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4 Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism11

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This essay is part of a project called “Theory of the Index,” concerned with the taking of preparatory notes for purposes of critical analysis. The hope is to make the analysis of literary symbolism as systematic as possible, while allowing for an experimental range required by the subtle and complex nature of the subject matter.

Fundamentally, the essay is built about the “principle of the concordance.” But whereas concordances, listing all passages where a given word appears in a text, have been compiled for a few major works, obviously criticism cannot have the advantage of such scholarship when studying the terminology of most literary texts. And even where concordances are available, there must be grounds for paying more attention to some terms than to others.

Here, treating the individual words of a work as the basic “facts” of that work, and using for test case some problems in the “indexing” of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,12 the essay asks how to operate with these “facts,” how to use them as a means of keeping one’s inferences under control, yet how to go beyond them, for purposes of inference, when seeking to characterize the motives and “salient traits” of the work, in its nature as a total symbolic structure.

Insofar as possible, we confine the realm of the “factual” to a low but necessary and unquestioned order of observations. Thus, it is a “fact” that the book proper begins, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was [. . .]” etc., and ends: “old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” We say it is a fact that the “book proper” so begins and so ends. But it is also a “fact” that the text begins with a prior quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and ends on a reference to duality of scene: “Dublin, 1904/Trieste, 1914.” We might get different results, depending upon which of these “facts” we worked from. But in either case, the existence of such “facts” is literally verifiable. “Facts” are what was said or done, as interpreted in the strictest possible sense.

The ideal “atomic fact” in literary symbolism is probably the individual word. We do not say that the literary work is “nothing but” words. We do say that it is “at least” words. True, a word is further reducible to smaller oral and visual particles (letters and phonemes); and such reducibility allows for special cases of “alchemic” transformation whereby the accident of a word’s structure may surreptitiously relate it (punwise) to other words that happen to be similar in structure though “semantically” quite distinct from it. But the word is the first full “perfection” of a term. And we move from it either way as our base, either “back” to the dissolution of meaning that threatens it by reason of its accidental punwise associates, or “forward” to its dissolution through inclusion in a “higher meaning,” which attains its perfection in the sentence.

Surprisingly enough, such a terministic approach to symbolism can be much more “factual” than is the case with reports about actual conditions or happenings in the extrasymbolic realm. In the extrasymbolic realm, there is usually a higher necessary percentage of “interpretation” or “inference” in a statement we call “factual.” We can but infer what the diplomat did. But we can cite “factually” some report that says what he did. People usually think that the nonsymbolic realm is the clear one, while the symbolic realm is hazy. But if you agree that the words, or terms, in a book are its “facts,” then by the same token you see there is a sense in which we get our view of deeds as facts from our sense of words as facts, rather than vice versa.

In this strict usage, many observations that might ordinarily be treated under the headings of “fact” fall on the side of “inference.” For instance, when referring to the formula, “Dublin, 1904/Trieste, 1914,” we described it as “a duality of scene.” There is a slight tendentiousness here; for our characterization leans to the side of “Dublin versus Trieste” rather than to the side of “Dublin equals Trieste” (toward opposition rather than apposition). And when referring to the quotation from Ovid, we might rather have referred to the quoted words themselves, stressing perhaps the original context from which they were lifted. Thus quickly and spontaneously we smuggle inferences, or interpretations, into our report of the “factual.” Yet, insofar as there is a record, there is an underlying structure of “factuality” to which we can repeatedly repair, in the hopes of hermeneutic improvement.

“Proof,” then, would be of two sorts. While grounding itself in reference to the textual “facts,” it must seek to make clear all elements of inference or interpretation it adds to these facts; and it must offer a rationale for its selections and interpretations. Ideally, it might even begin from different orders of “facts,” and show how they led in the end to the same interpretation. We should not have much difficulty, for instance, in showing how “Dublin versus Trieste” could still allow for “Dublin equals Trieste,” for there are respects in which Joyce’s (or Stephen’s!) original motives are transformed, and there are respects in which they were continued.

At the point of greatest ideal distance, an attempt to ground the analysis of literary symbolism in “terministic factuality” is to be contrasted with the analysis of symbols in terms of “analogy.” If, for instance, the word, “tree,” appears in two contexts, we would not begin by asking ourselves what rare “symbolic” meaning a tree might have, in either religious or psychoanalytic allegory. We would begin rather with the literal fact that this term bridges the two contexts.

Or let us go a step further. Suppose that you did begin with some pat meaning for tree, over and above its meaning as a positive concept. (In our hypothetical case, we are assuming that, whatever else “tree” may stand for, in these two contexts it at least refers to a tree in the primary dictionary sense, as it might not if one reference was to a “family tree.”) Suppose you were prepared to say in advance exactly what recondite meaning the “image” of a tree might have, in its nature as a “symbol” enigmatically “emblematic” of esoteric meanings. (For instance, we could imagine a psychologist saying, “It’s not just a ‘tree’; it’s a father-symbol, or a mother-symbol, or in general a parent-symbol.”) Even if we granted that your “symbolic” or “analogical” meaning for “tree” was correct, the fact would still remain that the term had one particular set of associates in some particular work. This is the kind of interconnectedness we would watch, when studying the “facts” of an identical word that recurs in changing contexts. Such an investigation would be in contrast with the confining of one’s interpretation to equivalences—“analogies”—already established even before one looks at the given text.

The “analogical” method is alluring, because by it you get these things settled once and for all. A good literature student, trained in the ways of indexing of “contexts” requires that each work be studied anew, “from scratch.” Night, bird, sun, blood, tree, mountain, death? No matter, once the topic is introduced, analogy has the answer, without ever looking further.

Part of the trouble, to be sure, comes from the fact that often brief poems are the texts used. And the short lyric is the most difficult form to explain, as its transformations are necessarily quick, while being concealed beneath the lyric’s urgent need to establish intense unity of mood (a need so urgent that in most lyrics the transformations are negligible, though such is not the case with great lyrists like Keats). Long forms (epics, dramas, novels, or poetic sequences) afford the most viable material for the study of terms in changing contexts. And the principles we learn through this better documented analysis can then be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the study of lyric “naturalness.”

Three illustrations, before proceeding:

On p. 36, in connection with the episode of Stephen’s unjust punishment, we read: “ [. . .] the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike [. . .]” and “the soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted [. . .] ” On p. 119: “Then, just as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might prevent the director from coming, he had heard the handle of the door turning and the swish of a soutane.” Here the recurrence of the swish establishes a purely “factual” bond between the two passages; and this factual bond is to be noted first as such, in its sheer terminal identity, without reference to “symbolic” or “analogical” meanings. More remotely, the “swish” might be said to subsist punwise in “was wishing.” Hence, if this iterative verb-form were noted elsewhere in the work, one might tentatively include its context, too, as part of this grouping (made by leaps and zigzags through the narrative).

Or one may isolate this concordance: p. 73 top, citing Shelley’s “Art thou pale for weariness”; p. 136, Ben Jonson’s, “I was not wearier where I lay”; p. 174, in Stephen’s villanelle, “Are you not weary of ardent ways?”; and on p. 175, when Stephen is watching the birds as an augury, “leaning wearily on his ashplant [. . .] the ashplant on which he leaned wearily [. . .] a sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness.” (Ordinarily, we take it that the various grammatical forms of a word can be treated as identical. But one must always be prepared for a case where this will not be so. One could imagine a work, for instance, in which “fly” and “flight” were so used that “fly” was found to appear only in contexts meaning “soar above” or “transcend,” whereas “flight” was only in contexts meaning “flee.” Ordinarily, “flight” would cover both meanings, as we believe the symbol of flight does in Joyce. Or should we say that in Stephens ecstatic vision of artistic flight the “negative” sense of fleeing attains rather the “positive” sense of flying?)

Or again: on p. 168 top, Stephen’s esthetic is stated doctrinally thus: “The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Without yet asking ourselves what such paring of the nails may “symbolize,” we “factually” unite this passage with “[. . .] some fellows called him Lady Boyle because he was always at his nails, paring them” (p. 30 top); and (p. 32): “Mr. Gleason had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed. Perhaps he pared them too like Lady Boyle.”

Such concordances are initially noted without inference or interpretation. For whereas purely terministic correlation can serve the ends of “analogical” or “symbolic” exegesis, it is far more tentative and empirical, with a constant demand for fresh inquiry. In fact, one may experimentally note many correlations of this sort without being able to fit them into an over-all scheme of interpretation.

But a grounding in the concordances of “terminal factuality” is by no means a solution to our problems.

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If we are to begin with a “factual” index, what do we feature? Obviously, we cannot make a concordance of every book we read. And besides, even if we had a concordance before we began, we must find some principle of selection, since some terms are much more likely than others to yield good hermeneutical results. If a researcher is looking for some particular topic, of course, there is no problem of selection. But if the critic is attempting to characterize, in as well rounded a way as he can, the salient traits of the given work, trying to give an over-all interpretation of it as a unified symbolic act, he has a lot more to do than merely look for terminal correlations.

Almost without thinking, he will select certain key terms. For instance, every reader would spontaneously agree that “Stephen Dedalus” is a term to be featured. And at the very least, he would expand the name in the directions explicitly indicated by Joyce: Daedalus, Stephanoumenos, Stephaneforos.

Also, the title suggests that the critic might ask himself: “What will be the operational definition of ‘artist’ in this work?” One must be wary of titles, however. For often they were assigned or altered to meet real or imagined conditions of the market; and sometimes a work may be given a title purely for its sales value as a title, which was invented without reference to the work so entitled. In the case of the Portrait, of course, it would be generally agreed that the work is depicting the growth of an artist (as so defined) not only emotionally but in terms of a doctrine explicitly stated. For, ironically, although Stephen’s doctrine denounces the “didactic” in art, it is itself as “didactic” as the Gospel; in fact it is an esthetic gospel.

But whereas the primary terms of a work operate by secondary connections, we can never be quite sure what secondary terms are likely to produce the best results. For instance, the first few lines of the book refer twice to “baby tuckoo.” In a sense, this is Stephen’s “real” name; for by the resources natural to narrative, an essence is stated in terms of temporal priority. Tentatively, then, we note it. And having done so, we find these possibly related entries: (p. 10 foot) “tucking the end of the nightshirt”; (p. 13) “little feet tucked up”; (p. 183) “a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit.” What, then, of “Tusker Boyle” (p. 30), the unsavory fellow whom we have already mentioned in connection with the paring of his fingernails, a reference also connected with reference to the artist’s “handiwork” (p. 168 top)? But the reference to hands also radiates in another direction, including both the priest’s painful paddling of Stephen’s hands in the pandybat episode, and the episode at the top of p. 124, where Stephen withdraws his hand from the priest as a sign that he is not to choose the religious vocation, but to become instead a “priest of the imagination.” (The scene was introduced by the already cited reference to the “swish of the soutane.”) This and the four references in sixteen lines to the “pain” suffered in the pandybat episode have as counterpart in the later passage an assurance that the music which had distracted him from the priest’s promises dissolved his thoughts “painlessly and “noiselessly.”

We could radiate in many other directions. On p. 30, for instance, the reference to Tusker (or Lady) Boyle had led immediately into talk of Eileen’s hands, with the memory of the time when this Protestant girl had put her hand into his pocket. Her hands “were like ivory; only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory,” etc., whereat we can radiate to “yellow ivory” and “mottled tusks of elephants,” on p. 138.

We could go on. But already we glimpse how, without our asking ourselves just what any of our bridging terms may mean “analogically” or “symbolically,” a circle of terminal interrelationships is beginning to build up. And even though we might abandon some positions under pressure (as for instance the series “tuckoo-tucking-Tusker-tusks”), we find connections of similar import being established by many other routes, most of them not requiring us to do any punwise “joycing” of terms (though we might at least be justified in applying such tentatives to even early work by Joyce, in the likelihood that his later typical susceptibilities were already emerging).

But let us get back to our more immediate problem. What should have been indexed in the opening pages? There was a “moocow” (“symbolically” maternal?), there was a father with a “hairy face,” there is a progression from “baby tuckoo” to “moocow” to “Betty Byrne” (beddy burn?!) to “lemon platt” (which puzzles us, except insofar as it may be yellow, anent which more anon). There are some childishly distorted jingles. And these may so set the rules of this adult work that we can look tentatively for such distortion as a principle, operating perhaps over and above the examples explicitly given in the text. (Otherwise put: if these paragraphs are under the sign of such punwise distortion, might we not be justified in asking whether there could also be displaced distortion, such as would be there if particular distortions were taken to stand for more than themselves, indicating that a principle of distortion was operating at this point? We bring up the possibility, to suggest methodological reasons why we might experimentally so pun on “Betty Byrne” as we did. We would remind our reader, however, that we are as yet committed to nothing, so far as this text goes. In advance, we make allowance for a latitudinarian range—as contrasted with those who, in advance, have it all sewed up. But we need not yet make decisions.)

Should we have noted that “His mother had a nicer smell than his father”? In any case, there are many other references to smell (pp. 10, 12, and 14, for instance); and the passage becomes doubly interesting when, in his stage of contrition (p. 116) Stephen has trouble mortifying his sense of smell: “To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odors,” etc.

Where do we start? Where do we stop?

Let us admit: there must be a certain amount of waste motion here, particularly if one undertakes an index before having a fairly clear idea of a book’s developments. One is threatened with a kind of methodic demoralization—for anything might pay off. Yet by an “index” we most decidedly do not mean such lists (by author or topic) as one finds in the back of a book. In fact, whereas an index is normally made by entries on a set of cards which are then rearranged alphabetically, we must allow our entries to remain “in the order of their appearance.” For a purely alphabetical reordering makes it almost impossible to inspect a work in its unfoldings. And we must keep on the move, watching both for static interrelationships and for principles of transformation whereby a motive may progress from one combination through another to a third, etc.

Over and above whatever we may enter in our index, there will be the search for “stages.” Methodologically, such a search implies a theory of “substance.” That is, in contrast with those “semantic” theories which would banish from their vocabulary any term for “substance,” we must believe above all in the reasonableness of “entitling.” Confronting a complexity of details, we do not confine ourselves merely to the detailed tracing of interrelationships among them, or among the ones that we consider outstanding. We must also keep prodding ourselves to attempt answering this question: “Suppose you were required to find an over-all title for this entire batch of particulars. What would that be?”

The Portrait is in five parts, which are merely numbered. What, then, should their titles be, if they had titles? We say that such a question implies a grounding in the term, “substance,” or in the furtive function indicated by that term, because it implies that all the disparate details included under one head are infused with a common spirit, or purpose, i.e., are consubstantial. We may be in varying degrees right or wrong, as regards the substance that we impute to a given set of details. But they are ultimately organized with relation to one another by their joint participation in a unitary purpose, or “idea.” In brief, we must keep hypothetically shifting between the particular and the general.

True: you can take it for granted that, once such a range is available, you can always attain some level of generalization in terms of which disparate details might be substantially related. Ideally, one seeks for terms that account for kinship not only with regard to tests of consistency; one also wants to place sequences, developments, showing why the parts are in precisely that order and no other; and if one seeks to be overthorough here, the excess should be revealed by trouble in finding cogent rationalizations.

Often, for instance, the critic may be overzealous in trying to show how a whole plot may unfold from some original situation, somewhat like an artificial Japanese flower unfolding in water. But an accurate analysis would have to show how a series of new steps was needed, to carry the work from its opening “germ” to its final “growth.” Thus, some opening imagery might be said to contain the later plot “in germ.” (We have seen this very Portrait so analyzed.) But on closer analysis you will find that the opening imagery “pointed to” the ultimate destination of the plot only in the sense that, if one makes a sweep of the hand from south-southwest to north-northwest, one has thereby “implicitly” pointed due west. Critics who would analyze a book as an unfolding from an all-inclusive implication will need to use a different kind of dialectic as well. They will need to show by what successive stages a work is “narrowed down”; for its “unfolding” will be rather like a definition that begins with too broad a category, and gradually imposes strictures until the subject is “pinpointed” (as with the game of Twenty Questions).

In the case of the Portrait, whatever difficulties we might have in deciding how we would specifically treat any of the details in Part I, we could “idealize” the problem in general terms thus: we note that this work leads up to the explicit propounding of an Esthetic (a doctrine, catechism, or “philosophy” of art). Then we ask how each of the parts might look, as seen from this point of view. The first part deals with rudimentary sensory perception, primary sensations of smell, touch, sight, sound, taste (basic bodily feelings that, at a later stage in the story, will be methodically “mortified”). And there is our answer. Lo! the Esthetic begins in simple aisthesis. So, in this sense, the entire first chapter could be entitled “Childhood Sensibility.” It will “render” the basic requirement for the artist, as defined by the terms (and their transformations) in this particular work. It depicts the kind of personality, or temperament, required of one who would take this course that leads to the Joycean diploma (to a chair spiritually endowed by Joycean Foundations). Family relations, religion, and even politics are thus “esthetically” experienced in this opening part—experienced not as mature “ideas,” or even as adolescent “passions,” but as “sensations,” or “images.”

But whereas we would thus entitle the first section of the Portrait, we do not want our whole argument to depend upon this one particular choice. We are here interested mainly in the attempt to illustrate the principle we are discussing. We might further note that, though “Childhood Sensibility” as a title fits developmentally into the story as a whole, it does not suggest a logic of development within the single chapter it is intended to sum up. It merely provides a term for describing self-consistency among the details of the chapter. It names them solely in terms of “repetitive” form, so far as their relation to one another is concerned. And only when treating them en bloc, with relation to the entire five chapters, do we suggest a measure of “progressive” form here. Ideally, therefore, we should also ask ourselves into what substages (with appropriate titles) this chapter on “Childhood Sensibility” should in turn be divided. At least, when indexing, we keep thus resurveying, in quest of developments. (The thought also suggests why an index arranged alphabetically would conceal too much for our purposes.)

The very rigors of our stress upon “terminal factuality” as the ideal beginning quickly force us to become aware of this step from particulars to generalizings (a step the exact nature of which is often concealed beneath terms like “symbol” and “analogy”). Hypothetically, even in a long work there might be no significant literal repeating of key terms. (We have heard tell of some ancient Chinese tour de force in which, though it is a work of considerable length, no single character is repeated. And one would usually be hard-pressed for a wide range of literal repetitions in individual lyrics, though the quest of “factually” joined contexts usually yields good results where we have an opportunity to study a poet’s terminology as maintained through several poems.) And even with the Joyce Portrait, which abounds in factually related contexts, we confront a notable place where we would obviously accept suicidal restrictions if we refused to take the generalizing or idealizing step from particulars to principles (or, in this case, from particular words to the more general themes or topics that these words signify).

We have in mind Stephen’s formula for his artistic jesuitry, “silence, exile, and cunning.” “Silence” yields good results, even factually. It is a word that appears at all notable moments along the road of Stephen’s development up to the pronouncing of his esthetic creed. There are a few references to cunning, the most pointed being this passage on p. 144 (all italics ours, to indicate terms we consider focal here):

Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame lout in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft; subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience, back upon themselves; and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little if at all, the ends he served.

The references to “service” touch upon the non serviam theme that emerged so startlingly in the sermon. And the silence-exile-cunning formula (p. 194) had been immediately preceded by Stephen’s challenge, “I will not serve,” etc. We here see “cunning” and “silence” interwoven quite “factually.” Also, we see the references to “craft” that could lead us into the final theme (patronymically punning) of the labyrinthine “artificer.”

Yet “artificer” is not literally (thus not “factually”) identical with “craft.” And as for “exile”: unless we missed some entries (and we may have!) the particular word does not appear elsewhere in this text. However, even assuming that we are correct, a punctiliousness bordering on “methodological suicide” would be required to keep us from including, under the principle of “exile,” Stephen’s question, “Symbol of departure or loneliness?” (p. 176), when he is considering the augury of the birds that stand for his new vocation. And once we can equate “exile” with aloneness (and its kinds of secrecy, either guilty or gestatory) we open our inquiry almost to a frenzy of entries: For “alone,” in this story of a renegade Catholic boy who “forges” 13 a vocation somehow also under the aegis of a Protestant girl’s hands, is as typical as any adjective in the book. Whereupon we find reasons to question whether the apparent disjunction (departure or loneliness) is really a disjunction at all. Far from their being antitheses in this work, the difference between them is hardly that between a bursting bud and a newly opened blossom.

In sum, once you go from “factual” word to a theme or topic that would include synonyms of this word, you are on the way to including also what we might call “operational synonyms,” words which are synonyms in this particular text though they would not be so listed in a dictionary. That is, not only would a word like “stillness” be included under the same head as “silence,” but you might also include here a silent gesture that was called “the vehicle of a vague speech,” particularly as it is a scene in which we are explicitly told that he “stood silent” (pp. 76–77). Or, otherwise put: similarly, variants of “loneliness” and “departure” (hence even the theme of the flying bird) might be classed with “exile.” And “cunning” in being extended to cover the artistic “craft,” might thus expand not only into Daedalian, labyrinthine artifice, “maze,” etc., but also into that doctrinal circle the center of which is the term, “imagination.” We would then need some summarizing term, such as “the Joycean artist,” or “the hawkman motive,” to include under one head the “fact” that “silence,” “exile,” and “cunning” are trinitarian terms, which in turn are themselves linked sometimes dictionarywise (as synonyms), and sometimes “operationally” (in terms of contexts interconnected roundabout).14

Clearly, in the analysis of short lyrics where terms cannot be repeated in many contexts, one spontaneously looks for what the old rhetoric called “amplification,” some theme or topic that is restated in many ways, no single one of which could be taken as a sufficient summing up. (Here again, ideally, we might try to find working subtitles for each stanza, as a way of aggressively asking ourselves whether we can honestly say that the lyric really does get ahead, even while pausing to summarize attitudinally.)

In essentializing by entitlement, one again confronts the usual range of choices between some particular of plot or situation and some wide generalization. Specifically, for instance, we might have chosen to call the first chapter “The Pandybat,” since the artist’s sensitivity is built plotwise about this as its crowning incident. The second stage (marking the turn from childhood sensibility to youthful passion) is built about the logic of “The Fall,” the incident in which the chapter terminates. With this title, it so happens, there is no need to decide whether we are being particular or general, or even whether we are discussing content or form. (Ideally, working titles are best when they simultaneously suggest both the gist of the story as such and the developmental stage in the purely formal sense.) We say the “logic” of the fall, as in this work the fall is a necessary stage in the development of the esthetic. Thus, later, 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.

3

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 by the condition of the volcano. Rather, it serves the function of “rhetorical amplification,” by restating in scenic terms the quality of the action that takes place with that scene as characteristic background. It is like an interpretative comment upon the action, almost a kind of “natural chorus.”)

Another instance of the same sort occurs shortly after the beginning of Part II, with the description of the scene in which Heyst has his first fatal meeting with Lena:

The Zangiacomo hand was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger or fear.

Particularly we note such a moment because it characterizes a “first,” the time when Heyst and Lena first meet. And we later see that it “astrologically” foretold the quality of the action that would eventuate from this meeting. Such “foreshadowing” is standard. But when we extend the same principle for subtler inquiry, we are admonished to make a special noting of all first appearances (if only noting no more than the page number, on the possibility that a later survey of all these moments might reveal internal terministic consistencies not originally perceived).

In particular, one should note expressions marking secrecy, privacy, mystery, marvel, power, silence, guilt. Such terms are likely to point in the direction of central concerns in all cultures. Here also we might include terms for order, since the pyramidal nature of order brings us close to relations of “superiority” and “inferiority,” with the many kinds of tension “natural” to social inequality. Such observations lead us in turn to watch for the particular devices whereby the given work “states a policy” with regard to a society’s typical “problems.” Here we seek hints for characterizing the work as a “strategy.”

In general, we proceed by having in mind four “pyramids” or “hierarchies”: (1) the pyramid of language, which allows for a Platonist climb from particulars toward “higher orders of generalization”; (2) the social pyramid, with its more or less clearly defined ladder of classes and distinctions; (3) the “natural” or “physical” pyramid (headed in such perspectives as the Darwinian genealogy); (4) the “spiritual” pyramid (“celestial” or “supernatural”). The social and linguistic pyramids are “naturally” interwoven, we take it, as language is a social product. And since the empirically linguistic is properly our center of reference when analyzing secular literary texts, we watch for ways whereby the “natural” and “supernatural” pyramids more or less clearly reflect the structure of the sociolinguistic pair.

In so doing, we do not necessarily deny that there are “natural” or “supernatural” orders, existing in their own right. We merely note that both, the one “beneath” ideas, the other “above” ideas, will necessarily be expressed in terms that reflect the ideological structures indigenous to the social and linguistic orders. In this sense, both “natural” and “supernatural” may be analyzable as sociolinguistic “pageantry” (by which we refer to the communicative ways, the cults of parade, exhibition, or appeal, that typify man as the typically symbol-using animal).

As all this adds up to what we might call the “hierarchal psychosis,” we ask how such a psychosis might be undergoing a “cure,” or “purge,” within the terms of the given work, considered as a terminology. We can expect many variants of such symbolic cure; for man, as the typically symbol-using species, is naturally rich in such resources. So our thoughts about hierarchal tension lead us to watch for modes of catharsis, or of transcendence, that may offer a symbolic solution within the given symbol-system of the particular work we are analyzing.

We are even willing to look for ways whereby the artistic strategy that is a “solution” may serve to reestablish the very tension it is resolving. Or, if that way of stating the case seems too ironic, let us watch at least for cathartic devices whereby a rising (as seen from one angle) is a fall (as seen from another), whereby, lo! a “fall” can be a “rise.” The possibility is of great importance in the case of the Portrait, the “factual” analysis of which explicitly depicts a fall in terms of a soaring above. Note, in particular, this passage (p. 125):

He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

Recall that this passage marks, almost “sloganistically,” the step intermediate between Stephen’s rejection of the religious vocation and his ecstatic vision of the bird-girl who stands imaginally for his artistic vocation.

We could here add other such rules of thumb, involving questions that require us to write over again, in this one essay, the Motivorum books on which we have been for some time engaged. But we finally hit upon one basic principle that might cut across all such a gatherum omnium, and might be argued for even if the reader did not agree with anything we have said up to this point. It is based upon an “entelechial” mode of thought. And we consider it in our next section.

4

By the “entelechial” test, we have in mind this principle: look for moments at which, in your opinion, the work comes to fruition. Imbue yourself with the terminology of these moments. And spin from them. Thus, at the very least, you would have the “epiphany” near the end of Chapter IV to guide you: