Cows

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.