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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald

By the end of Portrait, Stephen does begin to confront this threat by reconciling himself more openly with Yeats and the Yeatsian ideal of love. In keeping with the many journal entries at the novel's conclusion that show Stephen finally coming to terms with issues of family, religion, and women, his second entry for 6 April gestures toward a willingness to engage Yeats openly. Stephen disparages Yeats's own alter ego, Michael Robartes, as emblematic of a dreamy nostalgia for the past that he wants nothing more to do with:

    Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap
    her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long
    faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my
    arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world. (251)

The beginning of this entry reworks the first three lines of Yeats's poem "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty" (originally titled "Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty" in the version Stephen would be familiar with): "When my arms wrap you round I press / My heart upon the loveliness / That has long faded from the world" (Poems 59). Although Stephen still does not speak Yeats aloud, his engagement with Yeats by quoting him almost verbatim and then rejecting his longing for a "loveliness which has long faded from the world" in favor of a loveliness "which has not yet come into the world" marks a considerable achievement. The entry gestures toward Stephen's capacity to reconcile with Yeats more successfully than he does on the steps of the library. However, like all the journal entries, it remains only a gesture, and Stephen's emancipation at the end of Portrait remains far from complete. As John Paul Riquelme argues, "Stephen has yet to reconcile himself to Emma, to Michael Robartes, to Robartes' poetic creator, or to his race" (130). Given the number of instances in Ulysses where characters other than Stephen voice Yeats in Stephen's silent presence, moreover, it is significant that Stephen's handling of Yeats in the journal remains a private, silent moment. The act of grappling with Yeats in writing is certainly an accomplishment for Stephen, but it still falls short of the openness that would come from speaking Yeats aloud, and that seems necessary for Stephen to become an accomplished poet while working in Yeats's shadow.

Since Stephen ultimately hopes to create "a race less ignoble" through his writing, the task he has set for himself amounts to challenging not just Yeats but all of Irish poetic history. Harold Bloom argues that poetic history is "indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves" (5). In this sense, Stephen's project is, by its very nature, inextricably tied to the influence from which it hopes to break. The first two of Bloom's revisionary ratios help to account for Stephen's reworking of the Michael Robartes lines. In clinamen, the younger poet "swerves away from his precursor [...] which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves" (14). Stephen's modification suggests that Yeats's poem should have swerved when it expressed the kind of loveliness Robartes longs to embrace. Robartes, in keeping with Yeats's romantic infatuation with Ireland's past, yearns for "forgotten" loveliness. But Stephen imagines Ireland's past as potentially ensnaring and therefore looks forward to "loveliness which has not yet come into the world." The second ratio is tessera, in which the younger poet "antithetically 'completes' his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough" (14). Certainly Stephen's journal entry indicates that he thinks Yeats fails "to go far enough" in the temporal sense, since Robartes looks to the past for loveliness rather than the future. (Of course, Stephen's aspirations resemble Yeats's more than he acknowledges, since both poets embrace a beauty not in this world, even if one looks to the past while the other looks to the future.) As Bloom stipulates, Stephen retains the terms of Yeats's parent-poem but "misreads" them to alter the sense. The Yeats-induced anxiety in his act of "creative correction" thus fits Bloom's model almost prototypically (30, Bloom's italics).