Ornithic Joyce — An Egregiously Preliminary Round of Avian Observations

Abstract

Ornithic Joyce – An Egregiously Preliminary Round of Avian Observations James McElroy Ronald Bates published an article entitled ‘The Correspondence of Birds to Things of the Intellect’ in the James Joyce Quarterly of Summer 1965. In his article Bates identified a species of ‘ornithic’ guise that he claimed to be a common trait in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.1 Elizabeth Travis Rose, taking her cue from Bates, went on to note that very few Joyce critics have ever taken the time to research avian usage – the ‘ornithic’ – at any real length.2 William York Tindall, another Rose staple, claims, more generally, that Joyce’s ornithic trajectory involves a graduation from negative avian species in the opening section of A Portrait to much more positive, or at least far less menacing, species types near the novel’s end.3 As well as Bates and Tindall, Rose also references Lee T Lemon who, she claims, provides a ‘thorough’ catalogue of bird species in A Portrait. (Rose’s enthusiasm, notwithstanding, Lemon’s catalogue is, from a strictly taxonomic standpoint, inchoate at any number of key points).4 As much as Bates and associates might evidence the existence of certain ornithological elements in Joyce’s phylogenetic text, the same ornithic critics minimise the actual taxonomic worth of the bird species which inhabit Joyce’s palimpsestic narratives and, more often than not, misidentify or misappropriate a number of bird references including A Portrait’s lines about a ‘nicens little boy named baby tuckoo’ and how Stephen’s mother demands that he ‘apologise’ while his Aunt Dante chimes in, ‘Oh, if not the eagles will come and pull out his eyes’.5 To explain this oft-quoted ornithological reference point, most Joyce scholars (certainly early on in Joyce studies) have relied on mytho-symbolic or mytho-scriptural theories to explain the aniconic, in Tindall’s view, ‘indefinitely suggestive’, eagles which are implicated in having Stephen cower under a table at the Dedalus residence. Tindall’s adjacent comments on Joyce’s eagle use brings us nowhere fast since they are, at best, meandering in their treatment of the bird type under reference: ‘Tradition may have given the meaning of authority, Studies • volume 109 • number 433 59 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 59 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 59 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 Roman authority, to eagle, for example; but this meaning, enlarged by many connections, fails to limit or exhaust the meaning, which, though directed by tradition, remains indefinitely suggestive. In matters of this kind, limiting explanation is of less value than indication. It seems enough to point the images out and invite guesses’.6 Edmund L Epstein offers a co-equivalent exegesis of the same Joyce passage by proffering a biblical explanation (Douay Version) of the incident and tracing Dante’s threat back to Proverbs 30:17, with its stern prophetic warning: ‘The eye that mocketh at his father and that despiseth the labour of his mother in bearing him, let the raven of the brooks pick it out, and the young eagles eat it’.7 Epstein reckons that, if Dante is paraphrasing Proverbs 30:17, as he believes she is, then Stephen must have insulted one of his parents to deserve such harsh reprimand. (Epstein believes it is his father).8 Hans Walter Gabler agrees, though with a measure of professional caution, that while Proverbs is a likely source for A Portrait’s eagles – ‘the epiphany as recorded does not derive literally from Proverbs 30:17. Nevertheless, the nature of the biblical reference does not thereby elude definition’ – he considers Timothy Cruso’s God the Guide to Youth (1695) to be another possible source.9 However we choose to work through these assorted remarks it is clear that all these critics view Joyce’s avian usage, if view it they do, as incidental to Joyce’s morphological prose, with its much vaunted classical~demotic themes and visitant symbols. The aforementioned Epstein is even inclined to argue at one point, an argument based on an article by John V Kelleher that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly,10 that Stephen’s father counts him a cuckoo nestling of a different stripe...