Who speaks for Fergus? Silence, homophobia, and the anxiety of Yeatsian influence in Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald

The restoration of missing familial bonds that this friendship provides for both Stephen and Bloom effectively sublimates Stephen's Yeatsian and homophobic anxieties for the rest of Ulysses. However, while Joyce does not include Stephen as a character in Finnegans Wake, Yeats-related anxieties inform this text as well. In the fourth and final section, Yeats appears in the guise of the Irish Catholic eremite St. Kevin. As an incarnation of Shaun the Post, who represents inflexibility and self-defeating rationality in the Wake, Kevin stands diametrically opposed to Joyce, whom critics usually identify with Shaun's creative twin brother, Shem. According to legend, St. Kevin resisted the temptations of a young woman, Cathleen, who drowned herself after he spurned her advances (Glasheen 155). Joyce follows tradition by making Kevin fastidiously (and ludicrously) dedicated to the pursuit of mystic knowledge and purity, saying that he "took to the tall timber [...] in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction" (604.28-33). Of course, Joyce's ridiculing of the notion that one can comprehend "unity in altruism" or, presumably, unity in anything through "stupefaction" parodies Yeats's theosophical beliefs--beliefs that Stephen also mocks in connection with Irish writers in "Scylla and Charybdis." Joyce explicitly conflates Kevin with Yeats when Kevin embarks in his "postcreated portable altare cum balneo" (605.8; altare cum balneo is Latin for "altar together with bath"). In an allusion to Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," Joyce describes Kevin floating to the lake's "supreme epicentric lake Ysle" (605.16-17). Joyce further associates Kevin's scrupulous religious activities with Yeats's poem about perfect tranquility by having Kevin build "a rubric penitential honeybeehivehut in whose enclosure to live in fortitude" (605.23-24). (12) Kevin's religious dedication and commitment to chastity also make him a conservative figure for Joyce. In his version of the legend, Joyce retains the original water motif, but instead of having the temptress drown, he has Kevin sublimate his desire by urinating--"letting there be water"--rather than copulating (605.34). Kevin then blesses and bathes in his "holy sister water" (605.36-606.01). In suggesting that Kevin's purification ritual makes him a "recreated doctor insularis of the universal church" (606.7-8, Joyce's italics) the text depicts him as a failed creator figure because he fails to confront the realities of life. The notion that a "universal" church would have any use for an "insular" doctor sharpens the parody.

Given that ALP-as-River Liffey serves largely to bind the Wake together, the predominance of water in this episode demands close attention. Water flows through Joyce's works, as in Bloom's extended meditation in "Ithaca," ultimately subsuming all of history in the figure of ALP. But water in Joyce, especially in cloacal contexts such as this, can suggest homosexual anxiety even as it marks the confluence of time and feminine generation. Valente traces this phenomenon through Portrait, arguing that Stephen's trauma at being immersed in the ditch at Clongowes gets conflated in his mind with the robust, naked body of Corrigan in the bath, leading to a fear of water that "indicates how profoundly [Stephen's inchoate homoerotic desire] interfuses with dread" (57). Throughout the rest of Portrait, desire and dread combine to fill Stephen with anxiety whenever water or water imagery occurs. Of course, this phenomenon continues in Ulysses. In "Ithaca," Stephen declines Bloom's invitation to wash his hands, insisting he is a "hydrophobe" (17.237), and the overly meticulous voice of the "Ithaca" narrator echoes Stephen's distaste for water, declaring an "incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius" (17.247). In contrast to Stephen, Yeats-as-Kevin gets christened "Hydrophilos"--water-lover (Wake 606.5). Joyce's depiction of Yeats as an aqueous figure in the Wake, then, suggests that Yeats lacks "erratic originality of genius" (which accords with his being a Shaun figure) while simultaneously expressing an anxious combination of desire and dread at the possibility of Yeats being implicated in such an erotically charged scene.