Lice of Sweat and Spark

As Stephen broods on the smell of his decade-long infatuation, and the effect of her body on her fabric, he is interrupted by the piercing sensation of a louse.

Stephen has been pleasurelessly indulging in recollections of the rough and sexually loose regions of the city which he himself used to frequent. Stephen insists to himself that it is inappropriate to think of her image in the same "secret and inflaming" manner that he contemplates the young wives "gaily yielding to their ravishers" (253).

"That was not the way to think of her. It was not even the way in which he thought of her. Could his mind then not trust itself? (253)

Stephen seems to consider her image unworthy of contamination by the "monstrous reveries" of his mind (95). He reassures himself that he never though of her in the evil way he had previously reduced women to sinful machines, before his anonymous confession. Although he has now given up on mortifying his senses, he apparently still considers his sexuality to be a low thing.

Just as Stephen finds himself being mentally corrupted by imagining her sensually, "the tepid limbs over which his music had flowed desirously," the lice recall to him his physical corruption (254).

"A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and . . . the tickling of the skin of his neck made his mind raw and red. (254)

Much as lice were said to spontaneously generate from human sweat by medieval philosophers, "His mind bred vermin. His thoughts born of the sweat of sloth" (254). In other words, Stephen considers his own thoughts to be equitable with lice.

Although Stephen has rejected piety in favor of art, he considers himself weakened by sin. This influences his actions; he decides in the end of this moment that if she is "too good" for him, she should "go and be damned to her. She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning" (254).

Thoughts on Coming-of-Age

This is a new blog for a new semester's first class; the topic of the class is"coming-of-age novels." I might say the class has three 'windows.' The first window is the circle in which the students sit. The second window is the words that they read. The window that dominates for any student is the unique window that each one brings.

The students might not notice it, but there is irony in this literary study. The students think that they are reading about the life of ancient another but really the students are looking at themselves. For example, when students read about a poor neighborhood of Dublin, some may imagine it with slummy shacks, some with tall but crumbling buildings, and some with gleaming but cramped and unsanitary tenement-houses.

Individual readers also make distinct character judgements. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce suggests certain interpretations of Stephen's actions, but each reader brings a special flavor to their perception of Stephen. This is based on a person's ideals; a frugal reader would likely have a different take of Stephen's money-spending than a less thrifty reader.

This might all seem obvious, yet the various aspects of personality that determine the way a reader interacts with a book are themselves the things which undergo a change during the coming-of-age process, and may even be influenced by the reader's current selection. For a reader who is his/herself coming of age, reading a coming-of-age novel represents a cause-and-effect circuit as the book changes the reader who changes the book which changes the reader and so on.