The Penman and Postman Dynamic in Joyce
Journal
NTU Studies in Language and Literature
Journal Issue
14
Pages
1-20
Date Issued
2005
Author(s)
Abstract
Since Gabriel’s announcement that “Here I am as right as the mail,” Joyce has been preoccupied with the dynamic polyvalence contained in Gabriel’s statement. The right/write and mail/male interchange and permutation present themselves in Joyce’s engaging portraits of such writing-and-righting males as Stephen Dedalus, of the righting males such as Blazes Boylan and the Citizen, of the problematic (thus not right?) males such as Bloom, and of the mail-writing, philandering Bloom, alias Henry Flower. Joyce is keen on exploring and exploiting the readily transgressed boundaries in these two dyads. Especially prominent in the symbolic patrilineage building of the self-styled artist of Stephen Dedalus and the plotting, letter-writing Bloom, there emerges the complicated affiliation between the writing pen-man and the not-so-right post-man in Ulysses. Foreshadowing the sibling rivalry between Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake, the penman-postman affiliation in Ulysses is imbricated with serious dialectics. My paper proposes to examine how the penman and postman roles get identified in the first place (for this purpose, I need to go back to A Portrait) and what is involved and at stake in their responsibilities, with a purpose to enact the dialectics in these two roles. I would like to demonstrate that while having a penman as vocation in mind, Stephen must settle with being a postman first, literally hand-carrying Deasy’s letter on his behalf. Assuming this role entails surrendering the authorship (e.g. “The letter is not mine” U7.530) which he has been struggling to consolidate, making it inevitable that he becomes the “Bullockbefriending bard.” This suggests that carrying someone else’s letter threatens his own integrity as the penman proper. Also carrying a (writ-/right-ing) pen-man. On the other hand, his being (mis-)named variously and owning aliases—in mock-Odyssean manner—throughout the text (L.Boom being the ultimate misnomer) concur with his ability to freely create and coin new words, exercising the ability of a potential penman. It is then demonstrated in Ulysses that between the two roles of a penman and a postman, it is easy for one to slip into the other and these two roles are more often than not reinscribed with each other. That is to say, there is always an “other” to one. The process of searching for the symbolic father in Ulysses affiliates the father-son pair of Bloom and Stephen, and thereby configuring and consolidating the entanglement of the postman and the penman. The postman-penman affiliation and all the desire and tension that are involved therewith will constitute the odyssey (home-departing, wandering, and home-returning) of the pen, the letter, and the post, a journey which began in A Portrait, continues in Ulysses, and arrives at in Finnegans Wake.
Subjects
書寫之筆
郵件
聯繫
辯證
《畫像》
《尤利西斯》
《芬尼根守靈記》
the pen
the post
the letter(s)
affiliation
dialectics
A Portrait
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake
Type
journal article
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