Chapter 2 - Paris Recognized: Stephen Hero and Portrait

Summary

The second chapter, “Paris Recognized,” shows that Joyce’s discoveries in Paris shape his subsequent understanding of Dublin life. The chapter traces a series of meetings between Stephen Dedalus and Emma Clery in Stephen Hero and Portrait, culminating in an encounter in the colonnade of the museum library that undoes the transactional relations that mar their earlier encounters. In tracing their relations, the chapter uncovers Joyce’s development of a desublimated and unconscious aesthetic practice. Even though Stephen rehearses Joyce’s earlier aesthetic theory, in the scene in the colonnade he is an artist in a way that has been overlooked. Joyce draws on the synesthesia of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” to present Stephen and Emma as engaged in a sensory exchange that defies calculation; in their encounter, the Thomistic integritas, consonantia, claritas of the artwork are replaced by a transient expression of physically digested material