
	SOUTH PASADENA HIGH SCHOOL
	THE ENGLISH SEMINARAP
	[NICHOLSON]
	COMMENTARY



	JAMES JOYCE




	James Joyce's fiction often presents moments of sudden 
insight, when ordinary things are suddenly seen freshly and take 
on new significance.  In Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a 
Young Man, the protagonist Stephen Dedalus attempts to define 
philosophical terms from St. Thomas Aquinas by referring to 
such moments.  His definitions shed some light on the conscious-
ness of the protagonist in "Araby.".



"Beauty being a light from some 
other world"



 Douglas Hunt, The Riverside Anthology of Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.



 

The connotation of the wordStephen 
saidis rather vague.  Aquinas uses a term 
which seems to be inexact.  It baffled me 
for a long time.  It would lead you to 
believe that he had in mind symbolism or 
idealism, the supreme quality of beauty 
being a light from some other world, the 
idea of which the matter was but the 
shadow, the reality of which it was but the 
symbol.  I thought he might mean that 
claritas was the artistic discovery and 
representation of the divine purpose in 
anything or a force of generalization which 
would make the esthetic image a universal 
one, make it outshine its proper conditions. 
 But that is literary talk.  I understand it so. 
 When you have apprehended that basket 
as one thing and have then analysed it 
according to its form and apprehended it as 
a thing you make the only synthesis which 
is logically and esthetically permissible.  
You see that it is that thing which it is and 
no other thing.  The radiance of which he 
speaks in the scholastic quidditas, the 
whatness of a thing.  This supreme quality 
is felt by the artist when the esthetic image 
is first conceived in his imagination.  The 
mind in that mysterious instant Shelley 
likened beautifully to a fading coal.  The 
instant wherein that supreme quality of 
beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic 
image, is apprehended luminously by the 
mid which has been arrested by its 
wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is 
the luminous silent stasis of esthetic 
pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that 
cardiac condition which the Italian 
physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase 
almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the 
enchantment of the heart.


 



 

 


