The Metamorphosis of Stephen Da(e)dalus: The Plesiosaurus and the Slimy Sea

Abstract

In Joyce’s scholarship, very little critical attention has been paid to the monstrous creature depicted in Stephen Hero, the plesiosaurus, a large marine reptile of the Lower Jurassic Period. It appears when the protagonist envisions the birth of prehistoric art: “He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and caught glimpses of emergent art as one might have a vision of the pleisiosauros [sic] emerging from his ocean of slime” (SH 33). The prime concern of this essay is to inquire into why Joyce conjures up such paleo-imagery as that of the plesiosaurus, rather than other extinct creatures, and how he represents the “ocean of slime” as the nonhuman geological actor in his own background. I first highlight the actual plesiosaurus fossil discovered in 1848 and brought into Dublin in 1853. The fact that it had been moved to the Natural History Museum, Dublin, in 1890 will suggest the possibility that the direct inspiration for Joyce’s description was the Plesiosaurus cramptoni (now known as Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni) fossil. I then examine the traditional imagery of the slime-clad plesiosaurus in paleo-geological writings to elucidate how he employs conventional verbal representation, despite Stephen’s search for primordial art. Finally, I will analyze the hidden nexus between the plesiosaurus and Stephen’s monstrous egotism, or “self-centred” spirit as opposed to “self-submersive reptiles,” shedding new light on the “ocean of slime” as an image symbolic of the geological soil of Dublin out of which the fledging artist attempts to rise. The argument regarding two nonhuman actors will illuminate a different form of “the square ditch” into which young Stephen (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) is pushed and reveal his monstrous animality as a plesiosaurus before becoming a bird.