Stephen Dedalus - Analyst and Analysand

The third episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses presents the convoluted interiority of Stephen Dedalus. Walking upon the strand he reflects on the “ineluctable modality of the visible…Signatures of all things I am here to read” (31). In a fit of Aristotelian introspection, Stephen understands that the visible and audible worlds are forced upon him. From this comes the need to order the world of representation through language. The ears are never closed and there is no control over what is seen when the head is turned. Stephen is attacked by what he is forced to see and hear. The appearance of things is contingent on both reality, and one’s construction of what is perceived. As a result, nature for Stephen is like a book, it must be read if one is to find any significance in it. If it lacks any signification, it is in danger of unraveling. Because Stephen’s reality is so self-contained, it is just this unraveling that he, through language, must prevent both in nature and within himself.

Poetic language is all Stephen has to protect himself from the real. As he walks the shore he ponders “seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: aware of them bodies before of them coloured” (31). Stephen understands the nature of the real, how it must be mediated through symbolic representation. Yet, the real to Stephen is of a dual nature, that of the “diaphane” and the “adiaphane.” The former is representative of a transparent real, that which is tied to the imaginary and the symbolic, while the latter is that which is emancipated from the two. The adiaphane is utter blackness, it true, unmitigated real. Nature itself, as Lacan explains in Seminar XXIII, is similarly split through language. He states, “Nature…is distinguished by not being one. Thus the logical procedure for approaching it – to term nature that which one excludes in the very act of taking interest in something, that something being distinguished by bearing a name. By this procedure, nature only risks being characterized as a hodge-podge of what lies outside nature” (1). This, for Stephen, is the seaspawn and seawrack, the crunching filth that remains incoherent until it is named.

Stephen tells himself to “Shut your eyes and see” (31). Only through language may he eliminate the real as it is forced upon him. The internal and external worlds in which he is forced to wander must be measured by an “Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching” (31). The trauma of sensation, as well as the nightmare of history is un-faceable if there is a world without language. Stephen is constantly writing and re-writing himself, thus extending that text to the world around him. He calls himself a “changeling…I spoke to no-one: none to me” (38). For Stephen there is no coherent identity without language.

This changeling Stephen is the result of one who personifies the sexual relation in language. Lacan asserts: “We must break through into a new imaginary in relation to meaning.” This implies a discourse between language and the body. Stephen is perpetually involved in this, for language is his sole possession. Lacan furthers this: “One only recognizes oneself in what one has. One never recognizes oneself…in what one is” (46-7). Stephen is meant to be read, “Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful…When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”(34). Stephen desires to be both father and son, to be “made not begotten” (32). It is only through words that this can take place.

Sheldon Brivic, in his book The Veil of Signs does a remarkable job of explicating Stephen’s condition. He describes Stephen’s creative drive by way of sin. Brivic explains, “sin becomes an activity through which he develops himself by being shaken loose from an established context in order to enter a realm of semiotic shifting that expands his range of linguistic structure…The more he possesses language and its devices the more mind he has.” It is “life as a process of self-creation” (37). Stephen may only create his own world, become the “Unfallen Adam” (U 39), by remaining an apostate. The Other, for Stephen, thus becomes the mind of the artist, “he tries to claim this mind as his own by foreseeing the artist who will give form to his life (Riquelme 84), but this artist must always remain beyond him” (Brivic 37). The mess of signifiers forced upon him ineluctably must all fit neatly into the universe he has created, yet this is impossible. There will always be that “word known to all men” that he can never know. There will always be a return to what he has forsaken, namely the Church and the family. Stephen refuses the return Lacan gives emphasis to when he states “this decided filth must be passed through, so that something in the order of the real may perhaps be found [retrouver]” (48). For Stephen, the knot of the R.S.I. is in constant danger of unraveling. His notion of navel chords as a unifying system, “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh” (32), is threatened by the word that he cannot know. Without this word, there may be no consistency to the knot.

Because Stephen is so self-contained he takes on the remarkable position of being both analyst and analysand. He exists entirely within himself, and lacks an adequate interlocutor with whom to convey his innermost self. The closest he had was Cranly, his only real friend in A Portrait. Buck Mulligan is no substitute. It is a mere touch that sets the two apart: “Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s…Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen…Cranly’s arm. His arm” (6). Thus Stephen’s only true analyses are within himself. The Proteus episode, consisting entirely of Stephen’s interior monologue, is he on the couch set against himself: “You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time…My two feet are in his boots are at the end of his legs” (31). He wanders, collecting sensations, and constructs his own reality so as to prevent any disruption in the unity of the world. He even desires the presence of another, namely Cranly, “Stanch friend, a brother soul…His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all” (41). His self-exile has isolated him. He has truly become the boy that can enjoy invisibility (9).

It is the enjoyment of invisibility, the being through words in a self-created world, which protects Stephen from the real. In the construction of his own reality, he may fully cohere the R.S.I. Yet Stephen’s real is inescapable. This real is characterized in the ghost of his mother, which twice affects him symptraumatically. Stephen suffers greatly for the loss of his mother. Indeed, he is blamed for her death, as he would not kneel and pray for her at her dying request. First she appears as a “Ghoul,” a “chewer of corpses” to which he implores to “Let me be and let me live” (9). The second and most striking of the apparitions takes place in the Circe episode. Written in play form, Joyce uses this as a means to institute a meta-fiction into the narrative. As the Bloomsday world is a fictionalized account of Dublin in 1904, the events in Circe unfold in Nighttown, a fictionalization of the Bloomsday world. In this, the world is grotesque and debased, hallucinatory and dreamlike. It is a realm without adequate language, and therefore without adequate signification. It is the perfect inverse to Stephen’s interior world in Proteus. The wanderers of Nighttown are forced to face the unface-able. In other words, Nighttown is the real. Stephen’s mother appears “emaciated…her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould” (473). She commands Stephen to repent or suffer the eternal fires of Hell. He pleads to her, states his case, yet still a “green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart” (475). Language is of no shelter in Nighttown. He is thrust into the real, that from which he is foreclosed. He asks of his mother, “Tell me the word…the word known to all men” (474). Unable to cloud the real through language, he smashes the light, “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (475). The exchange with his mother in Circe relates directly back to Proteus. In recalling his time in Paris, the phrase “Shattered glass and toppling masonry” (36) arises regarding a bombing committed by an IRA friend. As well, he asks himself “What is that word known to all men?” (41).Without the mediation of the symbolic, namely poetic language, Stephen’s world is at risk of total fragmentation.

Through all of his introspection, his need to attain the Other of the mind of the artist, and to shed the fetters of the world that he has tried to forsake, all Stephen can do is write. He is a crippled creator, neutered by the inability to fully cohere the knot of the R.S.I. Despite all of the creation that takes place in Proteus, it culminates as “he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words” (40). Language cannot save him. His understanding of signifiers is what he injects into them, not their true meaning. What he does not understand is that his system only allows for a nature that is indeed a hodge-podge, it becomes a senseless blabbering and nothing more. Furthermore, Stephen’s perception is stunted as the day before he had broken his glasses. He is by no means clear-sighted, neither physically or as creator. He is unable to focus on a unity because he has separated himself from any semblance of such. Only when he allows himself to fully understand the signification he creates may he achieve the consistency he so severely lacks.