Irishness” of W. B. Yeats and of James Joyce, in an attempt to prove that James Joyce’s working knowledge of Irish history and literary tradition was better than Yeats’. What is of interest to us is his mention of the fact that Dedalus’ concern with the English language spells out his consciousness of its strangeness to him. He prefers the Irish language (75). This essay, like Spoo’s is an attempt at fitting Joyce into Irish History. Identifying James Joyce with W. B. Yeats amounts, however covertly, to calling Joyce a nationalist, what he paid relatively little attention to when he set out to become a consecrated artist. Characteristically, Joyce was not a proponent of literary movements. In “Grist for the Mill: James Joyce and the Naturalists,” Philip Raisor says the Irish renascence, which at the turn of the century kept George Russell and Edward Martyn at home and brought W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and George Moore (periodically) back from England and the Continent, first engaged and then irritated the youthful Joyce. He also showed little interest in the Gaelic revival (457). In this study, we hold that although an artist’s roots may always be traced to some culture and sense of national or regional belonging, he repudiates such bonds when he sets out to fulfil his exclusive role as an artist. One other Irish man of letters whose relationship with Joyce has been of critical concern is Gorge Bernard Shaw. In an article titled “A Respectful Distance: James Joyce and his Dublin Townsman Bernard Shaw,” Stanley Weintraub traces the attempts of Joyce to be noticed by Shaw, with the hopes of his helping him in the publication of some of his works, Dubliners for one. For some time, Joyce and Shaw reviewed one another’s books, and Joyce acted some of Shaw’s plays, especially The Dark Lady of the Sonnets twice at a time when Shaw’s plays were severely censored. Shaw attended the staging of Joyce’s Exiles at least once. But the two men hardly ever met and in a letter to Yeats, Joyce feels he does not belong to the Yeats-Shaw team and their artistic trends (72). Beyond seldom relating to Yeats and Shaw, it is not easy to identify Joyce with

18

Chapter One

any movement. His personal objectives cut him off completely from the Irish revolution (Levin 22). Once more, we find in James Joyce the artist’s characteristic sense of not belonging, even to his fellow artists. Leonard S. Klein says that James Joyce, in dedication to the lonely integrity of the artist, renounced both his Catholicism and Irish Nationalism, and although being a mild socialist generally, he abjured politics in general (527). As with Joyce, so it was with Lawrence. In a letter written to Robert Pratt Barlow, from Ardnaree, Lake View Estate, Kandy, 30th March 1922, Lawrence said, “I feel I don’t belong, and never should” (Treacy 93). In order to keep on with his work, he turned away from the world to live in one of his own making with Frieda and a few friends. This was so in order that he may escape the spiritual degradation of a commercialised world (Herzinger 19). But the modern artist will always need collaboration or impetus from fellow artists at one time or other. This is often the case with the maturing artist. In “Joyce’s Debt to Pinter”, David G. Wright sets out to prove that Joyce’s Exiles took greater and popular acceptability only after Harold Pinter successfully put it on stage in 1970. Wright finds great similarity between Joyce’s Exiles and Pinter’s Old Times. He says “much of Pinter’s Old Times concerns ‘exiles’ in Joyce’s sense and much of Joyce’s Exiles concerns ‘old times’ in Pinter’s sense” (482). In James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, Harry Levin has undertaken to examine, among other issues, James Joyce’s relationship with the publishers, the printers and the authorities of his day. Levin says that hardly anything Joyce ever wrote was published without a struggle. The game was always; “if the editors accepted his manuscript, the printers refused to set them up; if the publishers brought out his books, the censors destroyed them” (26). The charges against them were always obscenity, blasphemy, or treason. Sometimes his books were banned in Ireland, but published in Britain, and when banned in Britain, they were published in America. Even when he had become one of the acknowledged masters of English prose, an English printing firm refused to print A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They wrote back to him saying, “We would not knowingly undertake any work of a doubtful character even though it may be a classic” (27). Critical consideration has begun to unearth that Joyce borrowed most of the ideas he used in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This has to do with the thought that although an artist may soar and transcend the limitations of his predecessors, his primary material comes from sources related to these ancients. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, in The Workshop of Daedalus assert that it becomes increasingly apparent that

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

19

Joyce had either an actual or a literary source in mind for almost every passage in A Portrait (VIII). Hugh Kenner in Dublin’s Joyce also disclaims the originality of James Joyce in his works (12). From a language point of view, M. M. Bakhtin calls A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a consciously constructed hybrid of languages (4). Eugene Onegin says “the author of A Portrait participates in the novel with almost no direct language of his own” (Qtd. in Kershner 892). In the same line of thought Helmut Bonheim asserts that there may not be a tree or a stone in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake which Joyce did not see, hear, or read about (13). R. B. Kershner, in “The Artist as Text: Dialogism and Incremental Repetition in Joyce’s Portrait” explains his disclaim of Joyce’s originality in A Portrait by saying that an originally undifferentiated ego slowly takes on form and selfhood, expressed as inner narrative, by way of a continuous series of dialogic encounters with and among the languages surrounding it, from which the artist has always already vanished (893). Kershner advocates that Stephen is “an irrational sum of the texts, spoken and written, to which he has been exposed” (“The Artist” 890). Kershner takes for support Stephen’s words in A Portrait when he says he spends most of the leisure which his school life leaves him with subversive writers, “whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they pass out of it into his crude writings” (Portrait 78). The question of the language of James Joyce has also been addressed by Katie Wales in The Language of James Joyce. In his second chapter; “Joyce and Rhetoric: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, Wales suggests that Joyce’s rhetoric was learnt from books, classmates and from his Jesuit teachers (36). He picks up lots of examples from A Portrait to illustrate Joyce’s abundant usage of rhetoric. Functionally, rhetoric helps to embody James Joyce’s deepest thoughts and feelings, and it is also the symbol of his poetic aspirations” (66). Kershner holds that A Portrait is permeated with the nostalgic sense of a lost linguistic innocence and that there is no language with which Stephen is at home (“The Artist” 881). As a poet, Stephen Dedalus is particularly sensitive to words and language in general. Hugh Kenner in “The Portrait in Perspective” says as a kid, hardly able to think, Stephen initially incurs language as an invader armed with mysterious corrosive power which fascinates and paralyses his will: it has power to strike terror into a child who knows nothing of eagles, or of blindness, or of Prometheus (35). Kenner continues to advocate that language is primarily a disturbance, an emissary of the non-ego, an alien irritant body around which the artist

20

Chapter One

knowingly, as a citizen unknowingly, deposits protective coatings (“The Portrait” 35). “Joyce and Expressionism” is a study in the style of James Joyce’s works. In this article, Ira B. Nadel traces with striking clarity the probability that James Joyce did come into contact with expressionists such as August Strindberg, Gerhard Haupmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Reinhardt, Frank Wedekind, Stefan Zweig, and Ivan Goll (143). Most of these names, Nadel says, have often been mentioned as possible influences on Joyce and contributing to his expressionism. Beginning from Jack B. Yeats in 1903, Nadel traces with almost biographical detail, James Joyce’s reading, and appreciation of paintings, theatre attendance, correspondence and consequent expressionistic writing. He thinks James Joyce is very much an expressionist in “Nighttown” and in Ulysses (143). In Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in Ulysses, William M. Schutte sets out to study the artist figure in Ulysses drawing considerably from the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In one of the chapters of his book; “The Artist’s Role: The God of Creation”, he examines Joyce’s method in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and the posthumously published Stephen Hero. He calls A Portrait a prologue to the play of Stephen’s creative dreams. He finds, however that the confident, inspired creator of A Portrait is, after nine months, “a frustrated, disillusioned, bitter young man, whose literary production still amounts only to the ‘capful of light odes’” (84-85). In Helmut Bonheim’s Joyce Benefictions, one of his concerns is a study of Joyce’s style. In the first chapter of his book; “The Style of a Rebel”, he asserts that Joyce’s rejection of authority becomes part of his method and an ingredient of his system of manipulating language. Joyce is violently opposed to conventional language but at the same time fascinated with the possibilities that it offers. Bonheim says the flavour of Joyce’s “unconventional views – of the underdog, the anti-authoritarian, and the rebel – effectively pervades every major work that Joyce concocted” (4). Bonheim traces Joyce’s life to show that Joyce did not personally suffer any much of a bad treatment from his father, the Irish government or from the British government. Consequently then, his rebelliousness is not entirely the result of unprivileged youth or of intolerable oppression. The oppression to which Stephen rebels is “a fiction, a mere convenience… mechanism, a gimmick” (12). C. H. Peake has also seen in Joyce’s rebellion, one of the methods by which a functional interaction between the parts, and between the parts and the whole is created in A Portrait. He claims that Stephen’s rebellion moulds and directs the expression of his art. The rise and fall of each of

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

21

the impediments to the artist help to establish a structural pattern in the book (90). In “Some Psychological Determinants of Joyce’s View of Love and Sex,” Darcy O’Brien seeks to establish the psychological links that exist between Joyce and his work. He believes that the sexual puritanism of Joyce’s Irish Catholic background instilled sexual fears for Joyce. It also contributed to making Joyce divide womankind into virgins and whores as in A Portrait and later into whores, coquettes, and adulteresses as in Ulysses. Joyce’s writing on sex exhibits complex fears and hostilities, and his emphasis on perversion and cuckoldry amounts to an obsession. His letters to Nora, whom he later married, describe a complete dissociation between what Joyce calls his love for Nora and his sexual desire for her. O’Brien further intimates that Joyce’s love lyrics in his Chamber Music embody a furtive sort of sensuality, much as that of the “Hail Mary” or “The Litany of the Blessed Virgin.” For Joyce, as it is for Stephen, “a union between affection and sensuality was impossible” (15-16). As many critics have done, Kristian Smith considers A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man an autobiographical text; fundamentally true to life, but very incomplete and fragmentary. The general arrangement and focussing are, he says, “biographically reliable in as far as they indicate the author’s mental outlook and development” (6). He however gives a word of caution that the author cannot be quite identified with Stephen. To this effect he explains; “Joyce, apparently, loaded upon Stephen much of the mental or spiritual freight that he wished to unburden himself of” (7). He also simplified in Stephen, many of his own troubles and difficulties. C. H. Peake in his turn, with a lot of certainty holds that in A Portrait, a mature artist looks back over his own youth, from a particular viewpoint, perceiving what was significant to his development as artist, estimating what was vital and what was transitory in that development, and viewing his early self with purposeful irony (56). On the other hand, Sydney Bolt denies that Stephen Dedalus is identical to Joyce. He argues that Stephen Dedalus is a character governed by that aspect of Joyce’s character that is most relevant to the story of Stephen’s rebellion, namely his egoism. He says Stephen lacks Joyce’s amiable and sympathetic characteristics to be equated to Him. He acknowledges, however, that Stephen is not the portrait, but a portrait, one of several possible renderings of the original material (63). As we hinted earlier on in this book, fiction, with the passing of time tends towards autobiography. With growing demands for social and psychological detail, the artist has nowhere else to turn, but to his own experience, hence the autobiographical nature of most modern art. Harry

22

Chapter One

Levin explains that the social forces that make the artist an outsider also force him to focus his attention on himself. He becomes his own hero and then crowds other characters around himself (47). In The Consciousness of Joyce, Richard Ellmann, among other things examines the significance of names for James Joyce. He mentions that Joyce once took Gordon Brown for a stage name because he considered Gordon Brown the father of modern philosophy. As author, he chose Stephen Daedalus and this first appeared in print as signature to three of his stories in the Irish Homestead. The first three chapters of A Portrait make it clear that Dedalus is a strange name for an Irish man. In choosing the name, says Ellmann, “he wished to invoke the collective past as well as his personal moment” (10-11). In “The Artist”, Levin undertakes a study of Stephen Dedalus as an artist. He portrays Stephen as the artist who is unable to merge his life in the common tide of other lives. In school he takes an equivocal position; “a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind” (15). At home he feels that he is scarcely of the same blood as his mother, brothers and sisters, but stands to them in the mystical kinship of fosterage, foster child and foster brother. He begins his education by questioning the Jesuit discipline; he would finish by repudiating the catholic faith (19). To Stephen, friends figure mainly as interlocutors to draw him out upon various themes. Each epiphany2 - awakening of the body, literary vocation, farewell to Ireland – leaves him lonelier than the last” (Levin 18-19). In this article Levin portrays the artist as estranged from family, friends and everyone else, taking to loneliness. In 1901 when Joyce was nineteen, he wrote a letter of admiration to Ibsen praising his impersonal power and his indifference to public canons of art (Qtd. in Prescott 79). In an essay; “The Day of the Rabblement” Joyce wrote that no man can be a lover of the truth unless he abhors the multitude and advised that though the artist may employ the crowd, he must be very careful to isolate himself (Qtd. in Prescott 79). In both cases mentioned above, being an artist and adhering to established canons and mixing up with the masses is not possible. It may be helpful here to look at what Joyce, as an artist, thought about friendship. A brilliant essay by Richard Ellman; “A Portrait of the Artist as a Friend” proves very resourceful. He says that from a number of 2

Ghent says an epiphany is an image, sensuously apprehended and emotionally vibrant, which communicates instantaneously the meaning of experience. It may contain the revelation of a person’s character, brief and fleeting, occurring by virtue of some physical trait in the person (“On A Portrait” 65).

Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence

23

unsuccessful relationships which Joyce entertained, he concluded that your friend is someone who wants to possess you mentally and your wife physically, and longs to prove himself your disciple by betraying you (96). Consequently, Joyce grew “accustomed to represent himself as a mild saint surrounded by energetic devils” (99). Ellmann is of the opinion that Joyce took some pleasure in being the victim of failed friendships. He says it was essential for him to believe that his friends were, at the slightest nudge, his enemies (100). Since exile and self-isolation seemed to Joyce artistically rewarding, he maintained for himself and for the hero in A Portrait, the kind of attitude Ellmann describes in the following lines: For if friendship exists, it impugns the quality of exile and of lonely heroism. If the world is not altogether hostile, we may forgive it for having mistreated us, and so be forced into the false position of warriors without adversaries. Joyce allows his hero to sample friendship before discovering its flaws, and then with the theme of broken friendships represents his hero’s broken ties with Ireland and the world (90.)

The artist’s commitment to art often means that whatever happens to art is taken to have happened to the artist. As far as the artist is concerned, if you like or dislike his or her work of art, you have equally liked or dislike its creator. It is also at this level that Joyce evaluated who was a friend to him, and who was not. J. Mitchell Morse in “Augustine’s Theodicy and Joyce’s Aesthetics” says that Joyce tended to consider those who disagreed with him as enemies of art (301). Thus far, we know of the artist as someone in physical isolation from those around him. Dorothy Van Ghent in “On A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” takes us a bit further when she looks at the artist as a person in extreme spiritual isolation. She thinks that Joyce’s use of the stream of consciousness technique is relevant because it best allows for a penetration into the psyche of one who has practically severed himself from the rest of the world. She states that Joyce’s concern in A Portrait is with the associative patterns arising in Stephen’s mind from infancy into adolescence. What he emphasises is that Joyce is concerned with Stephen’s mental patterns only as they show the dialectical process by which a world-shape arises in the mind. This process is conducted in the absolute solitude of the inside of the skull, for Stephen has no trustworthy help from the objective environment. In conclusion she says the technique of the interior monologue is the sensitive formal representation of that mental solitude (64). In Block’s understanding, as expressed in “The Critical Theory of James Joyce”, the artist’s temper must be exercised in an atmosphere of

24

Chapter One

complete freedom, and the artist as a creative agent is subject only to the laws of his art, in which case, isolation is the first principle of artistic economy (242). The Joycean artist is one who has little or nothing to do with social responsibility. His one task is to poetically interpret the world of his experience and dreams. He does this by using his faculties of selection and reproduction to produce a new world of richness and of personal meaning. In a nutshell then, art “becomes a means of self knowledge and self-liberation and by dint of the sheer necessity to create” (Block 243). Joycean art, according to A. D. Hope has three main notions: The notion that beauty is a positive character of works of art; the notion that this quality is one of unity and coherence of theme and the notion that art is intrinsically a contemplative and analytical rather than a persuasive superficially representational activity (203). These three things generally guide the modern artist in his art. The commitment to beauty in art has brought about the issue of art for art’s sake in modern art. In “Joyce’s Epiphanies”, Irene Hendry Chayes examines the role of epiphanies in the creative process. She points out that Joyce’s work is a tissue of epiphanies, great and small, from fleeting images to whole books, from the briefest revelation in his lyrics to the epiphany that occupies a gigantic, enduring moment in Finnegans Wake (215). According to the theory of epiphanies, opines H. M. McLuhan, “art is a shadow of the incarnation, and every artist is dedicated to revealing, or epiphanizing the signatures of things” (251). Ordinary experience for the artist becomes a riot of impressions enmeshed in preconceptions, clichés, profanities and impercipience. Every experience is capable of an epiphany for the artist (251). As we have seen from the critical works considered above, a lot has been done when it comes to studies on D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce as artists and their writings as works of art. However, there is not as much available in the study of the artists these authors portray in their works and on their art, in their right as fictive artists. In this book, we have endeavoured to address the issues in such a way as to throw more light on the concern with the artist and his art in the modern English novel. We hope that this will, in its little way, throw more light into the understanding of the artist character that became a major concern for the modern novelist in general and for Joyce and Lawrence in particular.

CHAPTER TWO SOCIETY: THE EXTERNAL MOULD

It is because the artist is inevitably influenced by a particular milieu that we think he may not be well understood in isolation from it. A lot that happens to the artist, and the contents of the art may always be traced to happenings in the society of the modern artist. Modern art, therefore, is to a good extent, a reflection, depiction or reaction to societal issues. We are, for that reason, undertaking a study of the evolving nature of society as portrayed by D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow, and James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. We begin with what happens in The Rainbow, especially that which informs and influences Will Brangwen and the works of art he produces. The Rainbow is a study of civilisation in Lawrence’s day. Such a study was relevant to him because he was brought up in conditions similar to what occasions in this novel. His upbringing, says Leavis, was the training, later to be expressed in his mature insight and wisdom, as seen in his creative work and criticism of the contemporary world (D. H. Lawrence: Novelist 114). The Rainbow contains three generations which correspond to three epochs. The first generation of law and order turns around Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky. The second, which may be called the generation of love is represented by Will Brangwen and Anna Lensky. The third generation, exemplified by Ursula and Skrebensky represents the transitional period, the pause before the third age (Penders 83). From one generation to another, Lawrence develops the complex relationships within and between the three Brangwen generations. He touches on the differing values and the problems that recur and develop, “the influence of the past, the widening circle of interest, the growing burden of consciousness - in short, all the rhythms caught in the book’s triple- turning, opening spiral” (Goldberg 427). The Rainbow begins with a statement on the Brangwens and their life in the Marsh Farms as follows:

26

Chapter Two The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farms, in the Meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. Two miles away, a churchtower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town climbing assiduously up to it. Whenever one of the Brangwens from the field lifted his head from his work, he saw the church tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something above him and beyond him in the distance (Rainbow 7.)

Here is a typically rural setting, sandwiched between two growing towns, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The Marsh Farms is described in terms of its landscape; a lot of which is not yet tampered with by modern civilisation. The Erewash twists sluggishly through the alder trees giving the impression that the Marsh Farms is located in a river plain, with rich soil deposits from the meandering river. It is a vegetated milieu, watered by the Erewash and covered by trees. The typical tree-type of the Marsh Farms is the alder tree; “a member of the birch family growing in moist ground and having wood used by turners and bark used in dying and tanning” (Woolf Henry 27). It is indeed a marshy area, hence the appellation Marsh Farms. The Brangwen dwelling is called a farm, in description of their main activity which is farming. H. M. Dalesky says that for the previous generations of the Brangwen men, the twin supports of life have been the church and the land (The Forked Flame 82). The Brangwen man depends on his rich land for subsistence. He is so tied to his land that he only momentarily raises up his head and then is back to working on the land. At this stage in their development, they can hardly do without the land. This ties in with what Marx and Engels say about the social productions of a people’s life. In their opinion, in the social production of a people’s life, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable to and independent of their will. These, of course are relations of production, corresponding to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. It is the sum total of these relations of production that constitute the economic structure of their society. It is also the real foundation on which is built their legal and political superstructure. To this superstructure corresponds definite forms of social consciousness and the mode of production conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general (363). We may simply say that according to the foregoing thought, the Brangwens cannot but depend on the farm and its products for the time being. Life in the Marsh Farms is simple and slow. There are no foreign landlords to harass them. They are a natural and naive people with

Society: The External Mould

27

unsophisticated manners, and unfeigned emotions. It is evident when one of the Brangwens is happy or sad, in anger or joy. Their plain nature is likened to the irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is changing. They are in close relation to nature and alike to it in many ways. The Brangwen man is also religious. The church tower in the Marsh Farms stands high and above everything else. It is the reference point for the Brangwens from the field, the very centre of their lives and consciousness. The Brangwens are under the dominion of their religion, which rules and directs their life in a remarkable way.1 In the Marsh Farms the Brangwens at this stage are not an intellectual lot: “The men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day” (Rainbow 8). They are ruled more by instinct than they are by the intellect.2 This brings them very close to the animals which they rear. They come and go without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that is in them, not for want of money. They are aware of the last half-penny, and instinct makes them not waste the peeling of their apple, because it helps to feed the cattle (Rainbow 8). The atmosphere in the Marsh Farms is very much in communion and harmony with the elements of nature: “In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared on the grey, watery heavens, and flew cawing into the winter” (Rainbow 8). The means of transportation in the Marsh Farms is naturally by horse. They harness their horses at the wagon, “with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will” (Rainbow 8). The Brangwens at this time know no restrictions as to child-bearing. As naturally as they work on their farms by instinct, they also give birth to younger ones. After all, neither the land nor the economy imposes upon them any necessity for birth control. Child up-bringing is not an expensive 1

Lawrence once wrote to Ernest Collings saying he often thinks one ought to pray before working, and then leave the rest to God. He said he often felt as if he stood naked for the fire of the Almighty God to go through him, and that one has to be so terribly religious to be an artist (Huxley 110-111). 2 In a letter written to Ernest Collings as recorded in The Collected Letters, Lawrence says: My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge? All I want is to answer my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or whatnot…And I am not so much concerned with the things around – which is really mind (Moore 80.)

28

Chapter Two

responsibility at this time, although it does weigh on their chances of becoming rich. They have never become rich because there are always children, and the patrimony is divided very often (Rainbow 7). The Marsh Farms is totally cut off from the world of popular politics. The inhabitants do not bother about affairs beyond their restricted territory. They neither have an established government nor look forward to any for the time being. They are only a large family bound together by blood intimacy rather than by written laws. They relate to one another as they do to the animals and plants around. After all that has been analysed above, Lawrence masterfully hints towards a shift in the society of The Rainbow when he says, “Every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the youngborn on the earth” (Rainbow 8). The throwing of this seed is to give birth to another kind of life. Lawrence further says, “There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about which they were eager” (Rainbow 8). They had an “air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety, an expectancy, the look of an inheritor” (Rainbow 8). However, this expectancy is more a female impulse, an intuitive one, as they take the lead far ahead of the men and are far more ready and work for the changes more than do the men. The Brangwen man is more conservative, reserved and inward-looking. H. M. Daleski, reproaching the Brangwen man, says he believes that the Brangwen man has failed to realise his ‘man-being’, because his disposition is essentially female. In consequence, the Brangwen woman is not fulfilled (81). Daleski draws this thinking from D. H. Lawrence’s position as expressed in his “Study of Thomas Hardy” in relation to the expected behavioural patterns of the sexes. Lawrence holds that in every creature, mobility or the law of change is found in the male. On the other hand, in the female is found stability and conservatism. In woman, man finds his root and establishment. In man, woman finds her exfoliation and florescence. The woman grows downwards, like a root, towards the centre and the darkness and the origin. The man grows upwards, like the stalk towards discovery and light and utterance (Daleski 81). As earlier said, the women are different. They are out-going and very much interested in the life beyond the Marsh Farms. They look forward to another kind of life and other professions. They are open to reports and ideas beyond the Marsh Farms: “They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen” (Rainbow 8). Spearheaded by the woman then, there is an evident outward look from the Marsh Farms’

Society: The External Mould

29

population. It is at this level that we hear talk, for the first time, of another neighbouring town called Cossethay. In Cossethay lives the Vicar, an administrative deputy or an ecclesiastical agent. This has to do with some kind of organised administration that is hitherto foreign to the Marsh Farms, but which they are looking forward to. Furthermore, new ways of life begin to crop into rustic Marsh Farms. There is the introduction of a new and “magic” language. There is the Vicar, another kind of the man very unlike the Brangwen man. This vicar is as domineering over Brangwen as he, Brangwen, is domineering over cattle. With the introduction of the Vicar and his intellectual kind such as the Curate, there surfaces a need for formal education which the Brangwens, formerly secluded in the Marsh Farms, did not very much need. F. R. Leavis in Thoughts, Words and Creativity adds that the emergence of the Brangwens from their immemorial rustic traditionalism towards the possibility of the Eastwood intelligentsia and its cultural milieu is at the same time the development of the civilisation that produces industrialised Eastwood (11.) The element of power has shifted from brute physical power to the intelligence. It used to be the capacity to work in the farm that brought honour. It is now the thinking capacity that commands respect. The society is consequently experiencing a shift to being an intellectual one. Education, although far from being characteristic of the Marsh Farms has gained supremacy. They now consider education as a higher form of being, and the Brangwen woman wishes to give it to her children, so that they too can live the supreme life on earth. She wants them to share equality with the vital people in the land so as not to be left behind, obscure among the labourers. She is looking forward to husbands and sons whose livelihood is not always from the farm or from digging in the mines. In the Brangwen circles, there is an increased desire for the world and the things of the world. The average Brangwen woman looks forward to becoming a lady after the manner of Mrs. Hardy, who has become the subject of local gossip among the women: “all the women… talked eagerly about Mrs. Hardy, of her husband, her children, her guests, her dress, her servants and her housekeeping” (Rainbow 10). The lady of the hall is the living dream of their lives. Her life is the “epic that inspired their lives…each of them lived their own fulfilment in the life of Mrs. Hardy” (Rainbow 11). The traditional woman and her role are on the pathway to scorn. We must also note that for every society, when the woman begins to change, the men folk are bound to change as well, either

30

Chapter Two

in reaction against or for the change. When both have changed, the social ideals follow. So we read: The male part of the poem was filled in by such men as the vicar and Lord William…men with strange movements, men who had command of the further fields, whose lives ranged over a great extent. Ah, it was something wonderful to know, this touch of the wonderful men who had the power of thought and comprehension (Rainbow 11.)

The Brangwens have thus emerged, and have been made psychologically ready for more of the outside world. F. R. Leavis adds: “so there has been produced machinery, to take the place of the human machine…but the machine means industrialism, and industrialism means industrialised [Marsh Farms]” (Thoughts 11). The industrialisation of the Marsh Farms begins with the construction of the canal that runs across the farms. This canal immediately opens the Marsh Farms to the outside world, making it easier for visitors to come to them and for them to reach out to the rest of the world with greater ease. It also gives them an opening to the outside world of business and other professions. For example, they now have access to professions in mining because of the newly opened collieries of the Erewash valley. Lawrence makes these changes to carry the truth of history when he says: About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly opened collieries of the Erewash Valley. A high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which passed through the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in heavy bridge….the Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across their land (Rainbow 11-12.)

As soon as the canal is constructed, other elements of the modernisation process come in as well. Lawrence drives this home to us in the following lines: A short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion3 was complete. The town grew rapidly, the Brangwen were kept busy producing supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen…The homestead was just on the safe side of

3

The choice of the word “invasion” is already indicative of Lawrence’s attitude toward the developments taking place in the Marsh Farms. To him, industrial civilisation was unwelcome and he spoke against it in no uncertain terms.

Society: The External Mould

31

civilisation, outside the gate. The house stood bare from the road approached by a straight garden path (Rainbow 12.)

Up to this point, we have traced the changes and developments around the Brangwens to the point where they are set for another kind of life. With the new lifestyle, come new possibilities, offers and vices. The Brangwen eldest son runs away early to sea, thanks to the new developments in transportation. His brother, Tom Brangwen, at nineteen, goes to bed with a prostitute in a common public house. This experience is traumatising for him because until then he knows only two types of the woman; his mother and sister (Rainbow 19). The other Brangwens turn to drinking and other such habits which they do not indulge in before now, mainly because of lack of exposure to these. Structures such as hotels and bars spring up, giving room for visitors and habits from other places to be introduced in the area. In the relationship between the sexes, we find that the Brangwens have grown more articulate as the generations follow. There is hardly any open courtship between Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky. He loved her, went up to her, asked her hand, she agreed and they were married. But in the second generation, particularly between Will and Anna Brangwen, they grow gradually into a conscious, expressive and purposeful love relationship. They talk together at length and go on romantic walks. In the relationship between Ursula and Skrebensky, they are most articulate. They go to limits formerly taboo and sexually express themselves as none of the earlier Brangwens does. In this third generation, sex is talked out, not only insinuated, for who may discern. Sex becomes a core concern and they go miles to satisfy their sexual instincts. Samuel Hynes in The Edwardian Turn of Mind remarks that no aspect in the society leading to modern England changed as much as the way English people thought about sex (171). For the first time in the history of the Brangwens, Ursula goes experimenting with other forms of sex with her homosexual teacher, Miss Inger. The latter, a beautiful woman of twentyeight, fearless, independent, acute, quick, commanding and modern in her ways invites Ursula to go swim with her. It is during the swimming sessions that she introduces Ursula into lesbianism: Shyly, stiffly, Ursula went into the bungalow, and began to remove her clothes. The lamp was turned low, she stood in the shadow. By another chair Winifred Inger was undressing. Soon the naked, shadowy figure of the elder girl came to the younger…And the elder held the younger close against her, close as they went down, and by the side of the water, she put

32

Chapter Two her arms round her and kissed her. And she lifted her in her arms, close, saying, softly: ‘I shall carry you into the water’ (Rainbow 340.)

Lawrence grew up at a time when the general opinion of sex was undergoing a radical change. He was, therefore, neither the only one nor the first to talk about the changing attitudes to sex. As Fjagesund in The Apocalyptic World of D. H. Lawrence says, Englishmen like Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter contributed strongly to the changing view of sex (79). The new freedom was idealising physical wellbeing, young strength in the naked body and a certain frankness in the sexual matter, and the union of young women with young men. Unlike the very religious nature of the first Brangwen men and women, Ursula has no heart for religion. Her world has fast grown secular, so that no one has a compelling religious sense. Or, better still, each person practises religion as it fits them, and can cut off the parts that are encumbering. Lawrence presents this as follows: They took religion and rid it of its dogmas, its falsehoods. Winifred humanised it all. Gradually it dawned on Ursula that all the religion she knew was a particular clothing to a human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing, - the clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ, the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians the Osiris. Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local religions into universal religion (Rainbow 342.)

Thus and thus Ursula waves aside her former orthodox religious beliefs as it is already characteristic of her society to do. Earlier on, Anna develops a passive and questioning attitude towards the church. She acknowledges that the church teaches goodness and talks about the welfare of mankind. But she questions whether the saving of her soul lies in her performing certain acts conducive to the welfare of mankind. Rather, “there was something else she wanted to hear, it was something else she asked for from the church” (Rainbow 342). And the church is not giving her what she wants. The final split in the relationship between Skrebensky and Ursula is the case of her society for which there is a split in human relationships. There is now the pursuit of personal sensual pleasure at the detriment of the family, the home, the church, government and all else. The sense of community has been lost and individualism sets in. Having traced the developments or shifts that take place in Lawrence’s The Rainbow, it may be good to note the following. The shift from rural to urban, from a religious community to a secular one, the introduction of

Society: The External Mould

33

new professions, lawlessness and the like are a traumatic experience to the Brangwen man. He loses control of himself, and begins to grope for a new set of beliefs, community and security. This is the kind of society that harbours the modern artist. We shall move on to find a similar situation in Lawrence’s the Rainbow. So far, we have traced the evolution of the society of The Rainbow and now turn to the same for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is also interesting to note that it is the experiences of the young man, Stephen Dedalus, which pave and speed his way to become the artist that he becomes. C. H. Peake affirms that in A Portrait a mature artist looks back over his own youth, from a particular viewpoint, perceiving what was significant to his development as artist, estimating what was vital and what was transitory in that development, and viewing his early self with a purposeful irony (56). The story opens with a flashback to a story told to Stephen Dedalus from childhood and told in the traditional storytelling style, in a child’s language.4 This beginning of the story highlights the child’s relationship with his father. They have a good rapport and there is a fair degree of communication between them. The father is telling the child of a cow coming down the road. The story of the cow is meant to frighten the child, Stephen Dedalus. The cow is frightening since cows are not generally what a child would like to come close to. What it means is that the child begins to suffer a sense of threat and begins to arm himself to fight back. The street down which the cow moves is both residential and commercial, as we are told that Betty Byrne lives there and sells lemon platt. It must be one of those rural settings where basic necessities are sold and bought from small retail stores. The presence of the cow also suggests that it is a rearing area, all the more emphasising a rural setting. When the novel begins, it is typically a child’s world with nursery rhymes such as the one Stephen memorises and repeats to himself. It runs as follows: O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place… O, the green wothe botheth (Portrait 8.)

4

C. H. Peake praises James Joyce’s style of letting childhood be expressed in a child’s language. He notes that when most novelists write about children, and even for children, they do not represent, describe and comment on the child’s experience in a language and manner that are childlike (96).

34

Chapter Two

This is followed by the child’s memories on the experience of wetting the bed; first it is warm, then it is cold. He remembers the bad smell of the oil sheet, and the duty of the mother who puts it on. Stephen, being very sensitive and observant remarks that his mother has a better body odour than that of his father. His mother does nothing more than being housewife and taking care of the children and entertaining them. As Richard Hoggart puts it in The Uses of Literacy, the traditional mother, like Mrs Dedalus is expected to be at work in the home from getting up to going to bed. She cooks, mends, scrubs, washes, sees to the children, shops, and satisfies her husband’s desires. It is she who has the long waits in public places, at the doctor’s, at the clinic with a child who has some health trouble, at the municipal offices to see about the instalment of the electricity and the like (44). Mrs Dedalus, among other daily chores, plays the guitar for Stephen to dance. While Stephen is dancing, Uncle Charles and Dante clap. It is an atmosphere of humour. The Dedalus family has neighbours with whom the children can relate, meaning they are not as isolated from the rest of the world as are the original Brangwens in The Rainbow. There is a sort of community-life where Stephen, as young as he is, begins to play a part. He knows their direct neighbours, remarks that Eileen has a mother and father of her own, different from his, and begins to make plans to marry Eileen when they were grown. As soon as Stephen makes his childish hopes of marrying Eileen known to his mother, she rebukes him for having such a plan. Dante joins in the reprimands against Stephen’s thinking of marrying Eileen. Dante does not like the idea of Stephen growing up to marry Eileen because Eileen is a protestant. She thinks it is a bad thing for a well-meaning catholic to do. It is a society with religious conflicts, especially between the Catholics and the Protestants. The religious conflict as expressed in the forbidding of interdenominational marriages is likely to infringe on other areas of life, and definitely affect Stephen’s appreciation of human relationships in his society. He is told that if he does not apologise for wanting to marry Eileen, the eagles will pull out his eyes. It must be recalled that Stephen already has a health problem in his eyes. To think about the eagles removing them must produce a painful feeling in him. Since talking about marrying Eileen earns him a warning and threats, he underscores such ideas as taboo. But they do not leave him. He later satisfies his curiosity to find out about women by visiting prostitutes. He must, in a sense, fend for himself, since he cannot depend on his parents for matters relating to the opposite sex and to marriage.

Society: The External Mould

35

Soon afterwards, we meet Stephen in school. His is a literate milieu, where formal education is practised. There are enough playgrounds for the children in school and the prefects keep strict order in what is a religious school. But the order in school is stifling for Stephen, and sometimes the action of the authorities is hate-inspiring. Added to these, his classmates are relatively wilder and make a lot of noise during the games. This rough atmosphere puts him off, since he is of a delicate frame, and cannot stand the rough play in the field. Furthermore, his mother has instructed him not to speak with the rough boys in college and his father has told him never to peach on any fellow (Portrait 9). Stephen prefers the study-hall to the field, since he is more a creature of the mind. He observes that “it was better to be in the studyhall than out there in the cold” (Portrait 11). The classroom is a place for competition. It is divided into two groups; Lancaster and York, so that one does not only study to know, but also to make his group win. A spirit of competition is born in the pupils as they each labour to have their group win. This spirit of competition is also to be found in the politics as well as in the religion of the day. In class the students are class-sensitive. For example, Nasty Roche and Saurin treat the rest of the pupils with contempt because their fathers are magistrates. They do not drink the tea served in school, because their parents regularly supply them with coca-cola. What happens in this school milieu is only an offshoot of a socially stratified and class-conscious community. In this stratification, the rich are arrogant and bring up children who look low on the poorer rungs of society. Back at home, the Dedalus family is very much involved in the politics of Ireland. But they are not united in their ideas. Some think the Irish leading politicians are patriotic, others think the opposite. The main issue of contention turns around Parnell.5 Stephen is uncertain which side to take and why. Dante hates Parnell but Stephen’s father and Mr Casey idolise him. After a long time of reflection, as young as he is, he decides to read the papers himself. The discussions about Parnell are far from being only a Dedalus family affair. What happens in the Dedalus home is a depiction of a nation in turmoil. The issue is discussed daily in the papers and is the subject of discussion in the homes and in the streets. In the Dadalus home, they almost always get to fighting, as the differing parties press their points through. During one of such moment’s, 5

Parnell was an Irish nationalist, politician and a hero to Irish nationalists. He was condemned by the church for marital infidelity and this destroyed his political career, and hounded him to his death from exhaustion. Irish nationalists saw this action of the church as a betrayal of Ireland.

36

Chapter Two

“Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivered with rage” (Portrait 39). Herbert Gorman in James Joyce says Ireland was all in violence too. He says a violent impassioned atmosphere existed in Ireland in 1882 and was to continue to exist until that fatal time in 1890 when Parnell, the Uncrowned King, was toppled from his throne by a hypocritical combination of treacherous lieutenants and the Roman Catholic clergy (5). The violent political discussions in the Dedalus home get to their peak on Christmas day. Dante’s swearing, cursing, and Mr. Dedalus’ tears talk of an Ireland that is tearing apart. The conflict between the church and the state also divides the people further. These happenings mean a lot to sensitive Stephen as he quietly watches and takes note of the events. Herbert Gorman says they will continue to exist in his mind as: a vivid reality of sights and scenes and impressions, of legends and dreams and broodings, a sacred place of the coming to consciousness that would be reflected again and again, like sunlight in a shifting mirror, in all the work he would do thereafter (37.)

In class the children are schooled to a very strict moral and religious lifestyle. They are taught to say their prayers before meals and before going to bed. They are also led by the Prefect to pray as a group in the chapel. Part of personal prayer for Stephen is a genuine concern for his family: “God bless my father and mother and spare them to me! God bless my little brothers and sisters and spare them to me! God bless Dante and uncle Charles and spare them to me!” (Portrait 18). But as can be seen from Stephen’s prayer, there is a lot that is egocentric in the religion taught to the children, as it is for the other aspects of the life around. At home as it is in school, it is all a religious milieu, with Catholicism as the major means of religious expression. In the church, there is a mixture of religion and politics. The church justifies its involvement in politics because it is its duty to warn the people. They argue that, “a priest would not be a priest if he didn’t tell his flock what is right and what is wrong” (Portrait 31). But the others think that the priests are turning the house of God into a polling booth. This spells out a society in which the state and the church are at loggerheads, requiring that choices and positions be taken. This divide and the need to choose are going to hunt Stephen and some of his friends up to adulthood. What comes out from the Christmas party discussions is that both the state and the church are in the wrong, and are to blame. Mr. Dedalus exclaims “We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter” (Portrait 37). Dante fears for Stephen; “O, he’ll remember all this

Society: The External Mould

37

when he grows up…the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home” (Portrait 33). The people of A Portrait are articulate and have a propensity to say what is on their minds. They characteristically get to hot tempers very fast and pounce on one another physically or intellectually with ease. They are also emotional to the extent that a hot family discussion on church and state issues leads to tears. For example, “Stephen raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears” (Portrait 39). They are sensitive to social issues and to matters of religion and take sides, radically, for or against. In A Portrait, there is a sense of the dependent man in search of freedom. A logic of unease runs through and holds most of the characters captive, at least in their minds. This is understandable as Ireland is still under British rule at the time of this story. The church struggles to free itself from the clutches of state intrusion and vice versa. For the ordinary citizen, Britain, the church and God are all oppressive. Mr. Casey says, “No God for Ireland…we have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!” (Portrait 39). Yet almost all of Ireland is Catholic, and Catholicism may be called the national religion of the Irish. In school, there is talk of the theft of communion from the sacristy by some of the schoolboys. This again, in growing and sensitive minds, scares not only Stephen, but also the rest of his school mates who are scandalised that such a sin can be committed in so holy a place. The following lines picture them in their awe: The fellows were all silent. Stephen stood among them, afraid to speak, listening. A faint sickness of awe made him feel weak. How could they have done that? He thought of the dark silent sacristy. There were dark wooden presses, there where the crimped surplices lay quietly folded. It was not the chapel but still you had to speak under your breath. It was a holy place (Portrait 40.)

The childish but sensitive minds of the boys continue to imagine the terrible nature of the act. They say among themselves that it is certainly a terrible sin for anyone to go in there quietly at night, open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put. The root of the boy’s fear is that they have been promised collective punishment if they do not say who the thief was. Later on, the thief is discovered, but they are not very sure they are to go unpunished. In the uncertainty, Cecile Thunder promises she will go and not come back and Fleming calls for a rebellion. Fleming asks for a rebellion because rebellion was commonplace at the time, with the Parnell crisis and the

38

Chapter Two

demand for home rule in Ireland. In the minds of the boys, rebellion is a means of solving a crisis with the authorities, so they are ready to resort to it rather than suffer punishment undeservingly. The boys’ fear with regards to sin is not a genuine expression of faith. It is not the fruit of an understanding of the holiness of a loving God who demands holiness from man, for his good. They have been told of Judgement Day, hell and everlasting punishment, and that is what frightens them. The disciplinary system of the school in Clongowes assumes that the children are idlers, schemers, and lazy loafers. In some cases they are, but not all of them. It is this assumption that leads to the unjust punishment of Stephen by the Prefect of Studies, Father Dolan. Stephen, the serious leader of the Yorkists, is not doing his work in class because he has lost his glasses, but that earns him a punishment all the same. General instigation from the rest of the students, characteristic of Clongowes, pushes Stephen on to complain. He decides to do what the fellows have told him. He expects that “the rector would declare that he had been wrongly punished because the Senate and the Roman people always declared that the men who did that had been wrongly punished” (Portrait 53). Stephen becomes a hero for taking Father Dolan up to the Rector. When he comes back, the boys make a cradle of their locked hands and hoist him up among them, carrying him along till he struggles and sets himself free. On Sundays, Stephen with his father and his grand uncle take their constitutional. On their return they introduce him to the grimy wayside public houses where: “his elders spoke constantly of the subjects nearer their hearts, of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family” (Portrait 62). At his age, he understands very little of their conversation, but catches the words they use and memorises them. Afterwards, he says them over and over to himself till he has learned them by heart and, through them he has glimpses of the real world around him (Portrait 62). Schooled thus in the real life of his society, and seeing the shanty and offending state of his town, the young boy begins to look forward to the “hour when he too would take part in the life of that world” (Portrait 62). He does not yet know what his specific role should be, but hopes that premonition will lead him to it without any effort of his. In the neighbourhood, the boys, Stephen included, play the normal games every boy plays. They go for adventures and explore the quarters. Stephen and his friend, Aubrey Mills, accompany the milkman as he distributes the milk from house to house and from street to street. These

Society: The External Mould

39

adventures help Stephen to have a better look, knowledge and experience of his society as much as a boy can. To him, his experience leaves much to be desired. The town of Clongowes has as much of the vices as one would find in any twentieth century city. There are the abuses of the government and the betrayals of the church. The family has its habitual demands. For instance, after Mr. Dedalus has squandered the family money, it is hoped that Stephen should start working early so as to help in the running of the home, since he is the first of about ten children. We have thus looked at the nature of the society in the two novels. The pattern is generally of a society where the people gradually lose the sense of communal belonging, to one where their personal interests override the common ones. For example, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen’s personal convictions are followed irrespective of the consequences on his family, church and nation. His father squanders the family money without thinking of what that would mean to the rest of the family. He satisfies his urge to drink, even if the family should starve thereafter. In The Rainbow Ursula Brangwen is unmindful of what her actions do to Skrebensky and the rest of her family. Will Brangwen is mindful of his sensual needs, irrespective of how fulfilling them affects other others, etc. In the society of the modern novel, the trend of things is generally such that everything can be challenged and re-valued. As Carol Ferrara Treacy says in Art and the Artist in D. H. Lawrence, nothing is too sacred to be challenged, whether it is religious beliefs, family life, marriage, male and female sex roles or education. Everything in the society is challenged and altered (23). We come also to remark, that the novelists all begin by a concern for the society, which concern decreases with time. This is an acknowledgement of the critical role of the society in the life and making of the artist. The society functions as the mould that shapes the artist and the laboratory both for experimentation and source of material for his art. Along the line, as the artists get their feet firmer on their own, the narration proceeds as though the society does not exist. There is little talk of the elements that make up the life of the locality. The concern is with events as they touch the life of the character. A lot is said about his reaction to these events, and what dispositions he takes. Furthermore, the concern shifts from the physical being of the artist to his inner-man. We no longer know what he wears, what he eats and so on. We are brought face to face with his psyche. The shift from the societal to the personal and from the personal outward to the personal inward is

40

Chapter Two

characteristic of the two novels. It is this kind of trend that provides the conditions in which the modern artist lives and works. In the chapter that follows we shall attempt to look at the artist by examining his relationship to society. We shall also investigate into how much this society influences him and his art.

CHAPTER THREE OTHERWORLDLINESS AND REBELLION

The idea of the artist as an otherworldly and rebellious character is one of the common concerns of Joyce and Lawrence in their novels. These two novelists seem to agree that it is not possible to be an artist without living at variance with one’s community. Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus, who lives to reject the institutions of the family, the church and the state, and goes into exile. In like manner, in Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Will Brangwen quits Ilkeston, lives a relatively isolated life in the Marsh Farms, and is essentially rebellious to authority when he decides to marry, and is at home with no form of artistic expression. He begins as a woodcarver and singer, later on takes up watercolour painting, making clay models, jewellery, beaten and chiselled metal work. He prefers solitude and his commitment to religion is also an escape from the world of business. We shall straightaway look at the lives of these two artists, beginning from Stephen Dedalus and then Will Brangwen.

A. Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait Almost intuitively, and from childhood, Stephen begins to put on the habits and tendencies whose development set him apart. In school, while the playground is swarming with boys kicking at the ball and shouting, Stephen keeps on the fringe of the line, away from the sight of the Prefect and out of the reach of the rude feet of the other boys (Portrait 8). He feels he is different from the other boys and is quick by his heightened sensitivity to establish the disparities between him and the other pupils, and then to step aside from them. He feels he is weaker in build and could be a victim to the rough playing of the more robust build of the other boys. In this regard, Martin Schiralli in “Art and the Joycean Artist” writes that: At the core of Joyce's view of the psychology of the developing artist is his distinction between an artist's selective and reproductive faculties. For Joyce the artist is gifted (possibly cursed as well) with extraordinarily

42

Chapter Three acute perception. The world presented to the percipient-artist is a richer, more variegated, and more immediate world than that ordinarily perceived. The desultory preoccupation with the aesthetic dimension of phenomena that for the nonartist occasionally distinguishes experience is for the artist a chronic indulgence. Joyce's artist is predisposed in virtue of this exceptionally receptive faculty of selection to notice and attend to aesthetic value, a value which permeates the normal environment, both physical and social. Eventually the storehouse of impressions selectively recorded-what Joyce will later term "epiphanies"-drives the artist to find a means of consolidating those experiences in publicly accessible works of art (38.)

Stephen Dedalus, as a budding artist, as evident above, shows forth distinct faculties of perception and selection, which his classmates do not demonstrate. Almost without effort, he is acutely sensitive to realities to which the rest of the pupils are numb. Consequently, he has problems with people and circumstances where the nonartist lot are much at home, as with the playing in the football field. He has a problem with authority and keeps away from the Prefect of studies. Earlier on his aunt, Dante, threatens him, promising the eagles will pull out his sick eyes. His mother rebukes and requests that he should apologise for what is not wrong in his point of view and understanding of things. Rather than apologise, Stephen withdraws, and weaves the words of the threat into a piece of poetry. This incident constitutes the commencement of a life that is to be spent in exile while using the material that drove him from home as raw material for art. This is unerringly what happens to James Joyce himself, because although in exile, he writes almost exclusively of Ireland and Dublin in particular. He left Dublin at the age of twenty-one, in 1903, visiting Ireland only three times after that. From January 1910, he lived in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, but at the same time “the most insular of writers, writing of nothing but Ireland, nothing but Dublin in fact, writing home constantly for details of Dublin life, Dublin history, Dublin geography that he could turn into fiction” (385). In relation to his antipathy to authority, we also read that any allusion made to his father by a fellow or by a master puts his calm to rout in a moment (Portrait 76). Sydney Bolt in A Preface to James Joyce says that as far as Stephen is concerned, authority has two faces – one his father’s scrutinising hairy one, which is alarming, the other his comforting mother’s. He dances to authority’s tune, and is applauded and rewarded for obedience. The girl next door attracts him and he weaves a fantasy about her. Then comes his offence. Authority threatens him and asks a confession, but Stephen refuses (67). The composition of the poem in these conditions suggests that artistic creativity may be triggered by

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

43

opposition, oppression, hardship, discontentment or rebellion in the normal life experience of the artist. The modern artist often writes against the background of a thought, idea or circumstance that sort of forces him to express his thoughts, opinions or reactions against a natural or societal disquieting situation. Stephen Dedalus notices very quickly that there are two classes of boys in the field. Some are good and some are bad. He disapproves of those who are bad, approves of those who are good, but does not find his place with any of the two groups. His place is somewhere between the two categories. We read that: Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket…he [Stephen] crept from point to point on the fringe of the line, making little jumps here and there. But his hands were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the sidepockets of his belted grey suit (Portrait 8-9.)

In the field, Stephen’s classmates struggle with the ball, kicking, stamping, rubbing and running after it. But Stephen finds that it is useless to continue running round the field. He prefers the study hall to being in the cold out in the field (Portrait 9). He prefers individualistic or solitary activity to any group work. He finds that the other boys are different, and that he is not suited to work together with them: “All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices” (Portrait 13). When they are in the playroom, Stephen sits in a corner pretending to watch a game of dominos and, once or twice he is able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. He is unable to share a joke with his friends, not because he cannot do so, but because he is too much in the quest to understand things. He takes the posture of the observer for most of the time. When his mates laugh at him both for kissing his mother every night before going to bed and for not doing so when he contradicts himself, he tries to laugh with them but feels his whole body hot and confused in a moment. He is incapable of group involvement in this case and in many others in the novel. In another example, when the bell rings for prayers at the end of studies in the study hall, he comes out after the others. He lets them go ahead so that he comes out freely, alone, observant. The modern artist as typified by Stephen Dedalus is partly a participant, but more an observer of what happens around him. The action is left to the others, but their action affects him immensely.

44

Chapter Three

Wells shoulders Stephen into a slimy pit and he falls sick afterwards. This means that he stays alone while the others are in class. Later on, he is moved to the infirmary and given a bed alone. It is time for him to think of death, requiem masses and how people would react to his death if he dies. He feels different from the others again when Athy, the boy he meets in the infirmary, tells him he has a queer name, something like Latin. He notes that his mother is nice, but not so nice when she cries. This particular crying takes place as his mother, out of emotion, sheds tears of separation when Stephen is left in the boarding school. After his father and mother leave him in school, the car drives off, and Stephen remembers them shouting to him from the car; “Goodbye Stephen! Goodbye Stephen!” (Portrait 9). This parting becomes a celebration of Stephen’s break away from childish dependence and from the family bond. He remains in school to learn how to live alone and to manage his problems by himself. Another factor which increases his distrust of the family is his father’s financial situation, when compared with that of the fathers of the other children. He feels he has no place in his school because the other children have parents who are richer. An inferiority complex develops in him in relation to Athy, Saurin, and Nasty Roche who have well-placed parents with much money. We read that: He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played, and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boy’s fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them? (Portrait 26.)

In addition to the above, Stephen has a problem with his dressing; the deep low collar and the Eton jacket make him feel queer and old. For this reason, he does not feel the joy of festivity with the other boys on Christmas day. Because of his dressing, he feels himself queer, different, set apart. It is as though the artist samples for differences which make him look, feel, think and act extraordinarily from the others. Back at home during Christmas, Stephen feels sorry for his brothers and sisters who are kept, waiting for food in the room, as he himself has often waited. He questions in his mind why they must be kept in custody, in a sort of prison till the pudding was ready. He is no longer waiting like them since he is not considered a kid anymore. Yet, among the adults he is still considered a child, but his place is no longer in the group of children in the house. Therefore, he finds himself in some circle alone. To sensitive

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

45

Stephen, this amounts to an epiphany, prophetic of future seclusion from belonging to any societal grouping. During the Christmas dinner, he is allowed to eat with the adults, but too young to participate in the heated discussion on the church and the state. He is somewhere between those for Parnell and those against Parnell. He stands, alone, taking no sides, only observing. With time he takes sides in the Parnell issue, but as an individual, he refuses to join any protest movement. Back in school, there has been theft in the sacristy and the boys stand in groups discussing about it. Stephen walks up to one of the groups, is afraid to speak, and does nothing but listen. He is here using silence as one of his tools as an artist. He is an attendant, observant but voiceless. He is not part of their talk. He stands apart, but near enough to catch their talk. At this time, like Joyce, he is not a conversationalist (Bolt 67). Anthony Burgess in Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce writes, “It is noteworthy that in A Portrait he says little until he has reached the undergraduate stage: the talk is mostly left to his parents, teachers and schoolmates” (44). Company is a thing from which he breaks free. When he breaks free from his friends on returning from the rector’s office, we are told, “He was alone. He was happy and free” (Portrait 59). Circumstances also enhance Stephen’s peripheral stand in society. He is separated from his mates in Clongowes Wood College because his father does not have enough money to pay for his school. After holidays, his playmate, Aubrey, goes to school and Mike Flynn is sick in hospital, and he is left alone. Following these changes, sometimes a fever gathers within him and leads him to rove, alone, in the evening along the quiet avenues. In his restless marches, the peace of the gardens and the lights in the windows pour a tender influence into his restless heart. At such times he prefers total quiet, so that the noise of children at play annoys him. Their silly voices make him feel that he is different from the others and he wants to meet in the real world his substantial image which his soul constantly beholds” (Portrait 64-65). Due to financial difficulties, the Dedalus family moves houses from Blackrock to cheaper quarters, around Dublin. This is an annoying circumstance for Stephen. He is angry with himself for being young and therefore victim to his father’s restless and ill-thought impulses and decisions. He is also angry with the change of fortune which is reshaping the world around him into a vision of squalor and insincerity (Portrait 67). Rather than take an active part in protest or amelioration of the situation, “he chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret” (Portrait 67).

46

Chapter Three

At Harold’s Cross in a children’s party, he could have been fully involved in the games like the rest, but his silent watchful manner has grown upon him and he takes little part in the games. He is unable to share in the merry-making of the children, as they dance and romp noisily around. When he tries to share their merriment, “he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the grey cocked hats and sunbonnets” (Portrait 67). Not being able to be part of the playing children, he withdraws into a snug corner of the room, and begins to taste “the joy of his loneliness” (Portrait 68). Earlier on he remembers he and Eileen standing, apart, looking into hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up and down. At this time too, at the end of the party, he stands listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him. On his return home after the party, he sits alone in the deserted tram. In “Psychology and Literature,” C. G. Jung says that a great work of art is like a dream for its apparent obviousness and that it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal (174). Therefore, the artist is something of a dreamer himself. Stephen has his moments of reverie as well. The day following the children’s party, he sits on his table in the bare upper room for many hours, falls into a daydream and begins to draw diagrams on the cover of his book. In his daydream experience, he sees himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices (Portrait 70). John Dewey believes that there is a relationship between reverie and the creative impulse. He says: Indeed, it is safe to say that creative conceptions come only to persons who are relaxed to the point of reverie. The subconscious fund of meanings stored in our attitudes have no chance of release when we are practically or intellectually strained. For much the greater part of this store is then restrained, because the demands of a particular problem and particular purpose inhibit all except the elements directly relevant. Images come to us not by set purpose but in flashes, and flashes are intense and illuminating, they set us on fire, only when we are free from special preoccupations (275-276.)

Apart from the practical usefulness of the dream-state of being for the artist, it helps him to escape from the real world, into one of creative imagination. By his reveries he offers himself something of the world or state of things in the way he desires them to be, which is often not as they are in the real world situation. Stephen’s Belvedere mate, Heron, describes him in the following words: “he doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

47

and he doesn’t damn anything or damn all” (Portrait 76). He is known by his mates as not prone to do the things they are fond of. The other character of Stephen as an artist is that he takes radical positions - he either damns nothing or damns everything. His positions are extreme. In a conversation with Boland, Heron and Nash, they argue as to who is the greatest poet. Stephen dismisses Lord Tennyson as no poet; only a rhymester, although Tennyson is generally known as one of the greatest poets. Byron, the deviant, is Stephen’s greatest poet. He is known for being revolutionary in his poetry and given to proscribed activities. He has written some of the most morally daring poetry and is given to trying forbidden experiences (Abrams 368). In David Pryce-Jones’ “The Dark Lord” he appositely describes him as follows: Byron has his memorial among the honored national poets in Westminster Abbey. How this would horrify him! He mocked fame and society, and accused everyone respectable or ordinary of cant and hypocrisy. A cynic through and through, he particularly loathed enthusiasm of any kind, or "entusymusy," as he called it. It amused him to think of poetry as "poeshie" or even "brain-money," and he downgraded Don Juan, his masterpiece, into "Donny Jonny." Southey, the poet laureate of the day, was the butt of Byron's satire at its most savage; Keats, he thought, wrote "piss-a-bed" stuff; and "Turdsworth" was his name for Wordsworth. His own life was short, dissolute, and ultimately broken--a cautionary tale of how not to live (40.)

It is remarkable that Stephen chooses Byron as the greatest poet. This is likely because he finds a kindred soul in him. He later on thinks and acts in the same trend of mind as Byron, however milder. The urging of his father and masters for Stephen to be a gentleman, strong, manly, healthy, true to his country and a good catholic are taken into consideration for some time, but soon, they become hollow-sounding in his ears (Portrait 83). In rejection of the wishes of his father and masters, he begins to seek for what to commit himself to: His mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit…and it was the din of all those hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades (Portrait 83-84.)

Every common joy or exaltation sets Stephen craving for some further adventure. His movement is ever forward as if to overtake a new

48

Chapter Three

adventure. This is particularly remarkable after he successfully acts his part in the Whitsuntide play because after it, he instantly wants to be involved with the unfamiliar. When he comes out on the steps, he sees his family waiting for him and notices that every figure in the group is familiar to him, so he runs down the steps angrily, running across the road, walking at breakneck speed down the hill, without knowing where exactly he is going to. As a modern artist, he wants something entirely new and out of the common. He is tired of that which is familiar. He wants change and sometimes goes for it adventurously. When the financial situation of the Dedalus family gets worse, Stephen and his father travel by train, in the night, to auction their family property. Frightened by the unseen sleepers in the localities through which they pass, Stephen prays, but not as before to God – his prayer is addressed neither to God nor to a saint (Portrait 87).1 He has deviated from his religious lessons in Clongowes where he still prayed to God. Later on he does not pray at all because he tells himself, “God and the blessed Mary were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the blessed Virgin too pure and holy” (Portrait 116). He naturally rejects the call to be priest, rather obeying what he calls a wayward instinct. He swears that the oils of ordination will never anoint his body. The prevailing circumstances only make Stephen restless. He is in conflict with his family situation, his society at large and with the artist personality deep down of him. We are told his restlessness rises to the point that he has a fever. C. G. Jung considers such conflicts as characteristic of the artist’s life: The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him – on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction, and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire. The lives of artists are as a rule so highly unsatisfactory – not to say tragic – because of their inferiority on the human and personal side, and not because of a sinister dispensation. There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire (174.)

When Stephen is shown round his father’s former school, Queen’s College, “the sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the 1

Catholics believe that saints have great power in heaven and can intercede for those in grief, and help the person to obtain his request from God, to his best interests. They are also believed to have the power to obtain the grace of repentance for the sinner. Stephen seems hardly to adhere to this belief anymore.

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

49

absent students of the college about him and to shrink from their company” (Portrait 89). This scene in Queen’s College, reminds him of his own equivocal position in Belvedere; “a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind”(Portrait 91). He is one of the leading senior students and holds a position of authority in the school, often carrying out some administrative duties among the students and plays an intermediary role between the students and the school administration. With the passing of time, these responsibilities sit ill-atease on his shoulders. Living in the imaginative world of his vision and calling, he is cut off from the real world of palpable things. He eludes the sight of things; “for a moment he closed his eyes and moved in darkness” (Portrait 91). In this way, he further distances himself from the real world. We are told: By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensitive to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected (Portrait 92.)

He has cut himself from the pleasure of companionship with others, and from filial piety. All he has at this juncture is a cold and loveless lust, and drifts in life like the barren shell of the moon. In one of his nightly wanderings, he decides, against his church and moral upbringing, to deliberately “sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin” (Portrait 100). In this pursuit, he wanders into a maze of narrow and dirty streets where he contacts a prostitute and “in her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself” (Portrait 101). Maybe more than he realises it himself, he has drifted too much away from his immediate family. Joyce writes: He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that divided him from his mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother... everything else was idle and alien (Portrait 98.)

The above happens up to when Stephen is sixteen and is ready for the university. He no longer considers himself only a boy. Joyce says, “his

50

Chapter Three

soul had risen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes!” (Portrait 170). There is a new unquenchable flame in his blood, a lust for wandering that burns in him to set out for the ends of the earth: “On! On! His heart seemed to cry…a new wild life was singing in his veins…He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air” (Portrait 171). University helps to lead him toward his fated way. His religious inclinations die away. He becomes fearless and says he does not fear to be alone, to be spurned for another or to leave anything. He is not afraid to make a mistake, however great it may be, involving his very life in time and eternity. When asked by Cranly if he feared that the God of the Roman Catholics would strike him dead and damn him if he made a sacrilegious communion, he replied that he could do that right away. At the end of it all, he can no longer stand Ireland, his country; the old sow that eats her farrow. His expectations of family, state and religion being unmet, he leaves in search of the mode of life or art by which to express himself freely. He decides not to serve that in which he no longer believes, be it his home,2 fatherland or church. His chosen weapons are silence, exile, and cunning (Portrait 246-247). In summary, from childhood up to when Stephen goes to the university, he is a man apart, alone and non-conforming. This is what he is before he produces anything artistic and maintains it when he starts writing a few lines of poetry. This posture helps him to have a better look at the society from which he is an artist. He cannot also be otherwise, because the artistic gift inside of him sets him apart in this manner.

2

Home is one of those unstable concepts in modern literature. Law Jules David notes that Faulkner could not leave it, Thomas Wolfe said you could not go back to it, and scores of expatriate writers have repudiated it. For Stephen Dedalus, “home has an uncanny feel to it because it is ‘so familiar and so foreign’ – in short, because he is both at home and not at home” (197).

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

51

B. Will Brangwen in The Rainbow When we turn to Lawrence’s The Rainbow, we meet Will Brangwen who is the first Brangwen man in whom we find the modern artist’s personality and disposition well expressed. He has his roots at Ilkeston from where he comes to the Marsh Farms. We know very little of his life in Ilkeston, but the Ilkeston experience helps him to express himself as an artist. In the Marsh Farms, he is already an artist at work as woodcarver and chorister and is employed as lace-designer. In his manner and peculiar circumstances, he stands apart in many ways as often the modern artist does. Tom Brangwen makes the following remark of him: The lad seemed to him too special, self-contained. His nature was fierce enough, but too much abstracted, like a separate thing, like a cat’s nature. A cat could lie perfectly peacefully on the hearthrug while its master or mistress writhed in agony a yard away. It had nothing to do with other people’s affairs. What did the lad really care about anything, save his own instinctive affairs (Rainbow 115.)

He is likened to a cat; passive, uninvolved and with no inclination to empathise with anyone, for any reason. He is “égal à lui-même” and narcissistic, having nothing to do with the affairs of other people. When he comes to the Marsh Farms, he gets a room of his own, well removed from the rest of the family and everyone else, where he is hardly visited and leaves from it to three principal places of interest: his place of work, the church and Tom Brangwen’s home (more because he has a love interest there). When he goes to Tom Brangwen’s home in search for Anna, he takes her away so that gradually the two young people draw apart and escape from the elders, to create a new thing by themselves (Rainbow 115). To Anna Brangwen, Will has golden-brown, quick, steady eyes, like a bird’s, like a hawk’s which cannot look afraid. To her, he is a strange youth, self-possessed and antagonistic. In contact with Will, something entirely strange and unlike what she has known enters into her world (Rainbow 110). When they are in church, his voice comes strong and overriding. It may be easy to realise that he sings the tenor but there is a difference in the fact that his voice fills the church, ringing out like a trumpet, going its own way (Rainbow 110). In group singing he stands apart, not so much because he wants to draw attention, but simply because he has a nature apart. He does not know how to fit in with the masses, or is so much in the habit of setting himself apart that he now does it by sheer habit. When laughed at, he asks

52

Chapter Three

what there is in his singing to make any one laugh. He does not understand why he should be singled out, becomes the topic for discussion and laughed at. His interest in the arts, as we earlier mentioned, is also in carving so that his concern with the church becomes an artistic interest because of the much carving that the church holds. When he enters any church, his attention is immediately drawn to sculptural elements such as the nave, chancel and transept, of rod screen and font, of hatchet carving, moulding and tracery. He also notes which of the art objects are characteristically Gothic, Renaissance, Perpendicular, Early English or Norman (Rainbow 113). When he is in church he is actually there in the service of art, and consequently a stranger among the worshippers. He is of the very sensitive artists’ nature which often makes them find order and meaning where the others do not. On his way to the Marsh Farms, he stops for lunch in the church yard and there he hears the church bells “singing a hymn.” Only an artist’s ear can catch such music. He is quick enough to notice that the church has round arches on thick pillars, with pretty sedilia. But soon he has to be alone: “he returned to his lodging at night, treading quick, his eyes glittering, and his face shining darkly as if he came from some passionate, vital tryst” (Rainbow 114). Native to him is a strange, remote reality that carries into everything he says and does. F. R. Leavis says he is attended by a sense of something more, something further, which gives him absolute being. The great mass of activity to which mankind is involved means nothing to him. By nature he has no part in it (Thought 132). Like Stephen Dedalus, he is antagonistic to authority; hating his father with a hatred that is close to love as Lawrence calls it. When Tom Brangwen and his wife begin to be wary of his relationship with their daughter, he tells them off. He gets acutely angry that her parents want to censor his relationship with Anna, their daughter. To him, love is the sole responsibility of the lovers, so her parents have no right to intervene (Rainbow 113). Authority is inhibiting and limiting, both things he hates. He stands away from it in a definite way. The unknown about him makes him to move in the domain of the obscure with its unpredictability. Lawrence writes that the darkness of obscurity settles over him so that he seems to be hidden in a tense, electric darkness, in which his life is intensely active, but without his aid or attention. Even his mind is obscured (The Rainbow 113). Will Brangwen finds artistic inspiration through his love relationship with Anna. This holds together with Lawrence’s belief that a good manwoman relationship enhances art. Leavis in D. H. Lawrence says as an

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

53

artist, Lawrence thinks the crucial relationships are those between men and women (107). He follows the same thought in what follows: The resourcing of art will come about…through its becoming ‘more the joint work of man and woman.’ Men must have the courage ‘to draw near to women, to expose themselves to them and be altered by them’ and women must ‘accept and admit men’ as they are; as a result, both will gain ‘great blind knowledge and suffering and joy’ and this will result in a new art which it will take ‘a big further lapse of civilisation to exploit and work out’ (Qtd. in Delavenay 348.)

This ties in with the basic Lawrencian understanding that the source of all living is in the interchange and in the meeting and mingling of man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being (Delavenay 348). One of Lawrence’s biographers, Richard Aldington makes mention of the same issue about Lawrence and sex when he says that for Lawrence, sex is a flowering of the mysterious life-force, an unknown god who must be brought into the consciousness (121). In addition, Fjagesund Peter attests to Lawrence’s belief that sex is an essential part of the artist’s withdrawal from social participation. He says that by withdrawing from social participation, sex becomes the source of salvation in the private sphere, in the isolated relationship between a man and a woman (81). When Will Brangwen meets Anna, he is carving the creation of Eve, and under the drive of his newly awakened love, Lawrence tells us that at least he is able to create the new, sharp body of his Eve. Lawrence ensures that the first art product mentioned in the text in relation to Will Brangwen comes in connection with his love affair with Anna: His favourite art was wood-carving. The first thing he made for her was a butter-stamper. In it he carved a mythological bird, a phoenix, something like an eagle, rising on symmetrical wings, from a circle of very beautiful flickering flames that rose upward from the rim of the cup (Rainbow 116.)

The butter-stamper is as strange and removed as Will himself. Tom Brangwen, like Anna, likes the design on the stamper, but his question is, “What sort of a bird does he call it…And this was the question put by the customers during the next weeks. ‘What sort of a bird do you call that, as you’ve got on th’ butter?’” (Rainbow 116 - 117). Will is often likened to a bird that soon takes wings and flies away. When he kisses Anna for the second time in their relationship, Lawrence describes it in the following words: “His head lifted like an eagle’s…he put his arms round her and

54

Chapter Three

drew her to him. It was quick, cleanly done, like a bird that swoops and sinks close, closer” (Rainbow 117). Will is always in a state of absent awareness either because he is thinking through his creations or because he is carried away by an emotion for Anna. It is because of this that he does not often hear what is said to him. He may be around with people but quite in his own world. This also explains his broken, clumsy speech and lack of eloquence. He lives an instinctive superficial experience where he never attains real verbal expression as does Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Will’s domain of art is that which requires exceptional creative powers and a nimble hand. Consequently, he works swiftly and mechanically, producing very nice articles. Wood-carving and working with the chisel are a passion to him. He needs not speak much, so he abstains from speaking, and his mind is fixed away from current artistic concerns. He is interested in the gothic,3 in medieval forms, Renaissance, Perpendicular,4 early English and Norman, which are art schools of the past. In the text we find him carving the creation of Eve, which is: A panel in low relief for a church. Adam lay asleep as if suffering, and God, a dim, large figure, stooped towards him, stretching forward His unveiled hand; and Eve, a small vivid, naked female shape, was issuing like a flame towards the hand of God, from the torn side of Adam…she was thin, a keen unripe thing (Rainbow 120.)

Anna is the only companion of Will who gets very close to him at a personal level. He lives in a world cut away from the company of other men and women. As it is characteristic of the modern artist, he maintains a lonely state of existence. In addition to this, he posses the characteristic stubborn will of the modern artist. Persuade him as they might, Anna’s parents are not able to get him to postpone the marriage with Anna. Not even the evidence of lack of money and experience are allowed to serve as worthwhile barriers:

3

The Gothic is described as relating to or having the characteristic of a style developed in northern France and spreading through western Europe from the middle of the 12th Century to the early 16th Century, characterised by the covering of weights and strains at isolated points upon slender vertical piers and counter balancing buttresses and by pointed arches and vaulting (Woolf Henry 493). 4 This has to do with a medieval Gothic style characterised by the predominance of vertical lines, having its origin in the court style of fourteenth century England (Crosby 243).

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

55

Will Brangwen went home strange and untouched. He felt he could not alter from what he was fixed upon, his will was fixed. To alter it he must be destroyed. And he would not be destroyed. He had no money. But he would get some from somewhere, it did not matter. He lay awake for many hours, hard and clear and unthinking, his soul was crystallizing more inalterably … It was as if his soul had turned into a hard crystal. He might tremble and quiver and suffer, it did not alter (Rainbow 126 –127.)

When Will and Anna are finally married, he is given leave in his office for a honey moon. As usual, he spends it alone with his wife in their new cottage. He does not go adventuring, as would a worldlier disposition. He feels happy and alone with Anna. The two of them are said to be two blissful survivors in a world where everyone else is buried. There even comes a time during their honeymoon when he prefers the night to daytime. At night they think they are the only inhabitants of the visible earth, the rest of the world being beneath the earth. Being alone in the world, they are a law unto themselves, so they can enjoy, squander and waste like conscienceless gods (Rainbow 144). He enjoys being with her as remote from the world as if the two of them are a seed buried in darkness (Rainbow 144). For a start, company with Anna is blissful and fulfilling but no sooner is he with her alone for only a day, than he has begun to feel guilty of wasting a whole day, when he would have been mainly doing something artful, finishing his carving, for example. Lawrence comments on Will’s pre-occupation with his carving as follows: He sat thinking of his carving of Eve. He loved to go out over his carving in his mind, dwelling on every stroke, every line. How he loved it now! When he went back to his Creation-panel again, he would finish his Eve, tender and sparkling. It did not satisfy him yet. The Lord should labour over her in a silent passion of creation, and Adam should be tense as if in a dream of immortality, and Eve should take form glimmeringly, shadowily, as if the Lord must wrestle with His own soul for her, yet she was a radiance (Rainbow 149.)

As can be seen from the above, the first split in the relationship with Anna is mental. Secondly, he loves Anna from the word go as he loves his creation panel, but as could be obvious from the passage above, the panel is taking the greater part of his emotional involvements. He is so much at home in solitude that when his wife decides to offer a tea-party, meaning people will break into their solitude, his heart sinks and grows sad. He wants to be done with the outside world forever. The idea of the party makes him sullen, frightened, miserable, and worried. It is as if the world

56

Chapter Three

and the bustle of the party would kill his artist soul and rock his creative powers. But Anna decides she must have her party, soon after their marriage, and here marks a greater emotional split between them. From this settled emotional split, there comes a moment of physical separation, although they live in the same house. But as it is a general case with Lawrence’s artists, Will Brangwen cannot stand for long without leaning on a woman. There is, before long, an emotional sweep back from his panel to Anna, and the art begins to suffer. The marriage with Anna is a killer of the artist in Will because she almost immediately combats his deepest artistic feelings. She uses her higher intellectual abilities and powers of argument to combat what Will thinks about art, life, religion and society. Because of this, says Treacy: Will’s art is in a decline. His works are no longer original, creative, imaginative or spontaneous. As he defers to Anna and relinquishes his mastery of the home, so too does he abandon original mastery of his art. Copying reproductions, restoring church work – such imitative and derivative works occupy him, instead of the original ideas he once pursued (140).

With his art on the decline as noted above, he begins to direct his creative energies to mere church activity. He finds shelter, momentary security, and continuity in religion (Meyers 55). But as James Cowan says, Will Brangwen is the limited churchman whose religious practice is a kind of spiritual masturbation. Because he goes to religion as a sort of escape, he lacks the genuine religious passion which enables most of the saints to encompass the ambivalence of reality. His faith is not genuine because, “It is the church building he cares for and his passion is to manipulate stone work, woodwork, and organ to the end of self-satisfaction in a private ecstasy” (Cowan 36). Rather than create, he becomes a keen admirer of the creations of others. He is fascinated by pictures such as Raphael’s “Dispute of the Sacrament” and Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgement”, both of which, like the phoenix motif he sculpts for Anna on a butter stamper, are all reproduced in Mrs. Jenner’s Christian Symbolism (Delavenay 354). If he must continue to create, Anna should become part of himself, the extension of his will or he will draw away from her (Hough 76). Since Anna remains herself, he recoils into himself as well, and Lawrence remarks that there was something subterranean about him, as if he has an underworld refuge (Rainbow 160). He goes into this safe haven in an attempt to create the new woman by his carving. But he fails in this artistic endeavour and also fails in making Anna into such a woman. Only their

Otherworldliness and Rebellion

57

daughter, Ursula, may become this new woman he has wanted to create. When she does, he is unable to handle her. Being an artist, Will is never meant to take part in public life as he tries to, under the authority of his wife. Kingsley Widner decribes Will’s public-life experience as one under the “tearing influence of Anna” (78). He opens a woodwork class in Cossethay instead of a wood-carving workshop. Somewhere around middle age, the pinch of failure as an artist makes him restless, changing from one medium to another. He moves from modelling in clay to beaten and chiselled metal work. These artistic productions are no longer original. Even his water-colours seem strangely out-of-date (Treacy 142). He becomes frustrated and burns the wood-carving he has been working at. The burning of this wood-carving, Daleski says, is in a way, self-destruction and extinction. Thereafter, he tries to rise back to his vision, but never attains the heights again. He has painfully learnt that the attempt to be a man of society and artist are almost mutually exclusive. If he must carve, then he has to pave his way out of the bustle of life. Evidently, Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen are estranged and nonconformist in different ways. This feature, far from being particular to these two characters as portrayed by james Joyce and Lawrence, is characteristic of the modern artist in general. There are two ways to explain this character of the artist. It may be seen as an innate inspirational force in the artist which naturally pulls him or her away from conventional modes of life. This seems to be the main opinion of Joyce and Lawrence in A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man and The Rainbow respectively. The estranged and non-conformist character of the artist may also be explained in terms of the increase in division of labour and capitalist modes of production in which the artist is no longer a key and central unit in the society. In capitalism, the artist does not have a key and vital role to perform, and therefore is forced to occupy a peripheral place in society. This discussion leads us to Chapter Four: Towards Artistic Vision, where we are going to look at the experience, self-realisation and artistic vision of the modern artist. We are of the opinion that artistic vision is a result of the artist’s self-realisation, which in turn is influenced by his experiences in a particular society.

CHAPTER FOUR TOWARDS ARTISTIC VISION

In his brilliant book, Art as Experience, John Dewey comments on the processes that make for the experience of the human being in general and the artist in particular. His opinion is that experience occurs continuously because the interaction of the living creature and the environmental conditions are involved in the very process of living. Life, he says, is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own inception and movement towards its close, each having its own particular rhythm of movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout (35-36). The sensitive nature of the artist means that these happenings leave indelible marks, which in turn are shaped into a vision of life, which can always be traced into the work of every artist. In the same line of thinking, G. Plekhanov in Art and Social Life says, “Art begins when the human being recalls within himself feelings and ideas that he has under the influence of the reality surrounding him and gives them a certain figurative expression” (20). In all two novels; The Rainbow and A Portrait of the artist as a Young Man, it is remarked that beyond just knowing the society and discovering themselves, the artists get to establish an artistic vision that takes both personal and societal considerations into consideration. We shall begin by looking at Will Brangwen in this light, followed by Stephen Dedalus.

A. Will Brangwen Will Brangwen is a city-man, known to all the life of the then relatively industrialised world. He comes from a more industrialised setting than the Marsh Farm, so that a certain pinch of the greater freedom and open-mindedness of the urban setting is to his advantage. When he comes to the Marsh Farm, he does not pick up a carrier in farming as do the Marsh Farm Brangwens. He works as junior draughtsman in a lace factory. This is most likely because he grows up in Nottingham, which is a step ahead of the Marsh Farms in the industrialisation process, offering job opportunities other than in the farm. Later on he picks up a teaching job.

60

Chapter Four

He is not interested in politics and public activity, since these are far removed from his profession and the church. It is when his marriage has problems that he goes drinking and watches football matches. His intrinsic nature, as we earlier saw, is withdrawn. He is deeply religious and the Church has an irresistible attraction for him. He goes to church and gets involved in church activities with a lot of passion. He is in the choir, teaches Sunday-school and cares for the furniture of the church. He also plays the organ, trains the choir-boys and runs a religious class for the youths (Rainbow 208). However, his religion does not go beyond his instinctual demands. When he must have a woman, he does, even if it is not his wife. When his wife will not have him, he goes out for another woman, irrespective of the laws of the religious faith he professes. When he must get into a rage, he does, even if he is praying. His wife reviles him when he goes in to pray while seething in anger. She asks, “Why are you standing there pretending to pray? Do you think anybody can pray, when they are in the vile temper you are in?” (Rainbow 209). Religion for him does not carry the strictness of the puritans. Yet in it he finds some shelter, security and continuity (Meyers 55). It is a social practice that may blend with his instinctive needs. D. H. Lawrence informs us to the effect that the Brangwens shrink from applying their religion to their own immediate actions. All they want is a sense of the eternal and immortal, not a list of rules for everyday conduct (Rainbow 274). Lawrence himself “wanted a world in which religion will be real, not a world of church congresses and religious newspapers. He wanted a world in which religion would be deeper than mere belief” (Baille and Martin 30). Anna, his wife, is as dominant as are the Brangwen women in general. She is ahead of him in thinking and wins in almost all their arguments on religion. Anna becomes masculine and dominant by temperament, but Will, deplorably conventional, is passive and feminine. Kingsley Widner in The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fictions says, “We should be aware that the wilful woman actually dominates Lawrence’s work, though in diverse forms” (78). Will finds his marriage unhappy and frustrating as Anna gains intellectual control over him. She is able to send him off their marriage bed and have him sleep in one of the other rooms in the house. She holds her tea party soon after their marriage against Will’s wish. She has her way in about everything in relation to Will until she has reduced him to submission. She pushes away Will’s tools carelessly so that they become

Towards Artistic Vision

61

rusty, and argues with him until she proves him foolish and reduces him to shame, silence and ridicule on his carving. The fact that Anna cannot share his vision but fights against it is a fatality that sends him down to the defeat of his manhood. His life shifts its centre and becomes superficial. This also means that he does not harness enough energy to bring his talents to maturity. Horace Gregory says he remains only amateur to the wide sensibilities of an artist (D. H. Lawrence 39). Will does not become really articulate, and as a result, Anna is also unable to achieve full individuality, and seeks in childbearing a substitute for self-fulfilment. In her naked, big-bellied dance, she nullifies Will, but she too suffers a nullifying effect. The child, Ursula, grows to fight her, so that in childbearing she does not come to fulfilment. The relationship with Anna fails and so does Will fail as a father to Ursula. Joseph Warren Beach observes that: He is really insensitive to her spiritual needs, is weakly brutal or indifferent in his treatment of her; so that she, in her sensitive pride, shuts up against him, comes to see the world as hostile, and is badly ‘conditioned’ for her own emotional problems in maturity (377.)

Badly prepared thus for the spiritual and emotional problems that await her, Ursula craves for genuine love, revolts against her mother, dares beyond limits in dealings with men, and adventures into the mysterious man’s world of work and duty. She is aware that she is a “separate entity in the midst of an unseparated obscurity” (Daleski 107). However drawn away from art Will is, or discouraged from his art he may be, he comes back to it in the long run because in art he is responding to a pull inside of him. He halts for some time in his creative process, but keeps on with a passion in manipulating stonework, woodwork and organ to the end of self-satisfaction. In these other activities, which comparatively do not tap from his creative nature, he is not fulfilled. These only make him a pseudo-artist. For Lawrence, one is a pseudo-artist if he is only an imitator, never revealing his personal feelings in his work. As far as he is concerned, an artist should be an honest, open, expressive, fully realised adult. The true artist, Lawrence believes, should have the power to let go of his feelings, possess a purity of spirit, a sense of detachment, and a mystical insight (Treacy 61-62). But Will craves for creative art and often he comes to raptures when he sees an artistic product that shares with his vision of art. In art, he is interested in sculpture, architecture and music. He is “an artist whose taste, influenced by Ruskin, runs to medieval Italian painters

62

Chapter Four

and the cathedrals” (Treacy 137). Keith Alldritt adds that Will prefers fourteenth century artists because he is inescapably preliminary to the historic moment of full and balanced consciousness (83). Furthermore, in that century, his art is intricately linked with the religious matter. As far as Will Brangwen is concerned, a work of art must be able to excite in the beholder a sense of awe and mystery, transporting him to a sense of the remote. This is what he seeks to achieve in the butter-stamper he offers to Anna. On the butter-stamper he carves a mythological bird, a phoenix, something like an eagle, rising on symmetrical wings, from a circle of very beautiful flickering flames that rise upward from the rim of the cup (Rainbow 116). The bird on the stamper is not immediately recognisable. It looks like an eagle, not really it. It takes the onlooker to the world of myth; “having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence” (Bosley 755). The phoenix is a symbol of instantaneous passage from nonbeing to absolute, perfect being, from birth to the last judgement (Delavenay 354). The whole structure of bird and wings and flames raises questions in the minds of those who come to buy butter. Anna also reacts to it with a sense of the strange as evidenced below: She was curiously excited to see how it will turn out. Strange, the uncouth bird moulded there, in the cup-like hollow, with curious, thick waverings, running inwards, from a small smooth rim…Strange, to lift the stamp and see that eagle-beaked bird raising its breast to her. She loved creating it over and over again. And every time she looked, it seemed a new thing come to life. Every piece of butter became this strange, vital emblem (Rainbow 116.)

Anna’s father puzzles, frets and asks her what sort of bird Will calls it. The customers in their turn ask, “What sort of a bird do you call that as you’ve got on th’ butter?” (Rainbow 117). Furthermore, he is working at a carving he has always wanted to achieve, the creation of Eve, a panel in low relief for a church. It is described in the following words: Adam lay asleep as if suffering, and God, a dim, large figure, stooped towards him, stretching forward His unveiled hand; and Eve, a small vivid, naked female shape, was issuing like a flame towards the hand of God, from the torn side of Adam…there was a bird on the bough overhead, lifting its wings for flight, and a serpent lifting up to it (Rainbow 120-121).

The carving of the creation of Eve communicates as much a sense of the remote as the bird on the butter-stamper. Apart from being remote, it is

Towards Artistic Vision

63

imaginative because there is no way by which he could have presented creation from personal experience. His creative imagination as evident in this passage is all the same wrapped around his patriarchal and religious thinking. His picture of Eve; “a small vivid, naked female shape, … issuing like a flame towards the hand of God” is provoking enough to the feminist-sensitive mind of his wife, who lashes out, pouring ridicule on him. Lawrence describes Will at work creating his Eve in the following terms: “He trembled with passion, at last able to create the new, sharp body of his Eve” (Rainbow 121). He intends to make of the body of Eve something new, a new kind of woman. He wants to finish his Eve, tender and sparkling. In a position of the godlike artist, his wish is that “The Lord should labour over her [Eve] in a silent passion of creation and Eve should take form glimmeringly, shadowily, as if the Lord must wrestle with His own soul for her, yet she was a radiance” (Rainbow 149). Will does not come to full creation of this new woman since he gives sway to anger against Anna and destroys the panel. Anna does not become the new woman he wants to create either. His creative feat is delayed until he fathers Ursula, who in almost everything stands out distinctly different, new to the Brangwen line, a distinct specimen indeed. His art, as can be seen from the preceding paragraphs, and his philosophy of life too, are imbued with the female principle. For instance, from a distance he addresses Lincoln Cathedral with words that point to the fact that in his mind it patterns to the feminine sphere: “There she is.” Nathan A. Scott says the cathedral-arch, through which Will passes into the Cathedral, is obviously a sexual symbol (Qtd. in Daleski 100). Keeping in mind that the cathedral scene is an artist’s encounter with a work of art, and the artist being the sex-obsessed Will, Daleski thinks that the sexual imagery of Nathan Scott should not be regarded as merely instrumental and evocative. He thinks his cathedral entry is described in relation to the sex act because he approaches the religious mystery with the same longing with which he approaches the sexual mystery. Furthermore: The suggestion, indeed, is of a spiritual orgasm in which he ‘swoons’ with a great escape from himself, from the fearsome burden of the lonely singleness, both losing himself in the gloom of the church and taking ‘possession’ of it…Until Anna intervenes, Will enjoys in the cathedral the same sort of ‘consummation’ that he has relentlessly been seeking to find in her (Daleski 101.)

64

Chapter Four

John Dewy in Art as Experience says in general terms that a cathedral, no matter how large, makes an instantaneous impression, and that a total qualitative impression emanates from it as soon as it interacts with an organism through the visual apparatus (220). In this light, Will’s reaction at the sight of Lincoln Cathedral is both artistic and sensual. When he puts up the sheaves with Anna, she has the same effect on him. Occasionally, his love for Anna and his love for art coincide as when he offers the butter-stamper to her as a token of love. Will never gets anywhere creative in the art of singing. His singing is limited to the choir, which is largely routine and repetition. Nothing outstandingly new comes of it. Singing requires that he talks, but talking is a most difficult thing for him. Furthermore, Anna has spoken him dumb. Through his love for carving, architecture and the church, Will is a part of a wide tradition and culture which provides a framework within which his passionate nature develops. As Aiden Burns says, he belongs to a living, organic, believing community and very active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. His understanding of that tradition is imperfect and his horizons are set by what he can understand (54).

B. Stephen Dedalus Back at home from the beginning of awareness, Stephen realises that home is ruled by threats. His father has an alarmingly hairy face and does not have a pleasant smell. In this beginning as ever in the text, Stephen develops a bad opinion of his father. This marks the beginning of his undesired experience at home, and the longing to go away, which is later materialised through exile. He understands fatherhood as something which transcends the physical. To him, it is a “mystical estate, an apostolic succession” (Schutte 91). Seeing that Simon Dedalus does not meet up with the expectations of Stephen, his question is “Who and where is my father? With whom can I claim spiritual kinship? From whom can I claim understanding and protection?” (Smidt 81). His mother, who in his infantile appreciation has a nicer smell than his father, soon forces him into an apology for what to him is not wrong. What wrong is there in thinking, “When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen?” (Portrait 8). Catholic or protestant, his mother’s grounds for demanding the apology, make no meaning to his infantile mind. Her insistent “O, Stephen will apologise” (Portrait 8), only breaches the two of them as is already the case with his father. When later on his mother is too much of a catholic for his liking, and wants to censor his changing ideas,

Towards Artistic Vision

65

the split in their relationship increases. William Schutte points out that through his relation with his mother, his artist role is undermined and he is left the dispirited husk of a creative artist (95). According to Hoffman, Hall, and Schell, both parents fail in their role because they ought to contribute to the child’s socialisation process by assuming the role of loveproviders and care-givers; by serving as identification-figures; by acting as active, often deliberate socialisation agents; by providing the bulk of the child’s experiences; and by participating in the development of the child’s self concept (214). Stephen’s parents, especially his father, fail in their parental role. He is therefore bound to fend for himself. By the time they decide to make amends, it is too late because he has already rejected home, alongside the church and the state. There is a sense in which Stephen must reject his home because it is not a place of love, care and one to which he identifies himself. The constant quarrels, the arguments, divergent views and fighting provide an atmosphere that is not conducive for art and creativity. Until he rejects it, he may not come to free expression in his art. Ralph Landau attests to this when he says that creativity is fragile, and the best of circumstances requires tender loving care (155). These conditions, in Stephen’s case, are lacking. Since he must live as an artist and produce works of art, he sets out in search for the place with the right kind of conditions. Stephen has a problem with his eyes, and wears lenses from early age. That already constitutes a problem for him. As if that is not bad enough, Dante, a relative of his, threatens him with “the eagles will come and pull out his eyes” (Portrait 8). This threat is woven into some poetry so it sticks better on the sensitive mind of young Stephen. Dante’s threat comes in to add up to Stephen’s rising distrust of his father and mother, and settles it for him that the home is not the place for him. Stephen is ill at ease with the filth, squalor and the events in Dublin. This is seen in the passage below: His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the cold phenomenon of Dublin…every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts (Portrait 78.)

Being very sensitive, he is negatively affected by what Joyce calls “the cold phenomenon of Dublin.” An illustration of how deeply this reality affects him is seen when he falls sick when Wells shoulders him into a pit of scum. Ever since this experience, a thought of the slimy pit into which

66

Chapter Four

he fell sends him ill. The fact that he subsequently falls sick each time he thinks of the scum is a psychological reaction to a physical reality, which will stay on till he goes on exile. In addition to the cold reality of Dublin and the scum-pit experience, he is also disheartened by the general state of things in his own home. As Walton Litz describes it in The Art of James Joyce, after a meal in the Dedalus home the smell of fried herrings fills the kitchen, the bare table is strewn with greasy plates onto which lie glutinous fish bones and crusts are stuck by a congealing white sauce. Clammy knives and forks are abandoned here and there. A big soot-coated kettle which has been drained of the last dregs of shell cocoa lies in the midst, et cetera (133-134). Stenphen Dedalus can simply not stand this assault of his sensitive artist’s spirit. Mr. Simon Dedalus is a spendthrift, flirt and given to vanity. At home these habits get the family from one state of poverty to another, and they have to move houses time and again, each time to a less comfortable and less prestigious one. To make ends meet, Mr. Simon takes Stephen along in a trip to sell the family property. But on the evening of the day the property is sold, Stephen follows his father about the city from bar to bar. His father, a kind of the prodigal son, begins to squander the money with the sellers in the market, the barmen and barmaids, and gives some to the beggars who importune him for a gift (Portrait 93). Faced with his father’s debauchery and knowing the stressful financial situation back at home, what goes on is an ordeal to bear. At Newcombe’s coffee-house, Mr. Dedalus’ cup rattles noisily against the saucer, and Stephen tries to cover the shameful sign of his father’s drinking-bout by moving his chair and coughing. One humiliation succeeds another, for example, the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvettings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirts, the compliments and encouraging words of his father’s friends. This, to a level-headed and thinking boy who does not bother about such nonsense is nauseating. His shame grows when he is told, “Your father was the boldest flirt in the city of Cork in his day. Do you know that?” (Portrait 94). Any allusion made to Stephen’s father by a fellow or by a master puts his calm to rout in a moment. His own description of his father is that he is: 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 story-teller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past (Portrait 241). With this state of things at home he is affected as follows: “his childhood was dead or lost

Towards Artistic Vision

67

and with it his soul incapable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon” (Portrait 94). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may actually be described as growing in Catholic Ireland. There is the protestant Church, but Catholicism, if anything, is the state religion. Stephen grows up under the influence of this religion back at home and in school. All along, he attends Jesuit schools and for some time is expected to join the order and train to become a priest. In school he is taught to attend church, pray and to lead a God-fearing life. Most of it is indoctrination since he does not really grasp the meaning of the issues: “He could think only of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen” (Portrait 16). In addition to having no Christian experience and God being only a matter of names, he is faced with the religious conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants. He is unsettled as to who is right about the Virgin Mary controversy - the Catholics or the Protestants? He remembers that the protestants make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin; “Tower of Ivory. House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then?” (Portrait 35). In school he receives an unjust punishment from father Dolan, the Prefect of studies, who calls him a lazy, idle, little loafer. He remarks that the punishment is unfair and cruel because his glasses are broken and the doctor has told him not to read without glasses. Moreover, he has written home to his father to send him a new pair of glasses. In addition to all this, Father Arnall has instructed that he should not study till the new glasses came. He is totally at odds with having been called a schemer in front of the class and to be pandied when he is a good student by all standards and the leader of the Yorkists (Portrait 94). This is a crime against him from a man of the church and this sets a number of questions in his mind: How is he to ever trust the church and its men if they can be so cruel and unjust? How comes Father Dolan does not take into consideration the fact that he is a serious student and the leader of the Yorkists? The Prefect of studies says the story of breaking his glasses is all a trick. How does he know that it is a trick? (Portrait 52). The more he thinks along these lines, the faster he comes to conclude that the church and its men are unjust and cruel. Furthermore, they cannot be trusted for patient investigation unto the truth. It is the same men of the church who have betrayed Parnell, whom Stephen gets to love intensely, and sets out to write a poem on him. Not preoccupied with their pastoral responsibility and that alone, the leaders of the church have been trying to meddle the church with politics, and making the house of God into a polling-booth. Mr. Casey says, “We go to

68

Chapter Four

the house of God, in all humility to pray to our Maker and not to hear election addresses” (Portrait 31). But then we find that church and state are indivisible, since the priests find it their duty in warning the people, and in directing their flock in other issues as now in politics. His relationship with the church along time and experience is fitting with Joyce’s, who at first accepted Roman Catholicism as the fish accepts the ocean, a world to which he had been born and which was his natural element. But as time passed and increasing capabilities of ratiocination toughened his mind, he began to view the church in a different light. Furthermore, the sense of sin, of guilt, of worldly defilement and the cleansing power of absolution became painfully vivid to his adolescent nature, especially when he reached the age of puberty (Gorman 47). Stephen remembers the shouts at the Christmas party at home and Mr. Casey’s words: “No God for Ireland. We have had too much God for Ireland. Away with God…Away with God I say” (Portrait 32). He finally becomes something of a heretic. In a composition which he writes in class, the teacher notices traces of heresy, which Stephen, however, explains away by a play of words. C. H. Peake comments on the impact of the hot Christmas Party discussions on Stephen as follows: Stephen is a bewildered onlooker in a scene of violent political and religious passion and, apart from occasional passages expressing his bewilderment, there will be little point tracing what is going on in his head. It is the total image of the scene which fills him with terror: he asks himself, “who was right then?”, but he has no means of knowing. What shocks him is the destruction by violent passions of the adult world, the family circle, and the happy occasion to which he had looked forward. It is an entire experience, a dramatic scene which plunges directly into his imagination without passing through the understanding (104.)

As earlier mentioned, Stephen is inclined to love Parnell. He writes a paper in condemnation of the treatment he has received from the church. Historically, the Catholic Church hierarchy issued their condemnation in June 1891, stating that Parnell, “by his public misconduct, has utterly disqualified himself to be … leader” (Fidelma Maguire). This rejection is believed to have contributed to the deterioration in his health and sudden death that same year. Stephen, alongside the other supporters of Parnell, holds a grudge against the clergy and the church for killing Parnell. In addition to his abhorrence of the church and its leaders, Stephen hates foreign rule as well. But as he grows up, the compelling artistic urge takes so much of him that he does not pursue his political opinions. The family, the church and the state all frustrate his expectations. By personality

Towards Artistic Vision

69

and disposition he is an artist, but he discovers that none of these institutions is encouraging to his views. Thus disappointed, he soon comes to terms with himself and with his vision of society and art. In a quest for self-knowledge, he goes into his mother’s bedroom and looks at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressing-table (Portrait 71). Earlier on in school Stephen makes his first attempts at situating himself within the cosmos. His first problem is coming to terms with his name, and accepting it. It is evident to him that it is not a common name; sounds strange, and his friends say so. The name alone becomes an epiphany as it leads him to an artistic end, a creative one, like Daedalus the old artificer. Accepting the name is tantamount to accepting a call and a career. When at last he accepts it, he has accepted himself and his role as artist. There is another side to accepting the name Stephen; it is accepting the possibility of dying for his convictions. The historical Stephen dies as a martyr. He too may suffer and give his life for his faith in art. The historic Stephen sees heaven open and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God the Father. It is possible that he too receives his vision of art supernaturally. Perhaps not pleasurable to him, but Dedalus is also his father’s name. Bearing it is identification with Simon. It is an acknowledgement of Simon’s blood that runs his veins, and the possibility of becoming like him. This he does not want and as we said earlier, he denies son-ship to Simon, and goes in search of a father. In his determined aim to situate himself in the cosmos, he spells out the following: Stephen Dedalus Class of elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The world The universe.

He also comes to terms with the fact that he is only in the class of elements, and that he knows very little. He lacks experience and is baffled by many unanswered questions. Taking his little knowledge into account, he speaks little, listens and reads much. He can say nothing in the family Christmas party because he has nothing to say.

70

Chapter Four

Clongowes Wood is also a place of conflict for years before the college is ever built. Historically: Clongowes Wood College (Silva de Clongow) was originally a medieval castle built on the alluvial plain about a mile north of Clane near Sallins in County Kildare…It was held for generations by the great territorial family of the Eustaces and its importance as a stronghold can only be realised if it is understood that it was one of the outposts of the Pale (a double ditch of six feet high above ground at one side or part which mireth next to Irishmen (Gorman 23.))

Identification with Clongowes is not particularly disturbing to him at this time. But it is a place of fierce conflicts and stronghold for the subjugation of the Irish people. Its people are accustomed to conflict and the like. The picture at the Christmas party spells a Clongowes temperament. Consciously or not, Stephen picks this temperament and braves it through, against the odds, to pave his fated way in art. In an attempt at self-realisation, Stephen considers a new set of grounds wherein to situate himself. He says: Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation (Portrait 16).

This is an attempt to situate himself within the confines of time and hopes for the future, based on his Catholic religion. If he must get to heaven, he must as well stick to the rules of the Christian Faith. He tries to, but finds he cannot. When he throws off his Roman Catholicism he does it consciously, for there was a time he consciously was a part of it. As he goes with his father to sell the family property he resituates himself again as follows: I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names (Portrait 92). When he is sick in school, he does not write to his father but writes to his mother. His letter, whether he sends it or not reads: Dear Mother, I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me home. I am in the infirmary. Your fond son, Stephen.

Towards Artistic Vision

71

He knows where he stands according to his needs and which of his parents to relate to, at what time. The circumstances under which he writes this letter also bring us to see where Stephen places himself in relation to eternity at this time. He is sure that if he should die he goes to heaven, with six angels at his back, two to sing, two to pray and two to carry his soul away. These are his childhood imaginations, which he discards as he grows up. Death and dying no longer appear to him with such glory later on in the text. He is perhaps already affected by the general situation wherein there is “the loss of religious certitude, of belief in an outer life, in heaven or hell, and the consciousness of an immutable void beyond life, the nothingness of death” (Quentin Bell 215). More than ever before, he has to come to terms with his sensual needs, given that they are as part of him as his brain. Pressured against his moral upbringing, he goes out to satisfy his sexual needs. In doing this, he has transgressed the laws of the Catholic Church whose laws constitute a major component of the voice of his conscience. On the other hand, he is faced with the compelling law of his body, requiring sensual gratification. The gratification of his personal sensual needs is a choice against the church, and against the social and moral standards in his milieu. It is ultimately a choice for the individualistic as opposed to the societal, a pattern that will increasingly govern his life ever afterwards. At the time Stephen takes the decision to defy religion and obey to his body needs, he knows only two kinds of women; the virgin and whore. The virgin is not to be touched since, with the picture of the Holy Virgin Mary in his mind, he dares not defile virginity. Like Joyce he goes out for the whore: “Prostitutes gave Joyce all his early sexual experience. So far as we know, he had no sexual experience of any kind with girls who were not prostitutes, until Nora” (O’Bien 18). But, as Marian Eide says in “The woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the Politics of Creativity,” through Stephen's sexual preoccupations Joyce associates sexual and intellectual expression (377+). Stephen does not come to terms with his artistic vision until he is in the university. He knows he has studied and read enough to be able to stand up to the intellectual demands of his day. Anthony Burgess notes that until he reaches university age, he says little, in which case the talk is mostly left to his parents, teachers and school mates. But when he has achieved the stage of free flight, he is almost unnaturally eloquent (Here Comes 20). He also does not come to his vision until he has waved aside all the other voices that call him to other concerns, which are not art or artrelated. There are the demands of his father urging him to be a gentleman

72

Chapter Four

and of his masters urging him to be a good catholic above all things. There is also another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy. When the movement toward national revival begins to be felt in college, he hears another voice bidding him to be true to his country and help to raise up its fallen language and tradition. The world around him expects that he should raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours. As a leading student and secretary in the gymnasium, his school comrades want him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school (Portrait 84). Joyce tells us that these other voices sound hollow to Stephen, and that he gives them an ear only for a time. He is happy only when he is far from them, beyond their call. He also considers these other voices inferior to the call to be artist. Having come to experience and self-realisation, Stephen can now establish his artistic vision. Along the pathway of his vision, we meet him in the following mood: “A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies” (Portrait 66). He is dissatisfied with all of the social life around him, and in a sense, the moment when the artistic vision begins to dawn on him corresponds to a time when he turns his back to the madding world, using hardy’s terms. Remarkably, the pathway to his vision passes through aspects of the natural world; the quay, river and the sky. As soon as he turns to nature at the time of setting his artistic vision, a creative urge presses hard on him and he must define it so as to set out on a clear path. He wants to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beholds. He does not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which leads him on tells him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place (Portrait 65). The stirrings of his vision are a thing of the soul; emotions, mind, volition. He feels it creep within him, sometimes making him moody, sometimes excited and elevated. At this juncture, he cannot yet give a tangible mental grasp to it. By premonition, this time a faculty of the human spirit, he knows that artistic vision is personal and so he will be alone when he meets it. The other elements necessary for the meeting of his vision are darkness and silence. This leaves the impression that it is going to be something of a sacred moment.

Towards Artistic Vision

73

The encounter with his vision is anticipated to be a moment of transfiguration and supreme tenderness in which he would be transfigured.1 He imagines that he would fade to something impalpable under her [vision] eyes, then in a moment he would be transfigured. Vision here is given a female character, perhaps for the tenderness he imagines for the encounter. We also know that the thought of an idealised female has always led him to a moment of artistic creation. In his mind, a symbolic association between art and sex is established and as Levin says, it helps him to decide his later conflict between art and religion (Levin 20-21). The encounter, he expects, should create an invigorating, emboldening and experiential effect: “Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him” (Portrait 65). For the time being, his intuition is sharper than his mind and by it he receives a foreknowledge of the future, all of which are private and remote from the humanity around him. Joyce says: A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and, in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and timidity and inexperience were to fall from him (Portrait 99.)

Now that he is very close to his vision becoming palpable, “nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him” (Portrait 92). He would wonder away to remote places and for company prefer phantasmal comrades. When not with these he prefers the company of subversive writers. All leisure which his school life leaves him is spent in the company of these writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they pass out in his crude writings (Portrait 78). The more he tries his hand at writing, the more the word and the vision caper before his eyes. As these prance before him he is shocked to find in the outer world a trace of what he has up to then deemed a brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His recent monstrous reveries come thronging into his memory. They spring up before him, suddenly and furiously, out of mere words (Portrait 90). The vision is getting more real, more externalised and Stephen begins to catch a mental glimpse of what hitherto is only felt: “The verse passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage” (Portrait 99). Furthermore: 1

He must be likening this to the bliss of the experience Peter, James and John have with Jesus in the Mountain of Transfiguration. But whereas they are many, in his turn he is alone.

74

Chapter Four He had soon given in to them and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and always weak and humble towards others, restless and sickened of himself when they had swept over him (Portrait 90.)

Going to the university opens to him a new intellectual sphere and the emancipation needed to accommodate his vision. Free from the direct censorious eye of the priests and their religious expectations for him, and also free from being Prefect of Our Blessed Lady’s Sodality, he may readily respond to the call of art. Joyce tells us: “University! So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries who had stood as guardians of his boyhood and had sought to keep him among them that he might be subject to them and serve their ends” (Portrait 165). He has successfully broken away from all the other loyalties and demands on his soul, and can pledge allegiance to the consecrated life of the artist. Since his vision is not earthly, he begins to hear musical voices in the direction of his calling. The music leaps, “upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone, and downwards a major third, like triple branching flames leaping fitfully” (Portrait 165). He calls the musical voices he hears an elfin prelude, endless and formless. He seems to hear wild creatures racing from under the boughs and the grasses. Their feet, like the feet of hares and rabbits, of harts and hinds and antelopes passing in pattering tumult over his mind. Furthermore, he hears sounds like the sound of rain tapping upon the leaves. After these mysterious musical voices and passing creatures, he immediately thinks of Newman, and a line from him. Soon, the musical voices move from without to being heard inside of him. He hears a confused music within him as of memories and names which he is almost conscious of but cannot capture even for an instant. From the confused music, “there fell always one long drawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling – hello, Stephanos!” (Portrait 167). At about the same moment when he hears the call, premonitions of his free flight appear to him in the form of moving clouds: He raised his eyes towards the slowdrifting clouds, dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the deserts of the sky, a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high over Ireland, westward bound. The Europe they had come from lay down there beyond the Irish sea, Europe of strange tongues and valleyed and woodbegirt and citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races (Portrait 165.)

Towards Artistic Vision

75

More than ever before, his strange name is pronouncedly prophetic. This comes out more vividly in the passage that follows: Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of fabulous waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air…a hawklike man flying sunward across the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring imperishable being? (Portrait 169.)

A full identification with the old artificer produces an experience of transcendence, an astral transportation, a conversion in him. Richard Taylor in Understanding the Elements of Literature points out that the act of artistic creation is the most highly priced of all human activities, and that it is directly influenced and inspired by the supernatural which speaks through the imagination of the artist (30). In line with this thinking, we are told of a spirit that passes through Stephen’s limbs, moves him to ecstasy and keeps his soul in flight: His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs (Portrait 169.)

With this experience, he is born again into artistic adulthood. The boyhood experience he has metamorphosed out of is spurned. Henceforth, he creates proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul like the mature artist, with a new wild life singing in his veins. The experience has imparted to him a great sense of the beautiful, and heightened his powers of apprehension and appreciation. The wading girl, the birds and other aspects of nature appear almost as apparitions, and are seen with an artistic keenness hitherto unknown to him. In the vision of the wading girl, for example, he sees a girl standing in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. To him she seems like one whom magic has changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs look as delicate as those of a crane. Her thighs, full and soft-hued as ivory are bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers are like feathers of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts are kilted around her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom looks to him soft and slight, like the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long

76

Chapter Four

fair hair is girlish and her face carries with it the wonder of mortal beauty (Portrait 171). The vision of the image of this girl passes into his soul for ever with no word breaking the holy silence of his ecstasy, as Joyce calls it. Furthermore: Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, an angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory (Portrait 172.)

With this apparition, a sense of the aesthetic is born, and hence his aesthetic theory. He begins to forge out an aesthetic theory for himself. He feels that the spirit of beauty has folded him round like a mantle, and henceforth he sees things through the eyes of this spirit of beauty. With the priest in a philosophical conversation, they both discover that there is an art in the lighting of a fire. They discover that art falls in one of two groups; the useful arts and the liberal arts. Lighting a fire is a useful art, they agree. In the lighting of a fire, the object of the artist remains the creation of the beautiful (Portrait 185). Stephen further discovers that there exists another form of art which he calls the improper arts, improper because they excite a kinetic feeling. Examples of this kind of art are desire and loathing. He also finds that the pornographic or didactic are improper arts because they excite a kinetic emotion. On the other hand, he says, “Beauty expressed by an artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical” (Portrait 185). Rather, “it awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged” (Portrait 206). Stephen is greatly influenced by Aquinas and quotes him for most of the time. His own aesthetic theory can be called applied Aquinas. According to Aquinas, when the apprehension pleases, then the thing is beautiful. But what is beautiful to one may not be to another. To this Stephen says that though the same object may not be beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages of all aesthetic apprehension. According to Stephen, “art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (Portrait 207). The artist tries to “express 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 understand – that is art” (Portrait 207).

Towards Artistic Vision

77

This said, he distinguishes three art forms; another classification different from what he comes to with the priest. There are the lyrical form, the epical form and the dramatic form of art. In the lyrical form, the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself. In the epic form he presents it in relation to himself and to others, whereas he presents his image in immediate relation to others in the dramatic form of art. The dramatic form of art is life purified and projected from human imagination. In this form, the artist’s personality refines itself out of existence and impersonalises itself. The artist of this form, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails (Portrait 215). When he has gone through his conversion experience into an artist, has worked out his aesthetic theory and set on composing according to his theory, he sees himself as “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of existence to the radiant body of everliving life” (Portrait 221). So far we have attempted to trace the experiences of Will Brangwen and Stephen Dedalus in their respective milieus, their self-discovery and vision of art. We attempted to demonstrate that these elements in the life and work of the artist are bound and interrelate. Also that this pattern is characteristically the pattern of the life and work of the modern artist. In the next and last chapter of this book, we are going to look at Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen at work. Our interest is going to lie in how they manage the challenges that flood their path to creative activity and how much of their art is self-representative.

CHAPTER FIVE CHALLENGES AND SELF-REPRESENTATION

The modern artist lives at a time in history when life is stressful in every way imaginable. Unlike the traditional artist who was believed to be an integral part of his or her social setting, the modern artist finds social institutions stifling and inadequate to meeting his or her needs. The frustrations force him to live virtually without the society, go on exile, put on vagrant characteristics or to simply rebel in diverse ways. As with his life, so with his art: It is no longer primarily written for the common good, nor is it meant to serve a utilitarian role. As much as he faces difficulties living out his life, the production of works of art is also fraught with difficulties. Having lost out with society, revolted and resigned to himself, his concerns thematically are by and large related to his life and to the ideologies he stands for. In this chapter, we are going to have a look at Will Brangwen and Stephen Dadulus in terms of the challenges they face on their pathway to becoming artists and to produce works of art. We shall equally seek to establish the fact that as characteristic of the modern artists they are, they produce works of art which are essentially autobiographical and which represent and serve to promote their personal ideologies.

A. Will Brangwen We first meet Will Brangwen in his teens, newly come to the Marsh Farm with relatively little experience of the adult world. He has been brought up in the church, has not travelled as many artists generally do, and is not very much in contact with other practising artists. He relies principally on books for the shaping and nourishing of the artist in him. His reading has brought him under the influence of Ruskin and he enjoys medieval art. Keith Alldritt remarks that the artists Will Brangwen comes to admire are preliminary to the full consciousness of the art of the Medieval Period. This poses a limitation to his art because he will try to create from a basis that is wanting. Like them, he does not come to full

80

Chapter Five

expression. Delavenay says Will continues his instinctive superficial existence without succeeding in becoming really articulate, seldom finding real expression and that he is uncreated in spirit (68). This is actually the first difficulty he faces; the lack of experience and worthwhile relationships in the sphere of art. According to Treacy, Will’s art lacks the full renaissance bloom of a masterful artist like Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci (144). He however sets out to produce in sculpture what these medieval artists do through painting. He also wants to step ahead of them in the creation of a new kind of the woman in his Eve. This at least is the innovating element of his art. In this desire to experiment and innovate, he fits in with the other modern artists. His concerns in art are centred on his religious aspirations and a desire to represent in carving what he already knows of religion, especially Christianity. Like Tom Brangwen, he is negligent of “the other forces that go to make up the human personality.”1 His singing, as well as his carving are on religious matters, since religion is his only sphere of experience. We may equally reiterate here that when the modern artist sets to work, the natural tendency is to portray something of his experience and inclinations. He is a highly sensitive and sensuous man, and we find that these overflow in his art. He is, like Lawrence, engrossed with sex and enslaves himself to his wife to the detriment of his artistic pursuits. He is affected when his wife, almost an object of worship, rejects him and his art. Like sex, it is a passion for him to have the chisel under his grip as he labours to come to creative fulfilment. At work his senses are all gathered into one as he labours in solitude to realise his mind’s picture of the carving. Lawrence tells us, “The passion of his heart lifted the fine bite of steel” (Rainbow 120). The religious figures that come up in his painting include the creation, Adam, Eve and angels. At the moment of creation, these religious figures become almost real to him, so that while moving he feels a sense of them around him. For example, as he goes to the Marsh Farm in the twilight, he feels that the angels, with covered faces, are standing back as he passes. The darkness is of their shadows and the covering of their faces (Rainbow 121). However long it takes, he allots a lot of time and thinking to his carving and determines to finish it, but for major hindrances from time to time. Soon after his marriage, as his father in-law comes in, he finds him sitting and thinking of his carving of Eve. As with the creation of Eve, he 1

Back cover page of The Rainbow.

Challenges and Self-Representation

81

loves to think over his carving, dwelling on every aspect of it. What comes out on a general note is that creativity is preoccupying, and arrests the artist’s mind in such a way that there is hardly time to give to other things. After their marriage, the first difficulty Will Brangwen faces is that of another presence, his wife. He must now work in the company of another, at what is done best in solitude. Anna’s presence produces an inhibiting effect that is hard to overcome. He might have moved to work elsewhere alone, but cannot yet bear a moment of separation from Anna: “He seemed a dark, almost evil thing, pursuing her, hanging unto her, burdening her” (Rainbow 152). When Anna escapes from his overbearing presence, the following happens: His soul grew the blacker. His condition now became complete, the darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had gone: he remained complete in his own tense, black will…his dark passionate soul had recoiled upon itself, and now, clinched and coiled round a centre of hatred, existed in its own power (Rainbow 152.)

Apart from Anna being a hindering presence, Will’s love and dependence on her constitutes a formidable barrier to his art. Such emotional crises as the case in the scene quoted above are not conducive for any creative activity, because they are distressing and lacerating to the soul. Fiong Etuk in his book, In Search of Creative Excellence quotes Arthur Koestler who advocates that since creativity is fragile, it must be aided with tender loving care (155). The relation between Will and Anna hardly provides for this tender loving care that is conducive for creativity. Etuk further quotes Winston Fletcher who holds that having a good sense of humour is an essential ingredient in the creative personality (158). Both conditions are absent in Will at this time of his strained relationship with Anna. In their strained relationship, Will is too dejected to think and so cannot do creative work. Increasingly, he refers indulging in what does not require creative thinking as seen in the passage below: He remained at Yew cottage, black and clinched, his mind dead. He was unable to work at his wood-carving. He went on working monotonously at the garden, blindly, like a mole…He had been making the garden in order, cutting the edges of the turf, laying the path with stones. He was a good, capable workman (Rainbow 152-153.)

Another problem he faces after marriage is that there is not enough space for him to work in their house. Their cottage is a small one, so that when Anna begins to do her house work, as when she is preparing to throw her tea party, there is hardly any more room left. The lack of space

82

Chapter Five

is also compounded by the fact that for the time being he cannot afford for more space because of financial difficulties. From the examples of Lily Briscoe and Mr. Carmichael in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, it is possible that there is a creative site; geographical, for every artist, away from which creative activity is jeopardised. This lends to the suggestion that the cottage is such a place for Will so that when it is otherwise busy, he cannot get to any creative activity. This is all the more probable as we see from a few statements from Picasso, as recorded in his biography. As he shows some visitors round his studios he informs them of the following: It was here in this room that I painted Guernica. Other than that, though, I hardly ever work in this room. I did L’Homme au Mouton here, but I do my painting upstairs and generally work on my sculpture in another studio I have a little way up the street…This is where I do my engraving (Qtd. in Gilot and Lake 17-18.)

From the quotation above it is evident that there is a room where he paints, one where he does sculpture, and another for engraving. From the start this division may only have been administrative, but soon the various studios took, as it were, a spirit of their own, and a conditioning effect on Picasso.2 Apart from what Will reads from Ruskin, he also has books bought from a Roman Catholic bookshop with Italian, English, French and German church paintings. But as he sits absorbed by them, unable to carve, his wife ridicules him and his cherished pictures in the books. He has no intellectual arguments to back his religious beliefs and church practices. Things appeal to him in as much as he can feel them. He prefers things for which he does not need to wrack his mind before understanding (Rainbow 165). She, on the other hand, believes in the omnipotence of the human mind (Rainbow 173). He is finally cowed by her intellectual superiority and he becomes ashamed of his beliefs, as stated in the excerpt below:

2

We may safely say that there is a geographical spot wherein the artist is more himself and where he is at his creative best. We may get further illustration of this from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where Lily Briscoe never does any painting out of Hebrides, and not away from the lawn. When the war interrupts and she can only come to her painting ten years afterwards, she pins her easel at exactly the same spot as before. In like manner, Mr. Carmichael returns to Hebrides when the war is over to continue working on his poetry at exactly the same spot as well.

Challenges and Self-Representation

83

He was ashamed of his love for these things; he hid his passion for them. He was ashamed of the ecstasy into which he could throw himself with these symbols. And for a few moments he hated the lamb and the mystic pictures of the Eucharist, with a violent, ashy hatred. His fire was put out, she had thrown cold water on it. The whole thing was distasteful to him. His mouth was full of ashes (Rainbow 162.)

Will Brangwen and his wife are almost opposites when it comes to commitment to the church. Whereas church means everything to him, it means almost nothing to her. Church matters rather exasperate her. She does not get out of the church the satisfaction Will gets, and therefore sets out to destroy his passion for these things. However, in this attempt to kill the ecstasy with which Will would throw himself with Christian symbols, she literally kills the life and the artist in him. Under the influence of Anna, Will discovers after some time that his tools have gone rusty because he has not used them for a long time. They have equally been pushed aside by Anna because they lie on her way. She does not want to see the tools with which Will does his church-oriented work. Furthermore, she jeers at the Eve saying, “She is like a little marionette. Why is she so small? You’ve made Adam as big as God, and Eve like a doll” (Rainbow 174). Anna’s comments and actions do not at all encourage Will in his art. She constitutes a set-back which he must overcome in order to continue carving. As earlier stated, Will is more a man of the emotions than he is of the intellect. Moreover, although he can feel, he cannot put his feelings into words. This drives us to think that the nature of artistic inspiration is not necessarily patterned to the order of the intellect. For Will Brangwen, inspiration is a fragile thing of the emotions, and he depends on them for his creative activities. When these emotions are hurt or when he is in the low, he can no longer create or finish up work in progress. After Anna notes that Eve is made as tiny as a little marionette, she takes a feminist stand against what she terms the impudence and arrogance of men. She says, “It is impudence to say that woman was made out of Man’s body, when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have, what arrogance!” (Rainbow 174). Because of Anna’s challenging arguments, Will’s life shifts its centre and turns out to be superficial. He grows to be submissive to Anna and ceases to have any purpose of his own. One of the consequences of Anna’s continued nagging on Will is the fact that he burns his carving. In a rage one day, “after trying to work on the board, and failing, so that his belly was a flame of nausea, he chopped up the whole panel and put it on the fire” (Rainbow 174). The burning of

84

Chapter Five

the panel is tantamount to self-destruction. It signifies the extinction of the man who at first appears capable of utterance, but loses this under the influence of the intellectual supremacy of his wife. From the time of Will’s marriage with Anna, his art is greatly affected Generally, the art of Lawrence’s artists is affected by anything that affects their day to day life, especially in matters of love. Treacy confirms the foregoing thought when she says that the true Lawrencian artist can achieve mastery in his art only by experiencing life and love fully. Conversely, a failure in life or love signals a breakdown in their art. With Lawrence, the man and the artist are inseparable (116). This means that the artist in Lawrence’s work cannot be studied in isolation, away from concern with the artist’s self-realisation through life and love. Leo Gurko, in his study of Lawrence’s novel, The Trespasser, also says the art of Lawrence’s artists are vocations in the workaday world, not keys to the major journey (30). Lawrence himself could be writing a novel or poem while cooking and chipping in a word or two of conversation (Huxley xxxi). In addition to defeating Will intellectually, Anna refuses any sexual contact with him for some time. When this happens, he feels as though the ground under him is giving way, seeing that he has but one place where to stand; “upon a woman” (Rainbow 187). His condition is likened to that of the old man of the sea, impotent to move except upon the back of another life. Life without Anna seems a terrible welter to him, everything jostling in a meaningless, dark, fathomless flood (Rainbow 188). As said earlier, we reiterate here that sex is a crucial factor to the Lawrencian artist in general, and to Will in particular. The final stroke that breaks the camel’s back comes when Anna, pregnant, performs her dance before Will, with the purpose of nullifying him. The dance kills the bit of creativity remaining in him. We see this clearly in the quotation below: She lifted her hands and danced again to annul him…he stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing his non-existence…He watched and his soul burned in him…It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was being burned alive 3 (Rainbow 183-184). 3

Emile Delavenay suggests that the dance is Anna’s secret ritual to consecrate the illusory victory of handing to the next generation the responsibility of achieving perfect being (368).

Challenges and Self-Representation

85

The vision of the dance torments him incessantly, so that from the moment he sees it, he drifts along like a person in a dream. It produces a nullifying effect upon him, which effect tells negatively on his ego and creative powers. Like the panel of Eve which he has already burned, the dance produces a destructive effect on his soul. It makes him realise that he is alone in the world, but also that he must learn to stand alone, independent of Anna and all else. He decides that the world might be a welter of uncertainty, but he has to be himself because, “he had come into his own existence. He was born for a second time, born at last unto himself, out of the vast body of humanity” (Rainbow 190). Will has come a good way to face himself as an individual, distinct and separate from the rest. He has learnt his lessons from Anna, but has to learn more from their two daughters, Ursula and Gudrun. We are told, “The growing up of his daughters, their developing rejection of old forms set him also free” (Rainbow 255). What Anna falls short of accomplishing for him, Ursula and Gudrun succeed in doing by breaking away from the old life of Will. In Chapter Two, we mentioned that the Brangwen woman, very much unlike the Brangwen man, looks forward to becoming a lady after the manner of Mrs. Hardy, who has become the subject of local gossip among the women. In this chapter, this dream is excellently accomplished in Will’s daughters, and their experience produces an emancipation effect on him. For twenty years Will has gone on as a draughtsman doing work in which he has no interest because it is not creative. As an artist, routine work does not satisfy his innermost being, which seeks newly created forms of experience. Creative activity to the modern artist is first and foremost, a means to self-fulfilment. The urge to create is like an instinct which must express itself somehow. It is like the release of some internal energy for which the artist must find an outlet, without which he can know no rest. The spirit of creativity is innate to Will despite the odds we have mentioned in the foregoing paragraphs. He goes back to his carving, but discovers that in terms of his vision of art, he has not budged one step ahead. He is still where he was when courting Anna. He sees the puerility of his immature conceptions and the unreal world in which he conceives them. At this time, he feels he sees reality as though a palpable thing, and wants to carve things that are utterances of himself (Rainbow 355). Will’s desire to carve things that are utterances of himself ties in fittingly with Lawrence’s idea of the artistic endeavour in which he says the artistic exertion is the effort of utterance, the supreme effort of expressing knowledge which is complete for the moment (“Study of

86

Chapter Five

Thomas Hardy” 447). But since artistic vision is a fragile thing that when not nurtured lessons, Will has acquired knowledge but lacks vision. He becomes uncertain and confused in his art. At his best he wavers and begins to try his hand from one form of art to another, but produces only imitations. His creative force has been spent. He abandons his carving and turns to modelling in clay and plaster. But all he does is to copy designs of beautiful things conceived by other people. His work has the freshness of Italian art, but it is only reproductions of these (Rainbow 355). In his fatherly love for Ursula, he tries to make a portrait of her using clay, but the pitch of concentration required for it does not come. He finally gives up and turns to painting. In painting he tries water-colour painting as an amateur. He gets some positive results but becomes uninterested with anything related to painting. After one or two drawings of his beloved church he drops painting altogether, and turns to jewellery. The first things he makes are beautiful, but those that follow are imitative (Rainbow 356). He is dissatisfied with beauty without originality and show of genius, which are basic the soul of the artist. It would seem to us that in the end what remains of the artist in him is the fact that he maintains his solitude and indifference to the rest of the world. As Lawrence tells the reader towards the end of the novel, “The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great adherent” (Rainbow 356). In terms of the relationship between his art and himself, there is a sense in which Will Brangwen’s art is the expression of his inner longings. The first art object he produces is a butter-stamper for Anna. In it he carves a mythological bird, a phoenix, something like an eagle, rising on symmetrical wings from a circle of beautiful flickering flames (Rainbow 116). Will himself is often likened to a bird. We find this similarity between him and a bird when Lawrence describes the way he kisses Anna for the first time: He lifts his head like an eagle’s and kisses Anna like a bird that swoops and sinks closer to her (Rainbow 117). In addition, the bird in his carving suggests his own desire for flight, away from close contact with other men. It is important to note here that the symbol of the bird is used in relation to the modern artist by all two authors in the two novels we are concerned with in this book. To the modern artist, the bird symbolises the desire for freedom, exile and the possibility of soaring over the rest of the world for a better view of society. Another animal symbol for the modern artist is the cat. D. H. Lawrence likens Will Brangwen to the cat because of his cat-like ability to be passive and uninvolved with the happenings around him. When Lawrence

Challenges and Self-Representation

87

likens Will Brangwen to a cat he says a cat can lie perfectly peacefully on the hearthrug while its master or mistress writhes in agony a yard away. It has nothing to do with other people’s affairs (Rainbow 115). This is a true description of the modern artist’s relationship with the world around him. The second piece of carving Will begins working on is his panel on the creation. The concern with God, Adam, Eve, and angels in this panel is an expression of his inner broodings on religious issues. When he begins to lose faith in these things, under Anna’s influence, he also begins to produce articles that have nothing to do with religion. For example, the portrait of Ursula, the rings and bracelets he makes for his wife and daughters have nothing to do with religion. They represent his new worldly pursuits. Beyond himself, Will’s art is also an ex-ray of his society. In his first and second art objects, he represents the religious aspect of the society. When he loses faith in religion, he equally turns his interest to societal issues that are carnal in nature. This shift from the religious to carnal concerns is also a depiction of the general trend in his society. There is increasing loss of faith in orthodox religion and a marked increase in materialistic and atheistic tendencies. To sum up, Will Brangwen has genius but never gets to full self expression in art. When he sets out to work as an artist, many difficulties plague his way. Among these is the fact that he lacks experience. He has not travelled far and wide as the modern artist generally does, and his reading is meagre. His marriage introduces another human being into his life, so that he loses the solitude that he requires for working effectively. Furthermore, he yields to Anna’s intellectual superiority, anti-Christian and anti-artistic tendencies. When he begins carving, his interest is in religion. Later on, with his loss of passion in the church under Anna’s influence, all he is interested in is beauty. The medium of expression is no longer of interest to him, as he moves from one medium to the next. His art is also an attempt to exteriorise his blind passion for the church. It is the expression of his inner longings, subscribing closely to Lawrence’s “I always say, ‘Art for my sake.’ If I want to write, I write – and if I don’t want to, I don’t. The difficulty is to find exactly the form one’s passion […] wants to take” (Letters 1 491).

88

Chapter Five

B. Stephen Dedalus Lastly, we shall be looking at Stephen Dedalus at work as an artist, paying particular attention to the challenges he faces, the subject matter of his poetry and how much of himself and his society is depicted in his art. To begin with, Stephen Dedalus is introduced by his father to the world of literature from when he is a kid. The novel opens with his father telling him a story in the traditional story-telling style: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo (Portrait 7.)

He learns from his father that he could become the subject of a story, since the baby tuckoo of his father’s story refers to him. Also that in a story one may take another name, other than one’s real name, because tuckoo is not his true name. It is a name for the story. It is here that his later concern with names is born. He takes to his father’s method of presenting the story, but later seeks better methods of presentation as he repudiates old forms. But before then he is taught nursery rhymes, which is a beginning to his cultivating an ear for sound appreciation. Stephen’s earliest attempt at artistic creation is a childhood repetition of the threats at him for saying he is going to marry Eileen, who is a protestant. A few of the lines run thus4: Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise (Portrait 8).

It is an eight-line poem, of two utterances differently arranged, with the same rhyme pattern: abba. The central issue is the need for an apology for the crime of wanting to marry protestant Eileen. Since Stephen does not know the interdenominational conflicts between the Catholics and the Protestants, the poem gives no hint of remorse. The repetitions, musical in 4

This first attempt at composition is done with the innocence of childhood. It is not the result of mature selection and arrangement as we find him do in adulthood.

Challenges and Self-Representation

89

themselves, look rather a determination not to apologise. Stephen does not openly say he will not apologise, but hides under the table, as he is being forced to give an apology. There is as much emphasis on the threat of pulling out his eyes as there is the injunction to apologise. He would rather escape than contradict his genuine, though childish desire to marry Eileen in the future. The whole poem carries with it the atmosphere of the conflict he is to face as a grown-up, between his convictions, sometimes untested as here, and the expectations of those around him. This childhood victory scored against his mother will be scored again, when it comes to going to the university and leaving Ireland for Paris. The birds, represented by the eagle, used as an instrument of threat, are later to be a sign of his flight from Ireland. The instrument of threat is transformed in later life to lead his inner drive and dream. Stephen never again apologises to anyone for any reason, till the novel’s end. Stephen’s father loves music and sings a lot, and Stephen is taught to dance in tone with a sound made by his mother with the piano. Although he never gets to practice music, early contact with it contributes to his training in sound perception.5 Through his father’s singing, Stephen comes to get hold of the world around him. One of his father’s favourite songs reads: ‘Tis youth and folly Makes young men marry, So here my love, I’ll No longer stay. What can’t be cured, sure, Must be injured, sure, So I’ll go to Amerikay. My love she’s handsome, My love she’s bony: She’s like good whisky When it is new; But when ’tis old And growing cold It fades and dies like The mountain dew (Portrait 88). 5

James Joyce was introduced early into music by his father who loved singing. He was particularly interested in old fashioned operas and in the melodies of Tom Moore (Gorman 18).

90

Chapter Five

Since Stephen identifies with this song of a poem, we consider it as falling in line with his trend of thought in style and subject matter for the time being. Stanza one runs with a uniform rhyme pattern; aabbccdd, but the second stanza; abbcddec, is irregular. Stephen is first in harmony with Ireland, represented by the regular rhyme pattern of stanza one, till his love for her grows cold and inharmonious as captured in the irregular rhyme pattern of stanza two. He is as youthful and inexperienced as the youth in this song, so that the marriage, in folly, is the unstudied identification to Ireland of his boyhood days. Ireland is the good whisky which grows cold and the mountain dew which fades and dies. The point we want to make here is that the modern artist begins very early in life to show the distinctive traits which with time grow to maturity. He does not become an artist. He is born an artist. When the milieu is conducive, these characteristics show very early and mature faster. Will Brangwen in The Rainbow lacks a conducive environment and so does not grow to full expression in his art. But Stephen’s environment helps him more along the lines of his inner longings as an artist. Stephen’s infancy is followed by an intense commitment to reading the literature of his day. He reads Aristotle, Aquinas, Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, Gerhart Hauptmann and Newman et cetera. He forges an aesthetic theory for himself after reading these authors. When he begins to write after much reading, it is no longer the result of innocence, but the conscious productions of a growing mind. Soon after his vision, he experiences what Joyce calls variously as an enchantment of the heart or an instant of inspiration. He describes how this happens for Stephen in the following manner: The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow. O! in the virgin womb of imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light (Portrait 217.)

Immediately after the moment of inspiration as seen in the quotation above, a number of verses pass from his mind to his lips. He murmurs them over and feels the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through the words. The rhyme also suggests itself in words like ways, days, blaze, praise, raise and so on (Portrait 218). This takes place in his mind, and since the things of the mind are relatively volatile, the rhythm begins to die down. Fearing to lose all, he raises himself from the bed to look for paper and pencil. Finding neither paper nor pencil on the table, he picks up a

Challenges and Self-Representation

91

pencil and cigarette packet from his coat pocket, tears it open and begins to write down the stanzas of the villanelle6 (Portrait 218-219). The incident above reveals a number of things about the creative moments of Stephen Dedalus. In the first place, he is lying down, relaxed in bed, in the early morning period following a night’s rest. The setting and mood of the creative moment are very informal and commonplace. Secondly, the inspiration comes to him in a dreamlike mood, in keeping with what Jung says about a great work of art: “A great work of art is like a dream, for all its apparent obviousness” (187). It is worth noting the fact that this takes place in the chamber of his mind, and flashes forth like a point of light. At first, the villanelle comes to him as though dictated. This reminds of William Blake who writes poetry in about the same manner. In the same line of thinking, H. G. Wells writes of the dream book of Dr. Raven in The Shape of Things to Come. Dr. Raven tells Wells that: For some years, off and on – between sleeping and waking – I’ve been reading a book. A non-existing book. A dream book if you like…not quite print as we know. Vivid maps. And quite easy to read, in spite of the queer letters and spelling…. Oh, just the same as reading a book when one is awake. If the matter is vivid one sees the events as if one was looking at a moving picture on a page (20-21.)

Thirdly, Stephen is unprepared when it comes to recording the villanelle as it comes to him. This, on the one hand, is because he is a scattered fellow and on the other, because the inspiration takes him by surprise. He gropes for paper and pencil then lies back in bed to record his poem. His room is as much a workshop as the field and garden are for Carmichael in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Fourthly, the moment of inspiration for Stephen accompanies the moment of harmony with himself. When he is still battling out his position toward the family, church and state, no creative inspiration comes his way. When he is unsettled as to his position in the matters of sin and a church career, he tries to write but nothing comes out of it. He must first harmonise his experience before he can attain the wholeness, harmony and radiance of art (Bolt 63). The villanelle comes in bits and he selects and arranges it.7 Then more of it comes in the following manner: “The rhythm died away, ceased, 6

A villanelle is a nineteen line lyric poem that relies heavily on repetition. The first and third lines alternate throughout the poem, which is structured in six stanzas – five tercets and a final quatrain (DiYanni 1716).

92

Chapter Five

began again to move and beat” (Portrait 218). At moments he speaks out the words so that they leave an auditory impression and register in his mind. Furthermore, thoughts of good moments around his platonic affair with Emma Clere, Stephen's love interest, come in as a catalysing agent at the moment of composition. Emma is more like a muse than a flesh-and-blood person. He is inspired by her and writes a poem that succeeds (GradeSaver 2). By thinking about Emma, Stephen wallows in the lust of the list of the other women who have impressed him (Portrait 220). These also provoke sexual desire in him (Portrait 223). Sexual drive, as in Stephen’s case at this moment, may be appropriately called libido; emotional or psychic energy derived from primitive biological urges (Woolf Henry 656). It could be that creative energy and sexual energy have the same source and work in the same manner, since libido is both emotional and psychic. At the moment of creative activity, this energy is in the main psychical, with emotional overtones. The final release of the psychic energy needed for the successful composition of Stephen’s villanelle is erotic in nature: 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 waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain (Portrait 223.)

As should be noted, the creative force which comes to Stephen at the critical moment of creativity is given feminine qualities. His encounter with this force is likened to the love encounter of a man with a woman. The metaphor is heightened when Joyce says, “her nakedness yielded to him.” But while the reader takes in the seemingly sexual atmosphere, Joyce begins to talk of the liquid letters of speech flowing over Stephen’s brain. The thought that sexual and creative powers spring from the same source is thus established. The villanelle that he finally composes in the mood above reads as seen below:

7

Anthony Burgess suggests that the task of selection and arrangement of the material of the artist is conflict-laden. This, he says, is because the urge to swallow everything is inherent in every artist (“Here comes” 49).

Challenges and Self-Representation

93

Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of enchanted days. Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze And you have had your will of him. Are you not weary of ardent ways? Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes forth from ocean rim to ocean rim. Tell no more of enchanted days. Our broken cries and mournful lays Rise in one eucharistic hymn. Are you not weary of ardent ways? While sacrificing hands upraise The chalice flowing to the brim, Tell no more of enchanted days. And still you hold our longing gaze With languorous look and lavish limb! Are you not weary of ardent ways? Tell no more of enchanted days (Portrait 223-4).

The poem evidently turns around Stephen’s psychological state of mind and pursuits. He meditates on his present ardent ways and enchanted days, and tries to link them with the fallen seraphim, an image of the devil. Stephen habitually has a sense of the holy with a touch of the satanic at the same time. Just when he talks of the fallen seraphim, his mind turns to incense ascending from the altar, Gabriel the seraph, sacrificing hands upraised, the chalice and eucharistic hymn; all which are associated with the church and holiness. The eyes that have set man’s heart ablaze are perhaps the eyes of the prostitutes he is fond of at this time. In using them he certainly feels used because he says they have had their will of the man, who should be none else but himself. But he moves it to include all men when he says, “And still you hold our longing gaze with languorous look and lavish limb!” On the other hand, the poem is dedicated to Emma Clere, the temptress of his villanelle. Here she takes the character of a tempter unlike the innocence that at other times Stephen identifies her with. Earlier on we read: A sense of her innocence moved him almost to pity her, an innocence he had never understood…an innocence she too had never understood…and a tender compassion filled his heart as he remembered her frail pallor and

94

Chapter Five her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark shame of womanhood (Portrait 222 –223.)

When he presents her as a temptress in the poem above, he begins to feel that he has wronged her. Since the poem is dedicated to Emma Clere, he thinks of sending it to her, including the others earlier written. But if he sends her the verses, he suspects that they will be read at breakfast among the tapping of eggshells, her brothers will laugh and try to wrest the papers from each other with their strong hard fingers and so on (Portrait 222). Soon after Stephen writes his first successful villanelle, he also begins to keep a dairy, which in its style records his day to day experiences leading to his flight to Paris. On the 20th of March he records: “Long talk with Cranly on the subject of my revolt.” On the 16th of April he hears voices say to him: “We are alone. Come. And the voices say…we are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman” (Portrait 252). On the 26th of April, he records his mother’s prayers for him and sets off saying: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience8 and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Portrait 252 –253). Richard Ellmann remarks that in the encounter with reality he is the millionth, but in the forging of his race’s conscience he acknowledges no predecessors (James Joyce 75). As a growing artist, Stephen has the advantage of a home where very early he is introduced to music, sent to school and begins to read the right kind of literature. He also has the added advantage of having a room of his own where he can be alone and undisturbed. When he begins to try his hand in poetry, the relationship with Emma Clere proves a catalysing factor. The greatest challenge before him is that of facing a whole culture all alone. His ideas and aesthetic theory sound strange to a number of his friends, and he is charged with heresy, rebellion and heartlessness to his mother. The other issue is that those around him do not seem to perceive things the way he does. To the modern artist, they do not need to. The problem with Stephen, however, is that he is to some extent torn between his convictions and the crowd he is rejecting and walking away from. He lacks the moral strength needed for an independent continuity in art. His very sensitive nature and youth do not allow him the indifference of artists like Lily Briscoe and Augustus Carmichael. He is still too mindful of what 8

He sets out, first of all, to encounter experience, and only then can he create. He can create only what first has become a part of him, since art is the very central expression of life (Schutte 94).

Challenges and Self-Representation

95

others think about him and how his actions affect them, to be able to stand alone as an artist. Comparatively, Stephen is the younger of all the two artists we have examined in this book. He has had little of the pinch of society compared to persons like Carmichael, Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Although he has a good and extensive knowledge of his society, he lacks practical experience. He can only write of himself and his love affairs. He will need more time and experience before he can artistically feed the zeal with which he sets out for exile. As evidence of this, he is not the vibrant, challenging and optimistic artist we expect when we next meet him in Ulysses. Rather than forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, he begins by fighting back the accusations from his aunt and from Buck Mulligan, who think he is responsible for his mother’s death (Ulysses 11). At the time he sets out for exile, he is still too dependent on his mother for moral and material support. He does not have money, and lacks the material necessary for his compositions. The Villanelle he writes is written on scraps of paper and with pencil. It is also likely that although he is tidy in what he writes, he lacks the discipline to put his poems together for eventual publishing. Stephen’s art, here considered, leaves the impression that the best is yet to come. He takes the challenge of being a revolutionary artist, writes little for the time being, a writing woven around his meagre experience, and sets out for more artistic work. At the end of the story, his artistic achievement cannot be fully evaluated as yet, but he has fully laid the theoretical grounds for his career as an artist.

CONCLUSION

This book titled, The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen examines two fictional artists by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, two of the most prominent modernist artists of the twentieth century. This study makes little effort to look at these fictional artists as alter egos of Joyce and Lawrence; it treats them as modern artists in their own right. We have tried to give them some-what a critical “right of existence” of their own. We went further to appreciate their art as one would appreciate the work of a flesh and blood modernist artist. Chapter One, Critics on the Artist in Joyce and Lawrence, is a review of the varied critical attention on D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, especially as the artist portraits in their works are concerned. The critical attention considered also evaluates the artistic relevance and reception of their works. In Chapter Two, it was evident that for James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Rainbow respectively, society was undergoing remarkable changes, which in turn were leaving their marks on the citizens, especially the artists within these societies. In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence systematically traces these changes over three Brangwen generations so that the shifts are gradual, naturally succeeding one another, to what is obtained in the last generation. The changes in the society of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man parallel Stephen’s growth from infancy to mature manhood. At the end of the novel, catholic Ireland deteriorates and produces Catholics who never go to church and nationalists who betray, et cetera. Ireland is “the old sow that eats its farrow,” from which Stephen must depart. His friends who remain are remarkably selfish and helpless against a system they do not seem to understand and cannot alter. In Chapter Three we demonstrated that the modern artist, typified in this study by Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen, is characteristically otherworldly and rebellious. He lives in a society he no longer feels a part of, and whose ways and values are unsatisfying, or better still, stifling. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus begins to carry with him a sense of the outsider from home, church and the state in early boyhood. He is disappointed with his father and mother, falls out with the school authorities, does not understand politics, and is confused with the

98

Conclusion

religious matter. When he grows, he realises that he must not only denounce the systems he was almost intuitively repelled from since childhood, but must also quit them. He does these with unparalleled zest and conviction, as he steps away in optimistic stride and trust to art and creativity. In The Rainbow, Will Brangwen is independent and unyielding to authority and stands apart from the rest of the Brangwens. He is a gentleman artist, weakened in artistic commitment by marriage and sensual pleasure and lives virtually without the society. In Chapter Four, we were concerned with the experiences of the artists leading to the formation of their artistic visions. Stephen Dedalus’ aesthetic theory and progression in the apocalyptic accession to it was examined. As usual, he holds to his vision with ritualistic seriousness and reduces everything else to nothingness besides it. Will Brangwen is backward-looking in his vision of art. He cherishes the gothic in art. He is also immensely religious and his religious experience taints his outlook on life, so that art may only make meaning to him when it has a touch of the religious element. Chapter Five was dedicated to the challenges faced by each of the two artists under consideration, and how much of their work was an expression of their own lives and ideologies. Stephen is dependent, materially and emotionally poor, and lacks the discipline to put his poems together for eventual publishing and distribution. His villanelles are an expression of his amoral aspirations and meditations on the unpopular stand he is taking. Putting Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen together in this book was important in that it brought to focus the basic Joycean and Lawrencian concepts of the modern artist. Although Lawrence and Joyce differed remarkably in social class, education, style of writing and character, their notion of who the modern artist is, or should be, were essentially the same. Furthermore, the fact of choosing major character who are artists, in their two major novels, subscribes to our premise that Joyce and Lawrence, along with the other modern writers believed that modern life was best lived as artists. Even though we have dwelt principally on Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen in this book, the two novels considered turn around artists and art, and the lives of the other members of the society are judged with respect to their attitudes to these. Although we established in Chapter Three that the artist was essentially otherworldly and rebellious, he is the starting point of a life-style for society that in all respects may be termed artistic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol 2. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1974. Aiken, Conrad. “The Novel as a Work of Art.” Dial, vol XXIII, July 1927: 41-44. Aldington, Richard. D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But… New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950. Alldritt, Keith. The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence. Evanston: Northwester University Press, 1971. Allen, Walter. The English Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958. —. Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to our Time. London: Phoenix House, 1964. Anderson, C. G. “The Sacrificial Butter.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1962. 124-136. Anderson, Quentin, Stephens Donadio, and Steven Marcus. Art, Politics, and Will. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Andrews, W. T. ed. Critics on Lawrence: Readings in Literary Criticism. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971. Arndt, Melanie. “Joyce's Hero Mythicized: Charles Stewart Parnell.” 10/08/2005. . Arnheim, Rudolf. Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. Attridge, Derek. “Postmodern Joyce: Chance, Coincidence and the Reader.” 10/08/2005 . Auden, W. H. “Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence.” Critics on Lawrence. Ed. W. T. Andrews. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971. 47-51. Ayuk, Athanasius A. “The Search for Self Expression: A Study of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Diss. Yaoundé University I: 1996. Baille and Martin. Revelation. London: Faber and Faber, 1937. Balbert, Peter. “‘Logic of the Soul’: Prothalamic Pattern in The Rainbow.” D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985: 45-66. Balbert, Peter, and Philip L. Marcus, eds. D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

100

Bibliography

Bate, Ronald. “The Correspondence of Birds to the Intellect.” James Joyce Quarterly 2.4 (1965): 281 - 90. Beach, Joseph Warren. “Impressionism: Lawrence.” The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique. New York: Appleton, 1932: 366384. Beckett, Samuel, and Marcel Brion. Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. London: Faber and Faber, 1929. Beebe, Maurice. “Joyce and Aquinas: The Theory of Aesthetics.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 272-289. —. “Lawrence’s Sacred Fount: Artist Theme of Sons and Lovers.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, number 4: 1962. 539–552. Beja, Morris. James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992. Bender, Todd k., et al. Modernism in Literature. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. Blackmur, R. P. ed. Perspectives. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954. Blackstone, Bernard. British Writers. London: The British Council, 1983. Blamires, Harry. Twentieth-Century English Literature. London: Macmillan, 1988. Block, Haskell M. “The Critical Theory of James Joyce.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 231-249. Bolt, Sydney. Preface to James Joyce, 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1992. Bonheim, Helmut. Joyce’s Benefictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Bryfonski, Dedria, and Phyllis Carmel Mendelson, eds. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: Excepts from Criticism of the Works of Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short-story writers, and other Creative Writers: 1900-1960. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. Bryfonski, Dedria, and Sharon K. Hall. “D. H. Lawrence.” Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: Excepts from Criticism of the Works of Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short-story writers, and other Creative Writers: 1900-1960. Eds. Dedria Bryfonski, and Phyllis Carmel Mendelson. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Bump, Jerome. “D. H. Lawrence and Family Systems Theory.” Renascence Essays on Values in Literature: Family, Values, Literature XLIX.1 (1991): 60-80.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 101

Burgess, Anthony. Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. —. Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. London: André Deutsch Limited, 1973. Burgess, John. English Literature. London: Macmillan’s Green and Co., 1958. Burns, Aiden. Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980. Calderwood, James L., and Harold E. Toliver eds. Perspectives on Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Chayes, Irene Hendry. “Joyce’s Epiphanies.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1962: 204-220. Clark, Timothy D. “The Dedalus Factor: Einstein’s Science and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist.” 8 August 2005.

Connolly, Thomas E. “Joyce’s Aesthetic Theory.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 266-271. —. ed. Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1962. Cowan, James C. D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth. London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970. —. “Review of Marko Modiano’s Domestic Disharmony and Industrialisation in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Fiction.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.1 (1989): 88-90. Crosby, Sumner Mck. Art Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc. 1959. Crump, B. G. “Lawrence’s Rainbow and Russell’s Rainbow.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.2 (1989): 187-201. Crump, I. “Refining Himself out of Existence: The Evolution of Joyce's Aesthetic Theory and the Drafts of A Portrait”. Joyce in Context. Eds. Vincent J. Cheng, and Timothy Martin , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modern World, Chicago: Phoenix Books. 1967 Daleski, H. M. The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. Delaney, Paul. "'A Would-be-dirty Mind': D. H. Lawrence as an Enemy of Joyce." 14 August 2004. .

102

Bibliography

—. D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Delavenay, Emile. D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work: The Formative Years 1885-1919. Trans. Delavenay M. London: Heinemann, 1972. Derry, T. K., and M. G. Blakeways. The Making of Pre-industrial Britain: Life and Work between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. London: John Murray, 1973. Dewey, John. Art As Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, 1958. DiYanni, Robert. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. Draper, D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970. Eagleton, Terry. The Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1983. Edward, de Bono. Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to CreateNew Ideas. London: Harper Collins, 1994. Eide, Marian. “The Woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the Politics of Creativity” Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 44. 4. 1998, 377+, Hofstra University, Gale Group. Ellmann, Richard. “A Portrait of the Artist as Friend”. Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 88-101. —. James Joyce. Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. —. The Consciousness of Joyce. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. Engelberg, Edward. “Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman.” Critics on Lawrence. Ed. W. T. Andrews. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971: 67-79. Etuk, Fiong. In Search of Creative Excellence. Lagos: Spectrum Books Ltd., 1992. Eugene, Goodheart. The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. Fargnoli, A. Nicholas and Michael Patrick Gillespie, Critical Companion to James Joyce: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York, 2006. Farrell, James T. “Joyce and His First Self-Portrait.” The New York Times on the Web (December 31, 1944). 12 August 2005 . Ferris, Tina. “[Rananim] Lawrence as Transgressive Writer.” E-mail to the author. 16 Feb. 2005.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 103

Fieldler, Leslie. “The End of the Novel.” Perspectives on Fiction. Eds. James Calderwood, and Harold E. Toliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968: 190-196. Fischer, Ernest. The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach. Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1963. Fjagesund, Peter. The Apocalyptic World of D. H. Lawrence. London: Norwegian University Press, 1991. Ford, Boris. The Modern Age: A Guide to English Literature. London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1963. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1949. Frazer, G. S. The Modern Writer and His World. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Friedman, Alain. “The Stream of Conscience.” Perspectives on Fiction. Ed.James L. Calderwood, and Harold E. Toliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968: 374-384. Gardener, Helen. Art Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace and World Inc., 1948. Garnet, Edward. “Mr. Lawrence and the Moralists.” Friday Nights: Literary Criticisms and Appreciations. London: Knof, 1922: 145-146. Ghent, Dorothy Van. “On A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 60-74. —. “Problems for Study and Discussion for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 307-318. —. The English Novel: Form and Function, London: Harper Torchbooks, 1953. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. California: University of California Press, 1982. Gilbert, Sandra M. “Introduction.” The Phoenix Paradox: A Study of Renewal Through Change in the Collected Poems and Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence. By Gail Porter Mandell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984: XV-XX. Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. Gillet, Louis. Claybook for James Joyce. London: Abelard-Schuman Ltd, 1958. Gilot, François, and Carlton Lake. Life with Picasso. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. Goldberg, S. L. “The Rainbow: Fiddle-Bow and Sand.” Essays in Criticism II. 1961: 418-34.

104

Bibliography

Gombridge, E. H. The Story of Art. New York: Phaiden Press, 1972. Gordon, Caroline. “Some Readings and Misreadings.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 136 - 156. Gordon, David J. D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Gorman, Herbert. James Joyce. New York: Rinehart and Company Inc, 1948. Gove, Philip B. ed. Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms. Springfield: G. and C. Merriam Company, 1973. Gregory, Horace. D. H. Lawrence: The Pilgrim of the Apocalypse. New York: Grove Press, 1957. —. Pilgrim of the Apocalypse: A Critical Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Martin Secker, 1934. Grieder, Terence. Artist and Audience. Chicago: Brown and Benchmark, 1996. Güne, Ali. “Crisis of Identity in A Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Man.” Dogus University Journal 1.6, 2002, 37-49. Gurko, Leo. “The Trespasser: D. H. Lawrence’s Neglected Novel.” College English, number 24, 1962: 29-35. Hardy, Barbara. “Women in D. H. Lawrence’s Work.” D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet. Ed. Stephen Penders. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973: 90-121. Harper, Howard. “The BBC Television Serialisation of The Rainbow.”The D. H. Lawrence Review. 21.2 (1989): 202-207. Hawthorn, Jeremy. “Individuality and Characterisation in the Modernist Novel.” The Uses of Fiction. Eds. Douglas Jefferson, and Graham Martin. London: Macmillan, 1970. Hayman, David. “The Sentence in Progress: Joyce.” Prose Style: A Historical Approach Through Studies. Ed. James R. Bennett. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1971. Herzinger, Kim A. D. H. Lawrence in his Time: 1908-1915. Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 1982. Hewitt, Douglas. English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940. London, Longman, 1988. Hofbauer, Randy. “The Tool of the Martyr: A Study of Epiphany in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” 10 August 2005. . Hoffman, Scott Paris, Elizabeth Hall, and Robert Schell. Developmental Psychology Today. Auckland Bogota: McGraw Hill Inc., 1988.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 105

Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1957. Hope, A. D. “The Esthetic Theory of James Joyce.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 183-203. Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Macmillan, 1957. —. The Last Romantics. London: Methuen, 1961. Huxley, Aldous. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking Press, 1936. Hynes, Samuel L. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Jack, Jane H. “Art and A Portrait of the Artist”. Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 156-167. Johnson, Paul. A History of the Modern World From 1917 to the 1980s. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984. Jones, Peter. Philosophy and the Novel: Philosophical Aspects of Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, The Brothers, Karamazov, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and of the methods of criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Josipovici, Gabriel. The Lessons of Modernity. London: Macmillan Press, 1993. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: The Viking Press, 1967. —. “Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver.” Critics on Lawrence: Readings in Literary Criticism. Ed. W. T. Andrews. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971: 36-37. —. Stephen Hero. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991. —. Ulysses. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1922. Jung, C. G. “Psychology and Literature.” Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1972: 174188. Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956. —. “James Joyce: Comedian of the Inventory.” Perspectives on Fiction. Ed. James L. Calderwood, and Harold E. Toliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968: 38-54. —. “On the Centenary of James Joyce.” The New York Times on the Web (January 31, 1982). 12 August 2005.

106

Bibliography

—. “The Artist in Perspective.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton- Century- Crofts, 1962: 25-60. Kershner, R. B.. “Early Critical Responses to Joyce.” 14th August 2004 . —. “James Joyce: Early Years.” 14 August 2004 . —. “The Artist as Text: Dialogism and Incremental Repetition in Joyce’s Portrait.”ELH 53.4 (1986): 881 – 894. Kiely, Robert. “Accident and Purpose: ‘Bad Form’ in Lawrence’s Fiction.” D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert, and Philip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985: 91-107. Kinsella, Thomas. “W. B. Yeats, The British Empire, James Joyce and Mother Grogan.” Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies 22.1 (1992): 69–79. Klein, Leonard S. ed. Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century. New York: A Frederick Ungu Book, 1993. Laurenson, Diana, and Alan Swingewood. The Sociology of Literature. London: Paladin, 1972. Law, Jules Davd. “Joyce’s ‘Delicate Siamese’ Equation: The Dialectic of Home in Ulysses.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 102.2 (1987): 197-205. Lawrence, D. H. Assorted Articles. London: Martin Secke r, 1930. —. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. New York: Penguin Books, 1987 —. Mr. Noon. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1948. —. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Warren Roberts, and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking Press, 1968. —. Selected Tales. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972. Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955. —. “Study of Thomas Hardy.” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Viking Press, 1936. —. The Rainbow. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. —. Thoughts, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976. —. “Why the Novel Matters.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. II. Ed. M. H. Abrams New York: Norton, 1979.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 107

—. Women in Love. London: Everyman’s Library, 1992. Leo, Hamalian, “D. H. Lawrence and Black Writers.” Journal of Modern Literature 26.4 (1990): 579-596. Levenson, Michael. “Stephen's Diary in Joyce's Portrait--The Shape of Life,” ELH, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 1017-1035, The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3039476, 23/10/2008. Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. New York: New Directions, 1960. —. “The Artist.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 9-24. Lindsay, Donald. Europe and the World: 1870 to the Present Day. London. Oxford University Press, 1979. Literary San Antonio. “D. H. Lawrence: Biography.” 14th August 2004. . Littlewood, J. F. C. D. H. Lawrence 1: 1885-1914. Ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Longman, 1976. Litz, Walton A. “Lawrence, Pound, and Early Modernism.” D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 1985, 15-28. —. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Melbourne Auckland, 1977. —. The Practice of Writing: Essays, Lectures, Reviews and a Dairy. London: Secker and Warburg, 1996. —. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. London: Longman, 1972. Long, William J. English Literature. London: Ginn and Company, 1919. Lowe-Evans, Mary. “Sex and Confession in the Joyce Canon: Some Historical Parallels.” Journal of Modern Literature 6.4 (1990): 563576. MacGregor, Geddes. “Artistic Theory in James Joyce.” Joyce’s Portrait:Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 221-230. Mackean, Ian. “Rebellion and Release: An Analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Focussing on Chapters 1, 3, and 5.” 25 April 2005. .

108

Bibliography

MacManus, Will. “Flying by the Nets: Stephen Dedalus’s Search for Personal Definition in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” 20 July 2002. . Magalaner, Marvin and Richard M. Kain. Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation. New York: New York University Press, 1956. Maguire, Fidelma “Charles Stewart Parnell,” Movements for Political & Social Reform, 1870–1914. http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Charles_Stewart_Parnell, consulted 10/09/2010. Mahaffey, Vicky. “Reading James Joyce.” 10 September 2004.

Majumdar, Robin, and Allen MacLaurin. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Heritage. London: Mandell, Gail Porter. The Phoenix Paradox: A Study of Renewal Through Change in the Collected Poems and Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Martin, F. David, and Jacobs A. Lee. The Humanities Through the Arts. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc, 1997. Martin, Graham. “D. H. Lawrence and Class.” The Uses of Fiction. Eds. Douglas Jefferson, and Graham Martin. London: Macmillan, 1970: 8397. Marx and Engels. Selected Works. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1958. Mayhall, Jane. “D. H. Lawrence and the Triumph of Texture.” Western Humanities Review, 19 (1965): 161-174. Maynard, Mack. Ed. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. 4th Ed. vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1979. Mbuh, Mbuh Mathias. “‘Art for My Sake’ and the Western Self in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love.” New Perspectives in British Literature. Ed. Sunita Sinha. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Ltd, 2010, 60-84. —. “D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover: A Study in Conflicting Identities and the Search for Self” [unpublished thesis]. University of Yaoundé I, 1994. McLuhan, H. M. “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 249-265. Mercier, Vivian. “When the Artist Was a Young Man.” The New York Times on the Web(February 2, 1958). 12 August 2005 http:// .

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 109

Meyers, Jeffery. Painting and the Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975. Mikhail E. H. ed. James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1990. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957. Moore, Harry T. D. H. Lawrence: His Life and Works. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964. —. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking, 1962. Morse, J. Mitchell. “Augustine’s Theodicy and Joyce’s Aesthetics.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 290-303. —. Matters of Style. New York: The Bobbs-Merill Inc., 1968. Mottram, V. H. The Physical Basis of Personality. London: Penguin Books, 1952. Mowat, Charles Lock. Britain Between the Wars: 1918-1940. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1955. Muir, Edwin. The Structure of the Novel, London: Hogarth Press, 1928. Murry, John Middleton. Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Libraries Press, 1933. Nadel, Ira B. “Joyce and Expressionism.” Journal of Modern Literature 16.1 (1989): 141-160. Njwefu, Anyele Ruth. “The Unholy Trinity in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Diss. Yaoundé University I: June 1999. O’Bien, Darcy. “Some Psychological Determinants of Joyce’s View of Love and Sex.” New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium. Ed. Fritz Senn. Bloomington: Indiana Uni. Press, 1972: 15- 27. Olson, Elder. On Value Judgements in the Arts and other Essays. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Page, Norman. Speech in the English Novel. London: Macmillan Press, 1973. Parry, John. Guide Through English Literature. London: University of London Press Ltd, 1969. Peake, C. H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. London: Edward Arnold, 977. Penders, Stephen. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Plekhanov, G. Art and Social Life. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1953. Porter, Stephen. D. H. Lawrence: A First Study. New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930.

110

Bibliography

Pound, Ezra. “Letter to Harriet Moore, September 23, 1913.” Critics on Lawrence: Readings in Literary Criticism. Ed. W. T. Andrews. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971: 16-17. Prescott, Joseph. “James Joyce’s Stephen Hero.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 77-88. Pryce-Jones, David. “The Dark Lord.” National Review. Vol. 61.12, July 2009, 40+. Raisor, Philip. “Grist for the Mill: James Joyce and the Naturalists” Contemporary Literature, xv, 4, 457-473, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207772, University of Wisconsin Press, 23/10/2008. Redford, Grant H. “The Role of Structure in Joyce’s Portrait.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 102-114. Roberts, Warren, and Harry T. Moore eds. “Art and the Individual.” Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and other Prose Works. New York: Viking Press, 1968: 225-226. Ross, Charles L. “Review of Gerald J. Butler, This is Carbon: A Defence of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow against his Admirers.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.3 (1989): 346-347. Ruderman, Judith. “Review of P.T. Whelan’s D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in ‘The Rainbow’” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.1 (1989): 71-72. Sale, Roger. “The Narrative Technique of The Rainbow.” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (1959): 29-38. Schiralli, Martin. “Art and the Joycean Artist” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 23, No. 4 (winter, 1989), 37-50, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333030, 23/10/2008, published by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Scholes, Robert, and Richard M. Kain. “In the Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and Joyce.” 14 August 2004 . —. The Workshop of Daedalus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Schutte, William M. Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in Ulysses, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 111

Schwarze, Tracey Teets. “Silencing Stephen: Colonial Pathologies in Victorian Dublin.” Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 43.3, 1997. 43+. Hofstra University; Gale Group. Segall, Jeffrey. ‘“Ku’lturbolshewismus is Here’: James Joyce and the Anti-Modernist Crusade in America, 1928-1944.” Journal of Modern Literature 6.4 (1990): 535-562. Senn, Fritz. ed. New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Seward, Barbara. “The Artist and the Rose.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: AppletonCentury- Crofts, 1962: 167-180. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, Singapore: Toppan Printing Co(s) Ltd., 1965. Siegel, Carol. “Virginia Woolf’s and Catherine Mansfield’s Reponses to D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.3 (1989): 291-311. Sinha, Sunita. Ed. .New Perspectives in British Literature. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Ltd, 2010. Smidt, Kristian. James Joyce and the Cultic Use of Fiction, Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1959. Spender, Stephen. “All Life Was Grist for the Artist.” The New York Times on the Web (October 25, 1959). 12 August 2005 . —. “Self-portrait of the Artist.” The New York Times on the Web (December 18, 1966). 12 August 2005 . Spoo, Robert. “Joyce’s Attitude Toward History: Rome, 1906 – 07.” Journal of Modern Literature 14. 4 (1988): 481-497. Sporn, Paul. “James Joyce: Early Thoughts on the Subject Matter of Art,” College English, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Oct., 1962), 19-24, National Council of Teachers of English Stable, http://www.jstor.org/stable/373842, 23/10/2008. Stewart, J. I. M.. James Joyce, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd. 1960 Stoll, John E. “Recent Lawrence Criticism.” Sewanee Review 83 (1975): 191-203. Switzenberg, Amanda. “The Methodologies of Art History.” 14 August 2004 . Taylor, Richard. Understanding the Elements of Literature. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1981.

112

Bibliography

Tellock, E. W. D. H. Lawrence, Artist and Rebel: A Study of Lawrence’s Fiction. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1963. Tindell, William York. A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. New York: Octagon Books, 1971. Tiverton, William, and Martin Jarrett-Kerr. D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence. London: Rockliff, 1951. Toksyz, F. Gen. “Postmodern World, Postmodern Relationships: The Artist and Society Relationships in Barthelme’s Fiction.” Dogus University Journal 1.2 (2000): 164-169. Treacy, Carol Ferrara. Art and the Artist in D. H. Lawrence [unpublished thesis]. University of South Carolina, 1983. Trilling, Diana. “Lawrence and the Movements of Modern Culture.” D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet. Ed. Stephen. Penders. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973: 1-7. Troy, William. “A Note on Myth.” Selected Essays. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New Brunswick: Rutger’s University Press, 1967. —. “D. H. Lawrence as Hero.” Selected Essays. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New Brunswick: Rutger’s University Press, 1967. —. “Time and Space Conceptions in Modern Literature.” Selected Essays. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New Brunswick: Rutger’s University Press, 1967. Tyndall, William York. The Literary Symbol. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1967. Vivas, Eliseo. “The Two Lawrences.” Bucknell Review, 7 March, 1958: 113- 32. Vyverberg, Henry. The Living Tradition: Art, Music, and Ideas in the Western World. New York: Harcourt Brace Inc., 1978. Wait, M. Eugenge. “The Calling of Stephen Dedalus.” Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962: 114-123. Wales, Katie. The Language of James Joyce. London: Macmillan, 1992. Ward, A. C. Longman Companion to Twentieth Century Literature. London: Longman Group Ltd., 1970. Warren, Austen. “The Nature and Modes of Narrative Fiction.” Perspectives on Fiction. Eds. James Calderwood, and Harold E. Toliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968: 73-88. Watson, Jack Twentieth Century World Affairs from 1919 to the 1980s. London: John Murray Ltd, 1984. Weintraub, Stanley, “A Respectful Distance: James Joyce and his Dublin Townsman Bernard Shaw.” Journal of Modern Literature 13.1 (1986): 61-75.

The Making of the Modern Artist: Stephen Dedalus and Will Brangwen 113

Whelan, P. T. rev. of Harold Bloom’s “D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.” The D.H. Lawrence Review 22.2 (1990): 231-233. Widmer, Kingsley. Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D. H. Lawrence. Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 1992. —. “Lawrence as Abnormal Novelist.” D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (1975): 220-32. —. The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fictions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Wikipedia. “Modernism.” 8 August 2004 . Wilde, Dana. “A Note on Stephen’s Shapeless Thoughts from Swedenborg in A Portrait of the Artist.” Journal of Modern Literature 16.1 (1989): 179-181. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. —. The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. Woolf, Henry Bosley ed. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1980. —. “Notes on D. H. Lawrence.” The Moment and Other Essays.” Ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948: 93-96. —. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1989. Worthen, John D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979. —. D. H. Lawrence. London: Edward Arnold, 1991. —. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years: 1885 – 1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. —. “New Materials in the Biography of D. H. Lawrence-II: Catalogue of the Papers of Louis Burrows Relating to D. H. Lawrence .” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.1 (1989): 47-54. Wright, David G. “Joyce’s Debt to Pinter.” Journal of Modern Literature 14.4(1989): 517-526.