Lear learns what he
needs (2.4.264). He also learns to cast aside what he does not need. His
temperance matures as the tempest of “filial ingratitude” (3.4.14), once ravaging
his heart, recedes. So long as Gonerill knows what she does (2.4.228), as Regan
points out, there is potential for recuperation. Lear knows it. Lear learns.
That knowledge seems to be reaching him in the ways as mysterious as the flow
that redeems Gloucester’s unrequited heed. Edgar’s words of encouragement and comfort,
“Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80), are constitutive of the anchor that
provides stability and solidity of the attitude, as it is being established.
Lear learns:”No, I will be the pattern of all patience. / I will say nothing”
(3.2.35-36).
Strangely, as Kent
informs, “[t] hings that love night” (3.2.40) withdraw before the “darkness” of
the night from which Lear speaks. The power of the night like that exudes an
air of animosity toward the thickness of obscurity. It creates a chemistry of
negative valences. It procures Lear the basis for the oppositional attitude. It
provides him with knowledge -- the knowledge of resistance, that weird source
of vigor. The power of “NO.”
Lear learns the virtue
of noble rebellion, so Kent’s temptations, “Sir, where is the patience now /
That you so oft have boasted to retain?” (3.6.15-16), can be refuted and,
accordingly, discarded. Again, what is clouded by the harshness of Lear’s verbal
spitting surfaces through the kind, appeasing words of Edgar’s:”My tears begin
to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting” (3.6.18-19). That
falling mask, as it were, is the adhesive tissue of the soothing power of
filial gentleness. It epitomizes the credibility of Lear’s attitude reflected
in fiercely challenging hard-heartedness (3.6.34-35).
It re-shifts
erratically channeled passion. It reconfirms the vibrancy of resistance. It
reconstitutes the sound response to bewilderment and oppression: the cleansing
power of the capacity to discern and sustain distinctions. It reanimates the
basis for the reasoning that highlights the difference between the nourishing
restraint and abusive, manipulative, oppressive distortions of that bliss.
/
So spoke Lear
when he could not cry. Similarly, the cornucopia of speech ignited by Bloom’s
magical act in the encounter with the faucet--revamping the waters of words
flowing from the earlier chapters such as “Nestor,” “Hades,” and “Nausicaa”
like tributaries leaking into the main flow and apexing in Molly’s soliloquy in
the “Penelope” chapter--seems to deafen and overshadow unlikely tears of
repentance. In Vladimir Nabokov’s ambiguously ironic, provocatively elusive
opinion, “James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies
of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts (Strong Opinions 30). Perhaps. Or,
rather, as Stephen ruminates, “Nes. Yo” (Ulysses
430). One would like to know.
The flow
released by lifting the valve from the jet pouring out of the faucet reveals
all the water-words meandering throughout the novel as a maplike delta
comfortably protected by the sea hybridizing all the streams, yet somehow
preserving their distinctiveness. Fluid, yet distinguishable. Fluctuating, yet
steady. Elusive, yet strangely fathomable. Such is the mighty flow anchoring
the storyline in this stunning novel of Joyce’s. Like language, those
narratives reiterate the concept of power and what it means to be constitutive
of it.
As if unified by
the “Aeolus” chapter, the episodes immersed in the imagery of water offer a
symbolic in the key of versatile fluidity. As if an overarching, hub trope were
that of “gaseous vertebrate” (Ulysses 162)
that spans the trajectory of the whole vastness of the story, persisting in
providing the much needed connective, sustaining the consistency of its yarns,
subtlety of its threads. Like the omnipresent imagery safeguarding the
coherence of that giant narrative by the very virtue of its own mutability, the
metaphor, while creating a sense of an impalpable presence is also invoking the
awareness of the communication between quirky spatiality and capricious
chronology. The perseverance of that presence through time epitomizes the idea
of the historicizable ahistorical: undoubtedly situated within a particular
moment, and yet, reflecting other timeframes, other spatio-temporalities.
Like the
characterization, defying cronos’s empire, and yet not detaching itself from
the bitter-sweet romance with history: “probably that was it to somebody who
thinks she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age
especially getting on to forty he is now” (Ulysses
609). Like the young surgeon in the episode “Oxen of the Sun” challenging the
perception of age. Like the symbolic of “childman,” its inverted version of “manchild”
(Ulysses 606), and the communication
between them. What is the age of that historicizable ahistorical character? One
would like to know.
Just as there is
something about the characterization owing its eccentricity to the
communication channel saturated with static, so is it to a high degree
suggestive of resilience that allows the fluidity to deliver a solid, yet not
rigid, message. Thus severed by the battle between corrosive noise and the signal
persisting those temporary threats of distortion, it is a transient
communicational tunnel that acquires characteristics of the communication
channel as a momentary corruption of the communication content is dissolving,
and the flow is being re-established. Those are the loops reverberating with
the themes of labyrinthine seductiveness of entrapment by potion, distraction
by unlikely tones, and bewilderment by facelessness, as portrayed in the
episodes such as “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” and/or “Circe.”
Molly, in possession of
the most prominent vocal of all the characters in the novel, articulates
profound comments cacophonous in tone, polyphonous in thematic. Ranging from sometimes
charmingly lascivious, at times nearly vulgarly blatant explorations of the
realm of the carnal, her internally verbalized thought addresses the issue of
the body finding questionable satisfaction in copious fornication not infrequently
associated with clerical context. At the same time, evoking bodily sensations
semidetached from inner dynamic, her speech-flow reinstates random encounters
and elusiveness, unreliability, and suspicion pertinent to their irredeemably
aloof nature, to their aura echoing irrecoverable alienation, incorrigible
insularity.
Partly, her brooding
thoughts reflect a perception of another being as afflicted, fragmented, disjoined.
Partly, they voice an agonizing sense of longing. Those aspects of her
soliloquy portray the experience of the other as the utter unknown, just as the
whole world appears to be observed from that angle: “he says your soul you have
no soul inside only grey matter because he doesn’t know what it is to have one”
(Ulysses 611). Here, Joyce sketches the crux--the key knot--of
the narrative presenting the world populated by disconnectedness, void, and vapidness.
Simultaneously, he offers a hint for disentangling those static drenched nodes
within the web constitutive of and constituted by the communication between and
among fellow humans.
Where frustration by
hindered communication mirrors dissatisfaction with human interaction,
simplicity, instead of being a manifestation of purity, is rather sought as a
haven for comprehension starved minds. Likewise, unfathomable information is
understood to be a result of the perplexities imposed by the style and
demanding level of complexity of the communication input:“he never can explain
a thing simply the way a body can understand” (Ulysses 620). Where compromises are uneasy choices brining a sense
of insipid indifference, human relationships merely reflect a worryingly
uninspiring, unfulfilling experience of oneself:“hed never find another woman
like me to put up with him the way I do” (Ulysses
613). Friction inducing mutuality, rather than soothing reciprocity, is
indicative of the prevalent offcolor lenses that render the perception of the
world painfully alien:“and he knows that too at the bottom of his heart” (Ulysses 613).
And yet, there is noise
within noise. Within that disheartening confession, “there is a flower that
bloometh” (Ulysses 625), as Joyce
puts it so well. Within those supposedly comforting, while, in fact, saddening
crumbs of disillusionment, a bud of genuine solace is hidden. Waiting to be
recuperated and its alleviating power resumed, waiting for its vibrancy to resurface
--recovered. He knows it. Just as she does: “theres nothing like a kiss long
and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you” (Ulysses 610). The passion engrained in the power of that knowledge
ensures discerning and sustaining distinctions such as the one between the
flower in question and other types of flora. It safeguards from a threat of
“ignoramus that doesn’t know poetry from a cabbage” (Ulysses 638). The oneiric of poetry undoing nightmares of history.
Such is the mighty flow of the anchorage, the quirky disenchantment with that
what eludes even the elusiveness of language.
