Barthes/Loyola

Classification, structure, visible character, tabulation: these are the foci of the Ignatian system as it is presented in the Spiritual Exercises, the formulaic guide to the administration of the Jesuit retreat. A multiple text, the Exercises operates on four levels in Barthes’ analysis. The first is the literal text or the “proper level of the discourse” (B 41), addressed to the retreat director. The second level is the semantic text or the argument of the discourse which the director addresses to the exercitant. It is the “contents” of the first level. The two texts have a common actor, the director, who is in the first instance the receiver of the Exercises, and in the second their donor (insofar as the relationship between director and exercitant is one of donation—the director gives the Exercises “virtually, as one gives food” [B 41]). At the level of the semantic text, the exercitant is also the receiver who, having accomplished this task, will proceed to “send” the message, writing with the second text a third. This third level is, then, the “acted” or allegorical text—the “exercising of the Exercises” (B 42), as Barthes puts it. Consisting of the meditations, gestures and practices given to the exercitant by the director, the allegorical text is, in turn, addressed to God as receiver. Thus the fourth text is the anagogic one in which God responds to the message, and the sign (the gesture of the first three texts operating in harmony) is “liberated.” Clearly, then, it is incumbent upon the exercitant to become a “logo-technician” (B 44) or constructor of language just as Loyola in the giving of the Exercises became a “Logothete” (B 3) or the founder of a language.

Logothesis is “semiophany” (B 53), not a language of communication outside itself but a “new language, traversed by (or traversing) natural language, [and] . . . open only to the semiological definition of Text” (B 3). If Loyola had wanted to say something, Barthes writes, “linguistic language” would have sufficed. Loyola could be summarized if this were the case (B 16). But Loyola’s language exists to provide a code for deciphering (rather than, as Barthes writes, a code to be deciphered [B 48]), to “provide the means for capturing the sign of Divinity” (B 45). Four operations are central to this language. The first, self-isolation, refers to the fact that the new language must arise from a “material vacuum” (B 4), the product of the physical conditions of the retreat. The second, articulation, refers to the endless production of rules of assemblage (B 60) of the data resulting from the logothete’s segmentation of (in Loyola’s case) the body and the Christian narrative. Thus the Ignatian rhetorical technique of composition of place is substituted for “creation” (B 4). The third operation, ordering, involves the “mystical sequence to a higher order” (B 5) as the Ignatian retreat director operates the exercises in replicating sequences in the service of the new discourse. Finally, the fourth operation, “theatricalization” (B 5), involves the production of a “writing [that] . . . only recognizes ‘instances’ ” or the “unlimiting of the [conventional, ‘linguistic’] language” (B 6). This “unlimiting” process sees Loyola as scenographer dispersed across the framework he has produced, arranging topoi, cases, data ad infinitum (B 6).

Figure 1. The “arborescence of Ignatian discourse.” (From Roland Barthes, “Loyola”)

In the beginning, both retreat director and exercitant “flounder” in profound aphasia (B 45). Reaching out for the system before them, they grasp through this language of interrogation (B 45) the code which will enable them to discover the will of God in each instance of intersection of topos and case. The binary structure of the retreat (before the Election of the exercitant’s choice of conduct about which he has previously been uncertain, and after the Election, facing its consequences [B 47]) pivots upon the moment of freedom which is the moment of nothingness. Between this moment and the conclusion of the Exercises in the Lectio divina stretches the articulation of the Images⁵ and topoi, governed by the “protocols” of the retreat situation. These “protocols” or physical conditions of the retreat constitute the circumstances of the logothete’s self-isolation, the conditions necessary to the creation of a “linguistic vacuum” (B 49) in the exercitant—an articulated aphasia—out of which will come the elaboration and eventual triumph of the new language, logothesis. The elimination of both worldly, physical language and worldly, physical comforts results in the exercitant’s sole focusing upon the unique language he must speak (the creation of the allegorical text) and whose code Loyola is attempting to establish. Its analog is the initiation ceremony in which, having followed the ritual procedures under the guidance of the shaman, the novice must finally retreat into isolation in order to wait for the coming of his own song, his voice—precisely a semiophany rather than a theophany (B 53), a response which is language itself.

Vehicle of semiophany, the Ignatian technique of composition of place consists for Barthes of the collocation of Images or units of imitation (B 54). These are visual units, “views” framing tastes, odors, and so on as well as data processed through the optical system (B 55). Composition of place is articulated imitation, deictic in that it designates but does not define (B 62). It is the Ignatian linking of the medieval rhetorical mode of topography with the Classical art of memory (B 55)⁶ but, differing from the art of memory in this, it “attempts to found meaning on matter and not on concept” (B 62) where the Classical memory tradition fused them, seeing matter as cue to concept. Thus, in the example which Barthes uses, the exercitant places himself before the Cross and “attempts to go beyond the signified of the image (the Christian, universally meditated meaning) to its referent, the material Cross, this crossed wood whose circumstantial attributes he attempts, through the imagining sense, to perceive” (B 63). The Image is reabsorbed within the system, having transcended its signified—or operated nonreferentially in the first place—and returned to the code.

The same process is apparent in the Ignatian version of the Lectio divina or meditation on the (divine) name, the working of a series of variations upon all the signifieds of a single noun in order to arrive at an apprehension of the whole. Wresting from the form of the noun the whole gamut of its meanings, this process of reading meaning through permutation extenuates the Subject or topos of meditation, conforming to the same modes of repetition within the allegorical text (B 59). The retreat director’s articulation of the code (the semantic text) thus leads to this third level of controlled (re-)assemblage performed by the exercitant. In turn, the exercitant’s task of assemblage falls under two headings, repetition and narrative. Repetition—or “exhausting the ‘pertinences’ of a subject” (B 60)—takes three forms: rumination or the complete redoing of an Exercise by the exercitant, recapitulation (summatio), and varied repetition or the systematic variation of the viewpoint of a selected subject (B 60). These traditional rhetorical techniques are in turn brought to bear upon the exercitant’s dealings with the topoi of meditation as he undertakes a “weaving of meditation,” working methodically with the set topos and then its cases, point by point, in order to evoke the Images with which the Ignatian language is being composed as the exercitant weaves (B 58-59). Thus “the imagining of Hell consists in perceiving it five consecutive times in the mode of each of the five senses: seeing the incandescent bodies, hearing the screams of the damned, smelling the stink of the abyss, tasting the bitterness of tears, touching the fire” (B 59). Finally, the exercitant must live out “scenes” (B 61) from the life of Christ (thus fulfilling his task of narrative), himself experiencing through the use of articulated Images reaching out across their visuality to the referent, the stages of, for example, the Crucifixion. Relentlessly the coded programs of the system fall into place in the exercise of logothesis.

(Barthes/)Loyola/Joyce

In the Joyce system, the most elementary form of the Ignatian code invented for deciphering is to be found in Stephen Dedalus’s definition of the “epiphany,” found in the fragmentary draft manuscript known as Stephen Hero:

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (SH 211)

But the application of this concept (epiphaneia: appearance)⁷ is entirely visual as Stephen Dedalus tells his companion Cranly that the Ballast Office clock is “capable of an epiphany”:

I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany. . . . Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. (SH 211)

Thus topography and the Ignatian Image are linked as Stephen Dedalus manifests his striving to “draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram” (SH 33). In Joyce’s notes to his play Exiles, the system is presented even more explicitly. First we are given two lists of Images relevant to the situation of Bertha and Richard Rowan:

Snow:

frost, moon, pictures, holly and ivy,

currant-cake, lemonade. Emily Lyons,

piano, window sill,

tears:

ship, sunshine, garden, sadness, pinafore,

buttoned boots, bread and butter, a

big fire. (E 121)

Then, having provided topoi and cases (incipient Images stripped of literal text), Joyce proceeds to catalogue them:

A persistent and delicate sensuality (visual: pictures, adorned with holly and ivy; gustatious: currant cake, bread and butter, lemonade; tactual: sunshine in the garden, a big fire, the kisses of her friend and grandmother) runs through both series of images. (E 122)

establishing again the requisites of the Ignatian Image which “frames” data from all sensory systems, resolving them into the (epiphanic) “view” which is articulated fully in the Portrait in terms of Ignatian composition of place.

Framing that system is the multiple text structure of Barthes’ Ignatius. Clearly, the literal text of the Portrait is again the artifact itself, the literal level of the book addressed to the reader (who thus becomes surrogate retreat director). The director or donor of the Exercises proceeds to give them to the exercitant at the level of the semantic text as the reader exercises the narrative, giving it to him- or herself in the process of critical comprehension and exercising it in perpetual apprenticeship. If literal and semantic texts are regarded as unified in the Portrait, the position of the allegorical text becomes immediately apparent. Written with the semantic text, the allegorical level (the exercitant’s assigned meditations, practices, and so on) is the reader’s learning of the gestures and practices—the metalanguage—of the narrative or literal text. Completing the hermeneutic circle, the anagogic text makes manifest through exercise the logothesis or code for deciphering which is, like Ignatian language, “the means for capturing the sign of Divinity”—in Joyce, the operations of semiosis. That which can be summarized (and which does not occur in Ignatius) is the narrative, the literal/semantic text, existing only in service of the arrangement, the articulation, which finally enables the reader to become, as it were, his or her own retreat director, no longer a novice exercitant but a thoroughly competent one, capable of working the code in polyphonic bliss.

Not a reconstitution of the literal/semantic text, articulation uses repetition (rumination, recapitulation, varied repetition) as rhetorical strategy both within the text and in terms of the reader/exercitant’s procedures for recovery of its coded messages. Like his Ignatian counterpart, the Joycean exercitant must become a logo-technician. This is Stephen Dedalus’s task as well. His growth in terms of Image competence mimes the growth of the system as a whole within this text. The following sequence is typical of this development:

In this last example, the narrator presents Stephen Dedalus in the act of reassemblage as, articulating and repeating the system to him- or herself, the reader/exercitant recovers the elements of the code, acquiring the skills of the logo-technician.

Functioning as Barthesian logothete, Stephen Dedalus undertakes the four operations productive of language in Loyola’s system. Self-isolation, the first operation, is an obvious aspect of Stephen Dedalus at the literal level—the growth of the Byronic artist-exile seen very much in the act of “founding” his own language from the first page of the Portrait (as shown in the first example above). That process, in terms of both Stephen Dedalus and the text, is the articulation of sensory data through Ignatian Images, the “cutting up” of the body at both first- and third-person levels of the literal text. “Scenarios” are articulated through Ignatian composition of place, producing a series of evolving systems of assemblage programmed according to the codes governing Joycean topoi. The result is not an Ignatian mystical sequence to a higher order but nonetheless a progress of sorts toward the ironic higher order of Stephen Dedalus’s artistic aspirations. Emerging from the retreat exercises, Stephen Dedalus’s new language of Thomist aesthetic as well as foregrounded composition of place and what Barthes calls “image-reservoir perception” (B 55) involves an ironic but Ignatian “theatricalization” of self. More important, this operation is seen as a device in the service of the “unlimiting [of] the language” of mimetic discourse, producing a writing upon which the compositor arranges (in Ignatian repetition) his codes. Thus the seeming fragmentation of the literal text at the end of the novel resolves itself into a typographic (visual/framing) foregrounding of Image and coded utterance (“Item: he eats chiefly belly bacon and dried figs. Read locusts and wild honey” [P 252]). Composed of a set order of entries and elaborations, these subcodes replicate in sequence according to textual program rather than ad infinitum like their Ignatian counterparts.

The elaboration of the topos water provides an example of this process in its movement from an early experience of Stephen Dedalus on the Subject of “the white look of the lavatory” with its cases:

There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. (P 11)

to the meditation on his patronymic during which Stephen Dedalus

seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve. . . . (P 173)

and finally to the epiphany of the birdlike girl:

A girl stood before him midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. (P 175)

Gazing out to sea, she “suffers” his gaze, “gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither” (P 176). Twice repeated in the same paragraph after this entry, the phrase “hither and thither” encodes the sound of the river Liffey, eponym of in Finnegans Wake “hitherandthithering” along her course (FW 216.04).⁸

The traditional association of water and woman in these passages (obviously anticipated in the emphasis upon “cocks” in the first excerpt) moves to the assimilation of Dedalus (rather than of his true exemplar, Icarus) with the birdlike girl—birds auguring Stephen Dedalus’s artistic calling as does the subsequent reference to ibis-headed Thoth, god of writing (P 229). Writing, or more specifically words, have functioned as a Subject of this topos from the beginning, as the first passage demonstrates. The sequence makes equally clear Stephen Dedalus’s visual perception of a named world (“Signatures of all things I am here to read,” as Ulysses has it [3.2]), in fact of a world in which sensory experience and linguistic denotation of it are equivalent. Shivering, thinking of the watercocks, Stephen Dedalus’s attention is drawn not to an Image of cold and then hot water but rather to one of the “names printed on the cocks.”

A movement toward a Bachelardian semiophany of water, the passage focuses all of the major elements in the second excerpt given, presenting printed names alongside the “quaint device” in a medieval book whose Image is conjured by the “winged form” who, in turn, issues from the imagined perception of “the noise of dim waves” (note the auditory Image supplanted by the visualism of “dim”). As hawklike man branches into birdlike girl, so the emphasis upon the elaboration of the girl’s birdlike attributes branches into repetition (of the Subject and thus of the topos) with variations. In addition, repetition within each passage (of “cocks,” “waves,” “girlish”), rumination in the puzzling-out process central to the first passage, and repetition with variation of the topos water across all three passages, and of the Subject “bird” with an assortment of its cases in the second and third passages: all fulfill Ignatian categories. And, finally, Ignatian recapitulation occurs obviously at allegorical and anagogic levels as well as, within the literal text, after a passage like the third one above.

First summarizing the import of this experience, Stephen Dedalus once again resolves to “recreate life out of life” (P 176). Recapitulating on the level of the Image, we have: “Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose . . . ” (P 177). And recapitulating on the level of synchronic Joycean discourse, we have Stephen Dedalus falling asleep on the beach at North Bull Island across Dublin Bay from Sandymount Strand, site of LB’s sleep at the end of U II. 10. When Stephen Dedalus awakens, the Image is of

A rim of the young moon . . . [cleaving] the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools. (P 177)

Before he sleeps, LB studies his reflection in the Cock Lake⁹ on Sandymount Strand:

Tide comes here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. . . . What is the meaning of that other world. (U 13.1259)

So the topos of water branches to include both birdlike girl and Gerty MacDowell (Ignatian Images correlated within the system, Dedalus and LB aligned as voyeurs, the irony of Stephen Dedalus’s Byronic phase spotlighted); the topographical allocation of water and word expands to include word and world¹⁰ (the Flood and the birth of language in Vichian Finnegans Wake); the mirror code introduced in aqueous surroundings links Stephen Dedalus and LB, and U 1.3 is assimilated into U II. 10, crowned by the resolution of the same Subjects and cases in U II. 12. And the “green wothe” of Portrait’s first page is repeated with variation in the roseate recapitulation of the birdlike girl Image transformed into a memory locus, topography made emblematic and immobilized within the system, awaiting the next turn of the memory wheel of Joycean discourse.

Approached from another direction, however, the central topos of Portrait’s Ignatian meditation becomes neither water nor birds but Stephen Dedalus himself. Just as in the Spiritual Exercises the Subject is methodically confronted with the items or cases on a list of more general headings in order to evoke the Images with which Ignatius is composing his language, so in Portrait Stephen Dedalus is methodically confronted with those items or cases of sensory and linguistic data which will evoke the Ignatian Images, as we have already seen. In full articulation at the level of the allegorical text, these Images constitute the predominantly visual/spatial code of this stage of Joycean logothesis. The “spatialization” of name which occurs throughout the literal text, especially in its first two chapters, is an aspect of this code. From Stephen Dedalus’s early situation of himself as an Image in the composition of the universal place, the apotheosis of topography—

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

(P 15-6)

we move to

—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names. (P 95)

As the Ignatian meditation upon the physical sufferings of Christ leads inevitably past Christ the signified to the Cross (the signifier which guides the exercitant into the allegorical text), so Stephen’s construction of himself as a memory locus within the theater of discourse moves beyond the narrative deixis of these names and out into the realm of signs as reversible modules governed only by the syntactic structures of logothesis.

Where the reader/exercitant performs Joycean nembutsu¹¹ in the articulation of the discourse, the literal text’s Stephen Dedalus performs his equivalent in the course of the retreat. Halfway through the retreat (the “still point” at the core of the central chapter of the book),¹² Stephen Dedalus’s “soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able to suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth, as he sank, a faint prayer” (P 129). At the moment of the prayer’s exhalation, the period of freedom in nothingness which immediately precedes it has passed; he has begun the process of Election. As the retreat director articulates the Ignatian exercises, creating their semantic text before the exercitants, that overheard text is embedded within the novel’s literal one. Focusing Stephen Dedalus’s attention upon the operations of logothesis, the retreat sermons and their aftermath for the exercitant focus the reader’s attention upon the novel’s operations. Stephen Dedalus, who has been formed until this pivotal point according to the procedures of composition of place, Ignatian Images and their repetition and articulation, and whose given phenomenology has been one of Ignatian “views” both sensory and linguistic, now learns those operations directly.

Beginning with a caution to “remember only the last things and thou shalt not sin for ever” (P 112), the retreat moves to an elementary exercise in semiophany focused by a semantic interrogation (“Now what is the meaning of this word retreat and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary practice ... ?” [P 113]) and its response: “A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for a while from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this world” (P 113). Repeating with elaborate variation the call to memory, the Joycean catechetical techne employs both the rhythm and the repetition of question/answer mnemonic learning of the Catechism (its transformation, as we see in Stephen Dedalus’s case, into the allegorical text of a life both chosen and abandoned). Its efficiency in the case of the focal exercitant is perfect: “His soul, as these memories [of Clongowes associated with his old teacher now retreat director—another marker of this chapter’s arc of recapitulation] came back to him, became again a child’s soul” (P 112). Topoi are then announced (death, judgment, hell, heaven) and an exhortation to correct conduct is given—basic components of the system established from the beginning. As Image and topography had earlier fused around names as visualized loci, so the initial impact of this first retreat sermon stresses these elements once again: “The letters of the name of Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and thither with slow boorish insistence” (P 115), the repeated phrase “hither and thither” operating synchronically, foregrounding the logothetic movement of the literal text for the reader/exercitant as, diachronically, it foregrounds the approaching Ignatian training of subject/exercitant.

The next day of the retreat brings not only “death and judgement” but also a narrative that shifts slowly from the familiar narrative voice miming the perceptual processes of Stephen Dedalus as it deals with them to the retreat director’s voice with its exercises in composition of place, not labeled by him until the fourth sermon.¹³ First: exercise, sensory cataloguing; then: definition, verbal cataloguing. Gestures as deliberate, formulaic, programmed as those of the Noh define the director’s semantic text (rendered allegorical through the semiotics of gesture):“The preacher took a chainless watch from a pocket within his soutane and, having considered its dial for a moment in silence, placed it silently before him on the table” (P 120-21)—a vocabulary of visual excess (chainless watch, within his soutane, before him on the table, in silence/silently), a deixis of the absent, the invisible, the linguistically replete. Sensory cataloguing begins: “Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke” (P 123)—the setting of Subjects, to be followed by their cases in sensory order beginning with the elaboration of the visual. Hell is “a neverending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air” (P 123), and proceeding through smell and touch to a statement which mimes the cataloguing practices of the medieval speculum:

Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. (P 125)

Filth, most suffocating in its namelessness, anticipates the aural agony of the damned, forced to suffer again the words which induced them to sin. The sins of the ear are language sins, as through the ear comes the exercise of purgation, language wounds healed by logothesis. Election, transcending language, is the next step.

From the invocation to memory which commenced these exercises, the retreat moves in its fourth and final sermon to the topography of the eyes, its Subject, “I am cast away from the sight of Thine eyes . . .” (P 130). And in a sermon which is a virtuoso invention on Ignatian Images, the retreat director first defines his technique:

—This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the mind, in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the physical torments which all who are in hell endure. (P 130)

Consistently shifting from the literal to the allegorical within the exercise itself, the director begins the consideration of the “spiritual torments of hell” with a rumination upon the psychological pain of loss but soon returns to putrefaction, blood and the violence of hell, working to his crescendo, a Baroque variation upon the theme of eternal damnation in terms of grains of sand. Proceeding in a series of antitheses of presence and absence, the Image requires the exercitant to imagine such items as “an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air ...” (P 135). How long would it take, the director asks, for a bird to carry that mountain of sand away grain by grain? The labor would scarcely have begun, comes the response, after “millions upon millions of centuries,” but still that does not give us an Image of the span of eternity: “At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun” (P 135). Such is the “totalitarian economy” of the Ignatian system, as Barthes says (B 52).

After the retreat, Stephen Dedalus encounters his own guilt (his response to the Ignatian theses) figured in eyes and words. Waiting at the threshold of his room, he knows that “faces were there; eyes: they waited and watched” (P 139), and in a strong foregrounding of his allegorical dream-text, Stephen’s response to the Images of hell is a vision (“He saw,” as the narrator says) of “goatish creatures with human faces” in a field thick with excrement.

Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces. . . . (P 141)

The moment of Election was the spiritual half of this Ignatian binary structure; the moment of rejection of the past is a starkly physical one, the agony of guilt passing from the signified of hell to the referents of Stephen Dedalus’s tormented imagination. Its logothetic end-product is the anagogic text of viscera’s response (he is soon seized by convulsions of vomiting), followed not only by prayer but by Ignatian tears, for Barthes reminds us of the “veritable code of tears” (B 74) which is entered in Loyola’s Spiritual Journal by means of a sign system denoting their intensity.

Guilt leads to confession but first Stephen Dedalus interrogates himself about the nature of mortal sin:

Even once was a mortal sin. It could happen in an instant. But how so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see the thing, without having wished first to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part of the body understand or what? (P 143)

The response to this Ignatian deficit financing of the visual (recapitulating the association of hot and cold water with printed names on watercocks) is the “ebbing back” to Stephen Dedalus of “Consciousness of place” (P 144) in the last six pages of the chapter as scenes begin to “compose” themselves around him. The structure is briefly in balance: methodical mortification of the senses coexists with the newly conscious awareness of topography. There is even a certain satisfaction in the economy for at times “he seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven, not as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender flower” (P 151). In this, Stephen Dedalus differs from Barthes’ Loyola, who would have favored the crisp perfection of the soul’s number.

Figure 2. The “Oculus Imaginationis.” (From Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, Tomus secundus, 1619)

To the extent that Stephen Dedalus is capable of it in the Portrait, that sort of perfection is seen most strongly in his use of composition of place in the service of his neo-Thomist aesthetic presented in the last chapter of the novel. There the “first phase of [aesthetic] apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended” (P 216), the Blakean allusion to the engraver’s “bounding line”¹⁴ stressing the visual delineation of the Image being presented. Perhaps, too, this process of apprehension is “luminous” (P 216) in tribute to the Classical memory tradition’s need to place the mnemonic object in a well-lit situation in order that the oculus imaginationis might grasp it clearly on recall. The instant of nothingness before Election is projected in Stephen Dedalus’s notion of the moment of aesthetic pleasure as a “luminous silent stasis” which finds for its Image an Ignatian trope linking the spiritual to the physical in service of the conceptual, for aesthetic pleasure is “a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the enchantment of the heart” (P 217). The material for “enchantment,” the anagogic text of the viscera, is gathered from Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin memory theater, Images deposited in literary loci to be used in the process of reassemblage which will be the text of logodaedalus:¹⁵

His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile. . . . (P 179)

Stephen Dedalus/SD

Like the great wheels within wheels of Giordano Bruno’s memory system in De umbris idearum,¹⁶ the texts of Portrait turn one upon the other, their center the moment of Election at the core of chapter 3. Before the retreat, it is the wheel of Stephen Dedalus’s unknowing; after the retreat, the wheel of his deliberate composing. Moving as it were at different speeds, one wheel casts its Images upon another, Ignatian codes modifying the referential level of the text. Catching up with the verbal universe of which he is composed, Stephen Dedalus becomes cognizant of those techniques and operations which, through repetition and articulation, are Stephen Dedalus. Actively aware of his Dublin memory theater, using topography in the construction of memory loci, using loci in the deconstruction of topography’s immediacy, creating a logothetic vacuum which—mirrored in the journal fragments of the book’s conclusion—will be the occasion of “language tide” in Ulysses: Stephen Dedalus becomes SD, the paradigm of the codes of his articulation. But where the Ignatian code for deciphering is “the means for capturing the sign of Divinity,” the Joycean—endlessly recursive—is the means for capturing only itself,¹⁷ a semiophany in the service of language itself, programmed in the literal texts of Joycean discourse as an “arborescence” (B 57) of perceptual paradigms. First of those paradigms which we are taught to recover in the Joyce system, SD is (on the level of the literal text) the exposition of a dominantly visual semiotic, and then (on the level of the allegorical text or processual-mimetic level) the paradigmatic root of that branching complex of data, topographic and mnemonic, which begins in the Portrait. The same modal balancing in Ulysses eventually isolates the operations of logothesis in II.11 in which, equipped with the logo-technician’s understanding of the basic perceptual paradigm SD, the reader/exercitant celebrates the reassemblage of language, of names triumphant in the extended moment of the “postcreation” (U 14.294) which is Joycean semiophany.

An invention on the theme of Ignatian Lectio divina, Stephen Dedalus, the exercitant of Portrait’s literal text, is discovered as the goal of its anagogic one. As the name of the deity is deconstructed into its signifieds—a process of reading—so the topos Stephen Dedalus is deconstructed into its Subjects and cases. Meditation on the name (and its codes) articulates and reassembles the allegorical text, the “portrait” emerging from the pointillism of its narrative—re-assembled, for the process unfolds in endless circularity, anagogic/paradigmatic generating allegorical/ processual and so on until out of polyphony at last emerges the “unique language” which, like that of Barthes’ Loyola, cannot be given in any other way. We move from the Lectio divina of Stephen Dedalus’s name (which is the perceptual paradigm SD when the reading has moved along all topoi, all cases given) to its signifieds (Images, topography, loci) in order to arrive at a whole, to wrest—as Barthes says—from the form SD the whole gamut of its meanings (moving back along the axis of topoi), thereby to extenuate the Subject, Joycean discourse itself.