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By Root 1652 0

of the English language, bending it to his will. But to forge is also, of course, to counterfeit: Forgery, whether in one’s smithy or in one’s basement, is an act of criminal deception, an attempt to pass off the ersatz as the genuine article. Is Stephen aware of the equivocation in his declaration, the différence between intention and utterance, the dissemination of his meaning every which way? We cannot know the answer to this question; the next sentence is the text’s last, as Stephen invokes the protection and aid of his mythic forebear, the Dædalus of the novel’s epigraph. But there may be, too, a meaningful difference between Stephen’s own awareness of his writing’s betrayal, or lack thereof, and our understanding as readers. Perhaps, even if Stephen has not, we are able to enjoy a kind of hard-won epiphany; and while our “artist as a young man” wrestles to make an intractable language conform to his meaning, his author instead focuses our attention on the stubborn materiality and historicity of language. A wiser writer—like Joyce, perhaps—would learn to work in accord with language’s stubborn resistances, rather than trying in vain to master them.

As suggested earlier, it’s not simply individual words that slip—as if that weren’t bad enough. But phrases, too, sometimes carry with them untoward baggage, refusing to mean simply what they appear to say. On an early page of the novel, for instance, the affluence of one of Stephen’s classmates at Clongowes Wood School is invoked: “Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory.” A hamper in the refectory means simply that Rody Kickham has a private supply of food available to him in the dining hall—a luxury that Stephen’s family certainly cannot afford for him. The phrase “greaves in his number,” however, is a bit more layered. The standard annotations will tell us that it means “shin-guards in his locker,” suggesting the possibility that shin-guards are not issued to all the boys at Clongowes as standard equipment: Again, the Kickham family’s wealth buys young Rody a degree of luxury that Stephen cannot afford, and when playing football Rody gets kicked in the greaves, while Stephen takes it in the shins. However, a look into the historical Oxford English Dictionary suggests a further dimension: The word “greaves” is quite rare, out of use since the late nineteenth century, and the OED gives as its literary exemplars passages from an obscure poem of Lord Byron, “The Bride of Abydos,” as well as a passage from a far more familiar poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shallot”: “The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves, / And flamed upon the brazen greaves / Of bold Sir Lancelot.” Hence “greaves” isn’t just any old word for shin-guards, but a particularly literary one (the OED also tells us that the word “shin-guards” was in use back in the 1880s); further, it’s not just literary language, but language retaining the flavor of its earlier usage in Tennyson: an identifiably Tennysonian affectation on Stephen’s part (if, as is common in the criticism, we assume Stephen’s consciousness to be shaping, if not exactly writing, the prose of this section). With this Tennyson connection unearthed, it’s easy to look back to a sentence earlier in the paragraph and find Tennyson’s fingerprints there, too: “The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the foot-ballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light” sounds a lot more like something from Idylls of the King or “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or even “The Lady of Shallot” once we’re alerted to Tennyson’s lurking presence in the passage. Further, the early flirtation with Tennyson that lingers around these images and archaisms sheds an interesting light on a later episode in the novel, when Stephen is beaten up by his classmate Heron and his goons for suggesting that Byron is a better poet than the “rhymster” Tennyson. Stephen’s Tennysonianism suggests he had not always thought so.

Moving up one level, we witness Stephen’s growing attraction to the