Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Harkness, Marguerite. The Aesthetics of Dedalus and Bloom. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1984.
Related topics:
Creation and Making
Maternity
Music
Realism
Science
Touch and Feeling
Translation
Union and Division
The Unspoken
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/aesthetics-of-dedalus-and-bloom/oclc/787998788&referer=brief_results
This book focuses on how Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom embody the two dominant and opposing philosophies of art at the turn of the nineteenth century: Aestheticism, or symbolism, and naturalism, or realism. The Aesthetes, among them W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Pater, believe that the artist should transmute life into art, achieving what Wilde called a "momentary perfection" apart from the tedium and triviality of everyday life. In Portrait, we meet Stephen, the thoughtful artist and budding Aesthete who seeks to understand his world through ideas, symbols, and theories. However, where in Portrait Stephen can comfortably remain in this world of the mind, controlling "the terror of experience" by perfecting and making it static through art (Harkness 89), by the moment of Ulysses his mother's death has caused his symbols and theories to "disintegrate in the face of life" (124). In Ulysses, we find Stephen the artist foundering in the gulf between ideas and reality; real people do not behave like symbols, yet symbols have been Stephen's primary means for understanding the world. Though Stephen lacks the insight to see his identity crisis as stemming from the limitations of a purely Aesthetic worldview, Joyce makes this causation apparent to the reader, demonstrating his own ambivalence to this attractive but dangerous tendency.
In contrast to Stephen, Bloom represents naturalism and realism—the belief that art's chief purpose is to reflect and "improve the human condition" (11). Indeed, Bloom's realist focus on the ordinary, the actual, and the material may keep us from even recognizing him as an artist. However, Bloom is no less contemplative or imaginative than Stephen; but where Stephen aims to create art that is perfect because it is static, Bloom is an advertiser, a "kinetic artist" who uses his ideas to achieve real-world ends.
In her last chapter, Harkness addresses the meeting between the Stephen the Aesthete and Bloom the naturalist in the final few episodes of Ulysses (U 16, 17), in which the two men part "having established as much difference as similarity" (191). Both men believe strongly in the power of words, and each one finds shortcomings in their own method of artistic creation. As an adman and an Everyman, Bloom cannot create art that is singular to his own mind or purposes; his art cannot transcend because it is an anxious projection of and for his audience. Stephen, on the other hand, broods so much in his own "private and idiosyncratic" symbols that he cannot translate the singularity of the artist into comprehensible art (194). Bloom has only his audience, and Stephen has only his mind. Harkness finally suggests a bridge between the two in Molly. As a singer, she must be a "creative reader," interpreting source material and shaping it both to her own needs and the audience's enticement (194). Molly "dramatizes interpretive performance [and] mediates between artist and audience" (194). Her final declarations of yes do not make clear to what or to whom her affirmations respond. Rather, Molly affirms and mediates contradiction in much the same way Joyce's modernist novel does artistic modes, recognizing both Bloom and Stephen, realism and Aestheticism, the material and the mythical.
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