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

178James Joycea winged movement. He hears his name, Dedalus, called out, and thename seems to be prophetic.. . . at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed tohear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged formflying above the waves and slowly climbing the air . . . ahawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy ofthe end he had been born to serve and had been followingthrough the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol ofthe artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggishmatter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishablebeing. . . . (429)The ending of Chapter 4 presents this new consciousness interms of an ecstatic state of sensibility. It is marked by the radiantimage of the girl standing in a rivulet of tide, seeming “like onewhom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautifulseabird . . . touched with the wonder of mortal beauty” (431–432),while his own life cries wildly to him, “To live, to err, to fall, totriumph, to recreate life out of life!” (432) The girl is a “wild angel”that has appeared to him, to “throw open before him in an instant ofecstasy the ways of error and glory.” The batlike woman-soul of hisrace, flitting in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, has given place tothis angelic emissary from “the fair courts of life,” of strange seabirdbeauty, inviting him to exile across waters and into other languages,as the sun-assailing and perhaps doomed Icarus. And it is in theflights of birds that Stephen, standing on the steps of the universitylibrary, in the last chapter, reads like an ancient haruspex the sanctionof his exile.With Chapter 5, Stephen’s new consciousness of destiny issubjected to intellectual analysis. Here, during his long walks withLynch and Cranly, all the major elements that have exerted emotionalclaims upon him—his family, church, nation, language—are scrutinizeddryly, their claims torn down and scattered in the youthfullypedantic and cruel light of the adolescent’s proud commitmentto art. Here also he formulates his aesthetics, the synthesis whichhe has contrived out of a few scraps of medieval learning. In hisaesthetic formulation, the names he borrows from Aquinas for “the