The story of Joyce, told vicariously through Stephen, is chock full of variances -- the character is egotistical but lacking in confidence, able to thoroughly commit himself to a cause but also prone to discursiveness, imaginative but unable to see past extremes. Yesterday’s discussion regarding Joyce’s career actually brought to light the extent to which he allowed his own consciousness to leak into Stephen’s.
Of the most noteworthy is Joyce’s complicated relationship with his birthplace, Dublin, a venue he saw throughout his life as a spiritual home so ubiquitous that he could not bring himself to write about any other setting, as unwelcoming as she was. Due to his radical literary deviations and the tendency to portray her characters in an outspoken light, Joyce was essentially blacklisted by his motherland, never to return except to attend his mother’s funeral. If this “obsession from afar” sounds familiar, it’s because Stephen’s interactions with Emma and women in general are very similar. Even with his precocious sexuality, zealous approaches toward poetry, and extensive romantic fantasies, Stephen proves time and time again that his fixation with the female figure -- prostitutes, the Virgin Mary, Mercedes -- is more abstract than literal; in other words, he is in love with the idea of women but when it comes down to it, he can’t take the initiative to make an actual connection. This, in combination with his high mindedness, causes Stephen to give women ample screen time as auxiliary symbols in the legend of Stephen Dedalus but little consideration in terms of their own personalities. Likewise, his first ambitious poetic endeavors imply that his infatuation with the idea of making and sharing his art far outweighs his initial skill and creativity. This is especially apparent in his cut-and-dried attempt to write a love poem to Emma -- everything he knows is derivative of conventions and even when he does manage to put his feelings into words, he can’t find the courage to present the poem to the object of his affection. With religion, we can see that Stephen has a strong affinity to the concept of spirituality but that his devotion is misplaced. Even when he plays the part of a superlative aficionado, he almost sees the entire ordeal as a moral transaction rather than a sincere deposit of faith. The only aspect he seems to be able to grasp is the universality of God’s love, but keep in mind that this only serves the purpose of confirming his specialness yet again.
The early life of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism shares some parallels with Stephen’s narrative. He too experienced both ends of the lifestyle spectrum before directing his spirituality toward a middle path. Stephen, on the other hand, experiments with both borderline religious fanaticism and then debauchery but the closest thing to a “middle path” he takes is his gradual integration of art and spirituality. While there is certainly some merit in having the ability to exclusively dedicate to an objective, I think to an extent, by confining himself to extremes in the attempt to be taken seriously, Stephen has been being counterintuitive to his own intellect.