Associated with Baird's
Ibsen,
associated with Baird's
In Brief
Walking with Bloom to the cabman's shelter, Stephen is "taciturn and, not to put too fine a point on it, not yet perfectly sober." But he does occasionally utter a few words, starting with a mental association reported in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the stonecutter's in his mind somehow in Talbot place." Bloom hears Stephen offer this association as the two men are walking on Store Street, quite close to where the business stood. The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was a literary hero for the young Joyce, ranked higher than Shakespeare in his estimation.
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Early in part 5 of A Portrait, Stephen begins one of his daily walks to the university from his home on the northeastern edge of the city:
His morning walk had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman, that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile, that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty....
D. G. Baird and J. Paul Todd ran a business of "engineers and
founders" at 20-25 Talbot Place, just off of Store Street. The
fact that Stephen thinks inexactly of Baird's as a
"stonecutter's" can perhaps be explained by the fact that he
is indulging in imaginative reveries about literature,
dissolving something as crude as the "sloblands of Fairview"
into the "silverveined prose of Newman." Dublin's gritty
scenes are less real than his prized books, so the nature of
the business may not concern him much.
But there may be a little more to it. His anticipation that "the
spirit of Ibsen will blow through him like a keen wind"
suggests that he is thinking of one particular Ibsen play, When
We Dead Awaken (1899). In a long and admiring review
essay that the young Joyce wrote about this play, "Ibsen's New
Drama" (1900), he says of the young wife Maja that "Her
airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of
free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note,
counterbalances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of
Rubek" (Critical Writings, 65). Arnold Rubek, the
husband in this unhappy December-May marriage, is a sculptor,
so Stephen may be poetically associating the "stonecutter's"
business with Rubek's art.
In Ulysses, though, the link that Stephen "somehow"
draws between Ibsen and Baird's makes no sense at all to
Bloom. And when he speaks, later in Eumaeus, of "the
eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature"—an
idea which the young Joyce developed in another 1900 essay
inspired by Ibsen—Bloom feels "a bit out of his sublunary
depth."
Henrik Ibsen late in life. Source: medium.com.
Scene from a 1991 production of When We Dead Awaken at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Source: americanrepertorytheater.org.