Introduction to "Encyclopedia Joyce": On Being Very Big

Abstract

Introduction to "Encyclopedia Joyce":On Being Very Big James Blackwell Phelan (bio) and Kiron Ward (bio) Early in the schooldays of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce introduces him, and us, to the vicissitudes of totalizing thought. Studying his geography book, Stephen reflects on its description of the world and considers how humanity can be classified according to its nesting categories: "They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe" (P 15). In keeping with this, he has written in the book's flyleaf "himself, his name and where he was": Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe (P 15) Stephen imagines the whole universe knowable and unified in a totalizing schema. It is a sort of encyclopedism: a complete, commensurable scale, consistent and articulable throughout, fixed in a form; the symptom of a system for transmitting knowledge of the world to the world. This special issue takes Joyce's engagement with such encyclopedic thinking and writing as its topic. Even this early in A Portrait, the outlines of a critique of encyclopedism are perceptible. Rereading "himself, his name and where he was," Stephen finds himself probing the limits of the encyclopedic picture of reality he has been taught: Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. [End Page 27] He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could think only of God. (P 16) Only God is in a position to comprehend the totality of the world. That being so, Stephen must accept the formulation of totality he infers from his textbook and his teachers. In the impious and egotistic connotations of the repeated adjective "big" and his related inability to think of anything but God, Joyce figures how Stephen's youthful curiosity is bounded in its infancy. If it is "very big to think about everything and everywhere," then Stephen, who feels "small and weak" (P 8), must accept the idea of "everything and everywhere" taught to him by God's representatives on Earth. This is, of course, one of the kernels for Stephen's subsequent, and lifelong, rebellion—and here already, Joyce quietly lays bare the incoherence at the heart of what Stephen is taught. Upon deferring to God, he begins thinking about His names in other languages, before concluding "though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God" (P 16). In the encyclopedic framework into which Stephen is taught to fit the world, linguistic diversity is subordinated to a language that is more "real" than the others: English.1 How striking, then, that his friend Fleming has taken his geography book and colored the picture of the Earth on the first page—"a big ball in the middle of clouds" (P 15)—making it green and maroon, the colors Dante Riordan associates with Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. Looking "wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds," Stephen wonders: which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother and...