现代主义与后现代主义.doc

“Ignotas artes.” The Indeterminate Use of Myths and Symbols in Modernist Literature:a study of James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and W.B. Yeatss PoetryIn The Postmodern Turn, Ihab Hassan theorises that indeterminacy is one of two “central, constitutive tendencies in postmodernism” (92). The other, he suggests, is “immanence”. Determinacy, on the other side of a binary schema, is characteristic of modernism. But this distinction is not categorical and has its exceptions. Joyces Portrait and Yeatss poetry exemplify modernist literature which may be mobilised to critique Hassans delimiting of indeterminacy to postmodernism. Their use of myth and symbols in their writing is often indeterminate, open-ended and irreducibly polysemous. There is not a definite locus of one-to-one referential meanings made explicit to, or that may be determined by, the reader. Moreover the modernist writers relationship to myth and symbols is not all-accepting, sometimes ambivalent; their equivocation, I argue, constitutes indeterminacy.That Daedalus is an integral symbol which frames Portrait is apparent enough from the epigraph and conclusion: from Ovids Metamorphoses, the epigraph “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes” refers to the myth of Daedalus; Stephens final diary entry invokes the “old artificer” to “stand him now and ever in good stead” (1, 244). However, the Daedalus-framework through which readers understand the novel is rendered confusing by the plurality of possible meanings which attach themselves to that frame. Who, one asks, applies his mind to obscure arts? In the ur-text, it is Daedalus, the ingenious architect-artificer. The symbol lends itself to his namesake Stephen Dedalus, the would-be artist who precociously forges a grandiose artistic vision. But Joyce too, may verily occupy that subject position. Given the semiautobiographical nature of the Knstlerroman, author and protagonist are arguably somewhat interchangeable (notwithstanding the ironic distance Joyce erects towards his younger, gestating self). After all, Joyce employs modernist literary techniques, such as frequent use of free-indirect-discourse and stream-of-consciousness narration, which render his writing impenetrable and obscure to readers. The epigraph could then be self-reflexive. On yet another level, it might be the reader who, in reading Portrait, has to apply his mind to Joyces ignotas artes. The nexus of these various senses provides a fine example of how the indeterminate invocation of myth in the epigraph already begins the novel evocatively. It initiates an interrogation of how the referential aberrance, which extends to the relationship between myth and the rest of the novel, can render the meaning of Portrait obscure. Readers are invited to think aboutyet are unable to specifyStephens exact relation to the Daedalian myth that putatively shapes his bildungs. While analysing the epigraph already proposes the indeterminacy of the Daedalian figure and demonstrates how difficult it is to establish a definitive correspondence between Ovids Daedalus and the various artists (Stephen, Joyce, Stephen-Joyce), another question Portrait initiates is: whether Daedalus is most emblematic of Joyces protagonist, since Stephen confoundingly approximates other personae in Ovids tale. Stephen, we note, “wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets,” and “moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast” (94); “like a beast in its lair,” his soul, from sinning, had “lain down in its own filth” (109). Joyces representation of Stephen in these moments obliquely recalls the minotaur. Perhaps Stephen might also be read as a creature whose sexually indiscriminate self (which so despicably and unworthily of high Art has cavorted with a Dublin prostitute) is slain and shed in his bildungs. Even the labyrinth from which Daedalus escapes (that is, the maze and not the architect himself) arguably operates as a metaphor for Stephens convoluted consciousnesswith certain pathways tenable, primarily his brand of art; while others, such as “nationality, language, religion” (196), which are psychological obstacles constraining the artistic imagination, signify dead-ends he must overcome. The relationship between the farrago of mythic symbols and the novel is complicated and cannot be simplified to the level of determinate one-to-one parallels. One cannot with any surety map or conceive of Stephen as purely a Daedalian figure; to do so would be to ignore Portraits indeterminacy. Any interpretation of whether Stephens liberationist-artistic endeavour succeeds, moreover, is rendered provisional and indeterminable by Portraits (lack of) closure. Stephens failure is confirmed in Ulysses. Though one suspects Stephens invocation of the “old artificer” signifies successful exile from the Irish labyrinth, yet the Daedalian reference also ominously foreshadows failure, recalling the architecting of an elaborate, labyrinthine artistic vision only to lose ones way in it, or even being trapped and unable to escape in the first place. After all, instead of decisively upping and leaving for abroad, Stephen sticks around and diarizes fragmentarily for over a month about inane quotidian matters. On 16 April, he writes emphatically, “Away! Away!” but the fact that, ten days later, his mollycoddling mother is still packing for him (secondhand clothes, no less) undercuts the grandeur of his endeavour. Another laughable delay of a day later, out of the blue, the poncy posturing esthete calls again on Daedalus. Portraits ending in media res adds a final touch to the ambivalence of how exactly Stephen is Daedalian.Reading Stephen as a potential failure recalls Icarus. Icarus is Daedaluss son, who soared too near the sun and plummeted to his death after the wings which his father fashioned for him melted. Colouring any reading of the protagonist, the ghost of Icarus haunts a text which overtly refers to his father as the primary symbol: creeping in surreptitiously in the ambivalent “symbol” of “a hawklike man flying sunward” (162), a symbol bisected by its possible reference to his father; manifesting in the disembodied voice of a peer who shouts “O, Cripes, Im drownded!” during Stephans epiphany (163); and resurfacing in the last diary entry when Stephen unwittingly embodies the ghost and becomes Icarus by invoking Daedalus and “old father” paratactically (244). Stephen transfigures into an Icarian figure preparing for flight with wings that are analogous to his artistic vision. Both wings and vision are fashioned and inspired by a mythic father-figure. Tragically, they also disintegratealthough, ultimately, the reader cannot determinedly accept this insinuation of Stephens failure, given the irresolute conclusion and Joyces employment of the polysemous and mutually-ironising symbols of Daedalus and Icarus. Joyces indeterminate invocation of myth resists a systematic explanation of Portrait in terms of one-for-one correspondences between myth and the artists bildungs. The meanings evoked in Yeatss poetic use of myth and symbols are also profoundly obscure and sometimes indeterminable. An ideal starting-point to discuss the indeterminacy (but also richness) of Yeatss poetry is his belief in Spiritus Mundi. Spiritus Mundi is “the Spirit or Soul of the Universe, with which all individual souls are connected through the “Great Memory,” which Yeats held to be a universal subconscious in which the human race preserves its past memories. It is thus a source of symbolic images for “The Second Coming” (Norton 1881) A symbol extracted, for poetic use, from the constellation of universal, archetypal symbols is not only denotative of meanings that are potentially already plural. The symbol further carries with it “connotations of other meanings. In this way, all symbolism involves ambiguity and potential disagreement over meaning” (Childs 195-6). The indeterminacy of symbolic meaning, I contend, stems from what Spiritus Mundi implies about the way meaning accrues and congeals over time. Yeats notes that “hardly are those words out/When a vast image of Spiritus Mundi/Troubles his sight” (“The Second Coming” ll.11-13). These pithy lines epitomise the difficulty in interpreting symbols determinately. The sheer magnitude of the collective unconscious, which adjoins meaning to meaning associatively, vexes sight (which meronymises the human ability to interpret linguistic units, whether words or sounds). We strain to comprehend the enormity of symbolic meaning. Tangentially, I suggest it might be productive to use the concept of Spiritus Mundi as a lens to re-look Joyces use of the Daedalian myth in Portrait. Myths are symbolic, and while the myth of Daedalus denotes the story of the architect who was trapped in a labyrinth he constructed, its meaning stretches and expands to connote what Yeats might call a vast image that includes Icarus. While Stephen focuses on the success-story in the Daedalian myth, a more cynical reader mightwith Joyces ironising of his protagonist and subtle references to Icarus, who is also a figure in that mythimagine Stephens failure. The different conceptions of myth/symbol by the literary characters, by the author himself, and by the readers finally, result in an overall indeterminacy that is aggravated by the almost-inevitable contradictions and semantic overlaps in the mass of meaning. Yeatss use of myths with an irrepressible capacity to symbolise and connote, in fact, renders much of “The Second Coming” ambiguous. Even though Yeats tries to plumb the nebulous unknowability of the event with assertive statements, “Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” (“The Second Coming” ll. 9-10) the clairvoyant prediction is riddled by numerous indeterminacies that erupt from the poets conflation of myths/symbols. Yeats conjugates the religious belief in Christs returnwhich the title traditionally refers towith the pagan myth of the riddling Sphinx. Engaging in his own mythopoeia (or mythmaking), Yeats inaugurates a tenebrous myth about a new cycle of history initiated by some “rough beast” (l.21). The symbol of that harbinger is imprecise; the semantic vagueness of rough and beast renders Yeatss mystical vision cryptic and enigmatic. The most threatening of indeterminacies reposes in the final word born, which shores up another radical flux in meaningostensibly denoting the (re)birth of a Messiah and connoting salvation, but barely concealing the other connotations of apocalypse and annihilation that must occur before regeneration. The indeterminacy of Yeatss use of myth here is precisely what makes the poetic vision frightening.What perhaps can be said about Yeats attitude to myth and symbol is, that attitude varies in his body of work. A consideration of “The Second Coming,” informed by an understanding of Spiritus Mundi, will reveal the indeterminacy of meaning in the myths invoked. “Leda and the Swan” seems determinate enough a use of myth. Not all of Yeatss use of myth is indeterminate. For the poet, Zeuss impregnation of Leda, which is thematised in “Leda and the Swan,” represents a pivotal turning-point in what he considers the gyres of history. The rape decisively marks the annunciation which founds modern Greek civilization. Yeats states, unequivocally, that the initial violation begets a history of violence: “A shudder in the loin engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead” (ll. 9-11). Yeats determinately expresses the cause-effect relation between Ledas rape and modern history with stark concision and in the span of a singular sentence-length assertion. Little of his poetic appropriation of Greek myth to posit an explanation for the changing tides of history, in this poem, is indeterminate. Then again, in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” Yeats implores such mythic/symbolic abstractions to “come near, come near, come near” yet begs them to “leave him still/ A little space for the rose-breath to fill!” (ll.13-14). Exactly how far myth and symbol should penetrate his art is an issue which the poetdeeply anxious about the obscurity of his overly symbolic and archaic myth-infused artstruggles to resolve. To paraphrase the first four lines of “A Coat”, “old mythologies” adorn poetry with “embroideries” “from heel to throat.” There is something too ornate, stifling, choking about poetry infused with myth and symbols, that led Yeats, at least at the time he was writing “A Coat” in 1914, to conclude that “theres more enterprise/ In walking naked” (ll.9-10), that is, in writing simpler poetry stripped of symbols and myth. That attitude was not permanent, however. With poems written after “A Coat,” such as “The Second Coming” Written in 1920, 1921. and “Leda and the Swan,” Written in 1924, 1928. which are immersed in the use of myth and symbol, we realise that Yeatss corpus is shot through with vacillation and prevarication towards using myths/symbolsthus militating against a determinate reading of his poetry.While Yeats is equivocal, Joyces attitude towards myth is indeterminable in Portrait. Stephens antipathy towards characters like Davin, who supported Celtic revivalist movements and “worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland,” is obvious enough (174). “Davins nurse had taught him Irish and shaped the rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth” (174). To Stephen, Irish myth is figured as “broken lights”splintered, irretrievable, fractured. Stephens attitude towards Greek myth, in contradistinction, is one of embracing acceptance verging on sycophancy. Stephen fantasises about his namesake, “the fabulous artificer,” who catalyses his quasi-transcendent moment of epiphany (162). Why Stephen rejects a homelier myth to partake so determinedly in another more remote, the text leaves little explained, besides an arbitrary determinism by Joyces choice of names. More indeterminable is the authors attitude towards myth and whether Stephen benefits from seeking inspiration from it after