Liquid Theme Throughout A Portrait... and the Greek Daedalus Myth

by Ariel Mae Lambe

©Ariel Mae Lambe, 1999

Footnotes are in square brackets [ ].  Page numbers are in parenthesis ( ).  Pages in "Eveline" refer to the Dover Press edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

"Daedalus was the architect who had contrived the Labyrinth for the Minotaur in Crete, and who showed Ariadne how Theseus could escape from it When King Minos learned that the Athenians had found their way out, he was convinced that they could have done so only if Daedalus had helped them Accordingly he imprisoned him and his son Icarus in the Labyrinth, certainly a proof that it was excellently devised since not even the maker of it could discover the exit without a clue. But the great inventor was not at a loss. He told his son 'Escape may be checked by water and land, but the air and the sky are free,' and he made two pairs of wings for them They put them on and just before they took flight Daedalus warned Icarus to keep a middle course over the sea. If he flew too high the sun might melt the glue and the wings drop off. However, as stories so often show, what elders say youth disregards. As the two flew lightly and without effort away from Crete the delight of this new and wonderful power went to the boy's head. He soared exultingly up and up, paying no heed to his father's anguished commands. Then he fell. The wings had come off. He dropped into the sea and the waters closed over him. The afflicted father flew safely to Sicily, where he was received kindly by the King."[1]

Through the myth of Daedalus and Icarus flows the theme of water. First the sea represents a limit, then an obstacle to be overcome, and finally acts as a symbol of triumphant escape for Daedalus and one of death by drowning for his son. Similarly this liquid theme saturates Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though Joyce creates a wider spectrum of water symbolism. In the course of the novel, water is described as cold, slimy, scum, dark, rising and falling, shallow, swirling, azure, cold seawater, cold brine, turfcoloured, damp, and loud, as a grey sheet, a thunderstorm, a squall, a cloud. In each of its forms the liquid has a different feel, a different significance.

 The very first encounter we have with liquid in Chapter I is mildly unpleasant. Baby Stephen explains with great seriousness that "When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold." (1) Thus our initial sense about moisture is the discomfort its presence causes the protagonist. As a result of his infant accident, Stephen is condemned by his mother to suffer the queer smell" of "the oilsheet," presumably a protection against the damage of his bed clothes.  In addition to the smell, our young friend must endure the chill of the dampness as he tries to sleep in the soiled bed. Any person would find such conditions intensely unpleasant.  Indeed his dislike of such an environment manifest themselves later as an older Stephen constricts in his mind an idea of what his own personal hell would be. This first encounter foreshadows the underlying dislike even fearof water, which he carries with him for much of the rest of the novel.[2]

Another side of the boy's feelings about urine come up in Chapter 11.  After his theatrical performance, Stephen searches for his loveinterest but fails to find her. Hurt and angered, he runs out into the street, past his waiting family, and away.  In an attempt to calm himself, he runs and runs until he is far away from the theatre.  He finds himself breathing "rank heavy air" (60) and exclaims: "That is horse piss and rotted straw ... It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart" (60)  In this case, the repulsion of his youth acts as a means by which he can ground himself in reality. The smell brings him momentarily back to his carefree infancy. And in this heated moment of adolescent passion and despair, he has to escape to the innocence and simplicity of his past in order to come down from the clouds of angst his young emotions trap him in.  In this case, then, the repulsive nature of the urine is not negative for young Stephen. Instead its earthy nature soothes him. Not until later[3] will the scent loose its earthy quality and become something horrific and unnaturally disgusting.

Stephen's second mention of water is even less pleasant. While walking with a few of his friends at Clongowes, one particularly nasty bully named Wells pushes Stephen into a puddle: "That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Well's seasoned hacking chestnut the conqueror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rut jump into the scum." (4) He is repulsed by his involuntary encounter with the chilly puddle as he was as an infant by his involuntary wetting of the bed.

In addition to repulsing the boy, the incident terrifies him.  Already selfconscious about his size and weakness,[4] Stephen is scared by how helpless he is against a much larger boy who overpowers him, who symbolically drowns him. The wet and the cold that he suffers as a result of lying in the ditch give him a fever and make him quite ill. He is forced to go to the infirmary, a taxing experience for any young student at a boarding school.  The weakness and fear of being sick bring a host of other dismays into Stephen's mind. He has trouble with his school work and loses a contest of sums; he remembers with embarrassment and shame how the older boys have mocked him; he feels like he is going to cry; he has horrible thoughts as he tries to sleep and then has nightmares; and once in the infirmary, he becomes terribly homesick. The whole damp experience thus becomes more and more negative, leaving Stephen with a lifelong fear of water.

Stephen's fear ties his character back to those of the Daedalus myth: Stephen is scared of water as Icarus should have been. Stephen's "drowning," then, is a rite of passage: Icarus was immature and did not fear drowning as he should have whereas Stephen learns a mature caution at an early age. Perhaps if Icarus had gone to school with such a bully as Wells he would have been more wary of his father's words when flying over the deadly sea. But Icarus is not wise as Stephen is; this is perhaps why Stephen is named after Daedalus and not Icarus.

The boy's next encounter with water is in the infirmary at Clongowes while he is sick.  In his fevered sleep, he dreams of a ship on the sea: "How pale the light at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. I t was like waves.  Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking.  It was the noise of the waves.  Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell. He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and failing, dark under the moonless night.  A tiny light twinkled at the pierhead where the ship was entering: and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the waters' edge to see the ship that was entering their harbour." (16)  The ship, it turns out, carries the mournful tidings of Parnell's death. Here on the edges of the dark waters of young Stephen's mind, the boy observes the scene both with innocence and melancholy. In this short description of Stephen's dream Joyce presents several themes which will reappear later and hold greater significance.

The symbol of the ship will come near the end to represent Stephen's passage out of the country, away to freedom.  As he readies himself to leave, images of the sea and the ship will lose the dark uncertainty, the melancholy foreboding they carry in this earlier example. But young Stephen has no idea yet of his eventual escape. The ship brings sorrowful news of death. The mournful quality which surrounds the ship represents the sorrow Stephen feels at his fateful realization: is arriving, not departing and so there is no possibility for him to leave on it and escape the stagnancy of his Irish existence.  The ship sails in the periphery, remaining just out of reach in the moat of sea water which surround the island of Ireland.  Stephen admires the Count of Monte Cristo who realizes that the water surrounding his island prison is an obstacle which can be overcome, as opposed to an endlessly restricting limit.[5] He is after all Daedalus, inventor and escapee of an ultimately difficult and complex  albeit selfconstructed  prison. Yet at this young stage in his life, he has neither the physical nor the intellectual means to escape, as the unhelpful ship demonstrates. Perhaps the wise old man Daedalus within Stephen realizes that there is too much Icarus in him yet to make any such escape journey safe.

The description of Stephen's fevered dream also presents a comparison between fire and water. In fact, Joyce uses language which subtly melds the two until the waves of dark fire lap both wall and ship. This merging of elements and the description of fire as dark foreshadow the sermons on hell in Chapter III.  The priest in this chapter brings together the ideas of fire and water by describing hell as "a never ending storm of darkness," (85) a "lake of fire," (86) and a "burning ocean." (86) He echoes Stephen's idea of dark waves of fire: "the fire of hell gives forth no light" (85) Guided by these comparisons, Stephen's innocent melancholy at the death of Parnell is mutated and becomes the horrific monster of hell in his more experienced mind.

Hell appears in Stephen's mind in Chapter III, this time in the form of another nightmare. Both his early discomfort with urine and his repulsive and fearful fall into the ditch reappear in Stephen's personal vision of hell. He describes "A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettlebunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and cods of solid excrement. A faint marsh light struggling upwards from all the ordure through the bristling grey green weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung." (98) Hell is a cold, damp, smelly, uncomfortable bog. The stinking moisture on his infant bed sheets and the foul, ratinfested puddle of his youth are distorted and magnified into his ultimate terror.  The alleged rat grows into multiple "Goatish creatures with human faces, horny browed, lightly bearded and grey as indiarubber." (98) These malicious demons "swish in slow circles round and round the field" in a sort of rank, slowmotion whirlpool of despair.  The liquid references in this section are subtle as if there is just a bit of dirty moisture lurking somewhere forgotten.  Joyce gives a sense of uncomfortable damp without providing any of the purifying, rejuvenating water of later sections.

Stephen's idea of hell as a marsh or bog suggests his later displeasure with his country. Ireland is known for its bogs.  As a bog is trap for water, Ireland is a trap for its residents. Joyce explores extensively in Dubliners the idea of Ireland as a place where people are stuck.  And in Portrait, Stephen finally overcomes the obstacles which characters in Dubliners faced he leaves the bed of his infancy, the puddle, ditch, bog, marsh of Ireland, the island, by flying, sailing over the extensive moat of the sea, away to his mature freedom. Like the Count of Monte Cristo and like his namesake Daedalus, Stephen takes the leap and is successful in his escape.

The course which he travels towards eventual freedom begins with Stephen's religious revelation and confession near the end of Chapter III. The idea of cleansing water is introduced in the story of the life of Saint Francis Xavier "He went from country to country in the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptizing the people. He is said to have baptized as many as ten thousand idolaters in one month. It is said that his right arm had grown powerless from having been raised so often over the heads of those whom he baptized." (76)  Baptism, the spiritual cleansing of the soul with holy water, becomes, in its secular form, a major theme for the rest of the novel.

In the incident of Stephen's imagining of his own hell, Joyce lays out clearly the transformation of liquid from negative to positive.  As the gravity of his sin begins in earnest to weigh on his soul, Stephen feels as he did so many years before at Clongowes when he was pushed into the puddle: "His bands were cold and damp and his limbs ached with chill. Bodily unrest and chill and weariness beset him, routing his thoughts." (97)  When the guilt and despair become too much for him to take, he vomits "profusely in agony." (98)  Though more grotesque in substance than either urine or excrement, this bodily function serves to cleanse him.  When his sickness passes, he walks to the window and observes the land with a cleansed soul: "When the fit had spent itself he walked weakly to the window and lifting the sash, sat in a comer of the embrasure and leaned his elbow upon the sill. The rain had drawn off, and amid the moving vapours from point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers: and amid peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with his heart." (99) He feels fresh, almost rejuvenated. He prays for purity and guidance and then weeps.[6] In weeping "for the innocence he had lost," (99) he not only weeps out of grief, but also actually weeps as a cleansing method for the recovery of that lost innocence. In other words, if he cleans himself by repenting his sins and being absolved, he may be innocent before God once again.

When he goes to confession, his foul, disgusting sins flow from him like liquid, like urine, excrement, or vomit.  "His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice.  The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome." (103) After he has purged himself of these infecting and rank poisons, he promises to leave sin and seek God.  The priest guides him, cleanses him: "The old and weary voice fell like sweet rain upon his quaking parching heart.Blinded by his tears and by the fight of God's mercifulness he bent his head and heard the grave words of absolution spoken and saw the priest's hand raised above him in token of forgiveness." (103) Instead of the dark waves of fire, here Stephen encounters the sweet and quenching rain of God's light upon his soul in the form of the priest's words, his own tears, and the holy absolution. As he says his penance, "his prayers ascend to heaven from his purified heart like a perfume streaming upwards from a heart of white rose." (104) Far from the dark, cold, scummy water of the bully's infested ditch, water in this instance is clean, pure, sweet, heavenly.  In other words, water at this point in the novel has lost its negative qualities and taken on a decidedly beautiful, helpful, positive nature.

At the end of Chapter IV, Stephen visits the ocean[7].  He revels softly in the natural surroundings of the beach, appreciating fully the artistic beauty and serenity of the seaside environment: "He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself. - A day of dappled seaborne clouds. - The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord." (119)  Yet upon confronting the sea, his old negative feelings spring up and he feels fear "[L]ooking askance towards the water he saw a flying squall darkening and crisping suddenly the tide. A faint click at his heart a faint throb in his throat told him once more of how his flesh dreaded the cold infrahurnan odour of the sea: yet he did not strike across the downs on his left but held straight on along the spine of rocks that pointed against the rivet's mouth." (120)  In this encounter with the sea, Stephen begins to realize the ultimately more complex nature of his feelings for water.  Neither clearly negative nor completely positive a symbol in Stephen's matured mind, water represents for him many histories, aspirations, and emotions.

In this complex section Stephen's life and the lives of his mythological counterparts Daedalus and Icarus meld together. The friends whom Stephen comes across play jokingly with his name, making it into a Greek word: "Hello, Staphanos! ... Bous Staphanoumenos! ... Staphanos Dedalos!" [8] (120121)  Thus they suggest the Greek myth and connect him to its reference directly.  As if prompted by their banter, Stephen slips into an ecstatic recollection of the myth. In two paragraphs Joyce lays out the whole mythological context of the novel and clearly states Stephen's place in this context:

"Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, Ins strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

"His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight mad radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs." (121)

In this triumphant moment of ecstasy, Daedalus' spirit overcomes the obstacle of the sea. In the next few lines, one of Stephen's friends calls out "0, Cripes, I'm drowned!" (121) referring to Icarus. But Stephen is accounted for; it is not he who has drowned. And so again his namesake is made clear. Stephen Dedalus escapes, soaring above the sea, safe from death by drowning.

From this climactic moment in the novel, Stephen's relationship with water becomes more confident.  He has had a premonition about his ultimate success, about the inevitability of his escaping like Daedalus. As his intense feelings surge within him he feels a need to "quench the flame in his blood." (122)  He then engages in another symbolic baptism, albeit an entirely secular one.[8]  He takes off his shoes and socks and ventures down into the water to wade.  No longer dreading the sensation of water on his skin, he boldly steps in, feeling "a new wild lifesinging in his veins." (122) He immediately starts to enjoy himself, "alone and young and willful and wildhearted", [9] (122) he calms himself in the water gracefully growing accustomed to it, exploring it and ridding it of its former mysterious and negative connotations.

As if to actively encourage his communion with the formerly foreboding ocean, a lovely maiden appears to him, as if in a vision. She stands with her feet in a stream, looking out to sea and appearing to him "like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird." (123)  She is like a sweet fairy sent from the sea to give him the confidence he needs to brave the waters in his flight from his island prison.  Like Mercedes for the Count of Monte Cristo, she guides and motivates him with her beauty towards the sea: not cunning or dangerous like a mermaid, but helpful and reassuring. She confirms the realization that he has just come to about his pending successful escape.

With the realization of departure already made, the rest of the book provides Stephen with an opportunity to break ties. The rivulets of Chapter IV trickle gently into the first pages of Chapter V, creating tiny pools of water imagery. First Stephen recalls negative water symbolism as if he is trying to remind himself of why he must leave: "He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole, and the pool under it brought back to his memory the dark turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes." (125)  In this passage he recalls all the previous negative references: the yellow of his infant urine, the bully's puddle, the darkness of the nightmare waves and of the fire in hell, and the bog of his vision of hell.  Shortly after this passage Joyce reveals that Stephen is in fact in his parents home at the time of these observations.  The house is symbolic of Stephen's greater home-Irelandand he tries to make his departure easier by noticing all that is dark and foul about it.

As Stephen prepares to leave the house, he must wash.  His family fills the wash basin and his mother sets about cleansing her son. The wash takes on a couple of representations. First of all it is another example of symbolic baptism. Stephen must be rid of the old grime of the house before he goes out into the world.  And when he does indeed leave the house, he finds that the whole world has been similarly baptized; rain has fallen while he was inside, and everything is washed and dripping!  Second, like the fall in the puddle, the wash is a rite of passage.  Stephen must become accustomed to the idea of drowning so that he will carry the proper fear when he makes his journey. If he is instilled with this fear, then he will not make the same juvenile mistake that Icarus made. In this way, the bath saves him from drowning.

As the final departure nears, the waters of the ocean  his escape route  call to him more and more fervently until his mind is overcome.

"A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters.  A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from Ins heart like a bird from a tunet quietly and swiftly.  Symbol of departure or of loneliness? (165)

His liquid thoughts sweep him away, out to sea.  He is caught in a mental rivulet which runs inevitably out and away from the land. His mind knows that it is time.  He has been given all of the proper preparation: his history supports him, his knowledge enables him, and his maturity keeps him safe.  Thus when his ship finally comes on the very last pages of the novel he is ready to leave the "dark stream of swirling bogwater" (184) that is Ireland and go to another land to live his life as an artist:

"Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arm of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth." (185)

 

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