Joyce's Gnomons, Lenehan, and the Persistence of an Image

Abstract

Our understanding of characters and characterization in the novel has vastly increased in sophistication since the days when it was possible to ask seriously how many children Lady Macbeth had, or to see characters as mere portraits of the author and his friends or enemies, or to view them functionally as foils or ficelles and not much more. Even so, human nature being what it is, we must struggle continually against the temptation to forget that novels like poems are verbal structures merely; or that, reversing our angle of vision, our knowledge of Jesus or of Napoleon is in one very important sense exactly like our knowledge of Hamlet: it is ultimately derived entirely from reading words written or printed -arbitrary symbolic data representing conceptual reductions of sense-data.* I want to discuss a few of the printed data that can be discovered and shown concerning a minor of Joyce's, Lenehan-who has no given name like real people. The aggregate of these printed data can lead us into some unorthodox but instructive ways of examining the conception and genesis of character in the mind of Joyce and perhaps of other writers as well, for Lenehan bears about him traces of his creation, and achieves a very strange kind of immortality. The more specialized criticism dealing with Joyce's characters and characterization has developed in lines parallel with those followed by criticism in general. Thus his characters have been seen as though they were real persons now living, therefore possessing a theoretically infinite store of recoverable data: how many lovers had Molly Bloom, and should we like to be married to her?1 Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait is the young Joyce, perhaps painted by Picasso or Braque; Molly Bloom is an amalgam of Nora Joyce and the Virgin Mary.2 But