Chapter 5 is one of the all time great pieces of literature. It was worth the price of the show, as they say. The originality of each section, and therefore the whole, is absolutely stunning.
It's divided into four parts. There is very little narrative movement. Stephen has essentially made up his mind to leave Ireland and by the end of the chapter Stephen hasn't quite left but is at the verge of going. So what makes this such a great piece of writing? Well let's look at the four sections:
1. A day in Stephen's life, where he bristles against his family, then off to college, has a discussion with the Dean, science class, and then puts out his theory of aesthetics to his class mates.
2. Composes a villanelle poem.
3. Meets up with his friends and has a confessorial conversation with Cranly.
4. Diary of his last few weeks in Ireland.
What Joyce presents are all the themes that have been going on in the novel completed and tied together with them all forming the foundation of Stephen's individuality.
He rejects his family:
Quote:
His father's whistle, his mother's mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth. He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration; but, as he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning light falling about him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries.
He rejects Irish nationalism by rejecting Davin and what he stands for.
Quote:
Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant.
-- The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
He rejects his religion by rejecting the Dean, the Dean as a representative of what Stephen might develop to if he became a Jesuit.
Quote:
A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean's candle butts and fused itself in Stephen's consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest's voice, too, had a hard jingling tone. Stephen's mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest's face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?
And he develops an personal philosophy of aesthitcs, with all his learning throughout the novel of words (language) and beauty coming together.
Quote:
Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing slightly, he laid his hand on Lynch's thick tweed sleeve.
--We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand - that is art.
and
Quote:
Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension?
And then to show his maturity he composes a villanelle, a complex formulation of sound and rhythm for an aesthetic end. It's worth presenting the entire poem:
Quote:
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Then the confession section with Cranly has Stephen personally articulate his rebellion and transfiguration into a mature young man:
Quote:
His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening, excited Stephen's brain, over which its fumes seemed to brood.
-- Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning.
And finally the diary section, which completes the intrusion into Stephen's consciousness. What has been in third person has now become first person. To shift into first person monlogue at the end of the novel would have been aesthetically jarring and wrong. But a diary is not. And so we know Stephan from the inside. The novel started from his father's voice (Stephen being too young to understand language) and ends with Stephen in first person articulating his independence and individuality:
Quote:
April 26. ... So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
Interestingly, he leaves Ireland on my wife's birthday! :D
