One tiny detail that has consistently been popping up in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a young man is Stephen's heightened sense of smell. It sounds rather odd, but it's quite interesting to explore.
We can trace Stephen's affinity for smell to the beginning of the novel, on page one. To baby Stephen, the oil sheet smelled 'queer', and his mother 'had a nicer smell than his father'. Dante's slippers had a "lovely warm smell", while the chapel had a "cold night smell"- not like the smell of "old peasants who knelt at the back", but rather a "holy smell".
We can see that from a very young age, Stephen is associating places and people with a certain smell. I think, in a way, we can see Joyce reflected through Stephen's olfactory experiences.
We all subconsciously smell things- the smell of someone's house, or the smell of the air after rain. Although we notice these, we often don't dwell on these things too much. Joyce, however, places a certain emphasis on telling the reader what Stephen's nose is experiencing. The words 'vapour', 'odour' and 'smell' appear in the book over seventy times. Each time he mentions a smell, there is often an emotion paired with it- understandably so, since smell is strongly connected to emotional response.
For example, in chapter one, Stephen's old school has a "weak, sour smell". In Father Arnall's sermon, he depicts Hell as filled with the stench of rotting bodies- something Stephen takes to heart and recoils strongly at. I think these smells are one of the ways that Joyce is guiding, or even controlling Stephen's story. Joyce uses smells to tilt Stephen's emotions one way or another to certain things, and subsequently is building his unique character.
Another certain passage where I think we get a little bit of Joyce's own opinion is when the rumor was spread at school that the boys were caught drinking the scared wine. The wine on the rector's breath makes Stephen feel sickly, as Joyce notes several times. Wine is not a traditionally bad smell, like stinky socks might be, but Joyce chooses to make Stephen dislike the smell. I might be stretching this, but the fact that the sacred altar wine offends Stephen's nostrils might say something about Joyce's own attitude towards the church.
Whoooaaa I had never really dwelt on the whole smell thing until you pointed it out. It's so true though; Stephen does seem to relate many important things to odors and smells, and it's not something I've really noticed about any character at all in books. I can also vividly recall Mr Mitchell mimicking Stephen and taking in a deep breath and exclaiming "ah! horse piss!" as Stephen had done in the book. Seems a bit strange that that's the particular smell that calms Stephen, but whatever floats his boat I guess.
ReplyDeleteRemember that he has a particularly tough time mortifying his sense of smell, when he's on his whole mortify-the-senses kick. All the others he can take care of--it's easy to make himself deliberately uncomfortable--but smell causes him particular difficulty. He settles on stale, long-standing urine (because the regular, horse kind doesn't bother him)--maybe a flashback to the dreaded "square ditch" at Clongowes? That must not have smelled very nice.
DeleteYou bring up a really good point, and like Leah, I didn't really notice this until you brought it up. It's really interesting to see how he connects certain things with a certain smell, and looking back, he even punishes himself by intentionally trying to smell things that don't smell good, at one point in the book.
ReplyDeleteI never really thought about the importance of Stephen's affinity to smell things until you brought it up. It is interesting how Stephen relates things to their odors, and maybe there is a connection to things that he finds important or significant in his life at the time.
ReplyDeleteReally nice post. I didn't catch this till Kathryn pointed it out once in class and from then on I realized how heightened Stephen's sense of smell and how much he associated it with certain things. In some ways we are also the same; we associate good smells with usually good things and bad smells with bad things.
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