I’m re-reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man right now, and I was surprised to find the word “immodest” in one of the most significant sections. This post will briefly look at that word in Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

Chapter III of Portrait finds Stephen Dedalus attending a religious retreat where Father Arnall delivers a hellfire sermon that stirs intense fear and guilt in the young sinner. The sermon goes on and on for like thirty pages, and it must have made one hell of an impression on the young Joyce. I have no doubt that the words we read in Portrait are almost verbatim from the real sermon, which Joyce surely turned over in his mind again and again.

Part of the sermon lists the many torments of Hell, and one of them is the company of fellow damned souls. Arnall notes that in “olden times,” the punishment for parricide (the Oedipal slaying of the father, thematically relevant to Portrait and, really, all of Joyce’s works) was being cast into the sea in a sack together with a cock, monkey, and serpent. The purpose of this punishment was to give the criminal the company of “hateful and hurtful beasts.” But the punishment of Hell (which is for those who offend a Heavenly Father) puts the condemned in the presence of something far worse:

But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. 

I found it interesting that the word “immodest” occurs here, associated with damning sins, since it appears in significant places also in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

In Chapter 13 of Ulysses (Nausicaa), Gerty Macdowell sees Leopold Bloom ogling her, carrying out a “sinful” act (in the eyes of the Church):

she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking

In Chapter 15 (Circe), Bloom has a fantasy/vision of being put on trial for his various offenses that he feels guilty for, and J.J. O’Molloy, acting as his lawyer, defends him by saying,

My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to

The words “immodesty” and “gentleman” recur in Finnegans Wake, where we are told in I.2 that

Slander […] has never been able to convict our good and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker […] of any graver impropriety than that […] of having behaved with ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow

The word “gentleman,” too, is important in Portrait. When the very young Stephen is asked at Clongowes by the other boys what his father is, he replies “A gentleman.” And, as he gets older, he heard the “constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things.” Yet all of the voices around him, whether those urging him to be manly or those urging him to participate in the Irish nationalist movement, “had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears […] He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.” They are part of the nets that Stephen/Joyce must fly past to become an artist.

These words, “immodest” and “gentleman,” occupy such an important place in the young Joyce’s mind, and it’s fascinating how he weaves them into his mature works. Immodesty and ungentlemanly behavior are the charges placed brought against Bloom and HCE, and the young Joyce must have felt himself guilty of those offenses in his sexual behavior. As he writes of Stephen:

The image of Emma appeared before him, and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils. 

Finnegans Wake can be read as an attempt of a sleeping mind to come to terms with this sexual guilt, which is bound up in the Oedipal energies, which echo throughout Joyce’s work: in the reference to parricide in Portrait; the “worldly voice” young Stephen anticipates hearing among the hollowsounding voices that “would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours”; Bloom’s memories of his father Rudolph; and the struggles between HCE and the Cad (his two sons — “cadet” is French for “younger son”).

See this post and its sequels for a discussion of the Oedipal encounter between HCE and the Cad, where I suggest that “HCE’s anxieties and defenses of himself are primarily about learning to forgive the self, or at least accept the self in all of its flaws and anxieties, all of which are summed up in the encounters between HCE and his double.” 

This guilt is a trap, something that the artist must escape through self-acceptance/forgiveness, but it is also a source of creativity, which the artist can transmute/transubstantiate into art, representing it anew and narrating it back in new ways as a means of working through it. The words that afflict young Joyce become his tools to generate aesthetic experiences in himself and readers.

After all, Lord Byron (Stephen’s choice for greatest poet in Portrait) famously tells us “Good workmen never quarrel with their tools.” Out of the psychological torment of Catholic guilt, Joyce produces art. In his hands, transubstantiation is real. It is not a fantasy involving supernatural forces but the transmutation of experience into art that can alter the way readers engage with their own lives.