Like an Alchemist: The Artist between D’Annunzio and Joyce

Is “total identification with a specific author” achievable?, wonders Pierre Menard in Borges’ Ficciones. After all, the attempt to recreate the Quixote by copying it, and through the experiences of a different historical self, does nothing but overturn or perhaps even abolish the autonomy of the creator, who finds himself to be rather incidentally Miguel de Cervantes (Borges 45–46). The vain attempt to totally identify or engage with the author demonstrates a contradiction and ultimately shows the elusive essence of the author, absent precisely where his or her firm presence is expected to be.

The “death of the Author” utterly transforms the modern text by way of multiplicity and through the lack of a fixed end point. Barthes perceives this “evaporation” of origins as an overcoming of the post-positivist phase of the “Author’s empire” (50–54). It may also be the case for Mallarmé, Valéry, and the Surrealists, but not so for Joyce, in whose work the reigning identity and dissolution of the author are most definitely consistent and united. If the purpose of Portrait is to “unite the person and work,” which are “tyrannically centered on the author,” in Finnegans Wake instead occurs a depersonalisation in which “it is language which speaks, and not the author” (see Barthes 50). Furthermore, Ulysses is both an artist’s novel (“there’s a touch of the artist [even] about old Bloom,” Joyce, Ulysses 303) and a “multiple writing” in which there is no “underlying ground” (Barthes 53). The final configuration of the realistic Bildungsroman—the Künstlerroman with the hyper-subjectivism which is its trademark—announces and contains the very dispersion of the novel-form.

From the time of Stephen Hero, “talking about the perfection of art” for Joyce means talking about the nature of the artist, and to understand a literary work it is above all necessary “to approach the temper which has made the work and to see what … it signifies” (Joyce, Stephen Hero 79). The close examination of the artist’s nature achieves a level of utmost complication in Ulysses and is in particular the eminent subject of speculation in the philosophical chapter, Scylla and Charybdis. Stephen, George Russel and John Eglinton argue over the connection between life and literary work: whether it makes sense to want to know about the artist’s life and if it bears upon the work in any way. “His own image to a man with that queer thing known as genius is the standard of all experiences, material and moral,” states Stephen. Or, “are all these questions purely academic”; do we not care “how the poet lived,” and is every biographical investigation equivalent to “gossip?” (Joyce, Ulysses 250, 236). Finally, to what extent is the artist’s personality an archetypal essence, and to what extent should this essence be identified with the author’s self?

Stephen investigates the “mystery of paternity” starting from a certain prophecy about his own destiny described in Portrait. Since his childhood, Stephen has reflected on his own name, to such an extent that in Ulysses the upsetting question “what’s in a name?” emerges once again (Joyce, Ulysses 268). The name, written on young Stephen’s geography book, is a small fixed point that connects him to the “universe”; or, conversely, the universe, by more and more precise specifications, defines the name in its fatal uniqueness: “Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / Country Kildare / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe” (Joyce, Portrait 15–16). In the famous passage on the walk on Dollymount Strand after his refusal to join the Jesuit order, yet again his name, cheered and distorted by his companions (“Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!”), reveals to Stephen his own destiny: “now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy.” In the distance “a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air … a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve” seems to appear. The prophetic name of the “fabulous artificer” (“Dedalos”) alludes to the myth of...