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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald

The challenge Mulligan poses in "Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?" reinforces this homophobic link through the loaded word touch. In one sense, Mulligan hints that Yeats's flattery of Lady Gregory amounts to "touching" her up for money and that Stephen could learn from it. Mulligan uses touch in this sense in "Telemachus" when he urges Stephen to "touch [Haines] for a guinea" following Stephen's quip that the "cracked lookingglass of a servant" would make the perfect symbol for Irish art (1.155). However, as Joseph Valente points out, the word touch resonates traumatically for Stephen throughout Portrait because of the duplicitous touch of masters such as Father Dolan. Stephen enlists Cranly to help him overcome his fear of touching, but this proves equally traumatic since Stephen finds himself "thrilled by [Cranly's] touch" and confused by the attraction that Cranly barely conceals and that Stephen possibly reciprocates (Valente 66). (11) Immediately after Mulligan suggests that Stephen should touch Haines for a guinea, Stephen associates Mulligan with Cranly, revealing a homophobic anxiety toward both of them: "Cranly's arm. His arm" (1.159). As David Weir argues, Mulligan's "delight in anal stimulation, however mild," his use of humor as a "defense mechanism against repressed feelings or feelings not expressible in society in more direct ways," and his Wildean desire to Hellenise Ireland all suggest queerness (221-24). Certainly this provides Stephen with ample ground for suspecting Mulligan of same-sex desire, especially as they leave the library after a conversation involving Wilde, catamites, and a supposition that the novel's hero, Leopold Bloom, is "Greeker than the Greeks" (9.614-15). That Mulligan's use of the word touch sparks anxiety in Stephen is evidenced by the attention Stephen pays to Mulligan's "waving graceful arms" immediately after his challenge about the "Yeats touch," since it recalls Stephen's connection of Mulligan's arm with Cranly's (9.1162-63). In this scene on the library steps, then, Mulligan becomes the locus for both Stephen's anxiety about Yeats and his anxiety about homosexuality.

The library scene ends with Bloom passing between Stephen and Mulligan, creating a rift that anticipates his taking Mulligan's place at Stephen's side after Private Carr belts Stephen in "Circe." Only in the latter scene does Stephen voice the lines from "Who Goes with Fergus?" that have haunted him all day. Lying deliriously in the street, he finally (if unintentionally) permits Yeats's lines to escape the confines of his mind:

    Who ... drive ... Fergus now
    And pierce ... wood's woven shade ...? (15.4932-33)

A moment later, after Bloom unbuttons Stephen's waistcoat to help him breathe, Stephen continues:

    ... shadows ... the woods
    ... white breast ... dim sea. (15.4942-43)

Obviously, if these verbalizations are an achievement for Stephen, it is a qualified achievement to say the least. Punning on the private's name, Joyce suggests that while Fergus may indeed rule "the brazen cars," Stephen is far from ruling over the brazen Private Carr. Stephen speaks Yeats's words only in fragments, indicating that the punch has not completely shattered the psychic space where Stephen contains Yeats. Notably, the word love remains absent from what few fragments Stephen does verbalize. Thus, even as we see a trajectory wherein Stephen's struggles with Yeats range from tranquil interior contemplation (on the library steps in Portrait) to violent external clash (the aftermath of Private Carr's punch), at no point in this trajectory does Stephen successfully verbalize, and thereby reconcile himself with, the Yeatsian ideal of love or its homosexual counterpoint. As "Circe" draws to an end, however, one final chance to do so materializes in the person of Leopold Bloom. Comically misinterpreting the Yeats fragments he hears Stephen murmur, Bloom imagines Stephen to be preoccupied with a girl: "Face reminds me of his poor mother. In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him" (15.4949-51). Perhaps Stephen is doomed to repeat history and never come to some terms with Yeats. But Bloom's well-intentioned misunderstanding implies that even though he may not understand Yeats himself, he does understand something about love. Thus he might well be in a position to help Stephen confront his anxieties about Yeats, as the two enter a quasi father/son relationship and explore the meaning of love together.