I love Steven’s train of thought. Joyce has an incredible ability to express the candid unaffected sincerity of internal thought. Unlike Shakespeare (the king of the soliloquy), Joyce’s character Steven thinks to himself, for himself. In Hamlet, Hamlet obviously thinks to himself --for example the famous “To be or not to be, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer…” -- but Hamlets internal dialogue reads too much like a speech, as though Hamlet speaks to an audience and not himself. Shakespeare’s soliloquies are too well written, while Joyce allows Steven’s thought process to unwind distortedly and ungrammatically.
Steven’s thoughts balance perfectly between intellectual reasoning and unexplained instinctual self-consciousness. For example when Steven teaches his class and makes a comment, which he thinks Mr. Haines would have wanted for the collection of sayings.
“‘Kingstown pier, Steven said. Yes a disappointed bridge.’… For Haines chap book. No one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise.”
Joyce writes Steven’s thoughts as contradictory. Steven is human. He wants to prove himself to Haines, but at the same time he becomes aware of the subservience that accompanies this want. The quote is clever but not too clever. Phrases like “No one to here.” – are not a sentence but a thought and it rings out with the aura of feeling and instinct, not contrived practicality.
On another note, on the plot of the story, I found one important passage of the chapter to be about the ‘possibility of possibilities.’ Steven, while teaching, questions history.
“Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave weaver of the wind.”
The importance of this passage lies beneath the subtext of Homer’s Ulysses. Here, Steven not only questions history, but he questions, as Telemachus and Hamlet did, whether the ‘books are accurate’. He wonders whether Odysseus is coming home. Yes, Odysseus is thought to be dead, but there is a possibility that he is not. Yes, King Hamlet is dead, but what if he was killed. This passage shows Steven having a ‘new hope’, and further emphasizing his persona in connection with Telemachus and Hamlet.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment