Language, Art, Ethics

- Early blog post: but the epiphany is in the later bit so it's hopefully ok.

- sorry there were some errors; have tried to clean them up.

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I liked Lucas' close reading of the epiphany scene, and how he correlated it with the eileen scene to show how the repeating motifs create, among other things, a sense of the continuity of Stephen's consciousness throughout the text. One thing that struck me was the descriptions of Eileen and the unnamed girl: while Eileen seems 'corporeal' to us, the girl appears mainly as a 'corpus', a body of text.

Lucas pointed out the repetition of "Ivory" in the two passages, a reference to the litany of the Virgin Mary. I suggest that Stephen's language and conceptualisations don't adhere to Eileen: she mocks the litany (and thereby Stephen's idealisation of her), her actions and comments on pockets are non sequitur, she runs off "all of a sudden";

Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold.

even the syntax participates: the full stops seperate the tropes of religious imagery from her being.

In contrast the muse is transformed entirely by the "magic" of his language, she has no name; her body metamorphoses into that of a bird. each clause is a simile of Stephen's making, we see her only as he sees her. She has no agency of her own, only able to "suffer" his male gaze, transformed into an inactive aesthetic object.

This, i suggest, contributes to the sense of "disillusionment" in the novel: there is no union within the epiphany, it is, in fact an act of violence that objectifies and reifies the girl. Perhaps the same thing happens to Dublin: the transformation of city into intertextual tropes, while 'validating' or 'canonising' the Irish city, is nonetheless a kind of disembodiment, a kind of loss. In other words, a problem in the ethics of representation.