Decoding Dedalus: Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.

“Stephen disdains the subtle resuscitation of the Victorian bardolatry in the Revival’s aspiration to model the creation of Irish national culture on the use of Shakespeare for British national consolidation. Both efforts, to him, are grounded in the almost religious glorification of the poet.” - Irina D. Rasmussen, “Riffing on Shakespeare: James Joyce, Stephen Dedalus, and the Avant-Garde Theory of Literary Creation”

This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line.

The line below comes from “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth episode of Ulysses. It appears on page p. 185-186 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “—Our young Irish bards,” and ends “...all future plunges to the past.”

German Romantic Philosopher Friedrich Schlegel proclaimed that every man is either born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Stephen Dedalus certainly knows which side of the fence he’s on. The scene has been set in Ulysses’ ninth episode, “Scylla and Charybdis”, and now Stephen is ready to do battle with his own sea monsters - Aristotle and Plato. Unlike Odysseus, though, Stephen has sympathies with one of these rough beasts, slouching towards Kildare Street. Stephen’s worldview, due in part to his Jesuit education, is bolstered by the stony dogma of Aristotle/Scylla. Rather than forging a path between two beasts, he is pitting one beast against the other - his own love of Aristotle against the whirling maelstrom of Charybdis/Plato/Theosophy. John Eglinton lobs the first punch, daring to compare Ireland’s next generation of creatives to the Immortal Bard himself:

“—Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.”

Naturally we can pick up easily that Eg is really talking about Stephen here, as he’s the youngest Irish bard in the room. Eg maybe attempting a deceptive feint to get Stephen on his back foot. “Old Ben” is not some forgotten desert hermit, oh no; he is Ben Jonson, poet, playwright, and Shakespeare contemporary. Jonson did not shy away from critiquing Shakespeare’s work, and wrote of the Bard a few years after his death:

“I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.”

Jonson was not afraid to express a negative opinion about Shakespeare, but he also clearly respected his much more famous rival. He was not willing to slip into overblown, fawning praise either, keeping “on this side idolatry.” Eglinton feels much the same; he reveres Shakespeare (as does Stephen), but he is self-aware enough to avoid slipping into frivolous bardolatry.

*The infant Shakespeare attended by Nature and the Passions*, 1790’s, George Romney

Eglinton, Best, and Æ in real life were all Irish nationalists, proud of the people and culture of their native land above all else, a devotion they explored in their creative, scholarly, and political work. There’s a dissonance in these men elevating Shakespeare as the greatest of writers. Shakespeare is the national poet of England, himself a symbol of official English culture and its purported superiority in the world. For a group of men who aim to elevate Irish art, they are quick to show deference before their colonial oppressor’s lofty cultural icon. While on one hand, this shows the Library are not monomaniacal patriots like Haines, one the other, it cannot be understated how holy of a position Shakespeare held in English culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the hundred years preceding the events of Ulysses. A good example is George Romney’s 1790’s painting entitled The infant Shakespeare attended by Nature and the Passions, a work which echoes the infant worship of Renaissance paintings of Christ.

This symbol of English supremacy is the foundation on which these Irish Nationalist poets hope to build their Irish art. They all look to Irish mythology for inspiration, but the mythology of Shakespeare seems to captivate their souls much more earnestly. As a result, they are unable to progress and create any new or original works to rival those of Shakespeare. Æ and Eglinton tease the young upstart Stephen for his outlandish theory of Shakespeare, but Stephen represents the next generation of Irish artists trying to create original work, free from the nightmare of history. Their rigid and limited beliefs about what constitutes capital-A Art prevent them from taking the creative risks necessary to make revolutionary art. They’re playing it safe while Stephen wants to shake things up.

“—All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike me!
—The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely. Aristotle was once Plato’s schoolboy.
—And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.”

Like Eg, Æ extolls the English writers Shakespeare and Shelley. He also introduces the Charybdian philosophy of Plato to the mix, and this is where he and Stephen really start to agitate one another. Stephen faces a tough crowd for the unveiling of his Shakespeare theory, as they find him too academic and too Aristotelian. Stephen’s theory of Hamlet hinges on the facts of Shakespeare’s biography, so Æ has already rejected Stephen’s ideas out of hand, without even hearing the young Artist out.

In real life, Æ had a reputation for offering an open hand to young and up-and-coming artists. He was the first person to publish Joyce’s early short stories that would later become Dubliners. Of course, Æ greatest sin was telling Joyce he couldn’t continue to publish those same stories after receiving too many complaints. Despite Æ’s generosity to Joyce, I think Joyce never felt like Æ really got him or his art, and I think he never forgave Æ.

Likewise, the real Æ didn’t think that Joyce portrayed him accurately in “Scylla and Charybdis.” Joyce did his best to capture Æ as he saw him, including Æ’s interest in “formless spiritual essences.” Scholar Harald Beck found a 1906 article entitled “Art and Literature” written by Æ that contained the following quote:

“Spirituality is the power certain minds have of apprehending formless spiritual essences…”

Beck also shares an anecdote found in the 1978 James Joyce: A Student’s Guide regarding the statement, “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.” The real Æ remarks, “How clever of Joyce: I might have said something like that.” Writer Frank O’Connor then retorts, “He said it every day.” As Leopold Bloom noted in “Lestrygonians,” it can be uncomfortable to “see ourselves as others see us.”

It may seem problematic that Æ espouses “formless spiritual essences” in the same breath as “Plato’s world of ideas” since Plato is known for writing extensively on Forms. Scholar Fran O’Rourke, in his book Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, interprets Æ’s comments as, “Plato’s transcendent essences are not limited to any particular finite mode or concrete form.” O’Rourke also says that Æ correctly summarizes Plato’s theory of artistic creation. So, Æ is doing well here. This is not a Deasy- or Crawford-style train wreck.

However, Æ’s introduction of Plato stirs up problems about the stability of knowledge and whether or not we can trust the validity of our own cognition. Plato thought that senses were not a suitable vector for knowledge. Stephen dealt with a similar conundrum, but from an Aristotelian point of view, back in “Proteus.” For Plato, our ineluctable senses deliver us only imperfect shadows of perfect, universal Forms. Plato thought the Forms existed in a separate world of uncorrupted, unchanging essences that can never manifest in our material world. Platonic thought has a hard time grappling with the material world in which we humans actually live, resulting in what O’Rourke termed “the maelstrom of unceasing flux.” Charybdis, in other words. Veering too far into Platonism can lead to meaningless, woo-woo mysticism.

Æ also advocates for the painting of Gustave Moreau, a French Symbolist painter, as “the painting of ideas.” From the website of the Musée National Gustave Moreau:

“Moreau’s painting is meant to inspire dreams rather than thought. It seeks to transport the viewer into another world.
Even in his choice of subjects, Moreau wanted to distance himself from the facts of reality and experience. A deeply religious person, although non-practising, he felt that painting, a mirror of physical beauty, also reflected the great fervour of the soul, the spirit, the heart and the imagination, and had fulfilled the divine needs of mankind throughout time.”

Moreau’s paintings, which dealt largely with Classical and Biblical subjects, were seen as the pinnacle of Symbolist art in the 19th century, beloved by Symbolist writers like Stephane Mallarmé (a fact that will become germane in an upcoming paragraph.) Moreau’s art fell out of favor in the early 20th century, with the rise of modernism. Similarly, Æ’s influence fell out of relevance in the early 20th century, particularly around the time of the Easter Rising in 1916. The world changed, and the art of the 19th century couldn’t keep pace.

Joyce is using this passage to rebut a critique against the novel in which it appears. Ulysses is littered with the minutiae of Joyce’s own life, the unraveling of which has been a pastime for academics for the last century and change. I’ve personally heard people question whether it is necessary to know Joyce’s life or his politics or other details about the author to understand Ulysses. To have a deep understanding of Ulysses, it is overwhelmingly necessary to understand the trivial details of the very deep life from which they sprung. Joyce’s modernism hinged on the elevation the debased and filthy aspects of society, or even tedious and monotonous aspects of society, in order to gain a more complex view of that very society. By incorporating this style, Joyce rejected aestheticism and symbolism. In Ulysses it is evident that examinations of seemingly innocuous details can lead to art with an almost bottomless depth.

“Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.”

Stephen enters into a reverie in this passage that scholar Robert Kellogg describes as a “Mulligan-like” burlesque of theosophy. As Æ and Eg were both theosophists, Stephen soothes his frustrations at their slights by rendering their chosen philosophy foolish. Stephen is building up confidence as he nears the defense of his Shakespeare theory.

Scholar Ralph Jenkins notes that “Father, Word and Holy Breath,” “Allfather, the heavenly man,” and “Hiesos Kristos” are taken from Æ’s own writings, describing Æ’s conception of a theosophized Holy Trinity, appropriating Christian imagery into his own esoteric ideas, though Æ preferred the spelling “Christos.” I don’t know why Joyce would spell it differently in this passage.

“Logos” is not specific to Æ’s writing, but is a term of art used in theosophy more broadly. Jenkins explains the concept, as it was revealed by “the Ancient Wisdom millions of years ago from the Great Beings who came from Venus”:

“As science, theosophy considers all material and spiritual things as made up of two elements, the form and the life which dwell within. These result from the outpouring of the Logos, the will of god, of which all consciousnesses are a part.”

In the equivalences, “This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter,” Stephen interprets Æ’s words as indicating what scholars Thomas Dilworth and Karen Marrero call a “radical eastern-mystical interchangeability.” Anything is anything else. It’s all, like, one, man.

Though theosophy leans heavily on concepts appropriated from Eastern spiritual traditions, it is also heavily influenced by Christianity. For our purposes, the introduction of Æ’s theosophic jargon reveals the influence of Charybdian thought on Christianity. The Holy Trinity in particular falls apart under Platonic philosophy, as it requires a physically embodied man (the Son, Hiesos Kristos, Jesus Christ, whatever you want to call him) in order to be complete. The Son is replaced with the formless-spiritual “Word” in the theosophic Trinity, eliminating the Christ figure entirely. Thus we can see the corrosion of the Holy Trinity once it is pulled in the Charybdian maelstrom of theosophy, a bolder departure than any committed by the heresiarchs of antiquity.

We can confirm the suspicion raised back in “Aeolus”: Stephen most likely has been hanging around Æ, picking his brain about theosophy. Stephen seems a little ashamed of his previous enthusiasm as he has grown disillusioned with theosophy. He reveals in his critique that he is not only well-versed in theosophical terminology and concepts, but specifically with Æ’s ideas about theosophy.

“Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H.P.B.’s elemental.
O, fie! Out on’t! Pfuiteufel! You naughtn’t to look, missus, so you naughtn’t when a lady’s ashowing of her elemental.”

Stephen continues his burlesque of theosophy. Jenkins likens this section to a Biblical genealogy of eminent theosophists.

“Dunlop” is Daniel Nicol Dunlop, a prominent theosophist and close friend of Æ. Dunlop ran a vegetarian restaurant in Dublin and published Æ’s work in the magazine Irish Theosophist, which he edited. He met a young James Joyce (possibly around 1902) and remarked that “his attitude to religion was that of an apostate priest.”

“Judge” would be William Quan Judge, a Dublin native and one of the seventeen co-founders of the Theosophical Society along with Madame Blavatsky and Henry Olcott in New York.
“Arval” refers to the Arval Brotherhood, a secretive, 12-member elite priesthood in ancient Rome, known for their esoteric ceremonies and use of archaic language. Joyce is implying a parallel to the current Theosophical Society as a group of elitists performing their little ceremonies with intentionally arcane jargon, and holding Æ as their “emperor.”
Jenkins thinks that the “Name Ineffable” is another reference to Logos, as mentioned above.
“K.H.” is short for Koot Hoomi Lal Singh, who Jenkins describes as an imaginary Indian Master. Madame Blavatsky, however, claimed that Koot Hoomi was a Mahatma, or Ascended Master, who shared his wisdom in a lively correspondence with Blavatsky and several other prominent theosophists. Theosophist Charles Leadbeater described K.H.’s appearance as wearing “the body of a Kashmiri Brahman, and is as fair in complexion as the average Englishman. He, too, has flowing hair, and His eyes are blue and full of joy and love.” K.H. is believed by many to be a hoax. (Or is he?)

I interpret the next part of this passage as a Theosophic rendition of the Christian prayer The Apostles’ Creed. I suppose K.H. is a Holy Ghost of sorts. The line from the Creed, “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary” becomes “The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia.” In this version of events, Christ materialized into Mary’s womb via the astral plane. “He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty” becomes “departed to the plane of buddhi.” Of course, this passage creates a theosophy-friendly version of the “historicity of Jesus,” which may render that topic of more interest for ol’ Æ.

At the end of this litany, the point is conceded that only those with immaculate karma can take on the “life esoteric.” I read this as a reference to the elitist nature of theosophy, which Joyce referred to as the refuge of disaffected Protestants. This is backed up with the detail that allegedly Mrs. Cooper Oakley had seen H.P.B. (Helena Petrovna Blavatksy)’s elemental (I’m assuming this is K.H.). Isabel Cooper-Oakley was another prominent theosophist who accompanied H.P.B. to India. Cooper-Oakley, like many prominent theosophists, came from a wealthy Protestant family, which in part allowed her the opportunity to dedicate her life to spiritualism.

The last line is a clear parody of someone peeping at a lady’s private “elemental” parts. The opening chain of syllables is a play on Hamlet I.ii, “Fie on’t! Ah fie!” Gifford and Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated translates “Pfuiteufel!” as “a German oath” combining “Pfui,” meaning “fie” and “Teufel” meaning Devil.

“—That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet’s musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato’s.”
“John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
—Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.
—Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?”

It’s quite provocative for Stephen to directly call Plato shallow here. We can read between the lines and realize he’s actually calling Æ and his Platonic pals shallow. Stephen raises a point that the others do not refute, though: Socrates did advocate banishing artists from his ideal society in The Republic on the grounds that they merely create imitations of imitations. Stephen Dedalus would be booted out pretty quickly, but ironically so would Æ and Eg. I suppose we all pick and choose what we like about our problematic faves, but it is easy to see the shallowness in advocating for a philosophy that negates one’s own vocation.

Given that Æ has already presented his own theory of art, we can reasonably assume he doesn’t agree with Plato on this point, and therefore his worldview would be more accurately described as Neoplatonic rather than strictly Platonic. Stephen’s comment underscores the incoherence of artists losing themselves in the Platonic-Charybdian maelstrom and pokes a major hole in the worldview espoused by his opponents.

In Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, O’Rourke notes that Stephen is familiar with Aristotle’s definition of art as an imitation of nature, but does not dig into how it represents universal concepts. Aristotle doesn’t claim that poetry (art) contemplates universal essences, but that it has the ability to express universals by describing the actions of individuals, which in turn represent universal ideas. From Poetics:

“... poetry is more philosophical and elevated than history, since poetry relates more to the universal, while history relates to particulars.”

Stephen prepares to do battle:

“Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see.”

Stephen prepares to rebut Æ’s formless spiritual essences with precision of language, wielding his “dagger definitions” against his opponents. If you’re wondering why we’re suddenly talking about horses, O’Rourke notes that horses were a common example used in classical philosophy to contrast an empirical individual and a universal idea.

Stephen uses the concept of “horseness” to argue his point and poke fun at Platonic ideas once more. “Horseness” is the quality that makes something a horse, while its “whatness” is its essence. That essence is a projection of the Form of a horse, represented by “allhorse.” So, what makes a horse a horse is a projected idea from the intangible, uncorrupted concept of horse that exists outside the material world and can only be inferiorly apprehended by our human senses. Got it? Stephen is being snarky and making his opponents beliefs sound silly, but this horse business may have its roots in a conversation between Antisthenes and Plato on this very point of horseness:

“Antisthenes: I see a horse, but I don’t see horseness.
Plato: No, for you have the eye with which a horse is seen, but you have not yet acquired the eye to see horseness.”

O’Rourke explains that Stephen counters Plato’s argument with Aristotle’s theory of sensation, raising the question, “To what do general ideas refer?” “Whatness” or “quiddity” (“quidditas” if you're feeling Latin) is a thomist term, originating with Thomas Aquinas, the synthesizer of Aristotle and Christianity. The concept of whatness introduces Aristotle's solution to the Platonic problem of Universals. Plato believed that true reality was in the realm of pure Ideas or Forms, from which our material reality was a pale shadow. For Aristotle, it's the reverse: the material world is primary, and we extrapolate universals from that.

We must consider the relationship between sense and intellect, between the particular and general. These were the issues that Stephen wracked his brain over on Sandymount Strand just a few hours ago in preparation for this debate, first by engaging his ineluctable senses. The world is filled with an abundance of things we call horses, but they can vary widely in size, shape and color. They are all imperfect approximations of whatever the ideal Platonic form of a horse might be. It is our sense perception that allow us to interpret these multifarious horses and perceive their essential horseness. Stephen is acutely aware of the limits of human senses, especially the imperfections of vision, so intellect helps us clean up the raw data delivered through our senses, the things we “damn well have to see.” From O’Rourke:

“The eye necessarily perceives accordingly as it is equipped; erroneous impressions are corrected by the judgment of intellect.”

Stephen delivers one more morsel of Mulliganesque mockery before we end this passage:

“Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

Though Stephen takes the side of materialism in the ancient battle of Aristotle v. Plato, we should reflect that adhering too closely to materialism is also dangerous. Developing as an artist requires one to not fully embrace the dogmatic materialism of Aristotle or the incoherent mysticism of Plato. Instead, an able captain must sail between these two temperaments and find a balanced, nuanced worldview in the process. The answer to this conundrum isn’t one or the other, it’s sort of both. Materialism limits us as thinkers, holding us back from finding deeper meaning, while mysticism can cause us to believe we are pursuing Truth while in reality we are just circling the drain. Despite his refutation, Joyce didn’t totally reject Chaybdian ideas, either, given the amount of mystical ideas woven into Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce thought Blake was the greatest of all the romantic poets, but he is critical of Æ and Eg’s admiration for Blake because he sees it as an embrace of shallow, empty mysticism. As a remedy, we “must hold to the now” or risk losing ourselves entirely.

Decoding Dedalus: Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.

Further Reading:

Decoding Dedalus: Hamlet, ou le Absentminded Beggar

Decoding Dedalus: Folly. Persist.