The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Joyce · a novel in five chapters · first published as a book by B. W. Huebsch, New York, December 1916 · scored on Joyce’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The novel of an artist’s youth made a novel of consciousness; Bildungsroman, confession and manifesto in one book
Mythos
Daedalus the artificer, the labyrinth and the making of wings; Lucifer’s refusal returned as a young man’s credo; the father invoked at the last
Phase
From a child’s first memory to a student’s last weeks in Dublin: infancy, school, the family’s decline, terror and confession, a vocation refused, the university
Presentation
Fiction; five chapters divided by breaks, with no connective narrative between scenes; a third person that takes the idiom of Stephen’s mind at each age and gives way at the close to his diary, 20 March to 27 April; dialogue introduced by a dash
Register
From nursery speech and a schoolboy’s idiom through the pulpit’s rhetoric and an adolescent’s purple to scholastic argument and the fragments of a diary
Scale
One consciousness, its family, its schools, its church and its nation; Dublin, Clongowes Wood College and Cork
Governing Proposition
A small child hears a story of a moocow coming down along the road; at the close, in his own diary, the same mind sets out to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Between them Stephen Dedalus is held by family, church and nation, rises out of each in turn and falls back, until he names the nets and resolves to fly by them. The wager of the novel is that a self is made of the language it was given, that a prose which takes on that self’s words at every age can show the making, and that the flight is made of the same materials as the nets.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road”. The novel opens inside a story told to a small child, in the child’s hearing and in the child’s words, with no adult voice to frame it. The child is “baby tuckoo”. Within a page he is threatened: a rhyme tells him that if he does not apologise, eagles will come and “Pull out his eyes”. The first page holds the senses, a song, a fault and a punishment, and the last line of the book will answer the threat of the eagles with a prayer for wings.
The book is in five chapters, each divided by breaks into sections, and nothing joins the sections but the order in which they stand. There is no exposition and no narrator’s bridge from one scene to the next. Each section is the scene in which a stage of a mind is fixed, and the prose takes on the language that mind has at that stage: nursery speech, then a schoolboy’s idiom, then the rhetoric of the pulpit, an adolescent’s purple, scholastic argument, and at the end a diary in the first person. It ran as a serial in The Egoist in London from February 1914 to September 1915, at Ezra Pound’s instance, and was first published as a book by B. W. Huebsch in New York in December 1916. It is signed at the close “Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914”, and its epigraph is a line of Ovid’s on Daedalus (Metamorphoses VIII.188): “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes”, and he turns his mind to unknown arts.
At Clongowes Wood College the boy is small among bigger boys. The square ditch and the cocoa are the school as he has it, in the words he has for it. On the flyleaf of his geography book he writes his name and his address, and the address does not stop: “Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildare / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe”. The child places himself at the centre of widening rings, the rings of a world he will spend the book naming and leaving. Already the prose is his. It knows what he knows, in his vocabulary, and nothing more.
Movement II
The Christmas dinner, at home, is built from dialogue alone until the table breaks. Parnell has fallen, and the quarrel over him sets church against nation at the family table; neither will give way, and the boy watches what he cannot yet understand. At the end his father weeps: “Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!” The narration explains nothing. It gives the talk, and the child’s silence inside it, and leaves the grief where it falls.
Back at school Stephen is pandied by Father Dolan, unjustly, with the pandybat. He goes along the corridor to the rector’s room to say so, and he is heard, and the boys carry him shoulder high. It is the first refusal in the book, made in small, and the first of its heights. The chapter closes there. The pattern is set: each chapter will rise to a height at its close, and the next will open low.
The second chapter opens on decline. Simon Dedalus slides from comfort into debt; the family moves, to Blackrock and then into Dublin; the sisters drink their tea from jam jars. Stephen leaves Clongowes for Belvedere College, where he acts in the Whitsuntide play. He goes with his father to Cork, and there he finds the word “Foetus” cut into a desk, and his father’s youth turns to ash in the son’s mind. The chapter ends in the arms of a prostitute, Stephen’s first, and the height it reaches there is also a fall.
Movement III
The third chapter is the retreat. Father Arnall preaches on the last things, death, judgment, hell and heaven, and his sermons dominate the chapter: the pains of hell are given at length, for pages, in the full rhetoric of the Jesuit pulpit. The pastiche is complete enough to work on the reader as the real thing, and the terror is sustained past the point where it has landed. Stephen, in mortal sin since the night that closed the last chapter, hears every word as meant for him.
The sermon tells of the angel who fell, and gives him his word: “Non serviam”, I will not serve. The phrase is planted here, in a preacher’s mouth, as the type of damnation. It will come back as Stephen’s own. His terror is a sexual shame and a religious fear that cannot be told apart, and the book shows them as one system in an adolescent mind, with an exactness the English novel had not reached.
He confesses, and is forgiven, and the chapter closes in a peace the book lets stand for its length. The rhythm is now plain. Each chapter rises to its height at the close, and the next opens deflated after it: the boy carried shoulder high, the boy in a prostitute’s arms, the boy at peace with God, each is a liberation, each is real, and each is provisional. The book’s argument is carried by that rhythm before it is carried by anything Stephen says.
Movement IV
The fourth chapter opens on a regime of piety, the days ordered by devotion. It is written in the prose of devotion, and the prose is ripe; the book half mocks it. The director calls Stephen in and offers him the priesthood. Stephen weighs the offer and refuses it: the order he would enter is the order he must leave.
Free of the choice, he walks out to the sea at Dollymount. A phrase comes to him, “A day of dappled seaborne clouds.”, and he savours it, and the narration builds it. On the shore his schoolfellows call to him in a schoolboy’s Greek, “Bous Stephanoumenos!”, and his strange name, the artificer’s, becomes a prophecy of the making of wings.
Then he sees a girl standing in the water. “Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.” The terror of the third chapter and the rapture of the fourth are one capacity for transport, turned from God to art. Whether what he sees is a vision or a young man’s self-intoxication the book does not say. It ends the chapter on the height and leaves the reader to supply the distance, or to refuse it.
Movement V
The last chapter is the university, and the longest talk in the book. The English dean of studies does not know the word tundish, and Stephen thinks: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.” The colonial condition is stated in a sentence. He says plainly what holds him: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” And: “I shall try to fly by those nets.” The nets have names, “nationality, language, religion”, and of the first he says, “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
Walking with Lynch, he sets out a theory of beauty in the terms of Aquinas, integritas, consonantia, claritas, and of the artist who, “like the God of the creation”, remains “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”. Whether the theory is Joyce’s or Stephen’s, and whether the narration admires him or watches him, the book never says. The talk is long, with Lynch, with MacCann, with Cranly, and it carries more than the knowledge needs, but it is the material the flight is made from. He writes a villanelle, a lesser poem than the scene around it. He means to be “a priest of eternal imagination”, armed with “silence, exile, and cunning”, and he speaks the preacher’s word for Lucifer as his own: “I will not serve.”
Then the narration withdraws, and the book ends in Stephen’s diary, from 20 March to 27 April, in fragments, because Stephen now writes himself and the self is unfinished. Near its end: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The last entry is a prayer: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” The father invoked is Daedalus, and he is also the father the book has watched decline. The fall the myth holds in store is left outside the book.
Act III · The Twelve
The book was cut from Stephen Hero, the longer draft Joyce abandoned, and the cutting is its method: no exposition, no connective narrative between sections, each section the scene in which a stage of the soul is fixed. The subtractive test finds the spine required. Remove Clongowes and the later rebellion has no first injustice behind it: the unjust pandying and the walk to the rector’s room are the first refusal in small. Remove the Christmas dinner and nation and church never meet at the family table. Remove the sermons and the fourth chapter’s piety and the fifth chapter’s revolt have nothing to answer. The rhythm of rise and collapse requires each climax. What holds the axis a step below the top is the last chapter: the aesthetic discussion with Lynch, the walk with MacCann and the long exchange with Cranly carry more talk than the knowledge needs, and parts of the sermons repeat their terror after it has landed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self is made of the language, faith, nation and family that hold it, and the act by which it frees itself is made from the same materials. Stephen’s flight is written in the church’s own forms: he will be “a priest of eternal imagination”, and his refusal, “I will not serve”, is the phrase the retreat sermon gives to Lucifer. The colonial condition is disclosed in one exchange: the English dean of studies does not know the word tundish, and Stephen thinks, “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.” Sexual shame and religious terror are shown as one system in an adolescent mind, with an exactness the English novel had not reached. Held off the top because the disclosure stays inside one temperament, and because the book leaves its irony toward Stephen unfixed, so that some of what it shows is shown only if the reader supplies the distance.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height is reached at the close of nearly every chapter, by design: the boy carried shoulder high after the rector has heard him; the hell sermons, the dreadful sublime sustained for pages; the strand at Dollymount, the girl in the water, and “Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.”; and the last pages, “Welcome, O life!” The Christmas dinner reaches a dreadful height of its own in a father’s grief: “Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!” Frequency is high. What holds the axis below the top is that the book undercuts its heights on purpose: each chapter opens deflated after the last one’s climax, the villanelle is a lesser poem than the scene around it, and the transports of the fourth chapter are written in a prose whose ripeness the book half mocks. The irony is the design, and it also caps the elevation.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, and named in the hero. Stephen Dedalus carries the artificer’s name; the epigraph is Ovid’s line on Daedalus turning his mind to unknown arts; the imagery of wings, nets and flight runs from the child’s rhyme of eagles that will “Pull out his eyes”, to his schoolfellows’ cry on the shore, “Bous Stephanoumenos!”, to the last line’s invocation of the “Old father, old artificer”. It is load-bearing: the book is the labyrinth, Dublin, the church and the family, and the making of wings, and the father invoked at the end is both Daedalus and the absent Simon Dedalus. The second myth is Lucifer’s fall, built into the third chapter’s sermon and taken up by Stephen as his own. Icarus is not named and does not need to be. The particular stays particular: cocoa, the square ditch, the pandybat. Held a step off the top because the myth’s fall is left outside the book.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the novel of development and of the artist’s youth: Goethe, Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, George Moore, and Joyce’s own Stephen Hero, a conventional autobiographical novel of its decade. The turn: a style that grows with its subject, so that the narration takes the vocabulary of the mind it renders at each age; the removal of the narrator’s connective tissue, leaving only the scenes in which a stage is fixed; and the narrative handed at the end to Stephen’s own diary. It opens in nursery speech, with no adult frame. The stake was real: Joyce threw away years of work, and the finished book was declined by English publishers and printers before Huebsch issued it in New York. Held below the top because Ulysses made the greater break, and because this book keeps the chronological spine it bends.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book knows that consciousness is made of language, and knows it by being written in the language that consciousness has at each age: the nursery rhyme, the address on the flyleaf of a geography book widening from Stephen’s name to “The Universe”, the sermon’s rhetoric absorbed into the boy’s terror, the aesthete’s cadence, the scholastic proof. Told in one adult voice the same events would be a memoir about a boy; told this way they are the boy’s mind becoming able to say them. The five rising and collapsing movements are the argument that each liberation is provisional. The diary ending is form as knowledge: the narrator withdraws because Stephen now writes himself, and the fragments show how unfinished that self is. Held off the top by the last chapter’s dialogues, where the form becomes a container for argument.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over a century. The book’s central question has not been closed: how far the narration endorses Stephen. Hugh Kenner, in Dublin’s Joyce, read Stephen as an object of irony; Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), made the book his case of unresolved distance; others read the close as the earnest birth of an artist. Whether the villanelle is a real poem or a parody of one, whether the aesthetic theory is Joyce’s or Stephen’s, whether the girl on the strand is a vision or a young man’s self-intoxication: each has kept readers working. The formal depth yields too: water, cold and warmth, birds and nets recur across the chapters with a density that close reading keeps finding, and Kenner drew his “Uncle Charles Principle” from a sentence in the second chapter. Held below the top because much of the scholarship on Joyce runs through Ulysses, and this book is often read as its threshold.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the novel in English of the 1910s. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novel could be built from the stages of a consciousness rendered in its own idiom, without an authorial frame, and that a narrative voice could be saturated with a character’s language while staying in the third person. That reorganised what the novel of development could be and what free indirect style could carry. What holds it below the top is that the larger reorganisation was Ulysses, and much of the reach credited to Joyce runs through that book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became the model of the artist’s coming of age for the century after it, in English and beyond; Dylan Thomas named a book for it, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940); its aesthetic theory and its credo of “silence, exile, and cunning” entered the self-understanding of modernist and later writers; and it made Joyce’s name to Pound’s circle and to English readers before Ulysses.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 110 years. Form: the text survives whole, as Joyce finished it; printers’ errors and the cuts made in the serial have been repaired in corrected editions, a small charge on the fabric only. Presence: continuous since 1916, in print throughout, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, translated widely, filmed by Joseph Strick in 1977, and its phrases, “the uncreated conscience of my race” and “silence, exile, and cunning”, in common use. It has outlived its conditions: the Jesuit schools, the Parnell split and the Irish revival are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon a mind. Held below the widest presence because that presence is heavily that of a set text, and because much of the book’s standing is held as the prelude to Ulysses.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Joyce’s English. The prose is among the most exact in the language, and the making is load-bearing. The scene: the Christmas dinner, built from dialogue alone until the table breaks; the corridor to the rector’s room; Cork, where the boy finds “Foetus” cut into a desk and his father’s past turns to ash. The sermon is a pastiche of Jesuit pulpit rhetoric so complete that it works on the reader as the real thing. The rhythm of the prose turns with the scene: “A day of dappled seaborne clouds.” is a sentence Stephen savours and the narration builds. The construction is exact: five movements, each closing on a height, each opening low, with motifs placed across the whole. Charged: the villanelle, which may be meant as a young man’s poem and is, either way, the weakest writing in the book; and the long dialogue of the last chapter, where argument outruns scene.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the moocow and “baby tuckoo” on the first page, and the theory of integritas, consonantia, claritas expounded to Lynch on a walk in the last chapter; or the hell sermon and the girl on the strand. One law governs them: the soul’s coming to possess its own language, by taking in and then turning the words it was given. The nursery rhyme and the scholastic proof are two stages of one process, and the sermon’s terror and the strand’s rapture are one capacity for transport, turned from God to art. The book’s undecided irony toward its hero is consistent from the first page to the last and belongs to the law: the narration always speaks in Stephen’s idiom and never steps outside to judge. The range of register is wide and the law holds across it. Charged: narrowness is not coherence, and the range of matter is narrower than the range of style, since everything passes through one mind and the world outside it is admitted only as that mind receives it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Held, within one consciousness. Consciousness at the highest pitch: the whole book. The family: Simon Dedalus’s slide from comfort into debt, the moves from house to house, the sisters at tea from jam jars, the father’s past in Cork. The church: the Jesuit schools, the retreat, confession, the vocation offered and refused. The nation: Parnell’s fall at the Christmas table, Davin’s nationalism, the Irish language classes, the tundish, and “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Sexuality and its shame; art and its theory. They are integrated, not listed, because each is a net Stephen names: “nationality, language, religion”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: labour, the state as an institution and the natural order enter thinly, and the world is held only through Stephen, who does not see much of it; the city’s other lives are a background.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, then The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.1. A prose among the most exact in the language, built in scenes of dialogue, pastiche and rhythm and in five movements that each close on a height; a form written in the language its hero’s mind has at each age, which ends by handing the book to his diary; and a survival of 110 years in print and in the schools, with its phrases in common use.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3, held because the world is held only through Stephen: labour, the state as an institution and the natural order enter thinly, and the city’s other lives are a background. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.7: heights at the close of nearly every chapter, undercut by design, with a villanelle lesser than the scene around it and transports written in a prose the book half mocks.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, scored as the novel published as a book by B. W. Huebsch, New York, in December 1916: five chapters, divided into sections by breaks, signed at the close “Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914”. It ran first as a serial in The Egoist, London, from February 1914 to September 1915; the English edition, from the Egoist Press, followed in 1917. Corrected texts that repair printers’ errors and the cuts of the serial are taken as the work where they do so, and do not change it. Stephen Hero, the earlier draft Joyce abandoned, published in 1944, is context and not the work; Ulysses, in which Stephen returns, is a separate work and is not scored here. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Joyce’s English. English is quoted only where its words are certain; the book introduces speech by a dash, which is left out where speech is quoted here. The English of the epigraph is this page’s gloss of Ovid’s Latin, not a published translation. Hugh Kenner, Wayne Booth, Dylan Thomas and Joseph Strick’s film of 1977 are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the book in words, the number of its sections, the relative length of its chapters and the particular editions of the corrected text, are not given.