A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [14]
He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image [of the love interest in Monte Cristo, Mercedes] which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told 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. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment (p. 56).
While Stephen seems to be imagining some sort of amorous tryst, his imagination has not yet been fed any of the stark details of actual, physical sex: Like his poem about riding the tram home with E—C—just a few pages later, his inexperience leads him here to the brink of a scene that he is unable to imagine. The Count of Monte Cristo, too, is evasive on these questions; and precisely because the story he wishes to act out has skirted the issue, Stephen’s imagination runs into a kind of wall when the actual moment of his “fall” is to take place.
Stephen’s fall from sexual innocence into experience takes place in the closing pages of chapter 2; and when he wanders into the red-light Nighttown district of Dublin, and ends up in the bed of a prostitute, every feature of his earlier fantasy centering on Mercedes is ironically fulfilled. Not knowing where to look for Mercedes, his feet seemingly of their own accord take him “into a maze of narrow and dirty streets.” He knows that his role in his encounter with his Mercedes will be entirely passive, and in his transaction with the prostitute, Stephen “would not bend to kiss her,” and later “swoons” or perhaps, less poetically, passes out. He does indeed “fade into something impalpable under her eyes”; but this is Monte Cristo with an ironic difference. With the veil of a romantic fantasy interposing itself between Stephen and the prostitute, it’s almost as if he’s not present at his own deflowering. The narrative, in this case, both trumps and dictates the real.
One lesson, then, that we might take away from these two exquisitely well written books is that narrative in particular, and language in general, is in a sense the “prison-house” that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, another near-contemporary of Joyce’s, claimed that it was: Reality, or “the reality of experience,” is unavailable to human vessels excepting through the somewhat distorting vehicle of human language. Some, like young Stephen Dedalus, might expend their energies wishing for, working for, a language that would escape all such limitations: a sort of pre-Babel super-language, infinitely adaptable to the infinitely shifting shapes of the real. Another response suggests itself, however—one that Joyce was to work out in greater detail, and with greater care, in his next novel, Ulysses: that if stories are the only means we have to “encounter reality,” it matters very much which stories we carry around in our heads. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both stories that, on one level, counsel caution about the stories with which we furnish our imaginations, make a very good start.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar is Professor of modern British and Irish literary and cultural studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has published a study of James Joyce and the stylistics of postmodernism and has edited or coedited three volumes of essays: on modernism’s relationship to commodity culture, on the intersections of literary modernism and postmodernism, and on theoretical approaches to contemporary popular music. He also serves as coeditor of