Weaving the Wind: Stephen Dedalus, Joseph Joubert, and the Conditions of Art

THE COMPARATIST WEAVING THE WIND: STEPHEN DEDALUS1 JOSEPH JOUBERT, AND THE CONDmONS OF ART James Walton Notre vie est du vent tissé. (796) Ferme les yeux et tu verras. (286) Joubert, Carnets Weave, weaver of the wind. (2.52) Shut your eyes and see. (3.9) Joyce, Ulysses^ The affinities between Stephen Dedalus and Joseph Joubert (17541824 ), another "author without a book" (Blanchot 75), have escaped the attention even ofJoyce's French friends and commentators. Owing no doubt to the absence ofexternal evidence, the similarities between the above passageshave beenoverlookedby source-hunters, thoughWeldon Thornton concedes the likelihood of a "more specific source for the weaving allusions which I have not found." Thornton cites several passages from Blake, including the following Unes from Jerusalem: "the Daughters of Albion [i.e. Memory as opposed to Imagination] Weave the Web/ Of Ages and Generations" (28). Gifford (26) adds Isaiah 19:9 ("and they that weave networks shall be confounded") and John Webster: Vain the ambition of kings Who seek by trophies and dead things To leave the living name behind And weave but nets to catch the wind. (The Devil's Law Case V.iv. 124-27) For a later weaving allusion in Ulysses (9.376-78), both Thornton and Gifford supply a passage from the end of Pater's The Renaissance describing the process to which all "analysis" must yield: "that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves" (Thornton 177; Gifford 218). Joubert's own acknowledged source is familiar enough to underlie all modern instances. He quotes Job 7:6-7 from the Vulgate: "Memento quia ventus est vita mea," then "Dies mei velocius transierunt quam tela textente sucàditur" (796), reversing the lines of the original: "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope./ O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good." Taken together these sources, consistent with the argument of Ulysses, suggest that we are all practitioners as well as products ofan insubstantial art. Still, as variations of a weaving metaphor they constitute no more than a common cultural text, whereas the reader of Joubert's posthumously published notebooks will find in their rhetoric, in their phenomenology, and in the psychological conditions of their production a fully articulated type or pattern ofStephen's predicament 69 JOYCE, JOUBERT, AND THE CONDITIONS OFART as "artist." If Joyce's attention was drawn to Joubert by his Parisian connections or by the essays of Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold or merely by the name-fetish that brought ahost ofJ.J.s into his writings, the fact has gone unrecorded. Only by examining Ulysses itself (and secondarily A Portrait) can we demonstrate the extent to which a J. J. other than the author lurks outside the circumference ofthe narrative, supplying materials for the construction ofStephen's mind. In general that mind can be characterized as belonging to an author manqué, one who pursues the implications of Literature to a point that makes literature impossible (or who applies himself assiduously to an art that forestalls art); one whose representation of the world consists largely in the elaboration of a single trope ("Notre vie est du vent tissé") and whose paralyzing cosmic fiction figures as the last net that Dedalus must fly past in order to become Joyce. The first appearance of the weaver metaphor in Ulysses presents an example of projection on Stephen's part. Resentment of Mulligan has turned him for a moment into a defender ofthe faith. Placing his housemate among a "brood of mockers," he pronounces their common fate: "The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind" (1.657-63). But the oracular tone quickly turns to one of self-mockery: "Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zutl Nom de Dieul" 0.665). The use of French, indicating Stephen's fresh recollections ofParis, will be linked to the weaving image throughout the Telemachiad and beyond. At present , Stephen's attack on mockers and "subtle" heresiarchs is plainly disingenuous, for in Episode 1 it is he, self-styled freethinker(1.626), in whose own mocking mirror (2.159) we catch, through the interstices of time and space, repeated...