Stephen on the Strand



    Reading Stephen on the Strand: the Political Subject in Flux
 
    By representing subject formation as process, Ulysses models yet suspends possibilities of political orientation and makes affixing labels to Bloom or Stephen nearly impossible. Stephen's shifting identifications as he walks on the strand in "Proteus"--"Whom were you trying to walk like?" he wonders of his sojourn as a Parisian flaneur (3.184)--offer a heightened sense of the elusiveness characteristic of the text as a whole.

    Consonant with the confusions between fathers and sons throughout Ulysses, Stephen's meditations in "Proteus" touch on both Patrick Egan and his father Kevin, the former a self-declared (if timid) socialist, the latter a Fenian in exile linked to nationalist bombings and police attacks. As one might expect, Stephen's recollections of father and son in Paris seem to refuse, through their lightly mocking tone, the communal ties of fellow countrymen abroad. Yet another memory, interrupting even as it links the scenes of Patrick and Kevin, also suggests an undercurrent of connection. Having approached the post office late in the day with a money order from his mother, Stephen recalls having the door slammed in his face by a postal clerk:

Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes. Look clock. Must get. Fermé. Hired Dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right. (3.184, 186-191)
Although the cartoon-like comedy and context of Stephen's rage (his mother packed his bags in Portrait and now sends some of the ready) palliate the violence of his imagination, they do so without canceling the suggestion of anarchism uncovered within a wounded sense of entitlement. The "hired dog" is destroyed, after all, for his loyalty to the same government institution, the post office, in which Bloom encounters imperial authority in the form of a recruiting poster while awaiting Martha Clifford's letter--a repetition that gestures toward Dublin's General Post Office, headquarters for the 1916 rising. Just before and after this passage, the multitudes Stephen contains in "Proteus" are momentarily polarized around the issue of violence--the very issue that historically split anarchism off from socialism--and then recast, first as a question of self-division, then as a guilty alliance between self and other. In the first instance, imagining himself identified by two eyewitnesses as a murderer in Paris, Stephen offers an alibi: "Other fellow did it: other me"; in the second, assessing the rhetorical design of Kevin Egan's conspiratorial ramblings, Stephen thinks: "To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause" (3.182, 228-29). Less sure than Kevin Egan that he is his father's son ("I know the voice," Egan remarks), Stephen is nevertheless yoked, in shifting moments of self-division and conflicted identification, to multiple identities, including a range of socialist and anarchist stances: "Their blood is in me," Stephen thinks of his imagined Viking ancestors, "their lusts my waves" (3.306-7). But like Bloom, whose thoughts also assume brief residence in a variety of political identities, Stephen never settles into a politically engaged relation to the world.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Harp in Dubliners
 

    In Dubliners too Joyce dips into Ireland's storehouse of traditional symbols, though the harp in "Two Gallants," as observed by Lenehan, displays its subjection to foreign political power more openly as a form of ravishment. Accompanying a melancholy song of liberation deferred, the harp, "heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master's hands" (54). Even apart from the harp's status as an emblem of Ireland's past glories, the proximity of "master" and "strangers" -- both code words for the English in Ireland -- catalyzes the colonial resonance that is sustained in Lenehan's compliant response: "The air which the harpist had played began to control his movements. His softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes" (56). Lenehan's incorporation of the harp's notes -- he is played as he plays -- epitomizes the subject rendered perfectly passive before the interpellative designs of the recruiter.