Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Chapter 2--Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
Using the criteria discussed in this chapter, discuss the use of communion in the novel. Do not repeat a comment already made on this thread. However, you may respond to and/or extend another student’s comment. In your post, be sure to include specific quotes from the text, with page numbers, to support your conclusions.
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Chapter 2- Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
ReplyDeleteIn Professor Foster’s second chapter, he discusses the relationship in novels between sharing meals and communion, which Joyce demonstrates in his first chapter in order to present hostilities within Stephen’s family. At first, the Christmas dinner seems civil and polite. As soon as Mr. Dedalus and Mr. Casey mention religion and its place in politics, however, the conversation becomes animated. Mr. Dedalus and Mr. Casey argue with Dante about the importance of religion within Ireland’s culture. While Mr. Casey yells “Away with God!” (Joyce 34), Dante wants all Irish citizens to place “God and religion before everything!” (Joyce 34). Dante believes in the duty of priests to lead their “flock” (Joyce 27) to positive decisions. Mr. Casey, on the other hand, does not want priests to “preach politics from the altar” (Joyce 27) in his quest to separate political matters from those of religion. Amidst the yelling and cursing, the dinner turns from “an act of sharing and peace” (Foster 8) into one where “ hostilities and alliances are revealed” (Foster 12) as Joyce also does in his story “The Dead.” Due to the political talk at Christmas dinner, the children normally sit in a room away from the adults. This year, however, is Stephen’s “first Christmas dinner” (Joyce 26) in the same room as his parents. While there, he witnesses all of the conflict and stares with his “terrorstricken face” (Joyce 34) as he watches his father, who he sees as one of the strongest men in his life, cry. As a major coming of age experience for Stephen, the Christmas dinner proves to further parallel a communion. The event also unveils for the first time conflict within Stephen’s own family about religion and politics, leading him to question both. Within Joyce’s dinner scene, not only does the author follow convention by presenting a failed communion to foreshadow later conflict but he also develops the event as a coming of age experience for his young protagonist.
To add onto Descartes, Joyce utilizes Stephen's "first Christmas dinner" to express the split in his family and in turn, his dissapointment in them. Bringing in politics and religion into this meal created calamity and the children thinking "I'll pay your dues, father, when you cease turning the house of God into a polling-booth." (Joyce 19). This quote proves that this happens to this family often. The fight within their family spoiled Christmas dinner. His dissapointment in his family is the beginning of his dissapointment in authority figures in his near future.
ReplyDeleteComment Continued: His feelings towards authority figures sequentially causes him to lead a life of sin and rebellion. Eating portrays the division within his family and his disappointment in his father. After his “first Christmas dinner” (Joyce 26), he sins with other woman and does not follow his role models. Until he spends time on his retreat, he leads a life opposed to that of God. He learns how he has strayed from the correct path. After devoting his life to God, he then finds a middle ground following the authority figures he had once opposed.
ReplyDeleteChapter 2- Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
ReplyDeleteThroughout the second chapter of How to Read Literature Like A Professor, meals are illustrated as a means of saying “I’m with you, I like you, we form a community together” (Foster 8). They demonstrate bonding between individuals. Unfortunately, throughout the opening of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, respect kindness and a sense of belonging are all lacking in young Stephen Dedalus’ life at Clongowes Wood College. He tags along while the other boys play ball and he experiences verbal abuse at the hands of his peers on account of his odd last name, his social status, and his close relationship with his mother. The bullying climaxes when a student, Wells, pushes Stephen into a cesspool. Despite the generally negative experience he initially has with his class mates, Stephen eventually begins to fit in. The first sign of acceptance occurs when a fellow student, Fleming, approaches Stephen to see if he is feeling well. This encounter takes place over a meal of bread, butter and tea. Joyce utilizes the meal to show that the students, or at least one student, have stopped antagonizing Stephen. This deceivingly unimportant seen actually serves as a turning point in Stephen’s career at Clongowes Wood College. Due to friends like Fleming, he later gains the self confidence to report Father Dolan to the Rector and becomes a hero to the other boys.
In HTRLAP, Foster explains that the success of a meal can either mend a problem or widen it. In a Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen wins an essay contest and earns himself a large sum of money. Instead of investing the majority of his money, Stephen spends it freely. Stephen buys his family and friends expensive dinners and luxuries they normally could not afford. Stephen is using the expensive meals as a way to bridge the gap between himself and his family that his restless nature has caused. He “squares of Vienna chocolate” for the guests and family members he takes out daily (Joyce 85). However Stephen soon runs out of money and his household returns to normal. Stephen soon realizes “he had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach,” with the expensive dinners and treats he bought everyone (Joyce 87). In his despair over the failure his attempts reaped, Stephen wanders dark alleys and takes comfort in the arms of a prostitute. Stephen’s attempt to please his family with expensive dinners repeatedly backfired resulting in the lose of all of his earnings, a widened family rift in his mind and the start of carnal sin in his life. As Foster explained, a successful dinner heals rifts and a failed dinner widens the rifts.
ReplyDeleteIn HTRLLAP, Thomas Foster states that a "failed meal stands as a bad sign" (Foster 11). Jad Nnazy pointed out that "respect kindness and a sense of belonging are all lacking in young Stephen Dedalus’ life at Clongowes Wood College," which is very true in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." No other meals go as in depth as the Christmas meal in Chapter 2. Even then, the elaborate Christmas meal was covered up by the religious discontent within the family. Therefore, in the case of PAYM, the lack of meals represents the lack of communion Stephen has with the people in his life. Stephen already is an antisocial person, and "all the boys seemed to him very strange," suggesting that the problem Stephen's communions with others is himself (Joyce 11). If Stephen tried to make a better effort to interact and understand his classmates different opinions and views, he would have had a better social life. Instead of focusing on the quality of the conversation and connection of the people eating the meal, Stephen focused on the expensiveness and elaborateness of the meal itself. Thus, Stephen failed at being a sociable person when it came to communion at meals, and ultimately he became more reserved.
ReplyDeleteSorry! I meant that his comment about the other boys in his class seem to point out that Stephen is the cause of his difficulties of having communions with people.
ReplyDeleteIn HTRLAP, Foster explains in Chapter 2 how meals represent communion. Foster also explains how a meal can show how characters are interacting with each other, positively or negatively. In “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” a scene in chapter two shows this point Foster makes. When Stephen and his father are at the Victoria Hotel, breakfast is ordered. Stephen’s father orders breakfast but Stephen does not. The two are not eating together meaning there is a conflict. Stephen is upset about his father’s drinking habits, but will not directly say so. Joyce also proves Foster’s point by having Stephen stand “awkwardly behind the two men” (Joyce, 78). Foster explain people only eat with other people if they are comfortable with them. Stephen is obviously not comfortable which further supports his reason not to eat. Foster explains eating is personal and “we only want to do it with people we’re very comfortable with" (Foster, 8). Stephen not even ordering food shows how uncomfortable he is with the people around him. James Joyce uses this scene to show how Stephen feels he does not belong with certain people and how he wishes he could remove himself from these people. Stephen cannot remove himself which in the end effects his ability to order and eat food in this scene.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Foster, dinners and shared meals amongst character in novels always have some deeper meaning aside from simply sitting and eating, and this view holds true for Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Before Christmas dinner truly begins, Mr. Dedalus “seized the sauceboat” (Joyce 26) and attempts to offer it to the family members. Dante refuses, uncle Charles claims he feels “’right as the mail’” (26) without it, and Mr. Casey asks Mr. Dedalus to use the sauce himself. Before doing so “he poured the sauce freely over Stephen’s plate” (29). If the sauce represents Mr. Dedalus’ social advances towards each of the characters he approaches, Dante downright refuses his communion, uncle Charles feels fine without it, and Mr. Casey one might infer has enough already—only Stephen receives his father’s communion and by force. Later, after a brief spat in politics, Mr. Dedalus offers “‘more turkey?’” (27) to which “nobody answered” (27), and instead Dante reignites the argument concerning the political ventures of Irish clergymen. Joyce purposefully silences his characters for he cannot allow them to accept Dedalus’ communion nor his ideologies and mannerisms.
ReplyDelete