Avoiding and Confronting the Feminine in Pound and Joyce

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black, bough.

Ezra Pound writes of his poem, "In a Station of the Metro," that "in a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective" (Pound, 150). If we take Pound at his word, it seems quite easy to divide his two-line poem into two parts (it has, in fact, already been done for us). The first line ("The apparition of these faces in the crowd"), we might say, represents the "outward and objective" reality of the people in the Metro station, while the second line ("Petals, on a wet, black, bough") would then be a representation of Pound's "inward and subjective" reality.

But having done so, we will have disposed of all of the words in the poem by pigeonholing them into our two neat categories. Where, then, do we locate the "precise instant" of transformation--the instant that for Pound is the heart of the poem? The only possible answer is that it happens in what we might call the negative space of the poem. In other words, the "transformation" is implied by the colon in the first line, that tells us the "faces in the crowd" and the "petals" are somehow the same. Pound's "metro emotion" is expressed, then, not through language, but through its absence.

Pound tells us that when he first saw a "beautiful face, and then another and another" (Pound, 148) in the Metro, he "tried all day to find words for what this had meant to [him], and [...] could not find any words that seemed [...] worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion" (Pound, 149). The subsequent textual history that he gives us seems to trace an effort to eliminate language, in an effort to get back to the original, wordless emotion: "I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity.' Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the [...] hokku-like sentence" (Pound, 150). Pound would like to say, of course, that his poem represents a vortex, in which all unnecessary language is cast off, leaving only the words of the "first intensity"--a powerful language that is "lord" over fact (Pound, 152). But since, in practice, the vortex of this poem--the moment of transformation--is not represented in language at all, the poem reads like an acknowledgment of defeat: try as he might, Pound cannot summon the words that will embody his experience, his lost time. Language, as he sees it, is bankrupt in comparison to the complexity of lived human experience.

This perceived inadequacy of language is symptomatic, if we're to believe Richard Sheppard, of a larger, peculiarly modernist consciousness of a "crisis of language"-- a sense of pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, a [...] sense that all that remains are a few isolated and arbitrary symbols" (Sheppard, 324). Language is transformed: once the transparent medium of communication between minds, it is now a barrier. Thus the project of literature is placed in jeopardy. Virginia Woolf writes that "fiction in the form most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide" (Woolf, 123). If literature is the attempt to capture and express in language the "essential thing," the moment of intensity, then, implicitly, literature is the attempt to communicate that intensity, to bridge what William James calls the "greatest breach in nature" (James, 716), namely, the discontinuity between one mind and another. But if language is opaque, writing becomes a struggle against language as well as a struggle against reality. It becomes--for Pound, at any rate--a quest to find the right words and weed out the wrong, to dominate and "lord" over language.

As Marianne DeKoven points out in her essay on "Modernism and Gender," this can be read as a mode of male domination, the advocacy of "firm, hard, dry, terse, classical masculinity [...] against [...] messy, soft, vague, flowery, effusive, adjectival femininity" (DeKoven, 176). The language of the "second intensity" that Pound excised when writing his poem is, arguably, gendered feminine. And here we might do well to remember that, in the Woolf quotation given above, Woolf is speaking not only from the position of a modernist writer critiquing late Victorian writing, but also, implicitly, from the position of a woman writer critiquing the failure of male-dominated writing--including modernist writing--to acknowledge and express feminine experience. The "essential thing" that the "fiction most in vogue" fails to capture is, after all, elsewhere figured as "Mrs. Brown." In other words, the "crisis of language" that defeats Pound is the predicament of a language of male domination that erases femininity from itself to the point where there is nothing left to erase.

In the work of James Joyce, we see the same preoccupation with the limitations of male language. Thus, in the textual history of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we see a paring-down similar to Pound's process of composition in "In a Station of the Metro"; like Pound's poem, Portrait was condensed from a longer work of less "intensity," Stephen Hero. But the simplification, refining and polishing of language is only part of Joyce's process, which one might term a process of emergence, the development of complex, resonant, and densely interconnected meanings from a set of relatively simple terms--a different kind of intensity. And this, I'll argue, has everything to do with Joyce's encounter with the feminine.

In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus's thinking about language, and his sense of self, are inextricably intertwined with (and complicated by) his thinking about God and paternal authority, which, in turn, is complicated by his relationship to the feminine and the maternal. In the opening pages of the book, little Stephen seems to be working within a model of language in which each and every word is taken, in a sense, to function as a proper noun--to function as the name of something in the world, in a one-to-one correspondence. Language seems, at this point, to be perfectly transparent. The story told to Stephen, for instance, is immediately taken to refer directly to Stephen's own self, and to specific people and locations within his young experience. References to "A moocow" and "a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo" are comfortably processed by Stephen into the statements that "he was a baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived" (Joyce, 19--my emphasis). Language and the things it names have a basic unity. And this language is represented as being given to Stephen by his father, who is the one who tells the story.

Into this seemingly idyllic linguistic patriarchy, however, an element of danger and mystery is introduced, closely associated with a threatening female presence. Dante Riordan's two brushes--the maroon representing Michael Davitt and the green representing Parnell--arguably represent Stephen's first encounter with symbolism, a more opaque kind of language. And the incantatory refrain that Stephen associates with his mother and with Dante--

Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes

foreshadows Stephen's conflicted relationship with the feminine (Joyce 20). Both terrifying and oddly engrossing, its chiasmic structure will seem, later, to impose itself upon the whole of the book at multiple levels.

On the next page we see Stephen already in possession of the understanding that words are polyvalent--the word "belt," for instance, can refer both to an article of clothing and to a blow (Joyce, 21). This realization seems to resonate with the statement, on page 27, that "the earth moved around always." Stephen has already realized that language can slip and slide around: here he seems not far away from an instinctive understanding of the fact that the world he tries to define through slippery language is also unfixed and permanently mutable. His immediate reaction is to try to develop a sense of himself as a fixed point of reference: he is Stephen Dedalus, at Clongowes, in Ireland, in Europe, in the World, in the Universe (Joyce, 27). Implicit in this reaction is a certain degree of anxiety concerning the mutability that Stephen has discovered for himself; it is an effort (whether conscious or not) to keep the world stable--to keep things from falling apart by organizing them in a hierarchical scheme. And it is typical of Stephen, for much of the first four chapters of the book, that his attempt to order the world depends on God. God is the archetypal fixed point of reference, the arch-father in relation to whom language is always transparent. Even though language is unreliable--even though there are different names for God in every language--"still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God" and "God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages" (Joyce, 28). Although Stephen has discovered that not all words have fixed meanings, here we see him convincing himself that there is at least one word in each language that means one thing and one thing only. And this comforts him, since it means that he, Stephen Dedalus, can have a self that can be stably defined within the hierarchy of the Father. God, in fact, embodies precisely the kind of language that Pound seeks in his vortex-mongering--an ultimate power over fact.

But Stephen is not interested solely in referential stability in language, or in its potential power to give everything its rightful name. In fact, there is also a part of him--which will grow ever more important through the book--that takes an active pleasure in exploring the complex, liberatory possibilities created by words and phrases that have many, often contradictory, meanings at the same time. And this impulse is linked with a tentative eroticism--with (the representation of) the feminine. Stephen associates his first love, the protestant girl Eileen, with the liturgical refrain of "Tower of Ivory, House of Gold": "Eileen had long thin cool white hands [...] They were like ivory, only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it [...] Her fair hair [...] streamed out behind her like gold in the sun" (Joyce, 53). On the purely referential level, which is the level of Stephen's earlier thought about God and language, of course, Eileen can be neither a tower of ivory, nor a house of gold. But Stephen is already attuned to the aesthetically pleasing "truth" that emerges out of the seeming conflict between the meanings of "woman" and "ivory / gold." Stephen's enjoyment (such as it is) of Eileen's body is equated with his enjoyment of metaphor. Again, however, it is typical of Stephen here, as throughout most of the book, that his metaphors are Catholic metaphors, drawn from the "litany of the Blessed Virgin" (Joyce, 46). Stephen's early manipulations of the pleasures of polyvalent language emerge, ironically, out of the same symbolic and hierarchical order that Stephen depends on as a bulwark against mutability. It is this tension between sterile, orderly, transparent "masculine" referentiality and fertile, chaotic, opaque, "feminine" resonance that structures Stephen's relationship to language.

In this context, then, the Christmas dinner scene is a watershed moment in the book. It is the first place in Portrait where Stephen sees Catholic order--the order of the Father--itself assume a measure of polyvalence. For Mr. Casey and Mr. Dedalus, the Catholic Church is the betrayer of the cause of Irish independence; Judas to Parnell's Jesus. For Mrs. Riordan, however, the exact opposite is true: Parnell is the traitor to the cause of Catholic morality. Stephen can only watch in fascination as the adults clash, each side firmly convinced that they speak the truth. Stephen himself has already been identifying Irish politics with his religious, hierarchical order of the world: when he colors his picture of the world, in the same passage where he tries to establish a fixed point of reference for himself, he colors the world maroon and green, replicating the color-symbolism of Dante's brushes. In essence, when Dante and the two men argue with one another in front of Stephen, they are striking at the very foundations of Stephen's carefully ordered view of the world, by showing him that the truths they have taught him are fractured; open to debate--and once again, it is a threatening female presence that has exposed these fault lines.

Stephen reacts to this new reminder of the mutability of the patriarchal world by inventing an alternate world of fantasy. The language of The Count of Monte Cristo offers Stephen a world of mutability that is under his control, to shape as he will, like the image of the island cave that he builds out of the debris of his "real" life: "out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the golden and silver paper in which chocolate is wrapped" (Joyce, 72). Again, we might refer back to Pound. Stephen sees himself, like Pound, as a "lord" over language and fact, and this domination is achieved by erasing the feminine. In contrast to the "real" world, in which the patriarchal order is disturbed by women and the words they say, in Stephen's favorite fantasy the fantasized female figure of Mercedes is silent, and Stephen can refuse her with a "sadly proud gesture" (Joyce, 73). Stephen is thus imaginatively freed to become his own father, to invent his own language.

At the same time, this freedom is both ironic and anxious. The linguistic component of the "sadly proud gesture" is the banal "Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes" (Joyce, 73). And in the real-life acting out of that fantasy, the scene in which Stephen visits the prostitute, the "magic moment" in which Stephen had thought "weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him" (Joyce 75) is paradoxically experienced as a loss of self:

He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicles of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour. (Joyce, 109)

In the kiss, which covers his mouth and immobilizes his lips, Stephen loses his powers of speech. Stephen does not find clarity, as he had hoped he would. Instead, he is engulfed by the "vague speech" of the feminine other, which is not a "tongue" but the "unknown and timid pressure" of a physical tongue. I read this as a dramatization of the "crisis of language" that defeats Pound, and here defeats Stephen.

But Stephen and Joyce, as I've said, bounce back from this defeat, in what many see as the emotional high point of the book, namely the end of Chapter 4, when Stephen repudiates the priesthood and decides to become an artist. Since his encounter with the prostitute, Stephen has devoted himself once more to the speech of the Father, to order, and to asceticism--to a very Imagistic paring-down of excess that he hopes will compensate for his "swoon of sin," his lapse into vague speech,. But "sin" in and of itself represents another contradiction within the patriarchal order, which must define sin in order to define itself. Stephen wouldn't be saying his Hail Maries if he hadn't sinned with Mary's antithesis, and in fact, without an antithesis to define herself against, there wouldn't be a Virgin Mary to hail. By analogy, we might say (as I think Joyce might be saying), that patriarchal language contradicts itself by trying to pin down the "essential"--in trying (and failing) to do so, it always loses its own essential identity. We could then read the scene with the "bird girl" as an acceptance of the feminine, of polyvalence and ambiguity, in opposition to hard magisterial Pound-like "masculinity." Significantly, the chiasmic rhythm of "Apologize / Pull out his eyes / Pull out his eyes / Apologize" resurfaces here: " Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove" (Joyce, 176). And again: "her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish [...] her face" (Joyce, 176). At the center of these sentences, we are still faced with the Poundian impasse--we still feel the feminine as Other; we still feel its "unknown and timid pressure." After all, Joyce, too, is trying to record a moment of transformation, in which the objective and external girl becomes the internal and subjective "angel of mortal youth and beauty" (Joyce 176). But the chiasmic pattern--which is, in effect, the coupling of a Pound "one-image poem" with its mirror image--suggests a way out of the Poundian impasse, one that is inclusive and included rather than exclusive and excluded. The doubling of the "one-image" poem suggests that the internal / external divide can be switched around, that not only are we trying to capturing reality through language, but reality is, through language, is capturing us; suggests a way in which Stephen and Joyce can experience the feminine as self as well as other. It is Stephen's "soul" after all, that cries in "profane joy" at his vision (Joyce, 176)--and that soul is feminine:

the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch. (Joyce, 175)

Works Cited

DeKoven, Marianne. "Modernism and Gender." The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Edited by Michael Levenson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. 174-93.

James, William. "The Stream of Consciousness." The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. Edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. 715-723

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York and London: Signet Classics, 1991.

Pound, Ezra. "Vorticism." The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. Edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. 145-152

Sheppard, Richard. "The Crisis of Language." Modernism. Edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1991. 323-36.

Woolf, Virginia. The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. Edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. 121-26