ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

In Jennifer Keene's "Images of Racial Pride: African American Propaganda Posters in the First World War," Keene writes about the efforts to appeal war propaganda to black Americans. It is interesting, then, to consider the reaction of The Crisis to such efforts, when the February 1913 issue of The Crisis states, "Our record for clean advertising is history. No exaggerated statements or impossible propositions are permitted in our columns" (198). Of course, the publishers of The Crisis are referring to advertisements--but what are some forms of propaganda if not advertisements? More on this, The Crisis itself seems to define its response to war fairly neatly in the October 1914 issue: "Then the Lord of Hosts moved out of the temple and looked down upon the earth. As they have sowed So shall they reap. Let it go on, He said" (297). In short, The Crisis pre-US entry into World War I seems to indicate a lack of interest--or rather, as Daniel mentions in his blog post, the perception of the war as justice.

How then does The Crisis so radically change its views?

As discussed in class, the war promised opportunity for black advancement. Keene writes, "Many saw the war as a chance to advance the civil rights agenda. Here was an opportunity to prove their metal in battle and demosntrate both the key role they played in the economy and their willingness to sacrifice and die to ensure their nation's security" (207). The Crisis matches this view in later years, such as in their June 1918 issue. The cover of the "Soldiers Number" seems to have several layers to its intention. The first and most obvious layer is in prominently displaying a black man in a soldier's uniform. There can be no doubt that The Crisis is situating its viewership right in the midst of this American crisis. The man is a soldier, and his sacrfices are the same as his white countrymen. There is also the red, white, and blue colors--another symbol of claiming full citizenship as Americans.

In this view of equality, then, it might be argued that The Crisis does not view its own endorsement of the war as "impossible propositions." That would, in itself, be an anti-thesis to The Crisis--even as the seeming endorsement of war might not. 

Humans are visual. Written content can go far, but written content paired with intentional image selection can go so much further. The Crisis leverages this idea to the same end with different means in their October 1914 issue and June 1918 issues. The thesis, if you will, of the October 1914 issue is: Don’t fight somebody else’s war when there’s war enough at home. To emphasize this point, the issue shows dozens of images of children (such as the cover image). These images are emphasized further with language like, “cry, little children, cry and cry loud and soon, for until you and the Mothers speak, the men of the world bend stupid and crazed beneath the burden of hate and death. Behold, this old and awful world is but one slaughter-pen, one tale of innocent blood and senseless hate and strife” (290). There is a direct call to avoid war and fight on the homefront for racial justice. The June 1918 issue has the same heart to it, with its thesis being: Fight the war at home by proving yourself in the war abroad. Rather than images of children, it features images of strong, upright soldiers (as demonstrated by the cover image). Language such as, “Out of this war will rise… an American Negro, with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult. These things may not and will not come at once; but they are written in the stars, and the first step toward them is victory for the armies of the Allies” (60). The heart of the argument is the same as the one in 1914: achieve racial equality, but the means by which to achieve that has shifted from abstinence of foreign battle to engagement. It is worth noting that, though the cover images of these two issues have wildly different content (one a sweet, somber little girl making direct eye contact and one a broad-shouldered, iron-backed soldier), they have a similar color scheme. Both of these covers, unlike the covers of other issues of The Crisis are red. When discussing war, it is not a far stretch to associate the color red with the color blood. What this communicates is the idea that bloodshed is inevitable, whether the war is at home or abroad. However, the images tied with the color scheme seems to simultaneously suggest that while there is blood, there is purpose. 

The readings for this week had a common thread of the overarching effect of the war on the media and the lives of its citizens. The readings for this week pointed out the corollary that exists between the media and the community. Writers like Dora Marsden, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Ezra Pound to name a few; all call out the doublespeak of the coverage of the war that has led to an age of confusion and misinformation. The job of writers during this time is comparable to the soldiers on the front lines, without truth, there is no just cause, but rather a cause that has no rationale, and therefore it has no backing, no common cause to mobilize behind. The English specifically, is the focus of this firestorm of confusion and misinformation. In the Views and Comments section in the September 15, 1914 issue of The Egoist, Dora Marsden draws explicit attention to the false narrative that is being spewed to the English population by Lord Roseberry.

              “Why we English fight: Lord Roseberry: “To maintain the sanctity of international law in             Europe.” The international law presumably “should be” immutable and eternal: that, at least, is what the noble Lord means to fob off on the encouragingly wooly minds of his hearers” (344).

Marsden’s words speak to the rhetoric of the war that is withholding the truth from its citizens. The reality of the horror of the war is hidden from citizens under the guise of “a great and holy cause” (The Egoist September 15, 1914 pg. 343). Upon reading this issue, I was reminded of last Thursday’s class discussion of the illusion of hypnotism of the masses that is a symptom of the Modernist world. The misinformation of the cause of the great war that is being spread such as the example of Lord Roseberry that I quote above is an example of that illusion of hypnotism. The citizens of England specifically are being brainwashed by the false news they receive. They have been tricked into believing that the war they are fighting is for a moral cause and they should have no qualms about sending their children off to combat. Again, pointing to Dora Marsden’s piece, Views and Comments in the September 15, 1914 issue of The Egoist, “Law remains such an excellent conjuring property with the crowd: “Mumbo jumbo, Law and Mesopotamia” can always be relied upon to work all the tricks, and cloak all the spoof” (344). Within the literal combat of the war, there is another war that is being waged of misinformation and false narratives. Perhaps women and children suffer the most from this misinformation. In the piece, A Sound of Bleating by Josephine Wright this victimization is emphasized. This article struck me because it is one of the only articles in this issue that talks explicitly about the negative effect of war on women and children. There are many articles written by women that speak about the negative effects of the war, but never specifically pertaining to women and children. An excerpt that stood out to me:

              “The Suffragists of the United States call upon the women of the world to rise in protest against                 this unspeakable wrong and to show war-crazed men that between the contending armies                       there stand thousands of women and children who are the innocent victims of men’s unbridled                 ambitions; that under the lives, the hopes, the happiness of countless women whose rights                       have been ignored, whose homes have been blighted, and whose honor will be                       sacrificed... 

                 This is not a national issue; it involves all humanity” (The Egoist pg. 358).

This article coincided with the cover and content of the October 1914 Children’s issue of The Crisis. The pages of that issue are filled with children, children who are alone, who have lost their parents to the horrors of war. These 2 magazines, The Egoist (September 15, 1914) and the Children’s issue of The Crisis (October 1914) prove that the involuntary loss of innocence along with the pervasive spreading of misinformation and false narratives are both symptoms of war that affect more than the soldiers on the front lines.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1846) characterizes the young Hegelian idealists as basically bratty youngsters whose overeducation permitted their total dismissal of the actual material conditions of Germany. “The boasting of these philosophical commentators,” writes Marx, “only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions of Germany” (29). Hegel, and, later, Stirner and Feuerbach fail to get free of God and the state, because God and the state are not ideas. They are material conditions which arise out of specific improvements in the modes of material production of a given economy. The state emerges not out of God, but out of the competition of global market, which emerges out of new modes of material production. German philosophy can only treat ideas, and if the philosophy is bad, as Stirner’s was, then the “wretched material conditions of Germany are too blame. Who then can blame Stirner for, in his doctrine of Egoism, flipping wretchedness into virtue?

In Marsden’s magazine The Egoist, Marsden picks up the fight of ideas. That issue 1.18 of The Egoist begins with an essay on anarchism—a fantasy which can only ever exist in ideas alone—isn’t surprising. The success of the manifesto often depends on the brazenness of its ideas, not the pragmatism of its claims. That Marsden is writing about Egoism and Anarchism in the middle of the First World War is, however, surprising. On the surface, Egoism is built to destabilize nationhood and to challenge the The First World War as a crisis of nation as idea. Nations, to Marsden, are only ideas. But one can think them away. Revolution, Marx taunts, “is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought” (30). The First World War was resoundingly not an idea. It killed several key modernist artists. Ideas did not kill them. The First World War proves Marx right. “Men must be in a position to live in order to ‘make history,’” he writes (49). The modernists who survived left behind, in large part, the idealism of the manifesto, as it appears in the little magazines, in order to become properly political. Joyce, for example, leaves the eternally thinking Stephen Dedalus to embrace the Jewish Leopold Bloom who is built to navigate the actual material conditions of prejudice, suicide, and marriage because of his dogged pragmatism. It is in this way the coterie of idealists that formed the corpus of literary modernism grew up.

Something I kept looking for when I first started studying "The Children's" issue of Crisis was an explanation for the baby photos. That didn't readily appear, but it didn't take too long to see the pattern once I started paying attention to the order of the content itself. 

This issue starts off normally, but there is a noticeable amount of content dedicated to fathers, mothers, and the protection and advancement of children. Pages 275-276 for example feature two small stories about two notably charitable people known for their contributions to child protection and advancement. The "Lynching" article in the "Opinions" portion on pages 279-281 includes a story about a Black man enacting justice on a 17-year-old white boy for raping his 12-year-old niece: "If the boy had been arrested and tried in any white man's court it is not conceivable that he would have been sent to pay the penalty for his crime and his death should be looked upon as a blessing to the community which he lived" (281). "Mothers in Council" on page 285 is a story about a group of philanthropic and altruistic Black women centering their efforts around kindergartens, orphanages, and nurseries. By now, these articles have created a kind of domestic safe place for children, offering protection, education, justice, and nurturing. 

"Of the Children of Peace" on page 289 starts out promising enough with the story-time framework of the first paragraph, but it transforms into something grotesque and uncomfortable. Coupled with real-life photos of babies, toddlers, and children, these harsh depictions where children are stripped from their protectors grasp to be "strangled and crushed and maimed and murdered" contrast greatly the previous stories (289-290). I wonder if this, along with the terrifying wartime backdrop both in the story and in real life, amounts to an effect the exact opposite of what Keene's article explains. While the propaganda mentioned in Keene's article sought to reconcile the government and black communities in the interest of war efforts, this issue relies less on propaganda--less on the war for that matter--and more on the importance of protecting children and what happens to them when their fathers/guardians/providers are sent off to fight and die in a war, leaving their families behind to ration cornmeal, skip meals, and work 6 days a week in the name of patriotism.

In ordering this issue the way that it was, the impact of “Of the Children of Peace” is made all the more spine-chilling with the presence of baby photos and the previously established ‘safe space’ that was ultimately compromised.

Amidst the photos of black children that populate this issue, there is content that clearly articulates (at multiple points) revenge fantasies. While most didn’t actually happen (are just that, “fantasies”), the first instance of this genre is in the “Crime” section of the “Along the Color Line” column (273)—the same story appears in the opinion section as well (280-1). The opinion section sees this event as “one variation on this grim theme” of people not being tried/convicted for lynching murders. The irony here is that a black man killed the white man who (allegedly) raped a 12yo girl while accompanied with the sheriff. The author points out that the jury considered this as “justifiable homicide,” ending with the idea that justice wouldn’t have been achieved through the court system—i.e. the white man would have been acquitted or not been “sent to pay for the penalty for his crime.”

This current event joins a slew of other instances of revenge fantasies. The “Letter Box” houses a scenario in which a Samson-like figure with “a modern machine gun” confronts the “Knighthood of Dixie” (probably a KKK affiliate) (301). The NAACP advertisement (291) and the “Of the Children of Peace” editorial seem to envision a world in which children, the next generation, overthrow the yoke of racial injustice/prejudice. This is not a violent revenge fantasy, but still something that will “explode the ‘might makes right’ tradition” and end “organized murder of men”—both national war efforts and racial violence epitomized by state-sanctioned lynching. And, in “Goodwilla” and “Our Baby Pictures” children are discussed in terms of war: “soldiers” and “units” designed to “reach the maximum efficiency and service.” Their cause? A potential world in which the black community achieves the most reasonable, yet perhaps the ultimate, revenge: to end racial injustice and achieve equality.

The last instance of a revenge fantasy can be seen in the “War” article (296). A child prays to the “Lord of Hosts” asking to “Give me back my father!” The Lord decides to answer the “prayers of the mothers and the children” by ending war and giving back the ability to connect to the earth. The seraphim, the messenger, answers that certain people are thanking the “Lord of Battle” for his actions that “revenged” them. Ethiopia is rejoicing; “joy lights [the] face” of the middle easterner; and Haitians (?) “weep” for the fallen yet “rise and give praise that the string is broken and the feet are still in the house of their enemy.” Hearing this news, the Lord of Hosts pulls back into inaction, leaving the prayers of mothers and children unanswered, reasoning that “As they have sown/ So shall they reap./ Let it go on.” In this vision of war, the irony is that justice means letting war continue. This idea, made more concrete in the next article, is that colonization started a competition for foreign lands which was fueled/funded by slavery and the slave trade which led to the accumulation of wealth over which the European powers are fighting (299-300). These are the seeds that sowed WWI, according to the author. This issue of the The Crisis, then, is advocating for war—at the very least understanding the death and destruction it has wrought as deserved, perhaps as an ultimate justice for the world.

The Egoist

No.3

Volume 1

Mon. Feb 2nd 1914

Author Unknown

I read for this week both the 2/2/1914 issue and the 4/1/1914 issue of The Egoist. The sections of Portrait in these two editions are placed as the narrative focus (being the only sections that are serialized novels) and are individually structured to create a narrative hook.

In both issues, Portrait appears as the only prose form of artistry, although there are: poems (a set in each issue), a set of dialogues in the April 1 edition that reads almost like a play, a translation of “The Horses of Diomedes” that also reads like a play in the February 2 edition, a set of book reviews in the February edition, and a series of articles, ranging from issues about chastity to the Chinese. Many of the themes presented in the pieces included have themes of religion, politics, and artistry. The question of who artists are, with relation to themselves and the general public, comes up regularly. For instance, Huntly Carter rails against the artist becoming “de-individualised” through the sale of art (Egoist Feb 2, 1914 p. 58), Leigh Henry writes that “The artist does, not what others consider beautiful, but what for himself is a necessity” (Egoist April 1, 1914 p. 123), and Edgar A. Mowrer writes that “The true artist has but one end : the expression of his vision into the immanence of things” (Egoist April 1, 1914 p. 135). The content of Portrait is, then, congruous, with the ideas already in motion in The Egoist.

In the February 2 edition, the first that Portrait appears in, it has no preamble—just dives right in. The section ends with the protagonist falling asleep and wishing that he better understood questions about God and politics. The section that ends the April 1 edition is the scene where the protagonist is flogged for his broken glasses—the scene ends with the frightening promise/threat that the flogger will re-appear every day. Each of these endings provides the necessary “hook” for readers to want more. In the first, there is this begged question: “Will Stephen grow to understand the nature of God and the intricacies of politics?” In the second, the hook is a haunting one: “Will Stephen be beaten each new day?” Like Stephen, readers are left with this looming anxiety of what will happen. These hooks, while present in the book version, were lost to me as a reader because I have the luxury of completion. I have the whole book. The only hook needed for me is the one starting chapter 1. However, in terms of content structure, a hook at the end of each section is very important in a serialization because it’s what keeps readers buying more! This is reflected in the Feb 2 issue in that the final page of the edition contains an ad to purchase a subscription to The Egoist. The editors want to have their readers hooked and wanting more. 

Lots of focus on the individual in the "Meaning of Rhythm." It also marks a clear line between the artist, the journalist, and the ordinary person. The artist is so in love with life that their spirit floods out into its creativity. Honestly sounds a lot like the neo-romantic idea we were talking about a few weeks ago. The only difference is that the setting of the romanticism is enabled by modernity, that is—modern aesthetics—by thinking in abstract forms of work, whether by abstracted hands, like machines, or abstracted concepts and forms, like shapes, colors, and borders. But the imagery is natural and non-Western at some points, so there are some natural (romantic?) landscapes that seem relevant, even if they are laden with undertones of Orientalism and colonialist exoticism. The Edenic cover image echoes those sentiments as well.

The ads partially designed by the magazine’s artists (in Rhythm) remind me of the developments we discussed in advertising, which showed how images can be way more suggestive and effective than words/text in advertising and marketing.

Above are my informal notes from last week that I didn’t end up posting, but Stephen addresses rhythm directly in his esthetic philosophy. The meaning and buzz of rhythm are in the air at the beginning of the twentieth century.

As Lynch indulges Stephen in his rumination, Stephen describes rhythm as “the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic or whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part” (1154-57, 181). Through the jarring definition, it’s clear that rhythm involves the relation between things--it is fluctuation, it is the discursive back-and-forth between part and whole. The first “part” that comes to mind, in the context of Rhythm, is the individual and (the whole) society. But on the other hand, I am drawn to read these parts and wholes as meta-textual—the relations of constituent parts in magazines (like images, advertisements, fictions, and poetry) to the whole of the magazine. Similarly, Joyce exemplifies Stephen’s opinions about rhythm through his parsing of the prose of the novel into five distinct parts. Joyce asks us to read rhythm into his novel that, reflexively, defines rhythm. How does Rhythm work similarly with its editors?

Throughout Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephan Dedalus is wrestling with an internal existential crisis;  Who and What he should be. Should he align himself to religion and the church and become a priest? Or should he dismiss the church and religion and become an artist? There is another subcategory to the Who question: Should Stephen present himself as Irish and remain loyal to his country or should he present himself as an American? Stephen is faced with many internal queries that force him to scope out his own individual conscience. Part of this process involves Stephen finding his own voice, Joyce takes readers on an exploration of language that Stephen uses as his aid in his exploration of his world and its surroundings amidst his formative transition from a young boy into a young man. At the beginning of the novel, Stephen as a very young boy does not possess the authority of leadership or confidence in himself. Joyce depicts this lack of authority through the lack of dialogue from Stephen and extreme stream of consciousness, detailing in excruciating detail the thoughts Stephen forms, but cannot speak. In comparison to the other characters, Stephen speaks the least and his dialogue is noticeably shorter, lacking flow and assertiveness when he does speak. Part of the reason for this is Stephen's feeling of alienation from the other boys; he does not feel comfortable around them, and that discomfort causes his mind to revert to his happy place- in this instance, his parents at home. "All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap" (Joyce 11). "He drank another cup of hot tea and Fleming said:

-What's up? Have you a pain or what's up with you? 

- I don't know, Stephen said. 

-Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white. It will go away. 

-O yes, Stephen said. 

But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. (Joyce 11). 

Stephen is able to think about what is wrong with him, but he is not able to articulate to Fleming that he is sick. Fleming has to point that out for him. The presence of authority is another instant in the novel we witness Stephen's apprehensiveness with speech:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, said the prefect of studies... 

You boy, who are you?  

Stephen's heart jumped suddenly. 

-Dedalus, sir. 

-Why is he not writing, Father Arnall? 

-He broke his glasses, said Father Arnall, and I exempted him from work. 

-What is this I hear? What is your name? 

-Dedalus, sir. 

-Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses? 

Stephen stumbled into the middle of the class, blinded by fear and haste. (Joyce 45). 

During his time at Clongowes, Stephen is unfairly reprimanded by the prefects and his lack of conviction often makes him appear culpable in their eyes. As Stephen grows up and begins to trust himself more, Stephen's dialogue becomes noticeably longer, melodious, and self-assured, at times, arrogant.  His thoughts become less jumbled and more coherent. Towards the middle, to the end of the book, Stephen's thoughts and his conversations resemble high Philosophic thought. During an encounter with the Dean at the University, Stephen expounds on his advanced thought process: 

"This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. 

Will it therefore be beautiful? 

-In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says... In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell however it is an evil. 

-These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean... Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again. 

-If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws" (Joyce 163-164). 

This exchange between the Dean and Stephen shows the maturity not only of Stephen's age but of his speaking and thinking ability that are now on equal terms. He is developing his own individual conscience. 

In Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman's Modernism in the Magazines, modernism is defined by its "newness, its difference from some traditional practice." This is, of course, the working definition put forward to evaluate how visual art was presented in print periodicals. However, I was caught by how Pre-Raphaelitism is described in the timeline of modernism's progression: "a newness that claimed to be going back to an older oldness for its inspiration" (Scholes and Wulfman). While this is for an art movement, I thought about how James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man works in similar ways. Firstly, I acknowledge--as Scholes and Wulfman encourage--that my perception of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is of the whole novel rather than its original serialized appearance in magazines. Yet in trying to understand Joyce's work as it might have appeared to audiences of its time, I'm forced to consider the ways in which Joyce is embracing the "new" by understanding the old.

The most obvious way in which Joyce, like the Pre-Raphaelites, uses the past to make clear that which is new is in his style. Readers see in Portrait the Bildungsroman story the Victorians were interested in an era before. Yet in Joyce's recounting of a young man's life, there is an immediately disoriented sense of understanding: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...." (3). The first time I had read this book as an undergraduate, I was confused--and while times have changed since Portrait's first publication, I doubt time has changed so much that readers then were not a little confused either. Further reading makes clear how Joyce is using an older template in the Bildungsroman but making it new by investing in it a stream-of-consciousness or closer to the truth of the perspective of a small child. 

In other ways Joyce juxtapositions the old to display the new is in the character Stephen's sensitivity to sexuality. Of course, authors have hinted at sexuality before this. The Victorians certainly hinted at what they could. Yet Joyce does not hint nor slyly indicate that Stephen questions and explores the meaning of sexuality. Rather, Joyce seems to embrace Stephen's exploration of the topic--quite literally, when Stephen visits a prostitute. The reason I find this relevant is that Joyce questions more than a heteronormative sexuality; there are very open moments in which Stephen has to question masculinity and intimacy between men. One such formulation moment is when Stephen is still very young, and the boys are trying to figure out why the older boys are in trouble. Arty says, "They were caught with Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle in the square one night. . . Smugging" (42). Joyce outright confronts this topic in ways I found similar to The Freewoman's approach to then controversial and unspoken topics. I frame this as a moment of "old" versus "new" in that Joyce explores how this moment creates a distortion of Stephen's understanding of the world, as well as in the simple fact that such a conversation is caught up in a setting that had already passed (late nineteenth century).

Overall, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the age old story of a child growing into a man with the new and determined twist of examining honestly the factors that shape that child's understanding.

I've read Portrait more than any other text of Joyce's; I fear I've gotten Stephen all wrong. It's easy to apply Stephen as a paste. His capitulation with the rituals of Catholic purity, his flight from The Church, and his residual allegiance to its aesthetic logic struck me as familiar as another young, lapsed Catholic who publishes poetry and fiction. The Church is only the accident of Stephen’s real desire, the most immediate and sensual circumstance, which expresses his flight not from Catholicism, but orthodoxy, which is saturating and omnipresent. We call it Liberalism. We’ve planted the spirit of God into Man, his laws into rights granted by The State. In the polemic The Ego and His Own (1844), Max Stirner observes that “Our atheists are pious people” (185). The Church is everywhere, and its esoteric rituals of purity have become objective civil truths. [Liberalism], writes Stirner, is a step forward in the domain of religion, and in particular of Christianity; not a step out beyond it” (183). Stephen’s glimpse of the Bird-Girl isn’t as much libidinous or taboo as it is a vestige of pre-liberal barbarism; corporeality for the sake of corporeality. In the image of the Bird-Girl, he recognizes what Stirner calls self-ownership: egoism; a place outside of liberalism, a species-being. Portrait’s serialization in Dora Marsden’s magazine The Egoist is thus hardly coincidence. Stephen identifies the Egoist in the artist as much as art is a weapon against ideology. Stephen’s villanelle, with all its ecclesiastical intrusions emerges as as egoistic screed:

Are you not weary of ardent ways,

Lure of the fallen seraphim?

Tell no more of enchanted days. (223)

The “fallen seraphim” is the call of culture, the bearer of self-sacrifice and self-denial, which both The Church and Liberalism assure as objective moral truths. If the poem is ironic, as many have argued, then it is only so, because Stephen never really leaves the Seraphim behind. His art lugs St. Thomas Aquinas behind it like bad luggage, and Stephen knows it.

It seems fitting that the very middle section of A Portrait is dedicated to the physical and spiritual pains of damnation, immediately after Stephen spends a good portion of his time and money on vices. As Stephen believes his resolve to abandon faith has grown stronger, we see that his resolve is not as absolute as previously thought.

The mimicry of Dante’s Inferno here works brilliantly in tandem with Stephen's dilemma because it displays how tethered Stephen is to his religion and the idea of damnation. Further, we spend the entire novel taking note of how attuned to senses Stephen is, be it sights, sounds, or smells (especially smells, especially foul smells), which is another reason why Father Arnell’s sermon resonates so deeply with him. It terrifies him because it is terrifying. Stephen is not immune to fire and brimstone. Stephen is still extremely vulnerable, indicating that despite the notion that Stephen had forgone his innocence, there is still that childlike fear of God deeply instilled in him: "His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost" (Joyce 150). As the novel continues, Stephen’s piety increases more and more as his home life becomes more unstable. Religion becomes a crutch. 

Throughout Father Arnell's sermon, I couldn't help but imagine the impact this section had on readers at the time. As 21st century scholars, I feel like we can read this section with a certain objectivity, but I can't imagine that was the case for early 20th century audiences. Catholic and/or religious readers probably felt a sense of relief at Stephen's repentance and a certain disgust at his sins. 

I think about this because of the ever present and disturbing act of book banning and I wonder this: Was book banning a thing during modernism? If not, did people want it to be? Was it a thing in Ireland or Europe? If so, how explicit did a book have to be to earn that reputation? I wonder because I’ve never really considered book banning outside of an American context/perspective. Afterall, this book does hit a lot of themes that were/still are quite controversial.