Selfhood and the Sensorium in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

When we encounter Stephen Dedalus musing on the first page of the Proteus episode of Ulysses, he views the visual senses as the perceptual medium through which he is destined to make his art. The fragments of seaside experience he processes are cast off, banal, and even grossly material. His paraphrase of Aristotle’s theory of vision, according to Gifford and Seidman, suggests the dispassion of Stephen’s aesthetic “read[ings]” of the visible: the model claims that “the ear participates in (and thus can modify) the substance of what it hears, but the eye does not” (Ulysses Annotated 44). At the same time, thought itself is inextricable from perception (“thought through my eyes” [my italics]). This odd congeries of embodied reason and detachment, combined with Stephen’s sense of destiny, is characteristic not simply of Stephen’s aesthetic theory, but of his identity as well.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.

— Ulysses