The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered

7. Joyce’s Poetics of Knowledge

7 Joyce’s Poetics of Knowledge Marc C. Conner As Stephen Dedalus, aspiring Irish poet, wanders Sandymount Strand midway through the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, he asks himself the question that will haunt him throughout the day: “What is that word known to all men?” (U 3.435). Although in “Scylla and Charybdis” Stephen will suggest that the word is “love,”1 nevertheless in “Circe” he still seeks the word: “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men” (U 15.4192–93). Stephen’s epistemological uncertainty and his relentless pursuit of the word of knowledge suggest that among the many roles Stephen assumes in Ulysses, he is preeminently the seeker of knowledge. The elusive “word” he so restlessly seeks is the wisdom that he hopes will deliver him from the bondage of the world. For ultimately Stephen does not seek the creation of art—which is one of many reasons his actual artistic production is so scanty. What he fervently desires is salvation without recourse to faithful obedience. This desire reveals Stephen as an avatar of the young James Joyce, who agonized over this same yearning in the poems of his first book, Chamber Music. The dramatic “non serviam” that Stephen declares near the end of Portrait , and insists upon, perhaps even to his own destruction, in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, confirms his refusal to attain salvation through obedience . Yet, as Hugh Kenner points out, Stephen “never expresses doubt of the existence of God . . . his Non serviam is not a non credo” (127).2 In his climactic conversation with Cranly near the end of Portrait, Stephen states of theEucharistthathewill“neitherbelieveinitnordisbelieveinit,”andwhen Cranly then asks Stephen if he is “sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God,” Stephen responds, “I am not at all sure of it.” In Joyce’s Misbelief, RoyGottfriedrespondstosuchpassagesbyconcludingthat 144 · Marc C. Conner Stephen, like Joyce, is neither a believer nor a disbeliever, but rather a “misbeliever ,” one who still engages issues of religious belief but “consider[s] them from a perspective, an angle, that is willfully driven just to the outside” (2). Gottfried interprets Stephen and Joyce as definitive heretics, deliberate schismatics, unable to abandon their quest for what the faith promises, but unwilling to surrender to orthodoxy’s demand for “assent, self-denial, and submission” (2–3): Joyce was concerned with religious ideas, never able to break away from their consideration, never able to break their powerful hold on his mind. He turns to them again and again early and late in his works, never able to either disprove or ignore them. Neither a disbeliever nor an unbeliever, but never able to be a believer, he misbelieves continually . His misbelief affords him possibilities of challenge, of openness, that all invigorate his artistic endeavors. (9) Gottfried’s central claim, that Joyce never abandoned the religious quest, is consonant with my approach to the figure of Stephen and the young Joyce himself (even if I take issue with many of Gottfried’s claims and his methods of reading Joyce’s religious vision).3 Stephen’s ambivalence in religion is marked by his inability to comprehend love—when asked by Cranly if he loves his mother, Stephen can only say, “I don’t know what your words mean”—and by his overwhelming terror toward “a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear” (P 240, 243), including the transubstantiated Eucharist. Caught between his terror of the divine and his bafflement by love, Stephen seeks a salvific knowledge that will empower him to attain the heavenly kingdom in which he cannot quite disbelieve. This knowledge will liberate him from the oppressive authority of the Catholic Church, which holds in its grasp the keys to the otherworldly kingdom that Stephen demands. Stephen therefore is a definitive Gnostic seeker, hoping to “progress beyond faith to understanding, that is, to gnosis” (Pagels, Origin of Satan, 167). He desires what Hans Jonas describes as “‘knowledge of the way’—of the soul’s way out of the world— comprising the sacramental and magical preparations for its future ascent . . . reach[ing] the God beyond the world and reunit[ing] with the divine substance” (“Gnosticism,” 340). Although Stephen has rejected salvation through the Church and its required faith and obedience, he cannot reject Joyce’s Poetics of Knowledge · 145 his desire for salvation. Consequently he replaces salvation through faith...