Saint Genevieve
Saint Genevieve
In Brief
Stephen's extensive recollections in Proteus of the time that he spent in Paris, after his university days and prior to his mother's death, are anticipated by one such memory in Nestor. The "library of Saint Genevieve," located on the Place du Panthéon, contains a large reading room that is magnificent but utterly lacking in overhead illumination. It would have been quite dramatically dark as Stephen read there "night by night," and he takes the darkness as a metaphor for his own mind. On the desks were "glowlamps" that cast circles of light for reading.
Read More
Gifford notes that, according to the 1907 edition of
Baedeker's Paris and Its Environs, the library was
full of students in the evening hours. During those dark
hours, he suggests, the arching iron frame beneath the room's
roof creates the effect of being in a cave, bringing to mind
passages from Blake's The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "I was in a Printing
house in Hell, & saw the method in which knowledge is
transmitted from generation to generation. . . . In the first
chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a
cave's mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the
cave."
Blake's demonic dragon-men are associated, in Stephen's
thought as in the poem, with writers, bookmakers, and
libraries. He sees in his own mind "a sloth of the
underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon
scaly folds." The images of darkness and light in this
passage represent one of many ways in which Stephen
reinterprets Christian values, in this case by embracing
Blake's idea that "hellish" and "heavenly" qualities unite in
the human psyche.
