Stephen and Lycidas

Lycidas is the name of a poet-goatherd found in a poem by Theocritas. It’s also the name of the title character in a pastoral elegy written by John Milton after the shipwreck and drowning of the poet’s classmate at Cambridge, with whom he had studied to join the clergy.
In the poem, the narrator laments the gaiety and spontaneity he sacrifices for the labors of philosophy, and addresses the poet-sheperds working in the fields by telling them that Lycidas will return in his death to bless them in their quests to live lives of intellectual pursuit despite the sacrifices of certain sensual pleasures and a certain spontaneity. In this meditation on the nature of the philosopher and his place in society, Milton presents many contrasts between the thoughtful and the frivolous.
In Chapter Two, Stephen teaches the poem, but slips into a moment of almost narcissistic reverie after his student reads a passage:

“ -- Weep no more, woeful shepherd, weep no more
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor...” (Joyce, 25).

It is one of those intriguing moments we know so well, when the discussion of literature turns toward the personal and our conversationalist references a poem with such depth and complexity that we realize he alludes to a work of strongest importance to himself; momentarily, Stephen envisions himself as Lycidas, who blessed the would-be philosophers with consciousness, leading them from a happiness based on dismissal to an enlightened awareness.
This is certainly a difficult and fleeting peace Stephen attains; the schoolboys with whom he is surrounded, Buck Mulligan, Haines, and Mr. Deasy all challenge his conscious intellect by bullying and manipulating him or by using these tactics on one another-- in the case of the schoolboys.

“It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the
gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered
from the sin of Paris, night by night” (Joyce, 25).

The first sentence of the passage immediately following the schoolboy’s reading of the poem illustrates the deep sentiment the poem evokes in Stephen-- It brings him hope. With the first phrase, he is transported from the unpleasantness of the classroom of disruptive boys to a memory of studying in Paris.
The image of Stephen distracted and dreaming of Lycidas while surrounded by a noisy schoolroom of boys taunting one another is the first part of the novel in which Stephen is idealized as a teacher. In Chapter One, he played the half-wit to Buck’s virtuoso and struggled to assert himself; he walked away at the end, yes, and muttered “usurper”-- here he assumes a position of control.

Comparative Notes

It was clear to me that William Faulkner was influenced by James Joyce when he wrote the short story, “Ad Astra,” about ten years after the publication of Ulysses. In the story, six American soldiers go drinking on a break from fighting in the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. The structure, characters, and many of the descriptions parallel those found in Chapter One of Joyce’s novel:

Joyce’s choice of setting is romantic in its abstraction-- It’s set in a tower on the beach. William Faulkner also sets his story somewhat ambiguously. His American soldiers wear British uniforms as they drive to a club. Why a tower? Why British uniforms?

Yet the answers to these questions aren’t as important as the characters’ interactions in these meditations on human isolation. Many authors-- and directors, for that matter-- will place characters in a strange context in order to connote the absurdity of their habits.

Neither the college students in the tower nor the soldiers in the Jeep communicate in any way. They attempt to express themselves, but all of their exchanges are abrupt, brief, and incomplete. However, the inner lives of the characters are portrayed with richness. Joyce uses the stream of consciousness to reveal his characters’ struggles and philosophies, Faulkner allows his characters to reveal their thoughts in conversation.

Both works suggest an abyss that represents the richness and variety of human perceptions-- In Ulysses, it is represented by the sea; in “Ad Astra” by the subadar as he discusses the approaching end of World War I.

“’But soon it will clear away,’ he said. ‘This effluvium of hatred and of words. We are like men trying to move in water, with
held breath watching our terrific and infinitesimal limbs, watching one another’s terrific stasis without touch, without
contact, robbed of all save the impotence and the need.’”

This is represented in the structure of both works, which waft from dialogue to Faulkner’s philosophical narrative or Joyce’s stream of consciousness and back again. There is little action in either work, which address the variance in our modes of being, and the way in which that isolates us.

Sunday afternoon meditation on reality, perspective, Nabokov, and Yeats

Plato has a theory about objects and reality.

If this was a test, and you asked me to explain his theory, this is what I would say: Plato suggests that what we acknowledge to be a tree has a universal value; this value includes each of our differing perceptions of it, while the basic qualities that we ascribe to the object form its reality.

My Oxford defines reality-- in a philosophical context-- as an existence that is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.

Different perceptions complicate reality.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, and William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Phases of the Moon,” theories are given regarding the nature of perception, a concept which differs in its different manifestations through our different selves.

Our perceptions is made up of our perspectives on events, and the way these perspectives limit or free us from our potential to gain a broader perspective on the world.

Is there a universal model of the way perception changes in a person?

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes,

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been
set free... Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three
stages may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: We call ‘thetic’ the small curve or arc that initiates
the convolution centrally; “antithetic” the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and ‘synthetic’ the
still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on.
A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life.”

In “The Phases of the Moon,” Yeats describes human life during the different phases of the moon. I wondered-- Does Yeats present the phases of the moon to exemplify a model of the changes in consciousness that we experience over a lifetime, as Nabokov does with his definition of the spiral? Or does he imply that these phases of the moon represent individuals possessing varying levels of awareness?

I think that the poem could be read in both ways.

Middle and Late Yeats: The Unlimited Expansion

In Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats, the critic Grossman suggests the poet’s ascription of universality to his poetic voice with a discussion of Yeats’ philosophies regarding the link between mind and object.

“The archetypal self-finding on which poetic knowledge is based arises, as we have pointed out, in a single experiment which Yeats never ceased repeating: the comparison of the imaginal content of mind as autonomous subject with the imaginal content of world as the object of mind and the origin of experience. The discovery to which this experiment leads is that images which arise in the individual consciousness are also images in the great resource of collective representation which constitutes historical culture. The last and absolute version of this assertion is that mind and world are symbolically identical.”

He discusses Yeats’ concept concerning object perception, suggesting that the similarity of the perception shared by different individuals of an object allows for the poetic assumption of poetic knowledge-- which he defines as the universal relevance of a concept. Because we ascribe the same significance to a given object, there could be a similarity in other perceptions we share. Grossman also suggests that the world’s existence and value can be attributed to our perceptions of it.

The link between perception and object is a concept very much related to yogic philosophy, in which one level of enlightenment occurs when a viewer is conscious of all aspects of an object’s relativity to the varying aspects of the universe. This state is referred to in a translation of Yoga Sutras I found in my bookcase the other day-- “In the state of Nirvicara Samadhi, an object is experienced in its full perspective, because in this state, knowledge is gained directly without the use of the senses.” In this state, the enlightened transcends the constraints of his own perceptions and achieves a more comprehensive awareness which involves the perception of a greater reality, as Yeats seemed to with his development of a unversal narrative during his career-- after beginning with one that focused on themes that were prevalent in the poet's own life.

Yeats' Early Period: The Limit of Contraction

“The mind or imagination or consciousness of man may be said to have two poles, the personal and impersonal, or, as Blake preferred to call them, the limit of contraction and the unlimited expansion. When we act from the personal we tend to bind our consciousness down as to a fiery center. When, on the other hand, we allow our imagination to expand away from this egoistic mood, we become vehicles for the universal thought and merge in the universal mood.”
-- W.B. Yeats and Edwin J. Ellis in The Works of William Blake

The duality Yeats expresses here can be noted in a comparison of his earlier period to his middle and later periods. When we read works from Yeats’ early period, we suspect traces of Yeats’ personal consciousness. The speaker of “The Ballad of Moll Magee,” which describes the lament of a woman sent away by her husband for laying on her child in the night, expresses a cry for sympathy which is an emotion that Yeats may have wished for his own mother, who struggled with severe depression.

“The Madness of King Goll,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “To an Isle in the Water,” and “Who goes with Fergus?” also address themes of escape which mirror the sentiments which Yeats experienced as a young boy and artist--
In Ellman’s essay on Yeats’ early life, he discusses Yeats’ overbearing father. He was a pre-Raphaelite painter who had married Yeats’ mother while studying to be a tradesman; she expressed her disapointment with his erratic change in vocation through a crippling depression that kept her bed-ridden throughout most of Yeats’ early childhood. In his opinions, we understand that Yeats’ father was perhaps more voluble than explicit1-- Ellman suggests that his opinions were seldom recognized to be such, and that Yeats’ use of classical mythology and philosophies in his early work were perhaps a form of rebellion against the more fashionable techniques of his father. (Ellman discusses the concept of a conservative rebellion, explaining the difficulty in rebelling experienced by the generation born to one that has rejected traditional modes of thought and discusses the way in which the new generation might renew conservative ideas to reject the ideas of its parents.)

We’re left to wonder at Yeats’ childhood impressions. What was it like to grow up in a house in which the caretakers were unchecked by eachother? The relationship of the Yeats parents was unbalanced. His father’s strong opinions were unopposed and unquestioned by his mother, whose complete retreat suggests her dominance by him. Would Yeats’ father behave disrespectfully toward his mother, causing her to withdraw?

The troubles and inadequacies of Yeats’ parents may not have been apparent to an outsider-- Because the superficial observer would not notice anything that could possibly trouble Yeats, there was probably a sense of suspicion or prejudice surrounding this child who was probably suffering, apparently without cause. His father was a popular figure, but there was probably a great contrast between his social demeanor and his personality at home.

This leads us to the theme of escape in Yeats’ early period, and the limit of conscious contraction which he addresses in his introduction to a volume of Blake. These difficult feelings which Yeats grew up with may have contributed to the self-invention that distinguishes this period, in which we see that Yeats uses these classical influences in his allusions to difficult and painful personal experiences through verse.