This post follows my last post by looking at the word “chaos” in a key moment of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake.

At the beginning of Chapter III, after Stephen has begun to live a life of mortal sin, visiting prostitutes, he works on his mathematics for school:

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.

His equations growing and shrinking as he solves them reminds him of a “vast cycle of starry life,” stars being born and then quenched in dark chaos, a cycle that corresponds to his “soul going forth to experience” into sin and then back into himself (and presumably guilt or at least a cold, numb feeling).

I was struck by the way this passage is echoed in Finnegans Wake in the description of Shem’s alchemical art:

the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) 

As I noted in this post,

I think “chaos” is meant here in the Greek sense of the vacuum of Nothingness that preceded all things, where all things lose their (apparent) individuality. “Transaccidentated” suggests to me the opposition between essence and accident: 

That is, consciousness takes us through the accidents of our own existence until we understand that in our essence we are not an individual. We are dividual. Interestingly, the word “dividual” apparently both means “separate” and “divided among or shared in common by a number of people/things.”

The difference, between Shem and Stephen, I suppose, is that Shem’s art unfolds into a dividual chaos that links him to others (“common to allflesh”), whereas Stephen finds connection to others difficult, as indicated by the reference to Shelley’s fragment on the “pale” and “companionless” moon. Earlier in the novel, upon seeing his father interact with old friends, Stephen’s mind “shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth,” as he thinks of the fragment and the “vast inhuman cycles of activity” it sets against “human ineffectualness,” a juxtaposition that “chilled him.” As he later puts it in Chapter IV, “To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer.”

Stephen is still working out his connection to others, still maturing in his art.

He gets a taste of union with others when he performs on stage in Chapter II, when in the few moments before the curtain goes up he “shared the common mirth.” And when it begins, he finds himself “acting before the innumerable faces of the void.” At the end, “he heard the void filled with applause and, through a rift in the side scene, saw the simple body before which he had acted magically deformed, the void of faces breaking at all points and falling asunder into busy groups.”

I think this is an anticipation of his later notion of the stars crumbling and falling and being quenched in cold darkness. Unable to deal with his feelings, Stephen runs off by himself until he is comforted by the smell of “horse piss and rotted straw,” which calms him and brings him back down to earth.

As he matures into an artist, he will have to learn how to embrace that messy materiality as a way of discovering and celebrating common humanity, Here Comes Everybody. We can see this process continuing in Ulysses as he meets Leopold Bloom, who embodies some of the lessons he needs to learn. For more on this idea, and the notion of the “void” in relation to it in Ulysses (a word repeated several times in the above passage from Portrait), see this post.