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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald

    You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
    earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray!
    No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters
    for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W
    is wonderful. O yes, W. (3.137-40)

Stephen's instinct to contain his creative energies in this interior monologue reveals how counterproductive his silence has become. The scene he recalls might itself make for an interesting piece of writing--certainly more so than his villanelle of the temptress or the vampire poem he rips off from Douglas Hyde. However, he fails to recognize such a possibility. He instead wishes to "tell no-one" of his insecurity, lest he face ridicule for his lack of publication, while his nonexistent books with letters for titles exemplify his inability to sustain a line of mature creative thought.

Stephen's reluctance to put his work "out there" in general and his silent response to Yeats in particular may also owe something to Joyce's writing at a time when Freud and others had proposed that silence is literally expressive, usually in a negative sense. Several of Freud's pre-1922 writings explore the significance of silence in contexts ranging from the treatment of hysterical women to the interpretation of primordial myths. (4) For my purposes, Freud's most important discussion of silence comes at the end of his celebrated essay "The Uncanny" (1919), a text that proves especially illuminating here because of its impact on Harold Bloom in developing his theory of the anxiety of influence. Bloom acknowledges that "Freud's investigations of the mechanisms of defense and their ambivalent functionings provide the clearest analogues I have found for the revisionary ratios that govern intra-poetic relations" (8). (5) In particular, Freud's fixation throughout "The Uncanny" on repression, anxiety, and the "double" underlies the dynamics of how strong poets creatively misread one another in Bloom's model. The "uncanny," Freud writes, concerns "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" (Writings 195). Thus, one of the most fundamental human anxieties involves that which is unsettling precisely because it seems familiar yet cannot be fixed or rationalized. Freud concludes that "silence, solitude, and darkness" relate to this class of the frightening by denoting an "infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free" (229). This is the key idea that Bloom adopts in The Anxiety of Influence. For him, poetic influence breeds anxiety because the precursor poet serves as an "uncanny" figure for the later poet. Hence Bloom arrives at "the special case of the anxiety of influence as a variety of the uncanny" (77-78). The later poet assumes his place in literary tradition by "misreading" his precursor through a series of six "revisionary ratios." In apophrades, the last of these ratios,