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2 Three Definitions 4

The first of the definitions to be offered here is the broadest. It concerns “the lyric” in general. The second will deal with “the Platonic dialogue,” considered as a literary species. It is built around the examination of Plato’s dialogues alone: but because the form has been so often followed to varying degrees by other writers, the definition bears upon a field much wider than the works of Plato on which it was based. The third will be the narrowest. It was designed solely to provide a formula for Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This single work was considered somewhat “angelically,” as a kind all by itself. (We say “angelically,” thinking of Aquinas’s doctrine that each individual angel is a distinct species, and the only member of its kind.) But though we treat the work as sui generis, we necessarily define it in terms of some classification. Tentatively, we propose “lyric novel” as the generic name for this work, considered as a species. The prototype of such definition is Aristotle’s formula for tragedy, in the Poetics (Bywater translation).

A tragedy, then is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. Here by “language with pleasurable accessories” I mean that with rhythm and harmony or song superadded; and by “the kinds separately” I mean that some portions are worked out with verse only, and others in turn with song.

I. The “Lyric”

Definition:

A short complete poem, elevated or intense in thought and sentiment, expressing and evoking a unified attitude towards a momentous situation more or less explicitly implied—in diction harmonious and rhythmical, often but not necessarily rhymed—the structure lending itself readily to a musical accompaniment strongly repetitive in quality; the gratification of the whole residing in the nature of the work as an ordered summation of emotional experience otherwise fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified.

Comments:

“A short, complete poem.” Insofar as a fragment of a larger work can be excerpted and offered as a lyric, it must meet these tests of brevity and completeness, to be a perfect lyric. Lyrics can, however, have a function over and above their completeness. Thus, recall Aristotle’s observation that the earlier writers of tragedy used choral songs as integral parts of the action, whereas later these became merely intercalary pieces, having no more to do with the plot of one play than of another.

“Elevated or intense.” “Intense” because even a mood of sullenness or vindictiveness would be a fit subject for a lyric. Sometimes maybe even “dense” would be the word, or “condensed.” Maybe “dense” would serve to cover both “elevated” and “intense.”

“Thought and sentiment.” The contemporary stress upon the purely sensory nature of the lyric image makes this part of the formula look a bit quaint? But let’s recover the whole process here by disclosing the “sentiments” implicit in the “sensations,” and the “thoughts” implicit in the “sentiments.” True, in one poet’s poem of a few lines, such a search may be tenuous, or the findings hard to establish beyond question. But if the critic can gauge the particular poet’s language by the study of other poems by the same poet using the same terms, an entire “philosophy” can be evolved.

“Expressing and evoking.” We might bring the two steps together in the one word “communicating.” But the lyric, at least the subjective lyric, in contrast with the drama, tends to be first an outcry, and second a persuasion. Hence, our preference for splitting into two aspects the single use of a communicative medium.

“A unified attitude.” The “lyric attitude,” as vs. the “dramatic act.” Attitude as gesture, as posture. Think of it in the most plastic sense. As with the statue of a man on horseback, being heroic, in a public park (the scene integral to the gesture and posture not being there at all). Strictly speaking, an attitude is by its very nature “unified.” Even an attitude of hesitancy or internal division is “unified” in the formal sense, if the work in its entirety rounds out precisely that.

Attitude “towards a momentous situation.” Are we being too tricky here, in this word “momentous”? We wanted a word that connoted the significant, outstanding, distinct, or distinguished. “Momentous” would seem to do this, in meaning “of moment.” But there are also suggestions of the “momentary” in the word (hence involving us by another route in the lyric “arrest”). We could think here also of the ways in which Hegel might divide an idea into “moments,” and thereby we also verge upon the “motivational.”

Situation “more or less explicitly implied.” That is, the lyric attitude implies some kind of situation. The situation may be the vaguest sort: The poet stands alone by the seashore while the waves are rolling in; or, the poet is separated from his beloved; or, the poet is old, remembering his youth—etc. Or the situation may be given in great detail. Indeed, a lyric may be, on its face, but a listing of descriptive details specifying a scene but these images are all manifestations of a single attitude (attitude being incipient act, and image implying attitude towards the thing imaged).

“In diction harmonious and rhythmical, often but not necessarily rhymed.” The formula would accommodate both strict and free verse, as it should.

“The structure lending itself readily to a musical accompaniment strongly repetitive in nature.” This part of the definition involves ultimately something so idealistic (rather than realistic) as “tendencies” or “trends.” Hence, maybe this should be out. It implies definition in terms of “ideal paradigm,” as with our account of the five acts in Shakespearean tragedy. Might put the case thus: Recall, for instance, Lord Raglan’s book on The Hero. His recipe of 22 points for distinguishing such a mythic figure. But he does not attempt to find all 22 points for characterizing every such hero. Here is the list in its ideal perfection. But any given mythic hero may fail to qualify in some or other of the particulars.

Raglan’s pattern in toto: (1) Hero’s mother a royal virgin; (2) father a king and (3) often a near relative of mother; (4) circumstances of hero’s conception unusual; (5) reputed to be son of a god; (6) at birth, attempt is made, usually by father or grand-father, to kill him; (7) he is spirited away and (8) reared by foster parents in far country; (9) childhood vague; ( 10) at manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom; ( 11 ) after victory over king and/or giant, dragon, or wild beast, ( 12) he marries princess, often daughter of predecessor; (13) becomes king; (14) for a time reigns uneventfully; (15) prescribes laws; (16) later loses favor with gods and/or his subjects; (17) is driven from throne and city; ( 18 ) meets with mysterious death, (19) often at top of hill; (20) his children, if any, do not succeed him; (21) his body is not buried; (22) nevertheless he has one or more holy sepulchres.

In accordance with this formula, Oedipus scores 22, Theseus 20, Romulus 18, Hercules 17, Jason 15, Dionysus 19, Joseph 12, Moses 20, Robin Hood 13, etc.

Similarly, could we legitimately be to this extent “idealistic” in our definition: Could we say that the lyric “tends ideally” to be of such a nature as would adapt it to rondo-like musical forms; hence, it would have stanzas varying in sense though metrically similar, and built about a recurrent refrain. It could be studied as a departure from this “Urform,” or archetype. But it need not preserve such a structure explicitly, to qualify as a lyric.

“The gratification of the whole residing in the nature of the work as an ordered summation of emotional experience otherwise fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified.” This “gratification” (or “lyric pleasure”) would correspond to the “catharsis” of “pity, fear, and like emotions” (named by Aristotle as the tragic pleasure). An attitude is a summing-up (as were all the details of an actual experience to terminate in an attitude of cheerfulness or gloom on our part). But, as compared with the order in the poem, wherein things fall together felicitously, the experiences reflected there are “fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified.”

One colleague, erroneously hearing the last word as “simplified,” gave us a further insight into the problems of definition at this point. Presumably he was thinking of the experience in art as more complex than the experiences in life. There is certainly a sense in which this can be so: The reader of the poem must “make allowances” for the fact that the poem is an artifact, its moods artificial—and in this respect the poem could be called less “simple” than the actual attitudes it imitates. But when calling the poem a simplification and life outside the poem unsimplified, we have in mind the sense of unity (order) supplied by the poem. Croce would give the name of “catharsis” to such transcending of emotional matter by artistic form, or “expression.

II. Platonic Dialogue

Definition:

A methodic inquiry into first principles, as they are related to the principles of particular subject-matters. The method is by question and answer, engaging at least two persons directly, and others indirectly. The persons are differentiated as to both thought and character. The dialogue is explicitly organized in accordance with the dialectics of definition (generalization, division, successive sub-division, and a ladder of terms graded as regards relative distance from some norm). “Myths” are introduced sometimes as illustration, sometimes as the basis of a new motive that will pervade the disparate matter and infuse it with a common spirit. A kind of catharsis is got, by refutation of error, and by transcendence.

Comments:

“First principles, as they are related to the principles of particular subject-matters.” We have in mind here the distinction between Platonist and Aristotelian method (the distinction that Richard McKeon has called “holoscopic” and “meroscopic” respectively). That is, when Plato discusses some particular field, he does so by asking how it is related to “the Good” universally.

“The method is by question and answer.” Thus consider, in Demetrius’s On Style, this passage showing how different writers would develop the same idea:

In fine, it is with language as with a lump of wax, out of which one man will mould a dog, another an ox, another a horse. One will deal with his subject in the way of exposition and asseveration, saying (for example) that “men leave property to their children, but they do not therewith leave the knowledge which will rightly use the legacy”: a way of putting it which is called “Aristippean.” Another will (as Xenophon commonly does) express the same thought in the way of precept, as “men ought to leave not only money to their children, but also the knowledge which will use the money rightly.”

What is specifically called the “Socratic” manner (eidos Sokratikon)—one which seems to have excited the emulation of Aeschines and Plato in no common degree—would recast the foregoing proposition in an interrogative form, somewhat as follows. “My dear lad, how much property has your father left you? Is it considerable and not easily assessed? It is considerable, Socrates. Well now, has he also left you the knowledge which will use it rightly?” In this way Socrates insensibly drives the lad into a corner; he reminds him that he is ignorant; he urges him to get instruction.

Socrates breaks the maxim into a statement gradually unfolded through a succession of stages, alternate questions and answers, the questions being designed to call forth answers all leading in the direction of the final statement, which thereby is pointed up as discovery, something suddenly pounced upon.

“Engaging at least two persons directly and others indirectly.” The Republic threatens to break the frame here, as it is narrated by Socrates throughout. But the assertions are developed in the usual manner: Socrates tells of questions he put to others, and of questions and assertions made by him atop their replies.

“The persons are differentiated as to both thought and character.” Since the dialogue is essentially a “drama of ideas,” the appeal of character might be classed as Aristotle classed rhythm, harmony, and song in tragedy: among the “sweeteners” (hedusmata; in the Bywater translation, “pleasurable accessories”).

“Terms graded as regards relative distance from some norm.” In the Phaedrus, for instance, all leads up to, and away from, the sentence: “There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul.” This is the point of withinness-of-withinness, there just having been a reference to the “heaven above the heavens” (hyperouranion). Or, otherwise put: Here is talk of a “return home” to “the interior of the heavens”; the imagery concerns an ultimate feasting (ambrosia and nectar), which equals “knowledge absolute in existence absolute” (“the knowledge being in that which is beingly being”). And a few lines further on: Plato proposes his hierarchy of nine degrees, from the highest, the soul born in philosopher, artist, musician, lover, down to the lowest, the tyrant. The form thus aims not only to infuse the many with a principle of oneness, but to specify conditions that correspond to different stages of remoteness from the one (absolute being).

“Myths [. . .] introduced as illustrations” are merely “rational” aids to vivid exposition, like anecdotes. “Myths [. . .] as the basis of a new motive that will pervade the disparate matter and infuse it with a common spirit” are of a different sort. They serve to introduce an ironic image that lifts the dialogue into a higher dimension—and thereafter, things in the lower dimensions are seen in the light of this new vision. We might add here: The vision is wondrous, and designed to evoke by wonder the assent of reverence. (In the Theaetetus, several new starts are contrived, not by the introduction of a full-fledged myth, but by a new metaphor or analogy, that sets up a new perspective, or angle of vision, a series of veerings, with an effect of high comedy inasmuch as Socrates gets complete assent at each stage, before professing himself dissatisfied, stirring things up again, and dragging us away to a new search.)

“A kind of catharsis is got, by refutation of error, and by transcendence.” They are not quite the same. The constant refuting of errors (and its corresponding method: the clarifying of ambiguities) provides the same formal satisfaction as one might get by removing rubbish or by putting scattered papers in order. But the “transcendence” is more positive, involving a kind of “Kierkegaardian leap,” as with the new motive introduced by a mythic image, and the subsequent perceiving of this motive, however faintly, in all things that were, prior to its introduction, viewed without reference to it. (In its way the form fulfills the Gide-Stein ideal of a form that reveals the stages of its development into a form.)

Perhaps we should distinguish introduction, transitions, epilogue and “stages.” Perhaps these would correspond to the “quantitative parts” of tragedy, discussed in Chapter XII of the Poetics. By the “stages” we mean the successive levels of the dialogue, treated as stations of a journey, or as steps in an initiation. On that, more later.

III. The Joyce Portrait

Definition:

A serious prose narrative, imitating an agent’s spiritual, adventures, in the development of a new attitude, with its corresponding doctrine; it employs an intense, elevated, or otherwise exceptional diction (involving a principle of selectivity that makes it representative in the culminative sense rather than as tested by statistical averages); the unity of action centers in the unity of the main character, whose transformations coincide with the stages of the plot; like the lyric proper, it places great reliance upon sensory images, not merely for purposes of vividness (enargeia) but to serve structural ends (the images thus taking on “mythic” dimensions that transcend their specifically sensory significance); the seriousness of the agent and the magnitude of his trials serve to dignify the development towards which the work is directed.

Comments:

“A serious prose narrative.” Some readers have shown an inclination to overrate the possibility that Joyce would have us “discount” Stephen. The work as a whole is complexly motivated; for instance, Lynch’s “sulphuryellow” remarks to Stephen, while Stephen is explaining his ars poetica, should be taken as an integral part of the motivation, not merely as an irrelevant heckling. But we would not thereby conclude that the reader similarly is to “heckle” Stephen. Stephen is naive and excessive, but his trials are to be viewed sympathetically. Even though we are not intended to take the hell-fire sermon as seriously as he did, we are intended to feel that Stephen’s agitation was quite “proper” to his condition. Even though we may partly smile, we take each stage of his development “seriously.”

“Imitating an agent’s spiritual adventures.” Not the adventures of a Jason or an Odysseus—but in the order of meditation, scruples, “change of heart.” (Nor is Joyce’s Ulysses the adventures of an Odysseus.)

“In the development of a new attitude.” Perhaps most would prefer “vision” to “attitude.” (Should we also seek to include here the fact that the work as a whole gains unity in terms of the central agent’s sensibility and development?)

“With its corresponding doctrine.” It is surprising how many analysts, even when asked to discuss the over-all stages in the development of this work, will omit the “catechism,” the doctrinal equivalent of Stephen’s shift from religious to aesthetic vocation. (Here is the respect in which this “lyric novel” overlaps upon another species, an Erziehungsroman like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Ironically, though Joyce became a symbol of pure aestheticism, his novel is a plea for certain artistic policies.)

“Involving a principle of selectivity that makes it ‘representative’ in the culminative sense rather than as tested by statistical averages.” Stephen is not “representative” in the “statistical” sense. He is a rarity. But many modern writers have in one way or another adapted religious coordinates to aesthetic ends. And Joyce imagines such a course “to perfection.” This is what we mean by its “culminative” nature.

“The images may accordingly take on ‘mythic’ dimensions that transcend their specifically sensory significance.” We have in mind here the development that Joyce called an “epiphany.” Our remarks on the Platonic dialogue would indicate respects in which the Joycean form paralleled Plato’s use of the “mythic image” for the figuring of a new motivational dimension. Insofar as the bathing girl stands for Stephen’s new vocation, she is a “mythic” image, as distinct from a purely “sensory” image. She is “enigmatic,” or “emblematic” of the motives that transcend her meaning as a “natural object.”

“The seriousness of the agent and the magnitude of his trials serve to dignify the development towards which the work is directed.” Elsewhere we have offered four ways of subdividing the idea of tragedy: (1) Tragedy as a species (as with Aristotle’s definition of one particular kind of tragedy; a different kind of definition would be needed for, say, Cornelian tragedy); (2) the “tragic rhythm” (the progression from action, through passion, to learning); (3) the “tragic spirit” (the general cult of “mortification” or “resignation”; an ultimate or “cumulative” expression of social repressions voluntarily enacted by the self upon the self, in response to problems of private property in the social order); (4) “tragedy as a rhetorical device, as a means of dignification” (arguing for a cause by depicting a serious person who is willing to sacrifice himself in its behalf; the device has somewhat Satanistic aspects here, as with the heroics of Stephen’s willingness to consider the possibility that eternal damnation might result from his aesthetic “pride”).

IV “Stages”

Consider Chapter XII in the Poetics, the listing of a tragedy’s “quantitative” parts (Prologue, Episode, Exode, Parode, Stasimon, Commos). Here we touch upon the dialectic of “stages.” But Aristotle was so eager to disassociate himself from the Platonist dialectic in general, and to establish a purely secular analysis of tragic “pleasure” (despite its vestiges of ritual “cure”) his treatment here is quite perfunctory. The feeling for the “stages” of a development is slighted.

Our biggest loss here is unquestionably in Aristotle’s unconcern with the trilogy as a form. His analysis of tragedy centers about individual works considered as separate units. Yet what of trilogies like Aeschylus’s Oresteia, where each play carries the over-all development one step farther? (And, of course, if we had the material, we might further extend our theories of form until we also treated the contrasted fourth drama, the final burlesque or “satyr-play,” as an integral part of the playwright’s statement in its entirety.)

Modern anthropologists have supplied information and speculations that enable us to bring Chapter XII to life. (See George Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens, p. 192, for a chart suggesting how the “quantitative parts” of tragedy developed from patterns of religious ritual. Similarly, this Marxist-tempered variant of the Hegelian dialectic serves well for throwing light upon the trilogy as a form. Such considerations are directed two ways. First, the three stages of the only surviving trilogy are analyzed; next, a similar logic of the parts is assumed, in reasoned guesses as to the likely developments in the Prometheus trilogy, of which only the first play survives, though fragments of the others are extant.)

Often, however, anthropology has fed the present fad for “myth” in ways that mislead. For instance, many purely dialectical considerations are stated in an insufficiently generalized form; as a result, a term local to the study of ritual will be used to designate a process that is not necessarily ritualistic at all.

Thus, consider the most highly generalized resources of discursive reason: “composition and division.” Because such resources are universal to human thinking, they will also be found exemplified in primitive rituals. The principle of “division,” for instance, is present in sparagmos, the rending of the god’s flesh in primitive religious practices. Or the principle of “composition” is present here, inasmuch as the members of the group are thought to be made consubstantial by thus ceremoniously eating of the same magical substance. Suppose, then, for “division” in general, we used the word sparagmos, or rending and tearing of the divine sacrifice, and for “composition” in general we used some term for the tribal love-feast. The most rational processes of science or everyday life would thus be expressed in terms that referred merely to the application of them in one specific subject matter. Scientific analysis might thus be treated as a vestigial survival of sparagmos. The current over-use of terms for the processes of ritual and myth has two had effects: first, it can make even realistic common sense look like an attenuated survival of primitive magic; second, by thus misdirecting our attention, it can keep us from perceiving the mythic elements that really do infuse our culture (mythic elements rooted in the magic of property, with its avowed and unavowed, spontaneous and deliberate, forms of priestcraft).

While it is our job to brood over man’s dismal bondage to the magic of social relations as rooted in property, and thus to mention this topic in a hit-and-run sort of way whenever the given subject offers such an inkling, for the moment we are trying to suggest that the dialectic of “stages” (sometimes called “levels”) was not adequately considered in the case of the definition which we have taken as our model. So we suggested a possible corrective, plus a corrective to the possible misuse of that.

In the Portrait, considered from the standpoint of “stages,” the first three chapters would be like courses “prerequisite” to the choice Stephen makes in Chapter IV, where he turns from priestly to artistic vocation. However, we should not overlook an intermediate stage here. After thought of “ordination” [. . .] of “a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life without material cares” [. . .], of himself as “a being apart in every order” [. . .], of the window that might be his “if he ever joined the order” [. . .], of his destiny “to be elusive of social or religious orders,” there is talk of himself as “about to fall,” then “he crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka,” whereat he contemplates the opposite of order: “Then, bending to the left, he followed the lane which led up to his house. The faint sour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, [throughout, italics ours] the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.” Not quite. For the next episode will detail the vision of the hawklike man and the bird-girl (flight away, flight up, a transcending of the rotted cabbages). Hence, all told: from the priestly calling, through the dismal alternative, to the new exaltation, the aesthetic jesuitry that will be his purging of the alternative disorder, that will fly above it. And since the disorder had been “to the left,” and since Part I should “implicitly contain” what eventuates, we might appropriately recall young Stephen’s first triumph, as regards the pandybat episode, when he had gone “not to the corridor but up the staircase on the right that led up to the castle.” Here is accurate writing.

We could continue with further “stages.” Does not Stephen’s statement of his ars poetica, in a concerto-like relation with Lynch, correspond to the doctrinal stage in the Phaedrus, following the myth in Socrates’ second speech (which was itself the third stage of the dialogue as a whole)?

Joyce’s story, “The Dead” (in Dubliners), seems particularly to profit by a close attention to “stages.”

In the first of its three parts, the keynote is expectancy, which is amplified by many appropriate details: talk of preparations, arrivals, introductions, apprehensions, while fittingly the section ends on an unfinished story. All these details are in terms of everyday sociality, to do with the warming-up of the party, stressing an avid engrossment in such an order of motives, as though they were the very essence of reality. There are a few superficial references to the theme of death (the passing mention of two dead relatives who are never mentioned again, and Gabriel’s remark that he had been delayed because it had taken his wife “three mortal hours” to dress). And there is one enigmatic detail, though at this stage of the story it looks wholly realistic: the reference to the snow on Gabriel’s galoshes and overcoat as he enters, bringing in a “cold fragrant air from out-of-doors.”

The second stage, dealing with the party at its height, could be analyzed almost as a catalogue of superficial socialities, each in its way slightly false or misfit. The mood was set incipiently in the first part, when Gabriel offers the servant a tip. He had known her before she became a servant, hence his act (involving sociality of a sort) is not quite right. In the second stage, there is a welter of such intangible infelicities, as with the fact that Mary Jane’s singing received the most vigorous applause from “four young men in the doorway who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning of the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped.” This section is a thesaurus of what we might call “halfway” socialities, such as Miss Ivor’s “propagandism” for the Irish movement (in leaving early, she cries, “Bean-nacht libh”), Freddy’s drunken amiability, Gabriel’s dutiful conversation with Freddy’s mother, the parlor talk about music, the conviviality through common participation in the materials of the feast, Gabriel’s slightly hollow after-dinner speech that was noisily acclaimed, Gabriel’s distant relationship to two of the women who are giving the party, the few words with his wife indicating familiarity without intimacy, the somewhat gingerly treatment of the one Protestant among Catholics.

Such is the theme amplified, with apparent realistic engrossment, in this section. There are also a few explicit but glancing references to death. One threatens to be serious, when some of the Catholics try to tell the Protestant why certain monks sleep in their coffins; but “as the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table,” etc. And twice there is the enigmatic antithesis, the theme of the snow in the night, still wholly realistic in guise: “Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument.” In the other passage, there is likewise a reference to the “gleaming cap of snow” that Gabriel associated with the Monument. (One never knows how exacting to be, when comparing such passages; yet, as regards these references to the “cap” of snow, looking back we note that, when Gabriel first entered, the light fringe of snow lay “like a cape” on his shoulders. Cap—cape. Where secret identifications are taking form, since we are in time to learn that this snow stands for some essence beyond the appearances of halfway sociality, might not the signatures mark their secret relationship thus punwise?

In any case, the third section deals with events following the party. The cycle of realistic expectations and eventualities is drawing to a close. The party breaks up. We are now free to penetrate the implications of the antithetical moment. (“How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper table!” Gabriel had thought, in one of those two outlaw flashes when he had imagined the snow outside in the night. )

The first two sections were best described, we think, by a block-like method. Thus, for the first, we simply noted how the theme of expectancy could be stated in variation; and for the second, we broke the analysis into a list of variations on the theme of halfway sociality. For the point we were trying to make, it didn’t matter in what order we listed these details. But the third section concerns initiation into a mystery. It is to take us beyond the realm of realism, as so conceived, into the realm of ideality. Hence, there is a strict succession of stages, in the development towards a more exacting kind of vision. Each stage is the way-in to the next, as the narrow-visioned expectations of the party had been the way-in to the disclosures following the party.

The party is over. Where will we go? Is there not a symbolism emerging in the realism, when Gabriel tells the anecdote of the old horse that went round and round the monument? Next, the topic becomes that of every-which-way (we are still undecided), as the cabman is given conflicting directions by different members of the party. “The confusion grew greater and the cabman was directed differently by Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne, each of whom had his head out through a window of the cab. The difficulty was to know where to drop Mr. Browne along the route, and Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane helped the discussion from the doorstep with cross-directions and contradictions and abundance of laughter.” Finally, “the horse was whipped up and the cab rattled off along the quay amid a chorus of laughter and adieus.” We are en route, so far as realistic topics are concerned. But Gabriel and his wife have not yet left. And the development from now on is to concern them. Tableau: A man is singing; Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, is listening attentively, standing on the staircase, “near the top of the first flight”; Gabriel, below, is looking up admiringly. And “he asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadows, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”

Previously we mentioned the form of the Theaetetus: how, every time Socrates had brought things to an apparently satisfactory close, each such landing-place was found to be but the occasion for a new flight, a new search, that first seemed like an arrival, then opened up a new disclosure in turn. We believe that the remainder of this story possesses “dialectical form” in much that same sense. You might even call it the narrative equivalent of a Platonic dialogue. For from now on, Gabriel goes through a series of disclosures. Each time, he thinks he is really close to the essence; then another consideration emerges, that requires him to move on again. Let’s be as bluntly schematic as possible. It is not our job to regive the quality of the story; for that, one should go to the story itself. The stages, schematized, are these:

(1) As against the familiar but not intimate relations we have already seen, between Gabriel and his wife, here is a new motive; Gabriel sees “grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something.” And later, just before she asks the name of the song, at the sight of her flushed cheeks and shining eyes “a sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart.”

(2) They had arranged to spend the night in a nearby hotel. Hence, passages to suggest that he is recovering some of the emotions he had felt at the time of their honeymoon. (“Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire,” a reflection growing out of realistic reference to a literal fire.)

(3) Crossing a bridge, amid talk of the snow on the statue, while “Gabriel was again in a cab with her, galloping to catch the boat, galloping to their honeymoon.”

(4) Building up the sense of Gabriel’s possessiveness (“happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage [. . .] a keen pang of lust [. . .] a new adventure,” etc.).

(5) But, after the porter has assigned them to their room and left, the moment does not seem right. Gabriel’s irritation.

(6) She kisses him, calls him “a generous person.” His self-satisfaction. “Now that she had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.”

(7) Then the disclosures begin. He finds that he has misgauged everything. She has been thinking of that song. (Gabriel sees himself in the mirror) .

(8) At first taken aback, he next recovers his gentleness, then makes further inquiries. Angry, he learns that the song reminds her of a boy, Michael Furey, who used to sing the song. His jealousy. (Thus, up to now, each step nearer to her had been but the preparation for a more accurate sense of their separation.)

(9) On further inquiry, he learns of the boy’s frail love for her. “I think he died for me,” Gretta said, whereat “A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.’’ 5 He died for her? Died that something might live? It is an arresting possibility.

(10) After telling of this adolescent attachment, she cries herself to sleep.

So, we have narrowed things down, from all the party, to Gabriel and Gretta, and now to Gabriel alone. The next two pages or so involve a silent discipline, while he brings himself to relinquish his last claims upon her, as specifically his. The world of conditions is now to be transcended. Gretta had called him “generous,” in a passage that Gabriel had misgauged. Now we learn that “generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes.” The transcending of conditions, the ideal abandoning of property, is stated in Joyce’s own words, thus: “His own identity was falling out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, dissolving and dwindling.” For “his soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.”

Understandably, for if the world of conditions is the world of the living, then the transcending of conditions will, by the logic of such terms, equal the world of the dead. (Or, Kant-wise, we contemplate the divine; for if God transcends nature, and nature is the world of conditions, then God is the unconditioned. )

Psychologically, there are other likely interpretations here. Gabriel, finally, loves his wife, not even in terms of his honeymoon (with its strong connotations of ownership), but through the medium of an adolescent, dead at seventeen. With this dead boy he identifies himself. Perhaps because here likewise was a kind of unconditionedness, in the Gidean sense, that all was still largely in the realm of unfulfilled possibilities, inclinations or dispositions not yet rigidified into channels? There is even the chance that, in his final yielding, his identification with the dead boy, he is meeting again his own past adolescent self, with all its range of susceptibilities, surviving now only like a shade in his memory.

In any case, once we have been brought to this stage of “generosity,” where Gabriel can at last arrive at the order of ideal sociality, seeing all living things in terms of it, we return to the topic of snow, which becomes the mythic image, in the world of conditions, standing for the transcendence above the conditioned.

It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon the living and the dead.

“Upon the living and the dead.” That is, upon the two as merged. That is, upon the world of conditions as seen through the spirit of conditions transcended, of ideal sociality beyond material divisiveness.

The Kenyon Review 12.2 (Spring 1951): 173–92. © The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. Used by permission.

One observer analyzing the Portrait, noted that among the body-spirit equations were grease and gas, grease being to body as gas is to spirit. Hence, on learning that Michael Furey “was in the gasworks,” we assume that his spirituality is thus signalized roundabout, too. But we don’t quite know what to make of the possible relation between “Gretta” and “great” in these lines:

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Probably nothing should be made of it. But we do believe that such correlations should be noted tentatively. For we would ask ourselves how methodic a terminology is. Correspondences should be noted. But they should be left at loose ends, except when there are good reasons for tying such ends together.