Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
p. 158, Stephen says, “The soul is born [. . .] first in those moments I told you of.” And we shall later try to indicate, indexwise, with what thoroughness the work interweaves its terms to this end.
Surely, the third chapter should be called “The Sermon.” For that ironic masterpiece of rhetorical amplification is clearly the turning point of the chapter. To say as much, however, is to make a discovery about the form of this novel. For though the culmination of the sermon is close even to the mathematical center of the book (on p. 101 of a 199 page text we come to the “last and crowning torture of all tortures [. . .] the eternity of hell”), there is a very important sense in which the peripety is reserved for Chapter IV, which we might call “The New Vocation.” We shall later try to show how thorough a crisis there may have been in Chapter III, in Stephen’s emotions following the sermon, as revealed in the study of the Joycean esthetic. Meanwhile, we may recall that, when the choice between religion and art is finally made, it is a qualified choice, as art will be conceived in terms of theology secularized. Following Joycean theories of the emblematic image, we might also have called Chapter IV “Epiphany”; for in Stephen’s vision of the bird-girl the symbol of his new vocation is made manifest. Chapter V might then be called “The New Doctrine,” for we here get the catechistic equivalent of the revelation that forms the ecstatic end of Chapter IV.
When an author himself provides subtitles (and thus threatens to deprive the critic of certain delightful exercisings) at least the critic can experimentally shuttle, in looking for particular equivalents where the titles are general, and vice versa. But though all such essentializing by entitlement helps force us to decide what terms we should especially feature in our index, there are other procedures available.
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First, let us consider a somewhat nondescript procedure. Some notations seem more likely than others to keep critical observation centrally directed. We list these at random:
Note all striking terms for acts, attitudes, ideas, images, relationships.
Note oppositions. In the Portrait, of course, we watch particularly anything bearing upon the distinction between art and religion. And as usual with such a dialectic, we watch for shifts whereby the oppositions become appositions. Stephen’s secularizing of theology, for instance, could not be adequately interpreted either as a flat rejection of theological thought or as a continuation of it. Stephen has what Buck Mulligan in Ulysses calls “the cursed jesuit strain [. . .] only it’s injected the wrong way.” And it could be classed as another variant of the many literary tactics reflecting a shift from the religious passion to the romantic (or sexual) passion (the extremes being perhaps the varied imagery of self-crucifixion that characterizes much nineteenth-century literary Satanism).
Pay particular attention to beginnings and endings of sections or subsections. Note characteristics defining transitional moments. Note breaks (a point to which we shall return later, as we believe that, following the sermon, there is a notable stylistic break, a notable interruption of the continuity, even though Joyce’s artistry keeps it from being felt as an outright violation of the reader’s expectations already formed).
Watch names, as indicative of essence. (Cf. numen, nomen, omen.) In one’s preparatory index, it is permissible to “joyce” them, for heuristic purposes, by even extreme punwise transformations. Not just from “dedalus” to “daedalus,” for instance. But, why not even “dead louse,” in view of the important part that the catching and rolling of the louse played (pp. 182–183) in Stephen’s correcting of a misremembered quotation that contained the strategic word, “fall”? (The context has, besides “falls” twice in the quoted line, “falling” twice, “dying falling” once, “fall” once, and “fell” twice. But though Stephen likens himself to a louse, it is the louse that falls this time. He himself is already imbued with the spirit of Daedalian flight, whereby his fall has become transformed into a rise.)
Experimental tinkering with names does not in itself provide proof of anything. (So keep it a secret between us and the index). But it does suggest lines of inquiry, by bringing up new possibilities of internal relationship. On p. 167, for instance, when explaining his esthetic doctrine, Stephen says: “If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood [. . .] make there an image of a cow, is that cow a work of art?” Whereat we might recall not only the reference to cow with which this work began, but also the figure of the dead adolescent lover of Gabriel’s wife in Joyce’s story, “The Dead.” Even the hint of “ivory” is found there (the step from Tusker-Lady Boyle to Tower-of-Ivory Eileen) in Gabriel’s suspicion that his wife had had a clandestine meeting with Furey when ostensibly she “wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl.” We should also recall that the story ends on a paragraph in which the word, “falling,” appears no less than seven times, in the final ecstatic “epiphany” of the snow “falling softly [. . .] softly falling [. . .] falling faintly [. . .] faintly falling.” (There was another notable reference to “falling” in this story. When Gabriel and his wife are about to enter the hotel room where he hopes to enjoy a kind of second honeymoon, the narrative states: “In the silence Gabriel could hear the falling of the molten wax into the tray,” etc. The reference is to a “guttering” and “unstable” candle.) The possible fury-Furey tie-up is thus seen to have brought us by another route to the “logic of the fall” that is so important an aspect of Stephen’s esthetic.15
While watching for the expressions that best name a given character’s number, watch also for incidental properties of one character that are present in another. Such properties in common may provide insight into the ways whereby figures on their face disparate are to be treated as different manifestations of a common motive.
Note internal forms. While noting them in their particularity, try also to conceptualize them. For instance, here’s a neat job for someone who believes as much in the discipline of literary analysis as a mathematician believes in his mathematics: on pp. 182–183, conceptualize the steps from the misremembered line, “Darkness falls from the air,” to the correction, “Brightness falls from the air.” Of course, there are good memorizers who could reproduce the stages for you word for word. But there is a sense in which such accurate memory is itself “unprincipled,” being not much more rational than a mechanical recording of the passage.
Watch for a point of farthest internality. We believe that in the Portrait this point occurs just after the sermon, most notably in the circular passage (p. 105 top) beginning, “We knew perfectly well of course,” [. . .] and ending “We of course knew perfectly well,” with its center in the expression, “endeavouring to try to induce himself to try to endeavour.”
Note details of scene that may stand “astrologically” for motivations affecting character, or for some eventual act in which that character will complete himself. When such correspondences eventualize, they afford us sharper insight into the steps of a work, on its road from emergence to fulfillment. The best illustration we have for this rule is in the first chapter of Conrad’s Victory. There has been talk of Heyst living on an island “as if he were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas,” for “an island is but the top of a mountain” (an expression which we indexed, as the author himself so pointedly made the “equation” for us); then the description proceeds thus:
His nearest neighbour—I am speaking now of things showing some sort of animation—was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him, from among the clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a smoker. And when he lounged out on his verandah with his cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles away.
We could hardly fail to note so “empathic” an image, whereby an object far distant was enigmatically “equated” with a near personal property of an agent (the construct giving us a particularly ingenious kind of scene-agent ratio). And this entry later “pays off” handsomely, of course, as this same volcano breaks into agitation coincidentally with the plot’s eruption into crisis. (This conformity between act and scene is not explained “rationally,” as were the plot to have been shaped directly