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Who speaks for Fergus? Silence, homophobia, and the anxiety of Yeatsian influence in Joyce
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald
Of the many loves that dare not speak their name for Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, none remains more enigmatic throughout both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses than the love Stephen associates with Yeats. Stephen's juvenile love lyrics may resemble Yeats's early verse, but readers know that if Stephen is destined to metamorphose into a great writer, that writer will more likely resemble James Joyce than W. B. Yeats. Before Stephen can make this transformation, then, he must reconcile himself with the preeminent Irish writer of the previous generation. Stephen engages Yeats directly and indirectly throughout Ulysses, consciously pondering the phrase "love's bitter mystery" from Yeats's poem "Who Goes with Fergus?" whenever he remembers his mother's death and unconsciously reenacting the mystical "antique dance" from Yeats's story "Rosa Alchemica" in the brothel in "Circe." (1) However, given the extent to which Yeats obsesses Stephen, one wonders why he so rarely voices the fragments of Yeats's work that Joyce weaves throughout these texts. Why, to put it succinctly, is Stephen silent regarding Yeats?
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This question first struck me as a tangential curiosity when I began thinking about the dynamics of Yeatsian influence in Joyce's works, but it grew increasingly provocative and important as my investigations progressed: provocative because it led to a new understanding of how Joyce's webs of signification complicate one another even when they concern matters as seemingly unrelated as homophobia and literary influence; and important because it revealed that silence, which many readers have celebrated in Joyce's works, also hinders Stephen Dedalus's growth as an artist. At the same time, the question requires us to distinguish Stephen's silent contemplation of Yeats from Joyce's very different strategies for dealing with his eminent precursor. Stephen serves as Joyce's alter ego insofar as his thoughts and experiences resemble Joyce's as a young man, but we must take care not to equate character with author. Joyce repeatedly allows Stephen to think about Yeats's poetry and even to deconstruct Yeats's language in his head or on paper, but almost never to voice Yeats's words aloud. The comic foil Buck Mulligan speaks for Yeats instead, emphasizing the degree to which Yeats's handling of love lies at the heart of Stephen's silence. As critic David Weir has argued, there is also apparently a "homoerotic complication" (221) at play in Stephen's friendship with Mulligan, imbuing Mulligan's digressions on Yeatsian love with a strong element of what Eve Sedgwick has called "homosexual panic" for Stephen. Understandably, then, the question of "love's bitter mystery" remains, to borrow Lord Alfred Douglas's phrase forever associated with Oscar Wilde, a love for Stephen that literally "dare not speak its name." (2)
Stephen's silence reflects two interrelated anxieties that Yeats and Wilde respectively embody: the anxiety of poetic influence, as famously defined by Harold Bloom, and the homosexual panic that Stephen experiences in his friendships with other men, as defined by Sedgwick and discussed in relation to Joyce by several critics including Joseph Valente and Kevin Dettmar. (3) Stephen is unable to deal with love as it relates to either of these anxieties. His anxiety over Yeats's influence stems from the latter's masterly handling of poetic love, and, through a characteristically Joycean chain of associations, he conflates this anxiety of influence with his seemingly unrelated anxieties regarding same-sex love. Stephen copes with these anxieties by containing them in an interior psychic space where he retreats whenever Yeats poses a threat, and where he attempts to subsume Yeats into his own literary compositions. Private Carr jostles this space when he hits Stephen at the end of "Circe" but does not fully collapse it, and Stephen never does reconcile himself with Yeats. However, by looking at Joyce's conflation of Yeats with St. Kevin the eremite in Finnegans Wake, we see that the end of Ulysses does not mark the culmination of Yeats-related anxiety in Joyce's work. Whereas Stephen deals with his Yeatsian anxieties through psychic containment, Joyce responds to Yeats in the Wake through a reductive parody that ignores Yeats's mature writings and portrays him as forever trapped in a world of romantic naivete. This tactic reflects anxiety of a less threatening order than what Stephen experiences in Portrait and Ulysses, but it also reveals that Joyce himself never ceases to grapple with Yeats's influence.
It would of course be difficult to generalize about the complicated ways in which silence operates throughout Joyce's works. Focusing specifically on Stephen's silence about Yeats, however, reveals a Joycean critique of the notion that one can succeed as a modern artist using "silence, exile, and cunning" as weapons (Portrait 247). Stephen's claim late in Portrait that such weapons will stand him "in good stead" derives largely from the romantic ideal of poetry as "beyond and above consciousness," to quote Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," a work of great importance for both Yeats and Stephen (Shelley 516). Stephen alludes favorably to this text in relating his aesthetic theory to his friend Lynch. He praises Shelley for likening the mind "beautifully to a fading coal" (Portrait 213) when the aesthetic image is first conceived in the artist's imagination, and he interprets this metaphor as describing "the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure." Yet throughout Ulysses, Joyce mocks Stephen's juvenile adherence to the Shelleyan paradox that the poet can effect social change while also being "a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds" (Shelley 516). The novel repeatedly indicates that if Stephen hopes to emerge as Ireland's greatest bard, he must overcome his silence and actually publish something. In "Aeolus," for example, the newspaper editor Myles Crawford urges Stephen to write for him: "Something with a bite in it. You can do it. I see it in your face" (Ulysses: Corrected Text 7.616-17). As if to emphasize how far short of this mark Stephen's efforts have fallen, this scene is presented under the ironic headline, "'YOU CAN DO IT!'" Similarly, after Stephen finishes his lecture on Shakespeare in "Scylla and Charybdis," Mr. Best asks if he intends to write it out, suggesting that he "make it a dialogue [...] like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote" (9.1068-69). Yet Stephen tries to pass this burden onto someone else: "For a guinea [...] you can publish this interview" (9.1085). And when Haines asks Mulligan in "Wandering Rocks" if Stephen has written anything for the Irish literary movement, Mulligan derides Stephen's lack of productivity. "Ten years," Mulligan says, while "chewing and laughing.[...] He is going to write something in ten years" (10.1089-90). Of course, we learn earlier in the novel that Stephen feels insecure about his failure to publish. As he walks along the strand in "Proteus," he remembers looking at himself in the mirror and dreaming of the books he would someday write:
