The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus: The Conflict of the Generations in James Joyce's a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Edmund L. Epstein

Author:Edmund L. Epstein [Epstein, Edmund L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Literary Collections, Dublin (Ireland), Conflict of generations in literature
ISBN: 9780809304851
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Published: 1971-04-15T06:26:51+00:00

to Epictetus as an "old gentleman" conceals a gibe at the dean's age and debility.Even though the dean is old and fading, he is a danger to youth. Stephen's description of him contains a scenario of age threatening youth and keeping it from maturity. Similiter atque senis baculus, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man's hand, 54 to be left in a corner, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady's nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace. (P 186)

The old man travels, at night or in storm, to talk to a lady on a garden seat, and to menace—whom? Perhaps the young man whose nosegay the lady has placed on the garden seat. The old man is using a selfless instrument to frustrate the maturity of the young, just as the father is trying to use the dean to prevent Stephen's maturity. There is an episode in Wagner's Siegfried which resembles this scenario. Wotan stops Siegfried with his spear, the spear of law, and tries to keep him from seeking his destiny with the maiden Brunhilde on the rock surrounded by flames. Wotan volunteers the information that it was he who with this spear shattered his father Siegmund's sword Nothung and caused his death. Siegfried, outraged by this information and by Wotan's obstruction, shatters Wotan's spear with Nothung, newly forged from the fragments of Siegmund's sword. Wotan steps sadly aside and lets the young hero (his grandson) pass by to the end he sought to serve. In his notes to Exiles Joyce refers to the relationship of Wotan and Siegfried: "Wotan ... in willing the birth and growth of Siegfried longs for his own destruction." 55 Perhaps it is this story that directs the course of Stephen's thought on the senis baculus; there are other Wagnerian echoes in this chapter. Therefore, the cry of "Nothung!" as Stephen shatters the lamp in Ulysses bears

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