The Pater of Joyce and Eliot

Abstract

According to its author, Frank Kermode, the ‘main topic’ of Romantic Image (1957) has to do with ‘that “esthetic image” explained in Thomist language by Stephen Daedalus in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and he almost immediately indicates that St Thomas shares the honours with Walter Pater. Stephen’s description of ‘epiphany’, he remarks, is ‘the Joycean equivalent of Pater’s “vision”’ (Kermode 1957: 1–2). The ‘Joyce industry’, as Kermode calls it five years later in the title essay of Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962: 87), has yet to venture much beyond this merely initial point in the argument of Romantic Image, and even when critics refer now and again to Stephen as a Paterian artist, there are seldom any explanations — short of a few references to his theories of ‘luminous stasis’ — of what it more pertinently means to call him one. As Kermode goes on to suggest, the connections between Pater and Joyce, discoveries of which depend necessarily on a more intense reading than Pater normally receives, are intricate and substantial. They constitute one of the vital links between the ‘nineties’ and the literary modernism of the first two decades of this century, a conjunction which Eliot was determined to suppress. Eliot’s trashing of Pater, combined with his attempted appropriation of Joyce in ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ (Eliot 1975), were part of an effort to make Pater and the poets whom Yeats called ‘the tragic generation’ seem merely eccentric and, in any event, outside the main English tradition. From the beginning, Kermode has brilliantly, and against a determined critical consensus, set out to remedy this situation.