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| Moocow: Marxist or Elitist |
At several points in Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce revives his reference to cows in the
opening lines of the book (where Stephen's father tells him a story about a
"moocow coming down along the road” to meet Stephen, “baby tuckoo." (3) His
talk of cows, of bulls, of oxen and of other references to bovine matters is utterly (no pun intended) deliberate,
with great literary significance. In
part 5, Joyce mentions cows on two occasions.
The references, in playful conversation among Stephen’s friends, frame Stephen’s
articulation of his aesthetic theory.
The first reference is in the midst of Stephen’s banter
about art – and specifically the dichotomy between proper and improper art. Improper art excites kinetic emotions,
explains Stephen, while proper art is “static,” with the mind “arrested” and “raised
above desire and loathing” (222). Working
class Lynch, whom Stephen characterizes as “poor,” wonders, if he writes his
name in pencil on “the backside” of a figure of Venus in a painting, whether that
would qualify as art. Stephen explains
that people like Lynch, who is not normal, and is the sort of odd person who
once at school ate "pieces of dried cowdung," (222) shouldn’t be the
test of Stephen’s elevated theory. Lynch
protests that although he "did eat
a cake of cowdung once, ... [he] admire[s] only beauty." (224) Stephen replies that "to try to
understand [the] nature" of life, we would bring forth from the reality of
experience "an image of the beauty we have come to understand – that is
art." (234) To soften his explanation (or to make it more
understandable to the supposedly lowly Lynch), Stephen goes back to the “cow”
as an example Lynch would understand. The second reference in part 5 is when
Stephen asks Lynch whether a “man hacking in fury at a block of wood,” creates
"an image of a cow,” then “is that image a work of art?" (232) Lynch and Stephen have a good laugh, but then
Stephen explains that it is not the image itself that makes the work art, but
the emotion that the art gives off (where “the personality of the artist passes
into the narrative [or work of art] itself,” and the emotion is distinct (“equidistant”)
from the artist (233). Lynch gives up,
and wonders why Stephen is “prating about” art on “this God-forsaken island.” (233).
Why the cow references?
One view is suggested by an article linking Karl Marx’s use of a cow
metaphor to explain how people of Lynch’s social class are subjugated. Marx wrote that religion is a "drug
constructed to keep the masses bovine and contented," with those masses "chewing
their cud [partly digested food returned from the first stomach for further
chewing] comfortably," thus meaning people aren't facing the realities of
life. Marx suggests that people would
prefer to graze like cows, instead of "not confronting" the evils of
society. Stephen may also be sneering at
the uneducated classes, repressed by rigid Catholicism and the stagnant Irish economy. But Joyce may have a different use of the cow
metaphor in mind. The cow hacked out of
wood recalls the image of Stephen as a wreathed oxen of Part 4 (182). Stuart Curran sees the references as
highlighting Stephen the artist as the sacrificial lamb for his people, as the
oxen were sacrificed for the Greeks in the Odyssey.
I find it more convincing that Stephen is to play the
sacrificial elitist, the artist who will “forge in the smithy of his soul” the “uncreated
conscience” of Ireland, rather than the artist who will liberate the masses,
like Marx, from what keeps the Irish down.
