I went on a ride on a speedboat over the holiday weekend, and I chose to remove my glasses, lest they fly off my face and into the water (I have lost more than one hat in such a way over the course of my life). As severely nearsighted as I am, I find that removing my glasses and going off somewhere without them makes me feel keenly vulnerable.

I reflected, of course, on James Joyce’s terrible eyesight, and this post will look at Joyce’s speculation in Portrait that his weak eyes gave him more pleasure at prose that reflects the “inner world” than prose that describes the external world. I will consider how Joyce uses that idea in Finnegans Wake.

In Chapter IV, Stephen asks himself a question that resonates with me. First, he thinks of the phrase “A day of dappled seaborne clouds,” which pleases him. He wonders what about this phrase, and phrases like it, appeals to him. Is it their associations with colors and legends? Their rhythm?

Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

I think a lot of people — especially bookish young people — can relate to the idea of gaining pleasure from the contemplation of their own inner world. What’s interesting is that Joyce links it to the weakness of eyesight, shyness of mind, and an enjoyment of the way that inner world can be “mirrored perfectly” in prose. “Perfectly” is an interesting word there: I’m reminded of how nothing in the physical world perfectly matches our ideas. One doesn’t need to be a Platonist or subscribe to Plato’s idea of Forms (which I reject, as I’ve discussed here) to see the mismatch between our ideas and the reality we encounter, even before you consider the difference between, say, the idea of a circle and any actual circle we can draw.

But prose has the ability to mirror that inner world in ways that visual representations cannot. Properly stringed together, words can make us feel emotions and sensations very similar to those of the writer. And the enjoyment of the inner world of oneself and others is perhaps stronger in those who are poorly sighted and less confident in the external world.

This distinction between, on the one hand, those who are more pleased by words reflecting the “glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied,” and, on the other, those who are more pleased by “contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose” is depicted in the contest between the Saint and Sage at the end of Finnegans Wake, the meeting between Saint Patrick and the Druid. This contest uses light and its colors (broken by the “prism” of language) as a metaphor for seeing the world in terms of division or unity.

In this conflict, St. Patrick, who represents the Shaunish side of HCE, advances the common sense view of the world in which there is an external reality composed of objects separate from the self. The Druid, who represents the Shemish side, avers that all things are connected to each other, calling into question the distinction between “things.” In the language of this blog, the Druid represents the view that “things,” including the self, are ultimately stories about the flux of reality, not essences or representatives of some Platonic Forms that actually exist apart from the flux of the manifest universe.

It’s worth reviewing this post, where I discuss the attitudes represented by these sides of the dreamers. There are some interesting nuggets here, including “St. Patrick represents a naive materialism that (at the end of the dream, right before the appearance of the waking world) defeats the mystical, solipsistic idealism of the Druid, whose non-self night logic dominated the novel.” And I expand on the views of these characters, with examples and further explanations, in this post.

St. Patrick represents the kind of artist and reader who enjoys and uses words because they reflect an external reality, and the Druid represents the kind of artist and reader who enjoys and uses words because they reflect an internal reality, the emotions and the direct perception of the interconnection of all things, which I have called “inner light” in other posts.

[For more on this “inner light,” I would read my summary at the beginning of this post, where I suggest that “making contact with the ‘inner light’ of things involves comprehending the necessity of all things and and their dependence on all other things for their existence.”] 

St. Patrick calls the Druid a “pore shiroskuro blackinwhitepaddynger” — a poor Paddy/Irishman who is colorblind because he sees all things as the same color. He’s pointing out the downside of the Shemish view: at its extreme, this view fails to make distinctions properly between things and can be confused or even paralyzed in the external world of action.

Meanwhile, the Druid finds “all too many much illusiones through photoprismic velamina of hueful panepiphanal world spectacurum,” and thus “he savvy inside true inwardness of reality, the Ding hvad in idself id est, all objects (of panepiwor) allside showed themselves in trues coloribus resplendent with sextuple gloria of light actually retained, untisintus, inside them.” That is, he sees the rest of the light spectrum (the other six colors) inside everything, beneath the surface of the color that each thing supposedly is, binding that thing together with every other thing. At its extreme, the Shaunish view misses so much of significance to humanity, the direct experience of the “inner light,” of selflessness. But as a “Rumnant Patholic” (ruminating on Catholic doctrine and/or Irish history?), accepting conventional religious doctrine, he stares blankly at the Druid (“stareotypopticus”), and “no catch all that preachybook” that came from the Druid’s mouth. The Shaunish perspective sees and acts, but fails to Understand — in ways that make its actions less effective and often create harm.

There’s a lot going on in the Druid’s speech especially in this scene, making it incredibly difficult to read, and a close reading of it will be the work of future posts. There’s also plenty to say about his use of the phrase “thing in itself” (“Dving hvad in idself”), which was Kant’s term for the actual reality beyond their appearance in our senses. Interestingly, Kant’s idea was rejected by philosophers like Nietzsche, but I associate thinkers like Nietzsche (and Heraclitus) with the Druid, since they all embraced the “Innocence of Becoming” without “things.” I’d be interested in trying to square the circle of these ideas at some point in the future.

I also really enjoyed the word “throughsighty” in this phrase: the Druid “augumentationed himself in caloripeia to vision so throughsighty.” It puts me in mind of William Blake’s declaration that he sees through the eye rather than with it. As I discussed in a recent presenation I made for the William Blake Society, I don’t think that this idea needs to be interpreted in a supernatural way, implying the existence of some world “beyond” our universe: instead, it can imply that there are more ways to conceive of reality than ones that our commonsense, everyday thinking creates. Once we realize that all “things” are stories in the mind, we can choose to narrate those stories differently.  

It’s interesting that Joyce describes language in Portrait with the metaphor of a prism. As the medium of our storytelling (that is, our mind’s discursivity that produces our impression of separate “things”), language divides the One Light into many colors and helps us think of different reflections of those colors as separate things.

The physical operation of light in our sense of sight is an analogy for what our minds do when they break up reality into “things.”

Although the Druid is clearly wiser than the Saint, the Saint is not without his own wisdom, and the wise person needs to incorporate the insights of both perspectives: to escape the Shaunish tendency to be locked into a single set of (often unhelpful) stories or to deny the power of storytelling, but also to escape the Shemish trap of believing in the limitless power of stories or to be taken in by self-flattering stories.

More on this to come.