Trayvon Williams tragedy(not)

[Michael Bailey]

Joyce's disquisition on tragedy in Portrait ("Stop!  I won't listen!
I am sick.  I was out last night on a yellow drunk with Horan and
Goggins.") sets up some parameters

the tragic person is not Trayvon, for his suffering was brief and unilluminating

Zimmerman is the tragic protagonist - his fatal flaw the same as
America's indiscriminate infliction of violence against Communism and
terrorism


http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4217/4217-h/4217-h.htm

After a pause Stephen began:

—Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say—

Lynch halted and said bluntly:

—Stop! I won't listen! I am sick. I was out last night on a yellow
drunk with Horan and Goggins.

Stephen went on:

-- Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it
with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind
in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human
sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

—Repeat, said Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She
was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many
years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the
window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the
shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The
reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror
and pity according to the terms of my definitions.

—The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards
terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use
the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather
the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are
kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to
something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The
arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore
improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is
therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and
loathing.

—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that
one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of
Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?

—I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when
you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you ate pieces of
dried cowdung.

Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his
hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets.

—O, I did! I did! he cried.

Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at him for a moment
boldly in the eyes. Lynch, recovering from his laughter, answered his
look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull beneath
the long pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a
hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze.
Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by
one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and
self-embittered.

—As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are all animals.
I also am an animal.

—You are, said Lynch.

—But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire
and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really not
esthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but
also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from
what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a
purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before
we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

—Not always, said Lynch critically.

—In the same way, said Stephen, your flesh responded to the stimulus
of a naked statue, but it was, I say, simply a reflex action of the
nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion
which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens,
or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic
stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth,
prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

—What is that exactly? asked Lynch.

—Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part
to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or
parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

—If that is rhythm, said Lynch, let me hear what you call beauty; and,
please remember, though I did eat a cake of cowdung once, that I
admire only beauty.

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.

They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went
on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water
and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the
course of Stephen's thought.

—But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. What is art? What
is the beauty it expresses?

—That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepy-headed wretch,
said Stephen, when I began to try to think out the matter for myself.
Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk
about Wicklow bacon.

—I remember, said Lynch. He told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs.

—Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or
intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You remember the pigs and
forget that. You are a distressing pair, you and Cranly.

Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and said:

—If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least
another cigarette. I don't care about it. I don't even care about
women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a
year. You can't get me one.

Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. Lynch took the last one
that remained, saying simply:

—Proceed!

—Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of
which pleases.

Lynch nodded.

—I remember that, he said, PULCRA SUNT QUAE VISA PLACENT.

—He uses the word VISA, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions
of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other
avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough
to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means
certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces
also a stasis of the mind. You would not write your name in pencil
across the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle.

—No, said Lynch, give me the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles.

—Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is
the splendour of truth. I don't think that it has a meaning, but the
true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect
which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the
intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by
the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the
direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the
intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection.
Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of
psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same
attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connexion belong to
and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of
beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to
comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. Is that clear?

—But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another
definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and
Aquinas can do?

—Let us take woman, said Stephen.

—Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.

—The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said
Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to
be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out.
One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in
women is in direct connexion with the manifold functions of women for
the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is
drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that
way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you
out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one
hand on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and the other hand on the new testament,
tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt
that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts
because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and
yours.

—Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically.

—There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.

—To wit? said Lynch.

—This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick
Dun's hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh
roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out
oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel
rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his
companion's ill-humour had had its vent.

—This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though
the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who
admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy
and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension.
These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and
to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of
beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas for another
pennyworth of wisdom.

Lynch laughed.

—It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after time
like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve?

—MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied
Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas
will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of
artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I
require a new terminology and a new personal experience.

—Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect,
was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about the new
personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and
finish the first part.

—Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand me
better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy
Thursday. It begins with the words PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI. They say it
is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing
hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that
mournful and majestic processional song, the VEXILLA REGIS of
Venantius Fortunatus.

Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice:

IMPLETA SUNT QUAE CONCINIT
DAVID FIDELI CARMINE
DICENDO NATIONIBUS
REGNAVIT A LIGNO DEUS.
—That's great! he said, well pleased. Great music!

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat
young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped.

—Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was plucked.
Halpin and O'Flynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place
in the Indian. O'Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in
Clark's gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry.

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had
advanced through his tidings of success, his small fat-encircled eyes
vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.

In reply to a question of Stephen's his eyes and his voice came forth
again from their lurking-places.

—Yes, MacCullagh and I, he said. He's taking pure mathematics and I'm
taking constitutional history. There are twenty subjects. I'm taking
botany too. You know I'm a member of the field club.

He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion and placed a
plump woollen-gloved hand on his breast from which muttered wheezing
laughter at once broke forth.

—Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you go out, said
Stephen drily, to make a stew.

The fat student laughed indulgently and said:

—We are all highly respectable people in the field club. Last Saturday
we went out to Glenmalure, seven of us.

—With women, Donovan? said Lynch.

Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said:

—Our end is the acquisition of knowledge. Then he said quickly:

—I hear you are writing some essays about esthetics.

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

—Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject,
the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The Laocoon
interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic,
German, ultra-profound.

Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of them urbanely.

—I must go, he said softly and benevolently, I have a strong
suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that my sister intended
to make pancakes today for the dinner of the Donovan family.

—Goodbye, Stephen said in his wake. Don't forget the turnips for me and my mate.

Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face
resembled a devil's mask:

—To think that that yellow pancake-eating excrement can get a good
job, he said at length, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes!

They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in silence.

—To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA
REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so:
THREE THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE.
Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

—Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious
intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted
on his head.

—Look at that basket, he said.

—I see it, said Lynch.

—In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all
separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is
not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line
drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is
presented to us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in
space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first
luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the
immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You
apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend
its wholeness. That is INTEGRITAS.

—Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

—Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal
lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its
limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of
apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that
it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their
sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

—Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS
and you win the cigar.

—The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas
uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time.
It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or
idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other
world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of
which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is
the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in
anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic
image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But
that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended
that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its
form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which
is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that
thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks
in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme
quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first
conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant
Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that
supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image,
is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its
wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis
of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac
condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase
almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his
words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.

—What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense
of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary
tradition. In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of
beauty in the second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in
the first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. The
image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the
artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in
memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three
forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical
form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate
relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his
image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form,
the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to
others.

—That you told me a few nights ago, said Lynch, and we began the
famous discussion.

—I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down
questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the
answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to
explain. Here are some questions I set myself: IS A CHAIR FINELY MADE
TRAGIC OR COMIC? IS THE PORTRAIT OF MONA LISA GOOD IF I DESIRE TO SEE
IT? IF NOT, WHY NOT?

—Why not, indeed? said Lynch, laughing.

—IF A MAN HACKING IN FURY AT A BLOCK OF WOOD, Stephen continued, MAKE
THERE AN IMAGE OF A COW, IS THAT IMAGE A WORK OF ART? IF NOT, WHY NOT?

—That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true
scholastic stink.

—Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to
write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke
of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the
highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The
lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who
pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is
more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling
emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical
literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the
centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of
emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from
others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of
the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round
the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will
see easily in that old English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in the
first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is
reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each
person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes
a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist,
at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent
narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes
itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life
purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of
esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent,
paring his fingernails.

—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.