Useless Joyce by Conley Tim;

Author:Conley, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Although the terms of this intriguing definition, which links the dramatic with self-performance before others, do not change between texts, its presentation and in effect its full meaning does, for it moves from the unspoken, narrated description of Stephen’s thinking to a spoken Socratic dialogue with Lynch. That is, Joyce found greater force – a dramatic tension which allows for a wider possible range of conflicts and ironies – in compelling Stephen to utter his thoughts aloud, and letting them be interpellated.5 In the paragraph from Stephen Hero that I have just quoted, Stephen is not just mulling over his speech (which he is still two dozen pages away from actually giving) but trying to justify his doing such a thing at all: “his essay was not in the least the exhibition of polite accomplishments. It was on the contrary very seriously intended to define his own position for himself” (SH 76). How different all of this is from the showy unravelling of Hamlet in “Scylla and Charybdis,” which performance John Gordon has argued is as significantly if not altogether improvisational, “a production very much in its pre-Broadway tryout stage” (502). His trigonometric display, as it is advertised by Buck, is very much an “exhibition of polite accomplishments” but he promptly disavows that it is “his own position.”

The anxiety so palpable in the anticipation and preparation of the “explosive” lecture in Stephen Hero is perhaps best encapsulated by Stephen’s judging the period between Christmas and the second Saturday in March “an ample space of time wherein to perform preparative abstinences” (69) – that is an extraordinary last phrase. Yet it ought not to be supposed that the Hamlet lecture in “Scylla and Charybdis” is – as it might seem – any less worrisome an effort. Margot Norris stresses how much is at stake in the Hamlet lecture for Stephen, knowing as he does that “his own success or failure as an artist” may well depend upon the acceptance of the literati present in the library for the occasion (65). Stephen knows who his audience is and what possibilities of support and patronage they represent, and his attitude on this score is noticeably different from the one the alternate Stephen adopts in his Ibsen lecture. Norris writes that the Hamlet lecture is a “gambit” for literary prestige, “a high priority on this day with a high risk of failure unfortunately verified by its outcome” (64).

And failures both lectures are, though of different kinds. Here is the full description of the Ibsen lecture:

He waited until a compliment of discreet applause had subsided, and until McCann’s energetic hands had given four resounding claps as a concluding solo of welcome. Then he read out his essay. He read it quietly and distinctly, involving every hardihood of thought or expression in an envelope of low innocuous melody. He read it on calmly to the end: his reading was never once interrupted with applause: and when he had read out the final sentences in a tone of metallic clearness he sat down.

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