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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
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.
That the St. Kevin episode was among the first parts of the Wake Joyce drafted gives it additional importance for our understanding of Yeats's continuing impact on Joyce. Joyce began Finnegans Wake in 1923, the same year Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This may be nothing more than coincidence, since Joyce drafted "St. Kevin" in July, while the announcement of Yeats's Nobel Prize wasn't made until November. However, Joyce's decision to parody the increasingly revered older poet so early in his composition of the Wake suggests that, as Joyce began the most ambitious project in Irish literary history, Yeats loomed dauntingly in his mind. Joyce's third fair copy of the draft of "St. Kevin," which he sent to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 16 July 1923, contains the phrases "supreme epicentric lake isle," "an enisled lakelet islanding a lacustrine islet," and "a rubric penitential honeybeehivehut," indicating that he had Yeats in mind as a St. Kevin figure from the outset (Book 4 Facsimile 38e). His handwritten revisions to two separate sets of typescripts in 1938 further emphasize this Yeats connection. First, on a typescript from early 1938, Joyce scribbled instructions in the left margin for the typist to "change all initial 'i's to 'y's: e.g. ysle not isle" (61). This results in a preponderance of initial ys throughout the "St. Kevin" episode, which is tempting to read as itself suggestive of Yeats. But the ys also impose a Spenserian, pseudoarchaic orthography on the text, providing Joyce with yet another way of figuratively trapping Yeats in an outdated, sentimentalized literary past. On a subsequent typescript that year, Joyce added the phrase quoted above describing Kevin's "search for love of knowledge through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction" (90). Also, Joyce changed one more i to y ("enisled" becomes "enysled") on the same typescript (91). This implies that Joyce was thinking about the theosophical parody and the archaic orthography at the same time. Thus, both revisions seem intended to reinforce each other in portraying Yeats as an outmoded introvert forever stuck in an "enysled" world of kitschy, nostalgic aesthetics and self-gratifying desire.
