Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

168James Joycea kind of priest or prophet whose destiny lies in “namingthe names.” As one engaged in a kind of religious quest,Stephen imagines spiritual fulfillment as coming throughwords, the poem we see him write, the diary entries that endthe book, and the way the young artist wields language as aweapon and as a tool with which to seek enlightenment.fOne of the oldest themes in the novel is that language is a creator ofreality. There is this theme in Don Quixote. Quixote is supremely aman animated by “the word”; and as the words he has read in bookssend him into action—creating reality for him by determining whathe sees and what he feels and what he does—so Quixote in turn hasa similar effect upon other people, subtly changing their outlook,creating in them new forms of thought and activity. Don Quixotemay be looked on as an extensive investigation of the creative effectsof language upon life. Joyce’s Portrait is also an investigation ofthis kind; appropriately so, for the “artist” whose youthful portraitthe book is, is at the end to find his vocation in language; and theshape of reality that gradually defines itself for Stephen is a shapedetermined primarily by the associations of words. We follow in thecircumstances of the boy’s life the stages of breakdown and increasingconfusion in his external environment, as his home goes to pieces,and the correlative stages of breakdown in his inherited values, as hischurch and his nation lose their authority over his emotions. Veryearly the child’s mind begins to respond to that confusion by seekingin itself, in its own mental images, some unifying form or formsthat will signify what the world really is, that will show him the reallogic of things—a logic hopelessly obscure in external relations. Hismental images are largely associations suggested by the words hehears, and in intense loneliness he struggles to make the associationsfit into a coherent pattern.To the very young child, adults seem to possess the secret of thewhole, seem to know what everything means and how one thing isrelated to another. Apparently in command of that secret, they tosswords together into esoteric compounds, some words whose referentsthe child knows and many whose referents are mysterious; and the