False Images

Towards the very end of the novel, Stephen writes,

"Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty... presses in his arms the loveliness, which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world."

And yet, despite this conviction, for all his asserted perspectives on esthetics, there is the sense that Stephen still fears the reality he has come to believe in and adopt, not only for its potential lack of truth but the part of himself that continues to run contradictory to the perspectives he claims; the part of him that dwells on what should not be beautiful and the desires and consequences of the physical world. Despite his supposed contentedness alone and his asserted desire to discover and create beauty, he still longs to be discovered himself, dwelling on the girl and the idea of being beckoned into a house like Davin. Consequently, he is similarly hesitant to dismiss the potential of faith and religion completely. Stephen is, however, aware of this perpetual underlying self doubt which he symbolizes with the idea of the crocodile in the mud and the old man with the red eyes, writing, "It is with him I must struggle all through night till day come, till he or I lie dead..."

Another specific scene captures the essence of Stephen's residual fear and doubt. Before his conversation with Cranly, Stephen contemplates the girl and the dusk she passes through, remembering incorrectly, the line, "Darkness falls from the air." Initially, he feels a "trembling joy" but then begins to contemplate the reason behind the sensation, and as he does, concludes that the feeling is associated with physical desire which he does not want to "corrupt" his perception of her with. He wonders, "Could his mind then not trust itself?" and later thinks, "All the images it awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth." In his conversation with Lynch, Stephen seems to emphasize the significance of the mind and soul above all as they are the sources of transcendence and control necessary to an artist and life; the soul must learn to take flight and avoid the "nets" wishing to delude it. In this moment, however, Stephen faces the possibility that he cannot trust his mind, may not possess any control over it or the agency involved in creating. Instead, he wonders if it is possible that what he creates are illusions (vermin), whether his art can ever get close to the truth, and if it is possible he lives in just as much delusion as the ideologies of others he has come to reject. This self awareness, however, is what allows Stephen to go out into the world simultaneously wandering lost yet with direction, the dreaded "abandon" he mentioned to Lynch and the forging of his own path.

"The Terror of Sleep"

From the moment Stephen Dedalus makes the journey to Cork with his father in James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his mindset becomes increasingly ambivalent, his idealism merging and colliding with the opposite extreme of growing defeatism. While his somewhat voluntary alienation can be perceived as a sort of superiority, I think it arises from his mounting fear; the fear of certain isolation which consequently prevents him from acting upon the potential of connection.

In Chapter II especially, this feared "isolation" seems to manifest itself as the concept of living death or oblivion. On the train, Stephen falls asleep for hours and wakes up to find his father and most everyone else asleep, realizing his fear of not being fully conscious while life continues to unfold, of not understanding others and himself: "The terror of sleep fascinated his mind.. unseen sleepers filled him with strange dread as though they could harm him..."  As his father goes on inquiring about the deaths of friends and relatives, Stephen contemplates Parnell's death, Dante, and the more terrible "death" of ceasing to exist through being forgotten, in relation to how Stephen currently views himself as potentially unseen and misunderstood by others. The lust and desire he attempts to quench with his romantic image of Mercedes similarly illustrates this feared oblivion or unconsciousness in the death of his romantic dreams.

Notably, in his encounter with the woman in the street, Joyce first depicts Stephen's thoughts as relief: "He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries." At first, this woman represents to Stephen a potential Mercedes, someone who will hold him and finally see and understand him. Yet despite his want for this, he cannot kiss her and when she does, the result is a darker resolution as opposed to a romantic culmination, the resolution of his repressed lust. Through his descriptions, Joyce describes Stephen as willfully giving up his consciousness, surrendering to the previously feared oblivion. In such a way, he doesn't wake but instead goes on to perceive himself as "in mortal sin," essentially half-surrendering to living death as he believes himself to already be spiritually dead.

I couldn't help thinking of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" throughout this section. Throughout the whole poem, Prufrock fantasizes about and struggles with the idea of acting upon his desire in the potential of connecting with others and never does, similarly perceived as "pretentious" in his fear of being misunderstood. What strikes me the most, however, is the last line of the poem which reads, "Till human voices wake us and we drown." I interpreted this line to mean that ultimately one is disillusioned by ideals, but in this increased awareness enters a sort of living death and surrender, not dissimilar to Stephen's sexual encounter.

Death is of course, contemplated in great depth in the Father's sermons concerning Hell. Part of why he is able to make such an impression on Stephen is because he is able to take Stephen's previous concentration on living death and isolation which he has already somewhat submitted himself to and shift it to the consequences of literal death, preaching that this death and the "last things" is what should be prioritized in the mind. Stephen's previously feared unconsciousness on earth is translated by the preacher into Time and the indulgence of sin that comes with it ("Time is, time was, but time shall be no more!") Consequently, Stephen is supplied with hope as he now believes in the lack of alienation of a life after death and through being loved by God.

Eliot's reference to Dante's Inferno in "The Love Song"suggests that for Prufrock, Hell is this isolation and alienated turmoil he is going through. While Stephen may have been of like mind before, he is now supplied with this concrete description of Hell he can latch on to, something known to be feared as opposed to the "unknown" he submits himself to in his first sexual exploit. This higher mindset, this pre-constructed consciousness is what currently absolves him of attempting to further develop his own struggling perception of those around him.