A Portrait of Dedalus as a Very Young Artist: memoria/nous poiêtikos

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A Portrait of Dedalus as the Very Young Artist: memoria/nous poietikos Jolanta Wawrzycka

"A great and beautiful invention is memory, always useful both for learning and for life" (qtd. in Yates 44), reads the opening of Diakxis, the oldest known ars memorativa treatise dating from ca. 400 BCE and recorded about half a century after th~ death of Simonides of Ceos who is credited with the invention of mnemonics. 1 In De Oratore Cicero comments on the invention of the art of memory by Simonides who discovered the superiority of the sense of sight over other senses (11.lxxxvii: 355-358). Simonides saw poetry, painting, and mnemonics in terms of 1

The name of Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BCE) appears on the marble tablet from 264 BCE, called the Parnian Chronicle. The tablet was found in the seventeenth century ar Paros and is full of the dares of such legendary discoveries as the invention of the flute, the introduction of corn, and .the publication of Orpheus' poetry. It also records "the Ceian Simonides, son ofLeoprepes," as "the invento1 of the system of memory-aids." Nick-named "the honey-tongued" {latinized ro Simonides Melicus), Simonides was the first to equate methods of poetry with those of painting, a theory summed up by Horace's famous "ut pictura poesis" (Yares 42-44).

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incense visualization. Dialexis, thought to reflect sophists' teaching of Hippias of Elis, describes the steps how to commit things to memory: first, paying attention (or directing one's mind) so that "the judgment will better perceive things" going through one's mind; second, repeating again what one hears "for by often hearing and saying the same things, what you have learned comes complete into your memory"; and third, placing what one hears on what one knows (Yates 44). Sirnonides's visualization, the three dicta of Diakxis, and a few other aspects of ars memorativa echo in young Stephen's thinking at the opening of A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man (reaching their highest realization, I would argue, in "Proteus"). In this essay I will discuss the brief passage where Stephen, cold and weak on the playgrounds of Clongowes, keeping on the fringe of his line and out of reach of the boys' feet, manages to survive the hours of evening activities by directing his mind to the newly remembered words/sounds and, generally, by escaping into thought. Thinking, says Aristotle, can be done "whenever we please: for we can represent an object before our eyes, as do those who range things under mnemonic headings and picture them to themselves" (De Anima III.427h 16-20}. Aristotle thus compares the deliberate selection of mental images about which to think, with the ddiberate construction of images through which to remember {Yates 47). Such a process aids in the creation of natural memory defmed in Ad Herennium as "that memory which is embedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought" (III.xvi 24-25). Stephen's mind has not yet developed artificial memory ("a memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline," [Ad Herennium III. xvi 26-27]), though the formation of artificial memory (one that works ex locis et imaginibus) can be discerned in this passage, especially as Stephen's thoughts dwell on "beautiful colours to think of' (Portrait 12) or on new words (dog-inthe-blanket, magistrate). Some words (belt, suck, kiss) conjure up images, though some other words (God, universe, politics) defy imagining: they make him feel "tired to think that way" or cause him pain "that he did not know well what politics mean" or "where the universe ended" (16, 17). Joyce presents a very young artist to-be at the vulnerable moment when the boy's thought can be seen as indistinguishable from his soul, an

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identification made by Democritus and reported by Aristotle in De Anima (I.404a 31). That Joyce worked with Aristotle in French is evident from his Paris Notebooks as well as from the quotations found in Joyce's 1903-1904 notebooks transcribed in the Appendix B in Jacques Aubert's The Aesthetics of James Joyce. 2 Of interest is a quotation about mind/intellect that thinks through images: Joyce-"The intellect conceives the forms of the images presented to it"; Aristotl~"Thus it is the forms which the faculty of thought thinks in mental images." 3 Aristotle elaborates that "to the thinking soul images serve as present sensations .. · this is why the soul never thinks without an image" (De Anima III.43la 14-17). Stephen evokes the images associated with Rody Kickham (a decent fellow), Nasty Roche (a stink), his mother (nice but not so nice when she cries), or Cecil Thunder (belt, toe in the rump), and many others. But he also thinks in terms of words/sounds: they can be ugly (suck, Dante's burp) or nice "like a little song" of the burning gas; the very word "white" can make him feel cold and then hot, like water that comes out of labeled sink taps. Stephen's mind draws on aural/ocular sensations and, as it forms new memories, it also advances his understanding of new concepts: "by thinking about things you could understand them" (Portrait 43). Stephen's discerning, analytical mind is very early able to perform acts of under-standing that present him as a deeply h}rpolectic thinker (on hypolexis, see Senn 228). Words/memories appear Aubcn's hdpful Appendix shows Joyce's early modus operandi, to be glimpsed from the French quotations from Aristotle that Joyce translated inco English. See also Epstein's 1971 book, The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus, esp. chapter 1. In a~­ cion, Epstein's challenge to Gorman' s assertion (jamt:s Joyct 94) that Joyce read Amtotle translated by Victor Cousin is very informative (184 n14) and offers a philologicaVcranslatorial proof that the French translation of Dt Anima had to be the one by Cousin's student, Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire, published in 1846 in Paris as Psychologie d'Aristote. Traiti de /'Alme. Ellmann repeats Gorman's error in 1959 (124)

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and in 1984 (120). 3 De Anima, III.vii.431b2. Joyce's translation of the French: "L':1.me intcllegcnte pense les formes clans les images qu'elle pcr~oit" (from Psychologit d'Arisrote, trans. J. Banhelemy-Saint-Hilaire [317-18], qtd. in Aubcn, 133). Aubert cites the French quotation along with the English translation by Hett; while he cites De Anima correctly (III.vii.43lb2), he transcribes the English wording as "The thinking faculty thinks the forms in mental images."

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to distract him from the pain of his free'L.ing hands unaided by the pocket of his belted suit. Such striking phrases as, "That was a bdt round his pocket" (9), or "That was to kiss" (14), suggest an aptitude for abstract thinking, and an ability to detach a signified from its signifier, a mnemonic-like strategy (with some psychological undenones, as I ·will indicate bdow) that can be observed in several instances in this chapter: "belt was also to give a fellow a belt," etc. That is, Stephen's penchant for definitions and absuactions demonstrates his creative instinct and innate capacity to learn (made connate by Aristotle in Poetics). It also illustrates practical and theoretical aspects of Stephen's mind-nous praktikos and nous theordikos.4 But his power of abstraction is more than an instinct. Aristotle attributed the power for abstraction "to the nous poietikos, or the agent intellect" (McLuhan 260). 5 In his discussion of Portrait, McLuhan, aided by Aquinas, observes that such is the power of the nous poiltikos that it can "individuat[e] 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' (St. Thos., De Anima, article ti)" (250). 6 By abstracting, in other words, the artisan/artist creates a new entity. Towards the end of the novd, Stephen will taekle and embrace Aquinas to define beauty and its power to generate in the mind the "luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state . . . called the enchantment of the bean" (Portrait 213). For now, however, Stephen's nous poietikos moves from words to events to memories: the word "nice" triggers a memory of his mother kissing him good-bye, all red nosed and red eyed-a condition he pretended not to see. This is a complex memory for the young Stephen: his mother is on the verge of

-t Hett, in his introduction to Aristotle's De Anima, offers an explanation of some of Aristotle's technical terms, among them the tenn for minJ, "sometimes subdivided

by Aristotle into n (the mind as applied to producing results) and (the mind regarded as purely contemplative)" (xii). 5 Nous poiltiltos, also translated as "active mind," is the subject of Aristotle's De Anima ili.5, minutely explicated in the Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy. 6 McLuhan does not specify which translation of Aquinas's commentary on De Anima he cites.

tears, his father offers him two coins and bids him to write home and never to peach on a fellow, as they proceed to shake hands with the rector and wave goodbyes from the departing car. The genesis of this memory could be seen in terms of two memory aids from Ad Hermnium, locus and image, used in the process of training and development of artificial memory, especially of memory for things. According to Ad Herennium, images are particularly hdpful to memory if they arouse emotional effects by virtue of being striking, extraordinary, unusual, etc. (Ad Herennium Ill, xxii). Stephen's mother's red eyes and nose, marks of distress, impart the emotional charge to that image, as does the sum of money he received from his father (two, five shilling pieces; Giffords 1980 value of about $40 would translate to about $110 in 2010), and the rector's "souta.ne fluttering in the breeze" while his parents leave him behind (Portrait 9). The images, like definitions he conjures up, pass deeply into his memory, but they also appear to have a distancing effect and to function as a coping strategy that detaches Stephen and his mind from the pain of a sick body and homesick soul.7 There are moments when Stephen moves from remembering to reminiscing: "Soon they will be going home for the holidays. After supper in the study hall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from scvenryseven to seventysix. It would be better to be in the study hall than out here in the cold" (Portrait 10). Stephen's thoughts here are suggestive of the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis, understood as a deep fore-knowledge in the soul that underlies our capacity "to grasp what is true and good in the world, for without at least some dim memory of what we are looking for, it is impossible that we could ever find it, or know it when we did, as Plato demonstrates in Mmo and recalls synoptically in Phaedo" {see "Anamnesis," Encyclopedia of Rhetoric). In On I am aware that the straightforward application of memory aids from Ad Herennium to Stephen's image-induced formation of memories is flawed here: memory aids were deliberate mnemonic tools for remembering/storing and then retrieving data. My evocation of Ad Hermnium and image-based memory is meant to under-

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score how early in his childhood Stephen's nous poiltiltos enables him to transform his circumstances through the power of the image, or how early he is poised to pare his fingernails.

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A Portrait of Dedalus as the Very Young Artist: memoria/nous poilJtikos.

Mnnory and Recollection, Aristotle elaborates that reminiscence happens either through order (where the starting point is an image or a locus [II. 452a 12-13]), or through association (similarity, dissimilarity, or contiguity, that is, "something similar or contrary to, or closely connected with, whanve seek" (II. 4Slb 18-21])-all elements present in Stephen's projection. "Memory belongs to that part of the soul to which imagination belongs; all things that arc imaginable are essentially objects of memory," says Aristotle (On Memory and &colkction I. 450a 22-23); Stephen's soul, imagination, and memory merge into one at the moment of his need for comfort. If rnemoty has always been counted among the five partS of rhetoric, we are in the realm of psychology rather than rhetoric here; memory-"the flrm perception in the soul of things and words"-has always been at odds with the remaining parts rhetoric: inventiolinvention, dispositiolarrangement, ewcutiolstyle and pronuntiatioldelivery. Memoria, along with intelligentia and providentia, is also one of the three components of the virtue of prudence/wisdom: when Cicero speaks about memoria in terms ofprudentia, he defines it as "the knowledge of what is good, what is bad and what is neither good nor bad" (De lnventione II.liii.160-61). The workings of Stephen's mind discussed above also suggest a deeply seated virtue of prudence/wisdom, as he judges well which fellow students (or which situations) are "bad" or "good," the good being those relying on memoria,8 or "the faculty by which the mind recalls what has happened," inteOigentia, "the faculty by which [the mind] ascertains what is," and providentia, or foresight, "the faculty by which it is seen that something is going to occur befure it occurs" (De Inventiont II.liii: 162-65). Although all three components of Prudence in Stephen manifest themselves throughout the novel, I see them as particularly salient in the passage under consideration where young Stephen's "memory" and "intelligence" work to ascertain a largdy

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Both Ad Hennnium and Cicero's De lnvmtione define memory respectively as "Memoria est fuma animi rerum etverborum et dispositlonis perception," "the firm retention in the mind of the matter, words, and arrangement" (Ad Hermnium I. ii. 3); and as "memoria est flrma animi rerum etvcrborum perception," "the firm mental grasp of the matter and words" (De Inventione I. vii. 9).

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objective picture of his circwnstances, and where "providence" facilitates his emotional projection into the future comfurt- from imminent supper and warm bed to going home for Christmas. The fact that Stephen keeps "on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then" (Portrait 8) acquires a deeper significance in such a reading. It is difficult to ascertain whether Joyce used any of the strategies of ars memorativa or "memory schemado" (Finnegans Wake 240.7) that I think are echoing in this passage and in all of Joyce's works. Some scholars have explored these issues to various degrees and the subject of Joyce/memory continues to yield studies that show Joyce's work from new angles. For Joyceans, those angles include considerations of language memory, character memory, cultural memory, etc., .as .presc:nt~ in the 2009 dossier, Joyce's Collective Memories (see Bollettten Bosmelh and Torrcsi). As fur classical memory in Joyce, Jacques Mailhos, for instance, in his "The Art of Memory," mentions Joyce's use of memoriae /,oci and, in another essay, "'Begin to Forget it,"' offers a study of memory, forgetting, "text-machine," etc. John Rickard, in Joyce's Book of Mmwry, refers to Joyce's Jesuit education that "introduced him to models of mind and memory shaped by Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and even the rituals of the Roman Catholic mass," supplemented by readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Bergson, William James, and Sigmund Freud (8-9). William T . Noon, however, makes it rather dear in the opening chapter of Joyce and Aquinas, that there were neither regular courses in Scholastic philosophy at the UCO (3), nor were the UCO Jesuits free to employ "Principles of Scholastic thought" (5). The existence of the "Academy of St. Aquinas" and the fact that there was "a good deal of 'Thomism' in the air" (8) , arc, of course, the subject of his magisterial study of Aquinas in Joyce, though the Aristotle and Cicero that I employed in this exercise are largdy absent from the Thomistic thought presented by Noon. J. R. Schork's two books, Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce and Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce, offer encyclopedic details on classical dements in all of Joyce's oeuvre, though they don't address classical memory per se. Because I fuund it striking that both Aristotelian and Ciceronian dicta on memory, mind, soul, or wisdom echo in Joyce's presentation of Stephen's artistic incubation, I hope to have illustrated

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here those moments in Portrait when Stephen-the-Artist's memory, mind, soul, and wisdom are not only fostered by the exceptional qualities of his nous poietikos, but also set him on his way "into eternity" (Ulysses 9:19).

References Ad Herennium. Trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. The Loeb Classical Library. "Active mind" ("Nous poietikos"). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 2 Aug. 2010. "Anamnesis." Encyclopedia ofRhetoric. Ed. Thomas 0. Sloane. Web. 17 Sept. 2010. Aristotle. De Anima. Trans. W. S. Hett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957. The Loeb Classical Library.

-. On Memory and Recollection. Aristotle 285-313. Aubert, Jacques. The Aesthetics ofJames Joyce. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire. Psychologie d'Aristote. Traite de /'Alme. Paris: Librairie Philosophique Ladrange, 1846. Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria, and Ira T orresi, eds. Joycean Collective Memories. mediAzioni 6 (2009). Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Cicero, De Jnventione. Trans. H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. The Loeb Classical Library.

-. De Oratore. Trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. The Loeb Classical Library. Connolly, Thomas E., ed. Joyce's Portrait. Criticisms and Critiques. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962. Ellmann, Richard. fames Joyce. 1959. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Epstein, Edmund L. The Ordeal ofStephen Dedalus. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated. Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.

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Gorman, Herbert. fames Joyce. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939. Joyce, James. A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism and Notes. Ed. Chester Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.

- . Finnegam Wake. New York: Viking, 1976. - . Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York and London: Garland, 1986. Mailhos, Jacques. "The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec." Transcultural Joyce. Ed. Karen Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. - . "'Begin to Forget it': the Preprovided Memory in Finnegam Wake." Finnegans Wake: Teems of Times. Ed. Andrew Treip. New York: Rodopi, 1994. European Joyce Studies 4. McLuhan, H. M. "Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process." Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Joyce's Portrait. Criticisms and Critiques. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962. 249-65. Noon, William T.]oyceandAquinas. Cambridge: Yale UP, 1957. Rickard, John. Joyce's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnics in Ulysses. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Schork, J. R. Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1997.

- . Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998. Senn, Fritz. Inductive Scrutinies. Ed. Christine O'Neill. Dublin: Lilliput, 1995. Yates, Frances, A TheArtofMemory. London: Pimlico, 1992.

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