"Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

"JOYCE, AQUINAS, AND THE POETIC PROCESS" (1)

By Herbert Marshall McLuhan

ANYONE familiar with the persistent use which Joyce makes of the labyrinth figure as the archetype of human cognition will have noticed the same figure as it appears in the dramatic action of a Thomistic "article." There is first the descent into the particular matter of the "objections." These are juxtaposed abruptly, constituting a discontinuous or cubist perspective. By abrupt juxtaposition of diverse views of the same problem, that which is in question is seen from several sides. A total intellectual history is provided in a single view. And in the very instant of being presented with a false lead or path the mind is alerted to seek another course through the maze. Baffled by variety of choice it is suddenly arrested by the "sed contra" and given its true bearings in the conclusion. Then follows the retracing of the labyrinth in the "respondeo dicendum." Emerging into intellectual clarity at the end of this process it looks back on the blind alleys proffered by each of the original objections. Whereas the total shape of each article, with its trinal divisions into objections, respondeo, and answers to objections, is an "S" labyrinth, this figure is really traced and retraced by the mind many times in the course of a single article. Perhaps this fact helps to explain the power of Thomas to communicate a great deal even before he is much understood. It certainly suggests why he can provide rich esthetic satisfactions by the very dance of his mind--a dance in which we participate as we follow him.

His "articles" can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in act. The skill and wit with which he selects his objections constitute a cubist landscape, an ideal landscape of great intellectual extent seen from an airplane. The ideas or objects in this landscape are by their very contiguity set in a state of dramatic tension; and this dramatic tension is provided with the dramatic peripeteia in the respondeo, and with a resolution in the answers to the objections.

This, and much more was grasped by the young Joyce who seems to have been the first to make explicit the relation in Aquinas between the stages of apprehension and the creative process. In Aristotle the same view is also implicit, as Joyce was aware. In the Poetics Aristotle mentions imitation as connate to man, being the process by which men learn.

But this fact is not linked with the power of abstraction which in the De Anima he attributes to the nous poietikos or the agent intellect. That there is, however, a degree of poetic imitation in abstraction itself is plain from the fact that even in sensation "things exist in the soul without their proper matter, but with the singularity and individuating conditions which are the result of matter" (St. Thomas De Anima, article 13). That this is so is the effect of the nous poietikos which has the power of individuating anew in a bodily organ that which it has abstracted from existence. "For in things made by art the action of an instrument is terminated in the form intended by the artisan" (Ibid., article 12). Again, "for every object produced by art is the effect of the action of an artificer, the agent intellect being related to the phantasms illuminated by it as an artificer is to the things made by his art" (Ibid., article 5). And in the same place the creative efficacy of the nous poietikos as "illuminative" is referred to the text in the Psalms (4:7): "The light of thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord."

For Joyce and Eliot all art is a shadow of the Incarnation and every artist is dedicated to revealing, or epiphanizing, the signatures of things, so that what the nous poietikos is to perception and abstraction the artist is to existence at large:

The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for its new office, he was the supreme artist. (Stephen Hero, p. 78).

Ordinary experience is a riot of imprecision, of impressions enmeshed in pre-conceptions, clich6s, profanities, and impercipience. But for the true artist every experience is capable of an epiphany:

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.... Imagine my glimpses of that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. (Stephen Herr, p. 211).

Joyce identified the three notes of beauty of St. Thomas with the three operations of the intellect:

Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quiddims. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact; finally when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. (Stephen Hero, p. 213).

Obviously the business of the artist in this context is that of an impersonal agent, humble before the laws of things, as well as before his own artistic activity as revealer. He must strip himself of all but his mere agency:

   I have only pushed to its logical conclusion the definition Aquinas
   has given of the beautiful.

   Aquinas?

   Pulchra sunt quae visa placent. He seems to regard the beautiful as
   that which satisfies the esthetic appetite and nothing more--that
   the mere apprehension of which pleases ...

The passage in St. Thomas formally distinguishing beauty and goodness has wide but precise bearings for everything Joyce did as an artist:

   But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to
   appetite
   (goodness being what all things desire), and therefore it has the
   aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards
   a thing). On the other hand beauty relates to a cognitive power,
   for those things are said to be beautiful which pleases when seen.
   Hence beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in
   things duly proportioned, as in what is like them--because the
   sense too is a sort of reason, as is every cognitive power. Now,
   since knowledge is by assimilation, and likeness relates to form,
   beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.

THAT the senses themselves are properly analogous, as are the other cognitive powers, was not a fact lost on Joyce, who knew that the creative process itself was a retracing of the stages of apprehension. In this passage from St. Thomas can also be seen the reasons for Joyce's preferring comic to tragic art. Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. He could well afford to look patronizingly on the psychological gropings of Freud and Jung and on the inferior poetic consciousness of a Yeats or Proust, saying in "The Holy Office":

   So distantly I turn to view
   The shamblings of that motley crew,
   Those souls that hate the strength that mine has
   Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.

There was no shambling and no guesswork in anything Joyce did as an artist. An absolute clairvoyance and precision attended his work from the first page of The Portrait to the end of Finnegans Wake. And the reason for this, as he insisted, was his grasp of the full creative implications of the Thomistic analysis of cognition:

But, during the formulation of his artistic creed, had he not found item after item upheld for him in advance by the greatest and most orthodox doctor of the Church ... while the entire theory in accordance with which his entire artistic life was shaped, arose most conveniently for his purpose out of the mass of Catholic theology? (Stephen Hero, p. 205).

It is the Thomistic view that beauty relates to a cognitive rather than a volitional power that led Joyce to prefer comedy to tragedy. The long passage from his notebooks given by Herbert Gorman (James Joyce, pp. 96-97) will become a locus classicus:

   An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling
   of desire, but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the
   feeling
   of joy ... the feeling which the possession of some good excites
   in us.... For desire urges us from rest that we may possess
   something
   but joy holds us in rest as long as we possess something ...
   All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic and
   according as this feeling of joy is excited by whatever is
   substantial
   or accidental in human fortunes the art is to be judged more
   or less excellent... From this it may be seen that tragedy is the
   imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in art. All art,
   again, is static for the feelings of terror and pity on one hand
   and
   of joy on the other hand are feelings which arrest us. It will be
   seen
   afterwards how this rest is necessary for the apprehension of the
   beautiful... For beauty is a quality of something seen but terror
   and pity and joy are states of mind.

It is hard to know where to begin to discuss any phase of Joyce because he is so much of a piece. Anything of his includes all the rest. Thus, for example, his statement of the problem of genres seems simple and natural:

There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others. (Gorman, pp. 97-98).

But the complex generic idea operative here is a shadow at once of the three operations of the intellect and of the procession of Persons in the Trinity. There is also a note of Joyce's dated at Paris (March 27, 1903) which concerns Aristotle and imitation:

   he tekhne mimeitai ten physin--this phrase is falsely rendered as
   "Art is an imitation of Nature." Aristotle does not here define
   art; he says only, "Art imitates Nature" and means that the
   artistic process is like the natural process.... (Ibid., p. 98).

It is in Stephen Hero that there are the texts which explain what Joyce understood by "natural process":

For Stephen art was neither a copy nor an imitation of nature: the artistic process was a natural process.., a veritably sublime process of one's own nature which had a right to examination and open discussion. (Stephen Hero, p. 171).

That this process is that of ordinary apprehension is made plain on page 212:

   What we symbolize in black the Chinaman may symbolize in yellow:
   each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic
   beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost
   impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means
   impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty that
   has
   ever been adored on earth by an examination of the mechanism of
   esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow,
   or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has
   a different system of digestion from that which we have though
   our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be
   scrutinized in action.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this last phase for an understanding of Joyce's art, because he never ceased to evolve technique for scrutinizing sensations and impressions "at the very instant of their apparition." And this meant for Joyce neither impressionism nor expressionism but the revelation of the profoundly analogical drama of existence as it is mirrored in the cognitive powers in act:

   They sat sometimes in the pit of a music-hall and one unfolded to
   the other the tapestry of his poetical aims while the band bawled
   to the comedian and the comedian bawled to the band. Cranly grew
   used to having sensations and impressions recorded and analyzed
   before him at the very instant of their apparition. (Ibid., p.
   125).

Dubliners, for example, is a tapestry of such arrested apparitions variously woven into the natural process of childhood, youth, maturity and age. The Portrait is likewise static as the title insists, an inclusive moment focussing the stage of artistic apprehension in a vivisection of the young artist. It is noteworthy that Joyce excludes from the esthetic discussion in The Portrait just those features of the Thomistic analysis of cognition which were most important to him as a mature artist--namely the fact of the creative process as the natural process of apprehension arrested and retraced. The Stephen of The Portrait (probably named after the Dedalian St6phane Mallarm6) understands Aquinas via Mallarm6, whereas Joyce the artist, while led to Aquinas by Mallarm6 and the symbolists, finally was able to complete the work of the symbolists because he discovered how to perfect their insights by means of Aquinas. Yet it needs also to be said that the feebleness of grasp among Joyce critics is not so much their ignorance of St. Thomas as their half-awareness of what Joyce found in Flaubert, Rimbaud, and Mallarm6. Because Joyce and Eliot have surpassed these writers, only, however, with their assistance, it is enforced on the English critic to perfect their knowledge of them if only that the French in turn may come to enjoy the achievement of Joyce and Eliot.

There is a passage in Stephen Hero which will serve to suggest the kind of debt Joyce owed to Flaubert and his successors:

   The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is the most modern
   process one can conceive. The ancient method investigated law
   with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of
   revelation,
   art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have
   magical
   properties: they transform and disfigure. The modern method
   examines its territory by the light of day ... It examines the
   entire
   community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption.
   If you were an esthetic philosopher you would take note of all
   my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the esthetic
   instinct in action. The philosophic college should spare a
   detective
   for me. (p. 186).

The use of the words "vagaries" and "detective" is here precise and significant. For on the one hand the figure of the labyrinth is used everywhere by Joyce as the archetype of cognition and esthetic apprehension, and on the other the modern detective since Poe employs the technique of retracing in order to reconstruct an action exactly as it occurred. Edgar Poe is rightly regarded in France as the father of symbolism because he was the first to formulate the poetic process as one of discovering by retracing. The precise poetic formula for any emotion, he pointed out, was to be found by working backwards from effect to the arrangement of words which would produce that effect. It is also his esthete Dupin who first displays the same method in the service of crime detection. The modern psychologist, historiographer and archaeologist use this method in common with the physicist, the chemist, and the "private eye." Professor Gilson's Unity of Philosophical Experience has the distinction of being the first work of philosophy in which this method of reconstruction is fully employed.

BUT a great deal of poetic experiment and development preceded the discovery of the technique of reconstruction as discovery. And most of all is owing to the practitioners of the picturesque school of landscape that began with James Thomson in 1724. By the time of Scott, Byron, and Chateaubriand the possibilities of discontinuous landscape as a means of including and controlling a vast range of otherwise chaotic material was available to the novelist as a means of examining "the entire community in action." First Stendhal and then Flaubert and Dickens went ahead on these lines. But Flaubert was the first to see in his Sentimental Education that it means the abandonment of the continuity of unilateral narrative in favor of the more profound effects to be achieved by analogical juxtaposition of characters, scenes, and situations without copula. So that the Cartesian cries against cubist discontinuity have always been raised by those ignorant of analogy and equivocity.

But Joyce, while alert to all that Flaubert had achieved for him was not content with controlling just the larger areas of his discontinuous landscapes. He wanted and got a simultaneous control of the widest perspectives and the most intimate and evanescent moments of apprehension. And this he was able to achieve by analysis of the labyrinth of cognition which Aristotle and Aquinas had revealed to him, It is thus, for example, that he is able to include in the first two pages of The Portrait the entire experience of the race, the ground plan of all his unwritten work, and the most individual features of Stephen's expanding awareness. The opening words place the hero in the traditional labyrinth and confront him with a minotaur adapted to his infant years:

   Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow
   coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along
   the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...

Stephen Hero is so named because the artist in that work confronts and slays scores of minotaurs. The book swarms with labyrinths of many kinds and levels:

   At the door he had to resign her to others and see her depart with
   insignificant courtesies and as he came home alone he led his
   mood through mazes of doubts and misgivings. (p. 159).

Following this passage there is another labyrinth which is both exterior and interior. It presents one of the Daedalus family migrations inside Dublin:

   On the night before the day fixed for his legal eviction he moved
   his camp by night. The little furniture which remained to them was
   carried on a float and Stephen and his brother and his mother and
   his father carried the ancestral portraits themselves as the
   draymen
   had drunk a good deal more than was good for them. It was a clear
   night of the late summer freshened with cold as they walked in a
   body beside the sea-wall.... The tide was lapping softly by the
   wall, being at the full, and through the clear air Stephen heard
   his
   father's voice like a muffled flute singing a love-song. He made
   his
   mother stop to listen and they both leaned on the heavy
   picture-frames
   and listened:

   Shall carry my heart to thee....

Traditionally there are two kinds of labyrinth, stone and sea. Joyce uses both constantly. Here both are fused in the "sea-wall"--the family treading the maze between two powers (earth and sea) and carrying the household goods is arrested by the song. The moment of arrest is an epiphany, a moment not in time's covenant, and it is by the bringing of complex perceptions to a focus in such moments that the minotaurs of the labyrinths are always overcome.

But the technical means of capturing these moments is by landscape, as Wordsworth and others were aware. The Pre-Raphaelites and then Swinburne, Pater, and the early Yeats had sought for the means to prolong these moments. But the symbolists discovered that the moment was not an end but a beginning. It was a point from which to begin a retracing of the labyrinth of apprehension in order to find the inevitable art form for that moment:

In the centre of her attitude towards him he thought he discerned a point of defiant ill will and he thought he understood the cause of it. He had swept the moment into his memory, the figure and the landscape into his treasure-room, and conjuring with all three had brought forth some pages of sorry verse. (Stephen Hero, p. 67).

Since the relation of labyrinth and landscape calls for separate treatment it will serve for now to have pointed out that the conjunction of landscape and labyrinth provided Joyce with that vivisection of the stages of esthetic apprehension of which he was the only begetter. As much, therefore, as the ancient Daedalus who made the labyrinth in Crete, Joyce had the right to name his hero "Stephen Dedalus" (the French form of the word). But it is not only the labyrinth of cognition in which Joyce made himself at home, tracing and retracing with delicate precision. The labyrinthine structure of the eye it is that gives such salience in his work to the figure of the Cyclops. Most of all he was at home in the labyrinth of the inner ear where he met Persse O'Reilly, who is per se, son of the Real and father of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in The Cocktail Party. On the labyrinth of the ear, organ of the Incarnation, Joyce built those metaphysical analogies which enabled him to restore the orchestra of the seven liberal arts to its plenary functions. He is never less than the artist of the Word. Ulysses is reared on the labyrinth-landscape of the human body as the body politic; and Finnegans Wake whispers throughout with the voice of the river of human blood and immemorial racial consciousness. Joyce was at home in all labyrinths because of his original conquest of the stages of apprehension, of the mind in act.

HAVING suggested that Joyce took up the analysis of this matter at the very promising stage at which Mallarm6 had left it at his death in 1898, I should like to point to what is, so far as I know, the first stage of philosophic awareness concerning the retracing of apprehension as the poetic process. It occurs in Thomas Brown's posthumously published lectures on The Philosophy of the Human Mind. Brown was professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh until his death in 1820. And it is in lecture XXXVII where he is considering the "secondary laws of suggestion" as they affect genius that he states the difference between the imagination of genius and the fancy of ordinary minds. The mind of genius, he suggests, works in some sort of reverse direction to ordinary minds:

   In a poetic mind of a higher order, the conception of this very
   subject
   cannot exist for a moment, without awakening, by the different
   tendency of the suggesting principle, groups of images which
   had never before existed in similar combination ... new forms, of
   external passion, would crowd upon his mind, by their analogy to
   ideas and feelings previously existing; and this single change of
   the direction of the suggesting principle would be sufficient to
   produce
   all those wonders, which the poet of imagination ascribes to
   the influence of inspiring genii ... The inventions of poetic
   genius,
   then, are the suggestions of analogy: the prevailing suggestions of
   common minds, are those of mere contiguity.

In these lectures Brown is a severe critic of Locke and Hartley and the associationists, and seems to use "analogy" in a traditional sense. To what extent he was aware of the speculations of Coleridge, I cannot say. But Coleridge seems not to have had any inkling of the retracing process of the poetic process. It is noteworthy that his celebrated definition of the primary imagination merely states the notion of Aristotle and Aquinas concerning the nous poietikos or the agent intellect:

   The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime
   agent of all perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of
   the
   eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

That this has not been noticed as the nous poietikos is only less curious than the fact that Coleridge never seems to have commented on it again. His definition of the poetic or secondary imagination has aroused great interest and enthusiasm but is far from the precision of his definition of the primary imagination:

   The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former,
   co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with
   the
   primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree,
   and
   in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,
   in
   order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible,
   yet
   still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify.

Nothing could well be vaguer than this. It does not look very impressive beside Brown's statement. And Brown's view is in the line that leads through Burke to Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Joyce.

(1) Renascence 4.1 (1951): 3-11.