Anthropomorphism and Other Figures of Speech in James Joyce's "Ulysses"

Author(s): Sarah Joseph

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Jul., 2004), pp. 584-594
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3738988
Accessed: 22-12-2015 13:04 UTC

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 ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND OTHER FIGURES

OF SPEECH IN JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

Stephen, brought back from a self-imposed exile by the news that his mother
was dying, is miserable. Alone and estranged from his countrymen, yet suffering
acutely from the common blows history has dealt them, he is frustrated at not
being able to give written expression to his artistic talents. The first three chap?
ters of Ulysses, the 'Telemachiad', focus on Stephen's story. In 'Telemachus'
and 'Nestor', it is Stephen's fear, as an Irishman, of having been displaced in
history by the English that is to the fore. So much so, in fact, that perhaps we
lose Stephen behind the bluster of the other characters. In the third chapter,
'Proteus', Stephen finds the opportunity to let his thoughts wander uninter-
rupted as he walks along the beach. Dejected, homeless, feeling himself cast off,
he sees his dejection in the waste land around him. His antagonistic relationship
with his Dublin background?he feels both that it is a part of him and that he
is cut off from it?is played out as the landscape before him becomes a feature
of his subjective vision.
Anthropomorphism is the projection of human characteristics onto the natu?
ral world. The Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man gives us a
working definition of the term:

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality.
Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo
of the infuriated cries within him.1

Analysing anthropomorphism as an outward projection of what we feel in-

wardly may prove a useful way of trying to understand subjectivity and its
distortions of 'reality'. If Joyce's style is allusive and elusive and the use of
interior monologue sometimes difficult to follow, perhaps anthropomorphism
offers us a way in, a starting point from which to trace the flow.
Anthropomorphism is often seen as a specifically modern phenomenon which
tries to pass itself off unnoticed?the subjective parading as natural. This prac?
tice has also been much decried. As Alain Robbe-Grillet says in Pour un nouveau
roman, for modern man it was inconceivable that he should look at the world
and that the world should not return his gaze.2 Paul de Man in The Rhetoric
of Romanticism defines anthropomorphism as 'a conceit by which human con?
sciousness is projected or transferred into the natural world'.3 I think de Man
uses the word 'conceit' here in both its senses, as 'an elaborate metaphor or
artistic effect' and 'excessive pride'. It is man's conceit to see himself reflected
in everything he looks at and his further conceit not even to realize that he
does so.
My intention therefore is firstly to locate and then to analyse anthropomor?
phism. In so doing I hope that not only a clearer picture of the functioning
of Stephen's mind (which is notoriously difficult to follow) will emerge, but
1 A Portrait theArtistas a
of YoungMan (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 95. All referencesto the
novel are to thisedition(hereafterP).
2 Pour un nouveauroman
(Paris: Minuit, 1963), p. 53 (hereafterPNR).
3 The Rhetoricand Romanticism
(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1984), p. 85.

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 SARAH JOSEPH 585

also a more general insight into the subjective working of the modern mind or
at least its representation in literature. I shall look first at the portrait of man
reflected in the sea and then at the use of language filtered through Stephen's
consciousness. From this focus on the individual I shall then extrapolate to
the consciousness of the poet, or would-be poet. This consideration of lan?
guage will take me beyond anthropomorphism to an analysis of other figures
of speech and their articulation of subjectivity, which will then be followed by
an evaluation of this subjectivity within modernist discourse.
By the time we get to 'Proteus' the sea has been metaphorized, allegorized,
and glorified by Mulligan (whose 'stately' pretensions are not landlocked) and
many before him. Stephen, however, not having been convinced at the time,
now stumbles across another image of the sea as he walks along the beach:

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling
mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved
by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles,
breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily. A porter-bottle stood
up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: island of dreadful thirst.
Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away
chalkscrawledbackdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts.
Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.4

At the itinerary level of the plot (a level not to be undermined in Ulysses)

Stephen simply tries to cross the unsavoury sand without getting his feet wet.
The use of interior monologue, however, makes it difficult for us to concentrate
on plotting his exact footsteps (interior monologue cannot easily render verbs
of motion). The line 'The grainy sand had gone from under his feet' reveals
Stephen's sudden awareness of where he is. It signals Stephen's double entry
on the scene, his physical presence being accredited through the account of his
surroundings in his consciousness. The ground is effectively taken from under
him and it is thus an idea of destabilization which is conveyed. This feeling will
be passed on to the reader, who, unable simply to follow Stephen's physical
footsteps, suddenly finds himself in Stephen's mind.
Stephen's next realization is that he has been treading on an old mast. Synec-
dochically the mast comes to represent the Armada in Stephen's imagination.
It was not the English who defeated the Spanish but rather the sea. At the end
of the paragraph, however, seafaring man is reinvested with his heroic stature:
'Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners'. 'Mast', a sym?
bol of man riding the waves, becomes by analogy 'master'. This is the rational
man who would wish to number the pebbles. And we are reminded here that
man's desire for mastery extends well beyond the natural and animal king-
doms to the domination of other peoples. Who are the 'brown' men in the
boats? It seems unlikely that they are just browned by the sun. The 'wigwam'
would suggest that they are Red Indians, although the use of the word 'brown'
would suggest that their country of origin is not very important?'brown'
and 'wigwam' merely being used generically to denote 'not white', 'primitive',
colonized?a negative definition. It was the sea power of nations that deter-
4 Ulysses(London: Penguin, 1968), p. 50. All referencesto the novel are to this edition (here?
afterU).

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586 Anthropomorphism in 'Ulysses*

mined their potential to colonize and Dublin overlooking the sea here bears
witness to colonial invasion and the 'achievements' of the colonizer. Stephen
seems to take us back to a primitive bog (Ireland perhaps?) which needs to be
charted and mapped and requires that the names of things previously unen-
countered be learnt (wigwam). Perhaps as Stephen's mind drifts away leaving
behind Ringsend, infamous site of cattle rustling, these wigwams serve to peg
out landmarks on the horizon, albeit temporary ones given the makeshift na?
ture of wigwams, to keep the scene from slipping into total fluidity of world
and mind?these upright posts serving, like the mast and the cross, as points
of reference?although in these last two examples there has obviously already
been a paradigm shift to the symbolic. (Or are the wigwams and the washing by
metonymic contiguity the metaphorical sails ofthe boats?) Stephen's projected
desire is no doubt to be 'master mariner' himself, to master the scene metaphor-
ically through his daring feats of language rather than have the scene master
him and become just another object on the beach, another dogsbody. As such,
the metonymy of the scene which he sets up reflects his own fear of becoming
merely a contingency of his environment. His duty as poet is not Lessing's,
but rather it is to transform 'nacheinander'?just one thing after another?into
'nebeneinander'?one thing placed next to another, a relation of similarity or
contrast. The poet sets himself the task of rigging up metonymy to fill the sails
of metaphor.
As Stephen and Mulligan survey the sea from the tower at the beginning of
the novel, it is a traditional image of the sublime that Mulligan evokes. Man
is left awestruck by the sublime, rendered helpless before the greater forces of
nature, the sea in this instance, this vast expanse of water, threatening to swallow
up human life altogether, so insignificant is man beside nature. Stephen, the
artist, looking on the same image, is bafBed not by the sublime but by human
life itself:

Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the
wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull mass of liquid. A bowl
of white china had stood beside her [his mother's] deathbed holding the green sluggish
bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
(U, p. 4)

Is it phonetic association or metaphoric resemblance that controls Stephen's

mind here? No doubt it is both. In this passage at the start of Ulysses, Stephen,
newly back from France, merges the homonyms 'mere' and 'mer' in his mind.
'Cliffedge', what Stephen is looking at, slips phonetically into the 'cuffedge'
mentioned. Perhaps even the movement ofthe sea metonymically reminds him
of the heaving and vomiting. For Stephen the sublime becomes slime. It is not
the terrifying beauty of nature but rather the terrifying bitterness of human life
that strikes him. Both views coalesce in the finiteness of human life. If both
seek to contain the image (the bowl), Stephen, suffering, rejects what for him
are the comfortable cliches uttered by the 'wellfed'. He feels the raw edge, and
perhaps even anthropomorphizes it in the cuff.
Returning to 'Proteus', we see how items taken from the natural world are
described by the use man makes of them. The shells are 'razorshells'; the

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 SARAH JOSEPH 587

wood has been 'sieved'. When, however, man no longer needs such utensils he
tosses them aside and they cease to be of importance to him. The bottle on
the beach is one such item. A bottle does not 'stand up', it simply stands: a
human being stands up. A bottle only has a waist by analogy to the human body
Sewage does not 'breathe' but we breathe it in. Joyce uses anthropomorphism
to reascribe the discarded waste to the human hand or body that wished to be
rid of it. This is human waste: discarded objects. Another form of human waste
makes its presence felt: sewage, which at the time in Dublin was discharged
untreated straight into the bay. What is discarded from close contaminating
contact with us is, to use Kristeva's term (which I shall analyse more fully
later), abject, but here such undesirable matter is made to come back at man
with an unwelcome reminder of their former close association. The result is
repulsive. Man has subdued the sublime but the destructive force of nature
increases, not decreases, with man's disrespect.
The rubbish is anthropomorphized, made human, to remind us that it has
come from man, passed through his hands, and been discharged out ofthe back
door. This is Dublin's backyard ('farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on
the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts'). What is set before us
here as a waste land still nevertheless manages to sustain Dublin life. The sewage
breath the people breathe is mixed with the suggestion of the 'unwholesome'
food the poorer classes eat. A metaphor this time, drawn from the man-made
world as these 'unwholesome sandflats' become 'cakey sand dough'. Joyce mixes
sewage and food in the same breath. Metonymic contagion from this breeding
ground of infection ties human identity to the basic processes necessary for
sustaining the body?ingestion, digestion, excretion, the breathing process of
inhalation, exhalation also clearly participating in the process of incorporation.
Digestion is a gradual process during the course of which the raw material, food,
is transformed into the end product, waste. This middle process, which takes
place secretly in the bowels of our body, is not given much thought and when we
are confronted in this scene with the two, waste and food, placed metaphorically
side by side, the result is distasteful. As the old adage goes, 'you are what you
eat' and perhaps here by extension also 'what you excrete'. Metaphor is used
here to emphasize metonymy, to erase itself and make dividing lines recede into
negligibility. These are people who live on the margins of the bay. This is their
horizon. It is a familiar horizon that does not need to be theorized?it is their
back yard?for them it is a reality?anthropomorphized or not.
Kristeva's fundamental point about the abject is that it is not about cleanliness
but about identity. Her analysis in Pouvoirs de Vhorreur is built around the
developmental need the infant has to distinguish its own body from that of its
mother, a distinction which for the baby did not exist. The infant, to achieve
selfhood, must reject the mother's body as abject, as an encroachment. The
need to reject this close proximity will, however, constantly reproduce itself
in life, provoked by subsequent events, recalling this initial separation, and
threatening to subsume the subject.
Abject. II est un rejete dont on ne se separe pas, dont on ne se protege pas ainsi que d'un
objet. Etrangete imaginaire et menace reelle, il nous appelle et finitpar nous engloutir.
Ce n'est pas l'absence de proprete ou de sante qui rend abject, mais ce qui perturbe

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588 Anthropomorphism in 'Ulysses'

une identite, un systeme, un ordre. Ce qui ne respecte pas les limites, les places, les
regles. L'entre-deux, l'ambigu, le mixte. Le traitre, le menteur, le criminel a bonne
conscience, le violeur sans vergogne, le tueur qui pretend sauver.5

Perhaps in the beach passage it is Dublin life which becomes abject. Stephen
begins to embark upon the same trajectory as Joyce. The voluntary exile, the
traitor who can only write about the people he feels himself obliged to leave?
who betrays them in his writing but is obsessed by them at the same time:
the writer too becomes abject. Stephen, however, seems less drawn to writing
about the people than Joyce and perhaps this is where he fails. Stephen does,
however, feel himself to be more abject than Joyce here and perhaps in this
respect Stephen is presented here more as Joyce's projection of himself than as
artist in his own right. Joyce's writing was certainly rejected as abject by the
people he wrote about and there was a genuine and general fear of contamination
for those who might read him. Even before the publication of the book there
were problems. In America, The Little Review, which had began to publish
the text in serial form, was found guilty of obscenity. The review was fined;
the copies were seized and burnt. In order to find a publisher, Joyce would
have to turn to a country where English was not the native language. It was
Shakespeare & Company in Paris who first published the book.
As Stephen looks towards the higher beach and the 'two crucified shirts',
so too are there different levels of 'meaning' or 'reading' in the text. Like
Eliot's The Waste Land, his waste is also cultural waste, scraps of literature
and whatnot. Joyce even prefigures his own Finnegans Wake in this use of
'litterature'. Although Joyce contrives to make its absence pass unnoticed, the
one thing missing in this seascape is actually the sea. And yet it is there, not
evoked by reference to the 'real' thing itself but by intertextual reference to a
half-quoted passage of King Lear:
The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes
Cannot be heard so high.
(iv. vi. 20-22)

Gloucester wants to commit suicide by throwing himself off Dover Cliff. Since
he is blind his son is able to trick him into thinking he is standing above the beach
on the cliff edge. Interestingly, two instances of anthropomorphism disappear
in the use Joyce makes of the passage. The pebbles are no longer 'idle'?rather
everything seems to be actively getting at Stephen, driven by a life force of its
own (even the worms sieve the wood). The murmuring surge of the sea is also
nominally omitted. It becomes instead the murmuring surge ofthe poet's voice,
but also the voices with which the poet must contend and which threaten to
overwhelm him. They are both the voices of past poets and also the fragments
of everyday language, the 'squeaking pebbles'. In The Waste Land Tiresias, the
central unifying consciousness, is blind. Intertextuality can be blinding and
Stephen (and Joyce) are as the blind Gloucester, led on by their guides, no
longer able to see the real thing itself, dependent on hearing the murmur of it
in others.
5 Pouvoirsde Vhorreur(Paris: Seuil, 1980), 12.
p.

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 SARAH JOSEPH 589

And yet we do also hear the sea. The passage could be read as an expres?
sion of Schopenhauer's Will, the thing-in-itself, and of the artist's suffering
at his compulsion to represent the non-representable.6 The story of the blind
Gloucester becomes the blind striving of the Will, of life force. The world for
Schopenhauer has two aspects: first the shown?the world as idea or represen?
tation; and secondly the hidden?the world as Will?the thing-in-itself?the
world as it intrinsically is, not as it is apprehended by human consciousness.

The objective world, the world as representation, is not the only side of the world, but
merely its external side, so to speak [. . .] the world has an entirely differentside which
is its innermost being, its kernel, the thing-in-itself. This we shall [call] 'Will' after the
most immediate of its objectifications.7

If for Kant the things-in-themselves are forever unknowable because they ex?
ist independently of the mind, in Schopenhauer the Will is not identical with
the thing-in-itself but an attempt to express in already metaphorical language
something which is non-representational, transcendental.8 Kant argues that we
can only gain access to material objects by way of our sensory perceptions or
intellect; that is, via our subjectively determined apprehension. Schopenhauer,
however, identifies an object that the Kantian critique failed to consider: the hu?
man body.9 Our own body can be experienced from within. Physical movement
becomes an act of will and what the inner sense is aware of as an affectation of
the will becomes manifest in involuntary physical changes, heightened tension,
a blush, a shudder. Only the religious ascetic or the artistic genius, however, can
go beyond the individual will. When the artist contemplates nature or the sub?
lime, he becomes so enraptured that the subject/object distinction is dissolved
in a mystical union. The slime on the beach might seem to displace the sub?
lime but the backward and forward play of past and present tenses/participles
suggests the in-and-out movement of the all-powerful sea. All the instances
of anthropomorphism relate to the human body, to its shape, positioning, or
function, and yet Stephen only seems aware of his body by projecting outward
and then introjecting back inward what he has projected outward. He breathes
in and out, inhales and exhales in unison with the sewage breath. But Stephen's
cautious rhythmical tread is nevertheless palpable (the word 'trod' recurs as
the repetitive 'treading' in alliterative continuation) and it is in turn picked
up in his inner rhythms as the poet's lyrical voice breaks through. A process
of metonymic substitution seems to free Stephen to soar to heights above?it
is his boots only that 'tread', that plod?his soles but not his soul, the latter
continually trying to take off into lyrical heights. There is notably only one

6 See
Schopenhauer,Philosophyand theArts, ed. by Dale Jacquette(Cambridge: Cambridge
UniversityPress, 1996), for an expanded reading of Schopenhauer's notion of genius and the
relevanceof appearance and the will to the artisticdomain, the essence of which I develop here
briefly.
7 The World as Will and
Representation,ed. by E. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 30-31
(hereafterWWR).
8 See
Schopenhauer's criticismof Kant, in The Worldas Will and Idea, ed. by E. Payne (New
York: Dover, 1969) (hereafterWWI), and in particularthethirteen-pagesupplementto thesecond
book entitled'On the Possibilityof Knowing the Thing in Itself (pp. 188-200).
9 See
'Objectificationofthe Will', in WWI, 293-304.

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59? Anthropomorphism in 'Ulysses'

simple present tense: the sea 'beats' on the pebbles. If for the ordinary man his
experience is bound by the condition of being in the world, Schopenhauer asks:
But now, what kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to exist outside and
independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential to the world, the true
content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and is therefore known
with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas that are the immediate and adequate
objectivity of the thing-in-itself, of the will? It is art, the work of genius. It repeats
the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding
element in all the phenomena of the world. (WWR, 185)

Nature and art are the only two eternal realities which arrest time?hence the
gnomic present, while Stephen's footsteps are taken in time and will be washed
away by the tide. The original verb is 'chafes', which further emphasizes the
way the subject rubs up against the border of identity with the object.
If anthropomorphism is the subjective projection ofthe individual mind onto
the natural world, Schopenhauer insists that genius is pure objectivity.

Only through [. . .] pure contemplation [. . .], which becomes absorbed entirely in the
object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the pre-
eminent ability for such contemplation. Now as this demands a complete forgettingof
our own person and of its relations and connexions, the gift of genius is nothing but the
most complete objectivity [. . .] In other words genius is the ability to leave entirely out
of sight our own interest, our own willing, our own aims, and consequently to discard
entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowingsubject, the clear
eye ofthe world [...]. (WWR, 185-86)

Perhaps ironically, Stephen is too embroiled in 'his willing', his desire to become
a writer, to give expression to his genius and actually become one (a Nietzschean
eternal return?the will to become what you are?gone wrong). Joyce shows us
in this passage that Stephen has the flights of fantasy necessary for the writer
but suggests that somehow each time Stephen tries to take off he keeps getting
reined back in.
For genius to appear in an individual, it is as if a measure of the power of knowledge
must have fallen to his lot far exceeding that required for the service of an individual
will; and this superfiuity of knowledge having become free, now becomes the subject
purified of will, the clear mirror of the inner nature of the world. (WWR, 186)
The excess water in the beach scene has not the uplifting suggestion of super?
fiuity but rather of saturation. This water is not pure but murky. Stephen acts
not as a mirror to inner nature but as a distorting bottle; and the bottle, far
from overflowing, is empty.
Perhaps, however, Stephen's strokes of genius do coincide with Schopen-
hauerian objectivity if we remember that Stephen is not writing here?these
are just the thoughts running through his head. For Schopenhauer suffering
is not a representation of the world but rather an immediate intimate reality.
What makes Schopenhauer's thinking pessimistic is that suffering is the ne?
cessary condition without which the world would merely be 'idle'. The artist
himself is restless in his constant search for new objects of contemplation and
unlikely ever to find like minds to understand him. The artist suffers in pro-
portion to his genius. Between the lines of poetry here what is expressed is
Stephen's immediate suffering. The two, however, seem to merge.

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 SARAH JOSEPH 591

The notions of anthropomorphism, the Will, and the abject all coalesce in
blurring the subject/object, self/other distinction in the reading of this passage.
Warily coasting the bog, Stephen treads the line between subjective and ob?
jective reality. It is the difference between his fear of having a fouled-up mind,
and of actually falling and being covered in slime. If Stephen sinks into the
sand the sand will have won and meaninglessness will ensue?death through
sinking slime. Or rather he will become as the bottle, 'sogged', stalled in mire.
None of the inanimate objects here actually exchanges its stony silence for
the right of speech?the pebbles at best only 'squeak'. It is not therefore the
traditional chiastic anthropomorphic interchange of silent living contemplator
with inarticulate non-living object. It is not so much death that threatens as
being 'sogged', dragged down?although this is a kind of living death. What the
anthropomorphic trope emphasizes here is the slippage from one to the other.
Here, however, the remnants of a civilization washed up on the beach seem to
have sunk to the level where man would not want to wallow in it.
And yet throughout Portrait images reflecting the squalor of Stephen's home
are used in the tragic mode as Stephen equates himself with scum. As a non-
paying schoolboy in a fee-paying school, he is painfully aware of his origins:
On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr Tate, the
English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:
This fellow has heresy in his essay.
A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his hand between
his crossed thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about his neck and wrists.
Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting
and weak. He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind
and home, and feltagainst his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar. (P, p. 81)

The edge of the collar and the cuff bring themselves to Stephen's awareness by
contact with the skin. Cliff edge has slipped into cuff edge but the vertigo before
the precipice is the same. All Stephen's feelings are poured into the difference
between the two collars. If this is not anthropomorphism, we nevertheless see
the same processes of projection and introjection at work. Here is the raw
edge where subjective and objective reality meet. Stephen clearly has a sinking
feeling of shame here?a feeling of slipping back into the squalor of his home,
which he sees as conditioning his impure mind. In another image it is Stephen
himself who creates the borderline by his own pacing up and down:

The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales of merchandise
stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds of steamers wakened again in
him the unrest which had sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in
search of Mercedes [. . .]
A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the
river and on the lowering skies and yet he continued to wander up and down day after
day as if he really sought someone that eluded him. (P, p. 68)

This is a typical use of anthropomorphism to illustrate the feeling of dehu-

manization in the modern mechanized world. The bales of merchandise are so
massive that they threaten to overwhelm any sense of meaning (Kant's mathe?
matical sublime) and Stephen paces up and down in an attempt to reassert
himself and his place in the order of things.

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592 Anthropomorphism in 'Ulysses'

The power of anthropomorphism as a literary trope makes the line Stephen

treads between subjective and objective reality vacillate, and although it is
Stephen who frames reality?and we clearly realize that it is he who frames
the images we see?at the same time he is able to make it seem the other way
round, that reality is pitted against him and that his position is fragile and
endangered. That said, it is of course Stephen who controls both perspectives
as he flips inside out and outside in. It is in fact subjectivity, not objectivity,
that risks overwhelming him. Stephen's eye catches the fishing nets. Just as
man is anthropomorphically caught up in these 'dark cunning nets'?the nets
are not cunning of course, it is man's cunning which is behind them?man
now risks being caught in his own nets as he fishes in the sea he has polluted.
Stephen paints a legitimate picture of ecological disaster awaiting man, but
it could also legitimately be said that he sees traps everywhere?that he sets
traps for himself. It is Stephen, like his namesake Dedalus, who has created
(but not resolved) the great maze. All the forces Stephen perceives at work here
are images (anthropomorphized or not) which threaten to capture whatever
they are after: Stephen himself more often than not. The sand had gone from
under his feet; the sand lies in wait for him, waiting to suck his treading soles
[soul]; it breathes on him; the bottle is 'stogged'. Ireland is colonized and has
succumbed to drink. There is the threatened suicide, and the trick of the son;
there are hoops, nets, mazes. The list ends with the crucified shirts.
At one level what Stephen symbolically plays out for us in the beach passage
is the modernist dilemma itself. Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism speaks of
the modern subject 'as a monadlike container, within which things felt are then
expressed by projection outward'.10 Stephen is the bottled-up bottle on the
beach 'sogged to its waist'. In a metaphorical twist on the anthropomorphic
theme, rather than the bottle becoming human, Stephen actually becomes
the bottle, the central image though which the scene in viewed. He becomes
this sentinel surveying the waste land. Jameson is speaking in the context of
Munch's painting The Scream, which he sees as showing that

Expression requires the category of the individual monad, but it also shows us the heavy
price to be paid for that precondition, dramatizing the unhappy paradox that when you
constitute your individual subjectivity as a self-sufficientfield and a closed realm, you
thereby shut yourself off from everything else and condemn yourself to the mindless
solitude ofthe monad, buried alive and condemned to a prison cell without egress.11

Stephen's fear is indeed of being buried alive, dragging down the limits of
reality with him. Although, as shown in the quotation where nothing speaks
to him unless it reflects his inner cries, Stephen is conscious that this is what
is happening, in opting for Jameson's life of the artistic monad, the aspiring
writer will relentlessly defend his freedom of self-expression. Thus not only
does Stephen trap himself and furthermore become embroiled in the anxiety
of knowing that he is doing so, but more than that he fears being trapped and
silenced by others. It is his mother who comes to 'embody' such a threat as
he recasts her as ghoul, hyena, corpse-chewer?monster of his imagination.
Postmodernism
or theCulturalLogic ofLate Capitalism(London: Verso, 1991), p. 15.
Postmodernism,
p. 15.

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 SARAH JOSEPH 593

Stephen certainly has the modernist fear of others stealing his freedom and
preventing him from achieving self-expression, but really his moment of choice
in opting for solitude and self-expression is forever deferred because it is an
impossible choice to make. He can neither turn his back on people with whom
the squalor unites him nor ever be free in language. Perhaps at the level of the
plot he plods through, but at the mythical level he remains there. He might
rewrite reality in his thoughts but if he does not get it down on paper?as
Schopenhauer's duty of the genius compels him to do?his footsteps will soon
be washed away.
The human shells wrap up the passage in a final conceit and perhaps the image
ofthe crucified shirts on the line signals a more ambiguous status ofthe departed
spirits that were once embodied within the shells (are they empty or have they
now achieved a purer state?). For Schopenhauer the artist's role is not just about
portraying the sublime but about inhabiting objects of contemplation from
within. Human life and human consciousness are bound up within the figurative
shells of language that the skilled artist might have some degree of control in
fashioning for himself but which ordinary men have to accept ready made,
already inhabited by the remnants, the ghosts of others. To avoid the threat of
silence posed by the sand does Stephen use the pebbles as stepping stones?
these bits of language which can do no better than 'squeak'? Does he tread on
the 'razorshell' sharp fragments of language? Or does he just walk roughshod
over human life, treading on these 'human shells' in his egotistical choice of
the solitary monad's life of self-expression? The passage across the waste land
goes beyond just being a reflection on the artist's rite of passage and becomes
the trajectory of language itself. The ambiguous nature of language is felt in
the beach passage?language is both our protective shell and our confining
encasement. If I have made anthropomorphism the master trope here, it is
because this best illustrates that it is our use of language which determines our
experience of the real world. All language is a subjective construct?language
is by definition man's projection of his understanding onto the 'real' world.
Fittingly for the chiasmic play of inside/outside looked at in this passage, the
human shell, the skeleton, is on the inside. The word 'shell', however, definitely
suggests something on the outside, and if the flesh is stripped to the bone then
the human being whose shell it was is quite certainly dead. The abject as the
encroachment of life on death, the last borderline to be crossed, is terrifyingly
apparent as Stephen is haunted by the visions of his mother with her flesh
falling off to reveal her skeleton?the shell is hollow because stripped of flesh it
is death. Language likewise is the preserve of things past, the haunting voices
of the past given new life, a fact underlined here by the intertextual echoes and
the cliches now in the,mouth of the 'wellfed voice'. The piece seems to return
continually to the question of borderlines and the threshold of language, what
can and cannot be expressed.
For Alain Robbe-Grillet anthropomorphism is wrong because it is false:
'c'est un envers, c'est un piege?et c'est une falsification' (PNR,p. 54). He goes
on to show how even an absurdist novel such as Camus's L'Etranger, which
derives its logic from the belief that 'L'absurde ne serait ni dans l'homme ni
dans les choses, mais dans l'impossibilite d'etablir entre eux un autre rapport

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594 Anthropomorphism in 'Ulysses'

que d'etrangete' (PNR, p. 57), the driving force is still anthropomorphism. It is

the natural world (Mersault famously says it was the sun that did it) which leads
him to commit the murder: 'C'est une querelle d'amour, qui mene au crime
passionnel. Le monde est accuse de complicite d'assassinat' (PNR, p. 58). Joyce,
however, consciously uses anthropomorphism as a way of catching man out at
his own game of giving subjective meaning to everything. In Joyce there are
certainly many 'unnumbered pebbles' in the text?objects which are just seen
as objects, scattered throughout the text and to which no apparent meaning is
attributable, rational or irrational. What is this sand, these shells, these pebbles,
these bits of driftwood that Stephen finds on the beach? Perhaps Joyce leaves the
objects just as they are after all, Kantian rather than Schopenhauerian things-
in-themselves. In ostensibly constructing a passage over the waste land Joyce
in fact deconstructs each step of the way. Joyce is certainly adept at leading us
astray in our search for 'meaning'. Like Stephen, we are left to flounder but
inspired to continue to analyse and narrate our floundering?Dedalus sets the
task the human mind will relentlessly try to master.

Jesus College, Cambridge Sarah Joseph

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