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

Stephen's writing of the so-called "villanelle of the temptress" in the previous scene is what likely triggers this response to Yeats on the steps of the library. The villanelle owes much to the lyrical and romantic traditions of Yeats's early verse and may seem to implicitly deal with Yeats as a precursor. However, immediately after he writes the villanelle, Stephen first exhibits his Yeatsian anxieties because his foray into Yeatsian territory has made such anxieties "ineluctable" for him (in proper Joycean parlance). Moreover, Joyce burlesques Stephen's composition of the villanelle by locating Stephen's inspiration in a wet dream (the section's third sentence ironically reads, "His soul was all dewy wet" [Portrait 217]) and exaggerating his sense of achievement to the point of ludicrousness by having him imagine himself "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life" (221). Joyce's irony here exposes Stephen's villanelle as a bad knockoffof something from Yeats's Wind Among the Reeds phase and shows that, far from putting his Yeatsian anxieties to rest, Stephen has only now grown capable of experiencing them.

By examining the multiple forms of desire that Stephen's deconstruction of Yeats's verse in the "soft liquid joy" passage aims to satisfy, we also see rudiments of the homophobic anxiety that will haunt him more overtly throughout Ulysses. In an essay that associates Joyce's aesthetic impersonality with queerness, Tim Dean cites this passage in arguing that Joyce's linguistic playfulness grants him access, in Lacanian terms, to the jouissance that initiation into the symbolic order (that is, language) sublimates (257). (8) Dean acknowledges that "Joyce may be ironizing the Paterian idiom in which he formulates Stephen's response" to Yeats, but he also sees Joyce as "clearly committed to making 'a soft liquid joy flow ... through the words' of his own fiction" (258). Thus, desire operates on the authorial level in this passage insofar as Joyce revels in beautiful prose and "distanc[es] himself from Yeats as a poetic precursor by implying that the capacities of dramatic prose supersede those of lyric poetry." Although Dean refers to Joyce here and not Stephen, certainly the way Stephen subsumes Yeats's words into his own unspoken composition is also an attempt at "distancing himself from Yeats as a poetic precursor" in order to experience jouissance. But Stephen's insistence on only confronting Yeats in the privacy of his thoughts simultaneously prevents such distancing. Thus, his desire both to distance himself from Yeats and to confine Yeats--all the while refusing to voice Yeats--makes it impossible for this desire to be fulfilled.

This contradictory desire is informed, moreover, by a double response to the Irish nationalist subject matter of The Countess Cathleen. On the one hand, Joyce's well-known disdain for the Irish Renaissance suggests that Yeats represents for him a literary movement whose construction of Irishness is dangerously exclusivist. The Countess Cathleen, by reworking Irish folklore to comment on contemporary nationalist issues, epitomizes one prominent aspect of this literary movement. However, while Stephen's plan to search for poetic inspiration abroad implies a similar disdain for introverted constructions of Irish identity, part of his reason for leaving also stems from the Irish people's refusal to embrace The Countess Cathleen as a powerful and disturbingly accurate critique of the nation's continual willingness to play right into England's oppressive hands. The audience's hostile reaction to the play's first performance leaves him "looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin" (226). Unable to resolve this contradictory attitude toward Yeats's play, Stephen grapples with Yeats only in the safety of his thoughts. Yet this tactic ends up fueling another anxiety. The more he tries to act on his desire to overcome Yeats as a poetic precursor, the more this desire turns inward and risks reproducing the same threatening exclusivity he associates with Yeats and with the Irish Renaissance in general.