Like Night and Day

“Dark” and “light” are terms often used to differentiate good and evil, even to the point of being cliche. Joyce (and Stephen) embrace them wholeheartedly, using them to set the mood for scenes and suggest whether a particular situation/goal is a good one for Stephen.

Night is a universally recognized symbol of danger and secrecy, and Stephen associates it with both. Sometimes, darkness is something evil that waits to swallow Stephen up – he has to face a long, dark hallway before confronting the rector at Clongowes, when he is in a religious crisis after listening to the sermon at the retreat, his dark room becomes like the entrance to hell. At other times, the language of darkness is associated more with secrecy – he wanders through the streets seeking illicit encounters with prostitutes, and in his first encounter he describes “the dark pressure of her softly parting lips” and “darker than the swoon of sin”. Later on, when he’s seeking confession, he wanders through the “dark streets” again in search of a place where no one will recognize him. He pictures Judgment Day as a “black cold void waste”; the candles on the altar have been extinguished, leaving the chapel dark. At least for me, the mental picture in these scenes was one of pitch-blackness, only illuminated by the things Stephen was describing: the lips of the prostitute, the slide of the confessional door, his hand beating his chest in repentance. It really emphasizes the small actions at the heart of the scenes.

While all of this darkness describes paths that Stephen initially thought were right, but weren’t (having sex, rigid religious morality), light is used to describe Stephen’s true artistic passion. Throughout his life, Stephen’s search for meaning is motivated by a feeling of unattainable glory, his nebulous artistic ideal. (I know this is a vague description, but for Stephen it seems to be more of a feeling than anything concrete.) We see this in full force during his walk on the beach at the end of Chapter Four, and he mentions it later as part of his theory of aesthetics. Repeatedly, he describes it as “radiant” or “luminous”. In the same scene, he imagines music “piercing like a star the dusk of silence”. Even when night falls at the end of the chapter, it is described with language implying light – there is a “young moon” above the “pale waste” of the sea. This imagery seems to support the idea that Stephen represents Icarus rather than Dedalus – his intense attraction to this spiritual, artistic light is like the pull of the sun on Icarus.

The section with the most pointed usage of light/dark imagery is the scene where Stephen is talking to the priest, who is trying to convince him to join the priesthood.  Joyce repeatedly describes the fall of light on the priest’s face – he mentions it so often it must mean something. He is standing with his back to the light, so that his face is hidden in darkness. Behind him is a large window with a view of the sky, but he has no interest in it. In contrast, Stephen, facing the other direction, “gazed calmly before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening and the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon his cheek”. Later, arguably the exact moment he decided to refuse the offer: “[...] he raised his eyes to the priest’s face and, seeing in it a reflection of the sunken day, detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in that companionship”. Stephen welcomes the wide world outside the church, but the priest has closed himself off. Although Stephen once thought the church was his calling, it can only offer him darkness, not the light he truly seeks.