Stoom: the universal comedy of James Joyce

The title Harold Kaplan gives to the first section of his critique of James Joyce is Stoom: the universal comedy of James Joyce. As we have seen with Gustave Flaubert, this brand of comedy is as serious as it gets.

I mentioned previously that Kaplan has a tendency to put much of the responsibility for modern fiction on the shoulders of its authors. For example, he specifically faults Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for the final shattering of the anthropomorphic consciousness. But this focus on the artist is one of the prerogatives of literary critics.

According to Harry Levin, a scholar of both modernism and comparative literature cited by Kaplan, “With writers, there is always what Henry James called ‘the figure in the carpet’, a pattern woven into the warp of historic necessity by the woof of artistic intention, which it is the task of criticism to discover and to set forth” (pp. 9-10).¹

I think this study will demonstrate that the dilemma modern fiction describes is real and it is still with us. More to the point, it is still explosive. Harold Kaplan’s critique of modern fiction is one view of this reality.

The Importance of Priests

Kaplan begins this first section by noting Joyce’s description of one of his characters. Joyce tells the reader he is possibly a defrocked priest or else an unemployed actor.

“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”

A person resembling a poor clergyman or a poor actor appeared in the doorway. His black clothes were tightly buttoned on his short body and it was impossible to say whether he wore a clergyman’s collar or a layman’s because the collar of his shabby frock-coat, the uncovered buttons of which reflected the candlelight, was turned up about his neck…(Dubliners p. 111).²

We learn that the character resembling a poor clergyman in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is indeed a priest when Mr. Henchy addresses him as Father Keon. Kaplan says this description of the priest ‘might be presented as [Joyce’s] own sly signature’.

In any case, it is clear that priests hold a place of importance in Joyce’s writing. Kaplan puts it like this: ‘[T]he priestly imagination claims a performance on the stage of the infinite, and it claims the sacramental power of fusing spirit and matter, or putting it closer to our interests’. (Kaplan p. 43)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It’s not immediately clear whether this view of the priestly imagination is merely Kaplan’s interpretation of Joyce or Joyce’s own opinion. However, Kaplan later attributes it to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.³

In Stephen Dedalus’ young imagination the priest is the human figure who has come closest to sharing the omniscience and omnipotence of God. He has the power to act with his knowledge, and in his great action, the mass, which is crucial and cathartic, he makes his knowledge penetrate life and change it. The mass is a new act of creation, repeated endlessly in the ritual, whereby the imagination viewed as spiritual meaning inhabits and redeems passive matter. The wine which becomes blood concretely makes the fusion of terms whereby expressive meaning, held to its highest concept as God, has absorbed the object, the everlasting externality which the priest contemplates as he holds up the chalice. His ritual resolves the problem of life and declares it a unity and a success; the God of meaning arrives at his call with teleological purpose. The priest who cannot breach the external to that ancient miracle has failed, and Joyce’s artist conceives himself at that point of failure. (Kaplan p. 44)

“The Sisters”

After noting the presence of broken, transformed, dying and dead priests in several of the Dubliners stories, Kaplan cites Harry Levin, who said that the chalice which broke in the hands of the ruined priest of “The Sisters” was the symbol of a broken communion and a theme throughout Joyce’s work. Kaplan argues that the priest’s paralysis suggests the impotent high intelligence and imagination removed from their vocation (Kaplan p.44).

It was that chalice he broke….That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still….they say it was the boy’s fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him! (Dubliners p. 12)

“Araby”

Furthermore, in a back room where a priest had died, the boy in “Araby” (Dubliners, pp. 23-29) ‘found his precious books which plant the pure but secularized seeds of romance in his mind’ (Kaplan, p. 44).

The Successful Communion Versus The Ambition of the Artist

Kaplan argues that the ambition of the artist is the urge to transcend limits. He believes Joyce made this clear in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Portrait becomes Joyce’s introduction to Ulysses, but according to Kaplan everything Joyce wrote before Ulysses was to prepare himself and the reader for that task.

Joyce’s theme is the world, but in the total effort to conceive it, like a god creating a world, he first has to account for the creation of himself (Kaplan p. 44).

Recall that Kaplan also compared Flaubert to a God, a spectator god.

Irony

Kaplan calls Joyce ‘the radical modern ironist’ who built his career as an artist on the basis of destroyed religious thought (p. 4). We already know what he means by ‘radical modern ironist’ from his discussion of irony in the work of Gustave Flaubert.

Kaplan introduces this theme on page 26 of The Passive Voice.⁴ First he cites Erich Auerbach, ⁵ who concluded that Flaubert was motivated in large part by his hatred for nineteenth century bourgeois culture. Kaplan agreed with this view, but he thought there was something else influencing Flaubert; something that motivated James Joyce as well. This was the use of irony.

It seems to me, however, that Flaubert’s neutrality deserves greater credit. His later disciple, Joyce, in his portrait of the archetypal artist, described how emotions are transcended in the Olympian spirit of irony, based on a lucidly detached omniscience which purges anger, fear, and desire. The irony we speak of may be a value for the artist, if not perhaps for the teacher or psychologist, in that it satisfies the appetite for power in the intelligence; it arises particularly from the discrepancy between the wide consciousness of the observer and the restricted consciousness of the subject… (Kaplan p. 27)

Stephen Dedalus as a Failed Priest

We are told that in the priest’s hands, the power of the sacrament has the potential to fuse spirit and matter. Kaplan repeats this idea using words that are more specific to his critique of the modern mindset. The priestly imagination is the ‘power to reconcile illusion and reality‘.

Kaplan emphasizes that Stephen Dedalus is unable to fulfill this role. The priestly ritual is based on the principle of dramatic belief but the only source available to Stephen is dramatic disbelief. He says this is a radical understanding of the limitations on both his knowledge and his power. Stephen still feels the intensity of purpose and the vocation remains, but he has no hope for success.

We say then that the theme of Joyce’s early work was the struggle of the priest-artist for his old vocation. The story of Stephen Dedalus is the record of a consciousness yearning to exceed itself, and finding out the limitations of both knowledge and action. (Kaplan p. 45)

Rebellion and its Costs

The shocks experienced in Stephen’s childhood, boyhood and youth result in alienation and paranoia. It begins with his plunge into the cold muddy water and a resulting fever. Kaplan sees these experiences as ‘difficulties’, until Stephen rebels. Then the boy becomes a personality. His answer to the experiences that demanded submission and retreat is no. That ‘no’ becomes his response to all impositions on his personal power, freedom and knowledge.

Stephen’s rebellion gives him a personal consciousness, but this consciousness is actually an outsized demand for a universal consciousness. The real issue is his own total victory over the world, or a transfiguration of knowledge and power.

The Poet

In his poetry, Stephen allowed elements that he considered common and insignificant to drop out. The result is that his poetry creates its own world and invites a subjective trance.

Kaplan says that for Stephen, love is a domination of experience. He backs this up with lines from Chapter 2 of ‘A Portrait of the Artist’:

A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and, in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and timidity and inexperience were to fall from him. (Kaplan p. 46)

Instead, Stephen experiences his first sex encounter in the brothels. Kaplan argues that this demonstrates that the consciousness which strives for dominion has limitations in action.

The Limitations on Knowledge

Stephen had begun to understand the limitations on knowing as a child. He decided very early that only God can know everything and think about everything everywhere. God understood French for example.

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that (A Portrait, Kindle Version, Location 151-155).

Kaplan Understands Flaubert and Joyce to be Unmerciful Toward Their Protagonists

One way in which Joyce is unmerciful to Stephen, according to Kaplan, is that he allows Stephen’s religious struggle to turn back upon itself. In his youth, Stephen was the ‘ironic butt of the effort to know everything’. Then, when he is studying to be a priest, the retreat sermon comes to his mind. Stephen’s religious imagination ‘hears its own voice and becomes nonsense’ (Kaplan p 46).

Father Arnall had given a series of sermons on hell to Stephen’s class. Here, Kaplan interjects that heaven and hell have been furnished with the ‘inept details of the priest’s invention’. In other words, he seems to suggest that this is not how heaven and hell are really taught in the Church; the sermons include the priest’s exaggerations. But whatever its accuracy Stephen was convinced that it was a forecast of his own fate and it led him to see the possibility of salvation. Unfortunately, mundane reality kept breaking in.

When he returned to his room after the lesson, he was afraid to open the door. When he did open it, he prayed that death might not take him as he passed over the threshold, ‘that the fiends that inhabit darkness might not be given power over him’. He felt faces there with eyes waiting and watching.

The Retreat Sermon

Later he tells Cranly that he has to understand the prospect of spending eternity with the Dean of Studies. But we know that in his room on that day those lectures inspired the retreat sermon in his own mind. The ‘voice of the priest’ (Stephen’s voice) ‘argues itself down with its own hyperbole, its own faltering imagination’. The retreat sermon is ‘Superbly mock-heroic’ in Kaplan’s estimation:

We knew perfectly well of course that though it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try to induce himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary and so we know of course perfectly well–(A Portrait of the Artist, Kindle Version, Chapter III, Loc 2005)

The point according to Kaplan: that sentence will never complete itself. It is the self-parody and self-defeat of the ambitious human understanding.

The Ambitious Consciousness And The Parable of Dedalus and Icarus

The main parable, Kaplan says, is that of Dedalus and Icarus, with Icarus falling from a flight too close to the sun and Dedalus surviving to record it. He argues that this is the dilemma of the most ambitious consciousness in the world.

Icarus

The crafter Daedalus is ‘a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring imperishable being.’ In Joyce’s fulfillment of the parable, all particular instances of flight are doomed either to find themselves wingless in the outer circle of nonsense, the inexpressible inane, or to find themselves falling back to the sluggish earth. (Kaplan p. 47)

The Choices Stephen Rejects

Stephen’s first need is flight from the common-place, oppressive earth. We see his permanent sense of betrayal, his paranoia of suffering. He spends his young life challenging sluggish ties and makes a series of rejections. He flies past religion, language and nationality as he rejects the possibility of love, the actual love of his mother, and the offered friendship of Cranly. But what is he searching for beyond the freedom of flight?

Stephen’s dilemma was to either fall back to the humiliation of commonplace being, or to continue fight. If he were saved in the religious sense, he couldn’t see why it was necessary that he continue to live. But to continue flight was to reach the placeless, timeless inane, as evidenced by the retreat sermon. It is important that this sermon appeared at the moment of Stephen’s urge to believe. And instead of the teleological answer, Stephen got that strange circular sentence.

Stephen’s Demand

Stephen demands to know what form of knowledge can redeem the activity of consciousness. And the answer has been predestined by the parable. Daedalus returned from his flight to construct a giant maze for Minos. Like Icarus, Stephen’s experience made him fall. But his flight can be renewed by his artist’s conscience.

Stephen’s Mission and his Triumph

It is a triumph of sorts when Stephen chooses neither religious service nor the world of duties and despair. He now presides over both. He’s the intermediary between the ideal and real, the sacred and profane. He dedicates himself ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life’.

Joyce Illustrates His Theme at Several Points

• The Dross of the Commonplace
  • Stephen feels romantic agony when his girl does not meet him after his performance in the school play. The agony was out of proportion to his expectation, which was somewhat of a fantasy in the first place, but afterward he walks the streets and passes a stable. “That is horse piss and rotted straw. It will calm my heart,” he thinks to himself. But what it actually calms is not suffering so much as the threat of unreality and solipsism (Kaplan p. 48).
    • Stephen’s Principle of Art
      • Kaplan gives the example of the fancy vague babble of Stephen’s poems. He is sitting before a blank page and trying to write a poem for E. C. “Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint of brooding on the incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon…”(A Portrait location 846).
      • Kaplan says that to understand Stephen’s principle of art we must compare poems like the ones Joyce published in Chamber Music with the dross of the commonplace that he invites in his fiction.
• Consciousness and Matter Speak Directly to Each Other
  • Stephen is silent in his encounters with Davin, MaCann, and Cranly. One brings emotional claims, another, abstract doctrine or a program for living. However, he is talkative with Lynch. Stephen’s esthetic creed is his only faith, and Lynch, the vulgarian and buffoon is the proper audience. To properly discuss beauty, he must talk to the man who writes on the backside of Venus because he shares Stephen’s vision of beauty. As Stephen says to Lynch, the man who ate cowdung as a child, “we are all animals, I also am an animal...Thus the consciousness and matter speak directly to each other…The others cannot deal with Lynch, but Stephen can, and it has been the object of his education to learn how. Lynch, the ultimate rawness of material fact, cannot yield to a normative or teleological approach, but he must yield to an esthetic mastery of experience.” (Kaplan p. 49)
    • Stephen’s God
      • Stephen says, ‘I can’t love God but perhaps I can unite my will with his’” (Kaplan p. 49). But this is not the God who moves himself in material nature. It’s the God of omniscient consciousness…‘raised above desire and loathing‘.
    • Stephen’s Theory of Art
      • Joyce ends A Portrait by describing Stephen’s theory of art. Kaplan defines it as a metaphysics and a program for living. “If his creed is in any sense an affirmation of life it must be understood in consistency with his cold final rejections of religion, politics, friendship, family, and love.” (Kaplan p. 50)
      • In Kaplan’s view, a typical romantic revolt would be less of a contradiction. In other words, if Stephen had rejected conventional sterilities for the sake of ‘life’ in a naturalistic, neo-primivistic aspect.
      • “The life Stephen Dedalus has chosen has a special nature and definition, it is the life of the artist.” And this does not mean the rejection of one limited or unsatisfactory sphere of action for another. The complement of his refusal to become a priest is the refusal to be immersed in the body and routine of lay life. His philosophic dilemma was to see that the choice of one meant the moving away from the other. (Kaplan p. 50)
    • A Keystone in Modern Intellectual Biography
      • In Kaplan’s view, A Portrait stands as a keystone in modern intellectual biography in the way it describes a divorce between spirit and matter. Or rather, the irreconcilability of nature and mind. (Kaplan p. 51)
  • The Vocation of the Artist is the Triumphant Alternative to the Defeated Vocation of the Priest.
    • The old priestly ambition was to make a complete commitment of consciousness to action. The vocation of the artist escapes the failure of this commitment by refusing all commitments entirely for the sake of the free omniscient consciousness which acts only in the creation of itself in the images of what it knows. “In his rejection of religion, politics and friendship Stephen is declaring that action as such is failure, and that the conflicts of the ideal and the real are unresolvable.” (Kaplan p. 51)
    • “The object of art is to be raised above desire and loathing.”
      • Consciousness transcends action but it must first remove itself from the limitations of action.

Conclusion

In the last part of this section Kaplan ties his critique back to his initial thesis. He explains that the appetite for omniscience prompts the fiction, as it always has. And if it can’t offer teleological reasoning it compensates itself with lucidity. This imitates modern science. But when modern science progresses in its empirical awareness, it gives up its power to explain.

Here, he presents the example of “The Dead” (Dubliners, pp. 157-201) where a final awareness, no longer Gabriel’s, rises above the living and the dead to illustrate how the fragmentary human agent finds relief only in the rising general consciousness which absorbs him.

This consciousness is closer to the dead than the living perhaps, but it sees them together, the snow falling on all. (Kaplan p. 52)

We should understand the conclusion of A Portrait in the same way. The series of experiences in the book end finally in silence. Stephen’s mental stream has become a series of passages in his notebook, a writer’s notebook. Detachment is complete, the communication and dialogue with others as well as the emotional rhetoric in his own mind, are finished.

We remember the early temptation toward the omniscience and omnipotence of the priesthood. ‘No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God!’ Driven in the same direction but without the aid of supernatural power and knowledge, this modern artist, the voice of the conscience of his race, pays a strange and severe penalty. The price is his own passive neutrality; to become the knower of all that is knowable he must give up his own identity. (Kaplan p. 53)

1. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, Faber and Faber, London, 1941 ↩︎
2. James Joyce, Dubliners, Union Square & Co., LLC, India, 2024. ↩︎
3. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Diamond Pocket Books ℗ Ltd., New Delhi, 2021 ↩︎
4. Harold Kaplan, The Passive Voice, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1966. ↩︎
5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, Doubleday Anchor, p. 433. ↩︎

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