Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Chapter 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

IAs we saw in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,

one of the marks of great literature is the consummateness of the craft that writers put into their works. This is also true of James Joyce, but in his work this quality almost takes on the character of an article of faithin a new ‘religion’ of art. Each word, each image, each sentence cadence is made to contribute to the work’s overall effect. Likea musical composer about whose composition one might say that we cannot perceive the structure of the whole until we have heard the last note, and even the last undertone ofthe last note, or for a painter for whom eachbrushstroke distinguishes the significant form of the work ever more scrupulously, Joyce composed each of his narratives with aneye (and ear) for perfection. Indeed he was as consummate in the search for exactly the right word or phrase — le mot juste — as one of his greatest influences, the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. We can see Joyce’s painstaking approach to the writing of fiction in

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36 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

all his productions, from his narrative miniatures in Dubliners, right through to that vast and mysterious encyclopedia, Finnegans Wake. The fact that he spent years working oneach of his published works suggests circumstantially a heroic exactitude of method, if not a great deal of patience.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we can see this consummateness everywhere in the text. This was not the case with Joyce’s original conception of the story. A Portrait grew out of an earlier narrative, more or less autobiographically based, that Joyce, after writing twenty-five chapters and about 150,000 words, abandoned in favor of re-casting the whole from new artistic premises.This earlier draft was called Stephen Hero and it was contemporaneous with the writing of the book of short stories published under thename Dubliners. Most of the novel was written between 1904 and 1906. Allowing for its unpolished and fragmentary state, Stephen Hero is still a rather significant

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 37

James Joyce(Jacques Emile Blanche, 1935)


achievement for a writer in his early twenties. But it was a conception that was beyond the young author’s powers. The storiesin Dubliners are another matter. They were well within Joyce’s emerging skills as an artist in narrative. But after the experience of Dubliners and Stephen Hero, Joyce was ready to tryhis hand at a longer narrative again. And in A Portrait he succeeded. The composition of that novel gave him the opportunity to grow into the complete and accomplished artist he was to become.

Even the title — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — has been composed carefully. It tells us we will be reading a narrative about the formative years of someone who will go on to be an artist. But the word that Joyce uses todescribe the nature of the narrative to come does not emphasize the intrinsic temporal aspect of story- telling. Stories, remember, are told in time and their action occurs through the medium of time. It was this temporal aspect of narrative that gave a powerful impetus to the historicizing (and therefore narrativizing) bent of realism. Thegrowth and formation of a person from the generic label ‘young man’ to the settled persona of an ‘artist’ is, for all intents and purposes, a temporal process. But the word that Joyce chooses to describe what he is about to offer us emphasizes paradoxicallythe non-temporal, namely the visual, the static, the completed, in short a ‘portrait’.Thus the painterly reference in the title is very important because it gives us an ironic hint as to Joyce’s formal design and method for the novel.

In a wider frame of reference, Joyce’s choice of wording also conveys his own increasingly decisive rejection of the realist and naturalist conventions of the


previous century in the name of a new set of aesthetic ideas and artistic practices which will come to be known as ‘modernism’. But more about that later.

The title word ‘portrait’ carries a numberof other connotations.

One is perhaps best conveyed by Vincent van Gogh in one of his letters to his brother. “Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thoughts, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.” (To Theo, Arles, n.d. [August 1888]). Picturing the soul is the point of portraiture, van Gogh writes. Unlike the portrait as a genre in the ItalianRenaissance or the bourgeois portrait of the nineteenth century, both of which often emphasized the social position, wealth, and authority of the subject, the new portraituresearched out the soul, or essence, of the sitter, as an inward quality of being. In thesame letter he tells Theo that painters oughtto seek to convey this inward quality “by the actual radiance and vibration of [their] coloring.”

A portrait illuminates the essence of the individual, or to put it another way, the radiant whole that is greater than the accurate summing of the parts. A portrait is not a mere mirror. Joyce’s choice


of the word, then, suggests that the novel ismeant to communicate something of the essenceof its subject.

The episodes, events, experiences which embody Stephen Dedalus’s progress are not in themselves the essential point of the narrative, but only the “coloring” which illuminates the ineluctable gist of his being, that which is the “artist” in him. It is this inner subject which the novel painstakingly evokes with each brushstroke oflanguage.

The word “portrait” conveys a second, perhaps more subtle, meaning. If the progressof the artist is what the novel will offer us, then to call it a portrait is to suggest that the novel records a completed action, that the point of view of the narration is insome sense retrospective: “portrait of the artist” — the artist, it seems, has already emerged. What we are now being shown is the artist’s nativity from the fallow ground rendered by that familiar, yet mysterious, phrase “a young man.” Indeed, one might even argue that the book we hold in our hands is the very artifact that completes the process that the novel enacts. In other words, the story the novel tells is not completed by thelast words on the last page of the novel proper, but is clinched by the object we holdin our hands, as if this Joycean artifact itself is, to some extent, not just a portrait but has something of the character of a self-portrait as well.

The word “artist” in the title is a particularly important point of reference, asit indicates the destination of the plot. It also anticipates Stephen’s aesthetic credo in his discussion of beauty in Chapter Five. For Joyce an artist is a sensitive and giftedhuman being who sees more deeply into reality


than ordinary people and who, as a kind of priest presiding at the eucharist of the eternal imagination, is able to transmute thedross of life into pure gold, the beauty of art. In addition, the novel implies a new position for the artist in society. The artist is seen as a kind of remote figure, who is in life, but is deliberately not of it; he or she stands detached, perhaps even at a remote distance, from everyday existence. In this respect Joyce culminates that nineteenthcentury process by which the figure of the artist as a social presence grows more and more isolated from bourgeois society. We might now say that the artist becomes ‘marginalized’ from the main centres of social and economic life. Artists are set apart from bourgeois society, from the gross realism of commerce and the habits of material acquisitiveness, and they do this inthe name of a higher realism, the realism of seeing things as they truly are, of going to the heart of things and of living life more fully as a result, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” Stephen thinks near the end of Chapter4 (172/186). Artists, the novel seems to be saying, are set apart by their vision and their craft to struggle in isolation and exile in defence of the integrity of their artistic vision.


This conception of the artist owes a greatdeal to late nineteenth century aestheticism.But it is not one more bland imitation of thedoctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’ fashionable in the 1890s. In the thought of Walter Pater and his brightest — and baddest — student, Oscar Wilde, a clear dividing line is drawn between Life and Art, art is not some reflexactivity that derives from the utilitarian calculations of ordinary living, but stands apart. “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life . . . and develops purely on its own lines” (Wilde 86).But this approach to art is predicated on a prior condition, a new appreciation for the exquisiteness of sensuous experience.

One must enter into a higher kind of alert and sensitive awareness that is valued in andfor itself, “Not the fruit of experience,” Pater writes in the Conclusion of The Renaissance, “but experience itself, is the end. . . . To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain his ecstasy, is success in life.” Certainly Stephen’s ecstasies at the end of Chapter Four and in Chapter Five resemble Pater’s ideal of aesthetic existence, but Joyce, as opposed toStephen, is careful not to let himself get carried away even as Stephen seems to be doing so. For Joyce, the relation of Life andArt is a rather more complicated and diverse matter. Indeed, the novel works toward some sense of their intricate interlacing, a senseof their mutuality, even when Stephen seems blind to their affiliation. The work of art and the work of life are not, then, mutually exclusive domains; they intersect in the realand the artist is the point at which this intersection comes into view.

Finally, the principal meaning of the word“artist” emerges when it is put beside the


last element of the title, that is, the phrase “a young man.” The novel seems to set itself the task of answering the question, how does the artist’s complex persona emerge from the unformed state of youth and adolescence? How is the flux of possibility, blindness, and desire that characterize youthshaped into a highly elaborated, formed senseof self, vocation, and purpose?What personal, domestic, emotional, and intellectual experiences combine or are required to exist in order to free this particular young man’s inner predisposition to a life of art? What is the balance betweenindividual will and impersonal fate in the achievement of his aims?

Joyce, ever the consummate artist, starts to explore the implication of these questionsin the very first sentence of the novel. It begins with the age-old opening formula of fictional narratives, “Once upon a time,” a moocow comes down along the road and meets a “nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” If we have read the epigraph to the novel, which quotes Ovid’s statement that Daedalus, the legendary Cretan artisan, devoted his mind tomysterious arts,


then we might think of the mythological tale of Pasiphae and Daedalus’s wooden cow (GravesI, 88e).

This allusion brings to the fore in the very first sentence several crucial themes that run through the novel. First of all the reference to Daedalus himself brings the subject of creativity and the maker of art immediately into focus. The reference to the “moocow” and the story of Daedalus’s strangely erotic service to Pasiphae also brings to the fore the themes of fertility and desire and their association with the feminine. In this kind of framework, Joyce seems to be suggesting, we will find one of the sources of the artistic sensibility. Stephen Dedalus’s intricate relationships with girls and women throughout the novel, relationships which are pervaded by the diverse impulses of fantasy, of the courtly love traditions of Europe, of raw lust, of the dialectic of purity and defilement, and of a stereotypical notion of the imagination as essentially feminine, all develop into more complex forms from the innocent child speech of the opening lines.

The moocow may suggest too, in connection with Stephen’s special destiny as an Irish artist, the many cows that play a part in Celtic mythology. There are many tales in Irish lore in which cattle figure. This is not surprising in a mainly rural and agricultural civilization. In one of the heroic tales from the Ulster cycle, for example, the drovers of Queen Maeve’s cattle encounter the hero Cuchulain.

He is generally presented in these tales as being both smaller and younger — “a nicenslittle boy” in his own right — than his otherheroic colleagues. The presentation of Stephen at Clongowes school in relation to


his fellows seems to follow a similar pattern.

These allusions no doubt resonate in the text, but the immediate source of the moocow,we learn from the second line, was Joyce’s own father, John, who asked his son in old age: “I wonder do you recollect the old days. . . when you were Babie Tuckoo, and I used to tell you all about the moocow that used tocome down from the mountain and take little boys across?” (Letters III, 212). In this story,still told in Ireland, a supernatural cow carries children to an island where they are relieved of the petty restraints and dependencies of childhood and magically schooled as heroes before they are returned to their astonished parents and community.Similarly, the youthful Cuchulain travels to an island where a supernatural woman warrior completes his education in the heroic code ofconduct. Utilizing the same pattern near the end ofChapter 4, Joyce has Stephen cross a bridge to an island called “the Bull,” where inspired by a reminder that he bore “the nameof the fabulous artificer” (Portrait 169/183), he hears for the first time the ground notes of his calling as an artist.


Thus the first sentence of the novel compasses elements of many stories: legendaryfigures from Greek and Irish myth, the magical cows of peasant lore, and, in the context of the novel we are reading, Stephen’s own development as an artist. But this synthesis of fictional and mythological materials is located in time and space. Firstof all it is rendered in baby talk and it is the baby talk of someone alive in Ireland in a particular historical moment. The opening lines may begin with the evocation of myth but they modulate very quickly into the real and the everyday. “The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.” Indeed there was an Elizabeth Byrne, a grocer, who did business at 46 Main Street in Bray, a small town where Joyce lived between the ages of five and ten (Gifford 133).

This intersection of the imaginary and thereal mixes life and art. And it is from within this sense of art and life intermingling that we see the special vocation of the artist begin to emerge.

Baby tuckoo’s song which follows in the text also mixes life and art.

O, the wild rose blossomsOn the little green place

He sang that song. That was his song.O, the green wothe botheth

Stephen’s confusion/fusion of the two lines ofthe well known Victorian ballad called “Lily Dale,” a song about the death of children popular at the turn of the century, already enacts the artist’s vocation as creator. The “green wothe” is Stephen’s own imagined object; it is “his song.” The myths of the ancient Greeks and the Irish, and the antics of magic cows are the imaginings of others,


but the impossible rose of Stephen’s mixed up song is his own creation. The fact that it isa childish mis-saying of the actual lines is not the point. Certainly the young Stephen does not intend to get it wrong, but in responding to the need to sing and to lettingthe imagination get on with its work, Stepheninadvertently, or at least without deliberation, liberates the creative imagination and brings into the world what did not exist there previously.

The significance of Stephen’s “green wothe”emerges more clearly as the novel goes on. Atschool, the badges worn by the teams in a competition are roses and this fact stimulates a meditation by Stephen on the beauty of roses, white ones and red ones, lavender and cream and pink ones. “Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours,” he thinks to himself, “and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could” (12/9). Art makes possible what has not yet been


experienced or thought. Later, in his journal entry for April 6 at the end of the novel, this special sense of art is taken on as a personal artistic goal: “I desire to press inmy arms the loveliness which has not yet comeinto the world” (251/273). But these words arewritten in the midst of a conscious rejectionof the aestheticism of the past, which Stephensees as wearily celebrating “forgotten beauty”or “the loveliness which has long faded fromthe world.” His credo directs us to the future, the beauty that is yet to come and its radical closeness to life. “Welcome, O life!” his journal entry for April 26 declaims, “I go to encounter for the millionthtime the reality of experience and to forge inthe smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (253/275–76). The desire to tread the path of art as a way of forging the “conscience of my race” clearly leaves behind the aestheticism of the 1890s, even though some of the ideas about art with which Joyce is working have their origins in the earlier period.

The final lines of the novel re-iterate the nearness of the Irish cultural context; this is the “race” to which Stephen refers, even as he is readying himself for exile. It is perhaps not insignificant that Joyce as anauthor himself needed to go into lifelong self-exile from Ireland in order to come to grips with the reality of Ireland. In any case, the focus on art, the making of the artist, does not disengage the novel from therealities of Irish history. In fact, in the opening lines the references to Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, importantleaders in the political movement for Irish Home Rule, brings Ireland as an historical reality into clear focus right at the start. Certainly it is politics that disturb the


domestic sphere as the subject of the terrible quarrel at the Christmas dinner in Chapter One. In this episode Joyce takes careto show the pervasiveness of the political problem in Ireland, how it was gathered into every crease and fold of Irish domestic life,and most importantly how it had led to a kindof frustrated and sputtering paralysis, not only in divided families, but in the nation as a whole.

Paralysis and frustration lead to division, inner repression, and violence. The short opening section of the novel ends with another childhood verse. But this one introduces a note of violence in the image ofan eagle punishing a disobedient boy by clawing out his eyes unless he apologizes. This is an important and complex image that we will return to later, especially as it introduces the rich but ambiguous leitmotif of birds and flight, the entwined themes of escape and transcendence. At this point, though, it is enough to say that the image of the eagle and the threat of retribution for the unapologetic boy look ahead to Stephen’s development as an artist who comes increasingly into unrepentant conflict with his family and society. Episodes of punishment or the threat of punishment, in


Dublin, O’Connell Bridge and Sackville Street, c. 1910


various forms, severely test the maturing Stephen from the very beginning to the very end of the novel. Indeed the hellfire sermon on eternal damnation constitutes one of the central episodes. It is the subject of Chapter Three and Joyce has positioned it at the very heart of the novel, as one of the pivotal moments in Stephen’s development.

1.II

At this point it might be useful, then, to step back from the microscopic examination ofthe title and the short opening overture in order to make some introductory remarks on the topic of the novel’s whole form. If the novel carefully records the emergence of the artist out of the materials and conditions which make his birth possible, then we are obviously attending to a process of maturation, a process of increasing individuation. In short, we witness a young person’s drama of Becoming. This narrative subject is a familiar one in nineteenth century European literature and philosophy. The origins of conceiving of life as progressive maturation, as developmental, that is, as modes of Becoming, rather than modes of Being, originates in the Romantic movement in literature, but also in the Germanphilosophy of that period, especially in the work of Georg Hegel. In England, William Wordsworth’s epic poem of subjectivity The Prelude (1805) stresses the new theme of Becoming by tracing, as its subtitle tells us, the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind.”

This emphasis was part of a general changein the conception of the human subject in theRomantic period that some social historians associate with the rise of a middle class or bourgeois worldview which emphasized progress


and development inhistory as opposedto the hierarchic and static vision of a still feudal aristocracy. Instead of conceiving of the individual human being as


occupying a fixed place in the social and cosmic hierarchies, the bourgeois view stressed human potentiality for improvement and for overcoming all barriers to development and change.

All the progressive arts of the time reflected this shift of emphasis. In fiction it was the great German writer Goethe who didthe most to popularize the narrative of Becoming. His principal practical contribution, the Wilhelm Meister novels, developed to a high level a form of novel that has come to be called Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, sometimes also known as the apprenticeship novel.

The Bildungsroman follows the course of a young man as he enters life, seeks like-spirited companions, experiences love and friendship, comes into conflict with the realities of the world, overcomes the obstacles put in his path by his own youthfulness, in short, passes through a variety of experiences by which he gradually matures and finds himself. So worldly a setting might seem to require a realistic framework, but in fact this is not necessary.The hero resembles a kind of Faustian figure whose constant striving means his exposure toall the pleasures and pains that are a human’s lot on earth. So there is a kind of exemplary character to the hero’s journey. The principal focus is on the young man’s inwardness, and not society. In general the hero is relatively passive, letting the world impinge on him instead of attempting toimpress his will on the world. Although conflict and struggle cannot be avoided, there is also a striving towards inner harmony, self-knowledge, and, finally, autonomy. The hero’s life as told in the Bildungsroman will not be an erratic meander


through experience, but tend towards an idealgoal. In a sense, this type of novel also takes the form of a quest, but the treasure one seeks is the holy grail of one’s own essential self. Every experience in this journey then will be significant to the degree to which it brings about the ideal goal. It is because the Bildungsroman seeks theunderlying essence, the constant in a world of flux, which allows Joyce to think of what he is doing as a “portrait.”

This form of novel was particularly strong in Germany in the nineteenth century. Its authority tended to skew German realism by emphasizing the individual rather than society. In England, Bildungsroman was an important influence, but it was not dominant.Dickens’s David Copperfield is a good, but not unadulterated, illustration of the vigour of the form transplanted from Germany. In most cases, only elements of Bildungsroman can be found in novels of mixed or hybrid forms, as in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, where onlythe part of the novel dealing directly with the maturing of Ernest Pontifex shows the form’s influence. The social dimension of English realism exerted too strong a pressureon


writers and readers to divert the novel away from the social and historical course that was its special strength in England.

That is why Joyce’s choice in narrative subject and treatment is so interesting. For one thing, his use of Bildungsroman silently announces his attachment to continental European traditions of art, and implies rejection of Irish and English narrative traditions. This is a cosmopolitanism for which Stephen will speak in Portrait and in Ulysses, and for which Gabriel Conroy had already spoken in “The Dead.” But unlike Gabriel’s failure to untangle himself from a moribund Dublin society, Stephen’s pursuit offreedom from the immediate Irish context (see202–3/220 –21), including his acute awarenessof Ireland as a cultural and linguistic vassal of England (Chap. 5, 189/204) will be more severely and successfully asserted in A Portrait.

His choice of narrative mode is also interesting for another reason. As mentioned above, the Bildungsroman, although generally included within the larger movement of realism in the nineteenth century, often departs from the conventions of that realism by focusing on the central character rather than insisting on immersing the individual inthe social, political, and economic contexts which shape one’s experience. So to choose that form is to set oneself on a course that,as I mentioned earlier, begins to depart fromthe conventional realism of the nineteenth century masters like Balzac and Dickens, George Eliot and Joyce’s own consummate performance of the realist mode in Dubliners. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man marks the early stages of the crevasse separating the older realism in fiction from the new ‘modernism’ of Joyce, Lewis, Lawrence, and Woolf. In


Joyce’s artistic development, it will be thepublication of Ulysses in 1922 that will signalthe decisive break with the past. But in A Portrait we can already discern the new direction.


IIIFirst of all, literary modernism at around

the time of the First World War enters into European culture as a self-consciously radical disjuncture with the past. Its primary thrust is rejection of the nineteenthcentury legacy — in the words of one of the principal modernist poets of the time, Ezra Pound, it was the duty of the modern writer to “Make it new!” In the British Isles this means taking leave of the culture of the Victorians, their puritanical approach to ethics, their calculative utilitarianism, their sense that sure knowledge is the product of scientific experimentation and, inthe humanities, of historical analysis, theirfaith in progress, and their worship of technological innovation as the new religion of societies organized around relations of commercial exchange.

The modernists, like the aesthetes before them, tended to distance art from the crude materialism of this worldview. At times it seemed as if their high claims for Art were meant to function, among the intellectual elite at least, as a substitute for a Christianity that had lost much of its binding force in the nineteenth century.With the ‘death of God’ one might turn to art, it seems, to satisfy spiritual longings.Stephen, in fact, comes to a crossroads of this kind in Chapter Four of the novel. Will he take orders and become a Jesuit, or will he pursue the aesthetic imperative? Within the ethos of the literary modernism of the time, his choice is unmistakable. It is the way of art and the artistic life that leads to redemption.Redemption? Certainly not in religious ormoral terms, but in the secular andexistential terms of significant and


intense living and making. That is the newdestiny of the modernist writer. Stephenwill serve no other masters, but vital lifeand art.

To give the pursuit of art this kind of significance was perhaps not very surprising in a time when societies were undergoing enormous social and economic changes. The new commercialism of everyday life, for example, was encroaching on every aspect of existence.Older communal forms of life, the farm, the village, the shire, with their intense face-to-face intimacies were being swept away by the rise of a commercial culture. It was a culture driven by the new importance for communal life of the market and the consciousness to which it gave rise. As a result communities came to be organized increasingly around relationships of commercial exchange. Older social forms that were products of a settled rural culture, religion for example, or class hierarchies, and even, at a more personal level, constructions of gender and subjectivity, werebeing gradually swept away. For the modernist artist, more intensely aware of the relativism of modern times than most, art represented a kind of fixed value that could not be profaned by the touch of the market. In a time when people were coming to know theprice of


Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh (Francis Bacon, 1957)


everything, but the value of nothing, only art seemed to possess an intrinsic worth immune from commerce. Stephen’s sense of art as a redemptive force in life is perhaps bestseen in this context.

Modernism also, and this is perhaps its most lasting legacy, directed the artist’s attention to the media and structures of artworks, rather than to the information contained in them, or the teaching they provided, or even their meanings. Paintings are constructions in paint, and Picasso and the cubists, made us conscious of the materiality of the their medium.

Music is made from sounds and the fixed tone palette of the nineteenth century composers seemed unnecessarily artificial andconfining to Arnold Schoenberg who extended the chromatic scale out past the boundaries of the habitual and brought listening back tothe medium itself. And in literature, the medium of poems and novels was language, not fine feelings, nor lifelike characters, not even plots. These were secondary effects. A novel was not only a work in language, it was a work on language. And it was to language that the modernist artist paid the closest attention.

In fact, A Portrait seems rather weak in all those ways the nineteenth century had come toexpect a novel ought to behave. Yes, there arecharacters, a setting, rising and falling action, but none of it is gripping in the waya novel by Dickens keeps us turning the pages on the strength of plot and character alone. The vigour of Joyce’s work lies in its language, in its precision, in its careful composition of voice and tone, the delicacy of its phrasing, its shades and nuances and,above all, in its capacity to bring and sustain attention to itself in the reading


process. In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce worked towards a language-based art that has been the standard by which most modernist andpostmodern literatures have been measured ever since. A Portrait is the point of departure on that road to the language universe of Joyce’s magnum opus.


IVI said earlier that A Portrait is weak in

those matters of novel making which the nineteenth-century realists had accustomed readers to expect, expectations I should add that have not entirely disappeared even in the late twentieth century. Most readers still like a good yarn, with strong characters, and a minimum of exposition. Thatis not what Joyce gives us. Yes, we may certainly be interested in how Stephen turns out. Will he become a Jesuit or not? Will he gain a measure of justice after being unjustly punished at school? Will he visit Dublin’s Nighttown again? As interesting as these details of plot are, they are not the heart of the novel, nor is it Joyce’s intention to make them so. The novel gives usa portrait of Stephen, but it is a portrait which seems to lack that solidity of effect which is conveyed by the accumulation of a great deal of detail about the central character. There’s lots we don’t know and that Joyce doesn’t bother to tell us.

How old is Stephen when the novel opens? Why is no information provided concerning hisactivities between his leaving Clongowes Woodschool and his middle terms at Belverdere school? Why must the reader wait for almost two hundred pages to be told that Stephen is 16 years of age precisely at that point in the narrative? Why do the scenes of youthful love and fantasy lose their distinctiveness so that the reader can scarcely distinguish Eileen from E. C., Mabel Hunter from Mercedes? Why is Stephen’s mother such a shadowy figure? Why does Joyce end the novel anti- climactically with random entries from Stephen’s journal? Why the long sermon in themiddle of the book? Why is so much space and importance allocated to the exposition of


Stephen’s aesthetic theories?These are good questions, but they say more

about the expectations of the reader who asksthem, than about the strengths or weaknesses of the novel. What is significant in terms ofinformation or of continuous plotting or the weaving in and out of subplots simply does not matter to Joyce. So the text has sometimes been criticized for being out of proportion, somewhat misshapen, for not striking the proper sort of balances of realism. Events that seem to have little plotrelevance bulk large in the overall economy of the presentation; and those we might thinkhave great relevance do not.

This is a work that brings to light the formation of a character’s consciousness, themaking of a unique subjectivity. It is the formative experiences that count, not maintenance of generic decorum. In fact the conventional etiquette of realism would obscure the real story Joyce wants to tell, and so he breaks out of the prisonhouse of form inherited from the past. Incidentally, this feature of the novel is also a central aspect of many modernist


works. Mrs. Dedalus is difficult to visualizebecause it was Joyce’s purpose to convey to us that for Stephen she, and many of the other characters, are rather pallid and faint figures. Indeed characters, even Stephen himself, are not strongly realized in the novel. Rather it is experience as it impingeson consciousness, as it helps to shape subjectivity, that Joyce wishes to reflect inthe mirror of his art.What remains vividly in Stephen’s memory is not the concrete presence of his mother, who is treated more like an interval of mild weather, it is rather formative events which prevail, like the enflamed confrontation at Christmas with all its vertiginous verbal violence and the din it leaves in the boy’s head, or the long surreal sermon at the heartof the novel. In the sermon, the priest who gives it is not the center of interest, the presence that defines the episode. His words do that. The striking images and symbols which he deploys, the rhetoric of his presentation, the shape and tone of his preaching, these are the factors that strike deeply into Stephen’s receptive consciousness. They help to shape him as a subject and to make subjectivity itself visible in the course of the novel.

Making subjectivity itself visible is no mean feat. And whether Joyce succeeds or not is a matter for discussion and interpretation.But Joyce makes one very brilliant technical innovation that at least gives him an opportunity to succeed in his primary purpose.He parallels the language of the novel to thedevelopmental process of the narrative subject. The body and soul of the novel’s language itself ‘matures’ along with Stephen.It grows more complex in all the ways one might expect a human being to mature. Most importantly language becomes Stephen’s medium


for self- expression, as in the suave lyric he composes in Chapter 5, and as a result themedium for self-reflexivity and self-recognition. In his increasing powers of expression, Stephen is made to subtly reveal to us his self-reflexive grasp of his own identity and the forces that enter into its genesis, and, at the end, the anticipated exodus as well.

The best way to illustrate this fundamentalpoint is to compare passages from different parts of the novel. In the opening chapter, when Stephen is still a young boy, Joyce triesto capture the mental and emotional textures of a child. This is evident in the baby talk of the very first lines. Two pages further on, when Stephen has passed into his early school years, we find the following paragraph.Stephen has been thinking about his school speller and the odd sentences that are used as exercises. They seem like poetry to him.

It would be nice to lie on the hearthrugbefore the fire, leaning his head uponhis hands, and think on those sentences.He shivered as if he had cold slimy waternext his skin. That was mean of Wells toshoulder him into the square ditchbecause he would not swop his littlesnuffbox for Wells’s seasoned hackingchestnut, the conqueror of forty. Howcold and slimy


the water had been! A fellow had onceseen a big rat jump into the scum. Motherwas sitting at the fire with Dantewaiting for Brigid to bring the tea. Shehad her feet on the fender and herjewelly slippers were so hot and they hadsuch a lovely warm smell! Dante knew alot of things. She had taught him wherethe Mozambique Channel was and what wasthe longest river in America and what wasthe name of the highest mountain in themoon. Father Arnall knew more than Dantebecause he was a priest but both hisfather and uncle Charles said that Dantewas a clever woman and a well-read woman.And when Dante made that noise afterdinner and then put up her hand to hermouth: that was heartburn. (10 –11/7)

The first thing we ought to note is the peculiar character of the point of view of the narrative. We are not brought vividly into Stephen’s mind as in the technique of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ which Joyce will use to effect in Ulysses and which Virginia Woolf will refine in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Nor do we have a clearly defined first-person narrative, although the contentsof the paragraph all relate to thoughts, sensations, feelings which only Stephen wouldbe aware of. The passage, and the whole novel, is an example of third-person narration. But the effect of this external point of view is blurred by the fact that thenarrator only makes us aware of the contents of Stephen’s subjectivity. So Joyce’s method tends to obscure the distinctions implied by the clear realizations of either first- or third-person perspectives. Stream-of- consciousness is not far off in terms of the development of narrative technique. But that’s what lay ahead. In the present novel, the narrative takes from both perspectives, maintaining a kind of formal, yet weakened,


external or objective point of view, which at the same time induces a measure of empathy byonly giving us the world from one angle of vision, Stephen’s. Critics have energetically debated the effect of this approach and you might consider its strengthsand weaknesses.

The passage also conveys the child’s grasp of reality and enacts in a language and logicproper to this degree of maturity the appropriate subjective states. The importance of physical sensation to the child is immediately obvious. Joyce reduces the external world to a series of impingements on the senses and to Stephen’s verbal responses to them. A series of pleasant physical sensations are recalled. A warm fire, tea, the smell of heated slippers, and even the sound of someone burping are all characterized as “nice,” in other words they are given a meaning and a value, not from theperspective of an adult narrator recollectingin tranquility a bygone time, but in the veryterms a child, with a limited capacity for expression, might use. At the same time, in the emotional dialectic of the passage, whatgives the ‘niceness’ of the domestic scene its


particular degree of reality for Stephen is the contrast it makes with the world of his tormentors at school, Wells in particular. Wells is associated with the coldness and sliminess of ditchwater and several other odious images, the rat for example, and is positioned on the verbal landscape as “mean.”Out of these elementary materials Joyce conveys, what in his time had not yet become a truism of psycho- and sociolinguistics, namely, the now familiar notion that our sense of reality, not reality as an objectiveand scientifically verifiable fact mind you, but our subjective experience and valuations of reality are constructions of language through and through. One might also note thatthe emphasis on physical sensation introducesin a quietly efficient way the theme of the body, and the evolution of Stephen’s relationship to his own carnality.

To the same effect, Joyce uses a series of deliberate stylistic mannerisms to enact the consciousness of a child.

•The monotony of the verbal rhythms, for example, subject- verb-object forms punctuated by small eruptions of exclamatory effusivessness: “How cold and slimy the water had been!”

•The paring down of the diction to wordsof one or two syllables, except for theexotic names of far off places, like “Mozambique.”

•The use of the jargon of childhood: a boy is a “fellow,” a pleasant odour is“lovely,” and a seasoned ‘conker’ is, punningly, the “conqueror of forty.”

The passage not only conveys the child’s grasp of the real and of its symbolic resonances, but the logic of a child’s mentaloperations. The leaps from one subject to


another, linked loosely by association or by simple juxtaposition, enacts the movement of a child’s inner life as an undifferentiated flow of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. There may be a logic to the movement of mind here, but it is forever a secret of the child’s lifeworld. Joyce’s interest in rendering the child’s inwardness must have been stimulated by the extraordinary attention which the late Victorians began to devote to childhood (see Gillian Avery’s Nineteenth Century Children). And it is perhaps worth remarking that a good deal of Stephen’searly experience in the first part of the novel carries something of a ‘Stephen-in-Wonderland’ quality.

One aspect of this can be seen in the way the paragraph presents the child’s mind as a temporary repository of confused values and jumbled levels of meaningfulness. Dante’s great knowledge boils down to a few elements of basic geography. And the mere taking of orders by a priest places him above laymen inintelligence. To liberate the artist in himself, Stephen must not only


learn the truth about things, but also unlearn a great deal that is false or irrelevant.

The prose of the novel, then, ‘matures’ asStephen matures. So well is this accomplishedthat it is possible to reconstruct Stephen’s age, his mental and emotional level by arranging unidentified samples of prose from different parts of the novel. Compare the following passage on God from early in the novel with a passage on the same topic in themiddle of Chapter Five. Here is the first passage:

What was after the universe? Nothing. Butwas there anything round the universe toshow where it stopped before the nothingplace began? It could not be a wall; butthere could be a thin thin line thereall round everything. It was very big tothink [ … ] about everything andeverywhere. Only God could do that. Hetried to think [ … ] what a big thoughtthat must be; but he could only thinkof God. God was God’s name just as hisname was Stephen. Dieu was the French forGod and that was God’s name too; andwhen anyone prayed to God and said Dieuthen God knew at once that it was aFrench person that was praying. But,though there were different names forGod in all the different languages inthe world and God understood what allthe people who prayed said in theirdifferent languages, still God remainedalways the same God and God’s real namewas God. (16/13)

And here is thesecond:

He smiled as he thought of the god’simage for it made him think of a bottle-nosed judge in a wig, putting commas intoa document which he held at arm’s length,and he knew that he would not haveremembered the god’s name but that it waslike an Irish oath. It was folly. But was


it for this folly that he was about toleave for ever the house of prayer andprudence into which he had been born andthe order of life out of which he hadcome? (225/244)

The change in tone is perhaps too obvious to mention, but consider the skill it takes to accomplish this simple effect. In the second passage the frame of reference is adult, both in its capacity for irony, a certain satiric quality in the reference to the “bottle- nosed judge in a wig,” and in the evocation of an adult’s reflections as a kind of interior dialogue. The closing question is the question from someone who understands that actions have consequences, that nothing happens in a vacuum, that to choose one thing, means to reject something else. The boy’s questions in the first passage are quite different. They seek knowledge and define the limits of current understanding. The man asks questions for a different reason. For him they are a device for coming to decision, for supporting his judgment to act in a certain way. Finally, the rhythm of the sentences in the second passage make a more complicated and adult music.


The technique of a text maturing in parallel with the formation of the central character feeds directly into the novel’s overall structure. Chapter One deals with Stephen’s babyhood and pre- adolescence; Chapter Two with his early adolescence, school, romantic fantasies and the beginningsof his erotic life. Chapter Three takes up the complex geometry of guilt, confession, and atonement by way of the sermon on hell and damnation. Chapter Four embraces the pivotal moments of Stephen’s maturity; it deals with the post-confessional mortification of the flesh, the final rejection of the Church and the priestly calling, and the decision to be an artist. Chapter Five concludes with the emergence of Stephen into adulthood during his university years, the repudiation of his family, country, and religion preparatory to exile and the austere calling of art. This rather simple developmental pattern gave Joyce the framework in which Stephen’s complex interiority could be figured.

1.V

Telling Stephen’s story from the perspective of his subjectivity demanded not only innovation in technique, but in how the inner world of a character might be embodied.To this task Joyce chose, along with other early modernist writers, like Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, and H. D., to draw on the world of the ancient myths of the eastern Mediterranean. New advances in the fledgling disciplines of archeology, anthropology, and psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century had brought new approaches to the question of the nature of mind, psychic life in general, and of the deeper


relationship of the individual to the communal ethos. It was found that the ancient myths of the Greeks and of Asia Minor were not only quaint and charming talesfrom prehistoric times, but provided enormously interesting insights into the nature and textureof human communities at thedeepest levels of individual and collective consciousness. Forthis reason, modern writers were


attracted to these fragments of ancient cultures. Myths provided characters and character-types in the context of archetypal situations and narratives. The symbolism of ancient myths were put to new purposes among the more advanced writers in modernity. T. S. Eliot in searching for a narrative structure to unify the fragments of The Waste Land found it in the vegetation and fertility myths clustering around the figure of Adonis. Ezra Pound placed the god Dionysus at the heart ofhis Cantos.

In literature, music (Stravinsky), and thevisual arts (Picasso), the ancient world offered a base from which the evolution of Western culture could be measured. In some ofthese artists,D. H. Lawrence for example, this became a fully fledged cult of the ‘primitive’.

Joyce was not immune from these currents ofthought and he adopted what Eliot called in afamous review of Ulysses ‘the mythic method.’ For Joyce Ulysses is the obvious example. But it’s clearly part of the method of A Portrait as well. Stephen’s family name, Dedalus, connects the contemporary world with the ancient past.The name, as noted earlier, refers to the great Cretan artist and craftsman, Daedalus,a well-known figure in Greek mythology. The evocation of this ancient craftsman allows Joyce to work out Stephen’s fate at the intersection of history and myth, at the intersection of time with the timeless. Daedalus, as the archetypal artist-figure, can never die as long as there are artists within the human community. Stephen is an embodiment of the type and is therefore botha subjectivity in history, shaped by family and society, and a subjectivity out of


history which shares a common ancestry, across the inertial drag of mere chronology, with the mythical father of all artists. ButStephen is also the son of this ancient father. He is both Daedalus and, more tragically, Icarus.

In the ancient Cretan, or Minoan, myth, Daedalus devises his own and Icarus’s means of escape from confinement in the labyrinth,an escape attempt that ends tragically with the death of Icarus. How does this play into Joyce’s design for the novel? Or does it? Is the use of myth a way of inscribing a narrative of contemporary life with a transcendental significance that it normally would not have? To what level of detail can we legitimately pursue the mythic method, or,does the reference to certain mythological tales operate only in a general way? Of course, there are no simple answers to any ofthese questions. Each text has its own way ofsetting up a relationship with a mythic intertext. In the case of A Portrait, Joyce’s recourse to myth in the naming of Stephen is much looser and more suggestive than analytically precise. This was to change somewhat in Ulysses where many of the correspondences


between modern and ancient tales are set out with an almost mathematical precision.

Daedalus is evoked as the presiding spirit of artistic endeavour and of its closeness totragedy, sacrifice, and death. In a symbolic reading of the myth and of Icarus’s fate, thedeath of the artist results from his soaring flight. He mounts far beyond prudence into jeopardy and as a result suffers death. By the end of the novel Stephen is ready to takewing. The fate of Icarus is the cautionary tale. One might note also that Stephen’s first name, evoking St. Stephen the first martyr, further reflects the topics of sacrifice and death.

Imprisoned in his own labyrinth on the island of Crete, Daedalus fashioned wings forthe escape of father and son. The proximity of this story as symbolic of artistic fate provided Joyce with an important skein of images that runs through the whole novel. In musical terms this might be compared to a leitmotif, a particular melody that returns again and again in the course of the piece and provides a kind of musical cohesion to the composition. In A Portrait, the leitmotif offlight is central to the symbolic resonance of the mythic story. Of course the word ‘flight’ is rich in meaning. It denotes physical flight, of course, but its connotations suggest escape, release, defiance, transcendence, the spiritual dimension of being, and imaginative experience. In the culture and literature of Europe, flight is a poetic figure associated with the Romantic movement. The best example (of many) in English poetry is Keats’s great ode “To a Nightingale” where the bird, or more properly the beauty of the bird’s song, functions as a symbol of aesthetic transcendence. Joyce’s novel makes extended


use of these images of birds and of flight.Characters bear either the names of birds

or of variations of birdnames, Cranly and Heron, for example, and Daedalus is often given the epithet, “the hawklike man.” Birds are introduced in the very first pages where an eagle becomes an instrument of punishment,symbolically plucking out Stephen’s eyes. Theeagle returns again in a different form when Stephen is punished at school for breaking his glasses. Father Dolan who administers theunjust punishment is described with some of the characteristics of a bald eagle (50/51). Stephen without his glasses is of course ‘blinded’ and unable to protect himself from the swooping visitation of the prefect of studies. And Stephen’s fear at the first entrance of Dolan is described in terms of arrested flight, his “heart was beating and fluttering” (49/50). A leather soccer ball isdescribed as flying “like a heavy bird” (8/4); a turkey is consumed at the Christmas dinner (30/28); the boys at school are hustled along “like a flock of geese” by a prefect who is “flapping the wings of his soutane” (74/77).From these few examples the design is clear. There are birds that fly


and those that merely flap their wings, thosethat bring punishment, and those that fly towards freedom.

It is the flight from home, church and Ireland, from the ties and entanglements thatthey cast over Stephen, towards which the whole novel moves. And it will not come as a surprise to see that in each of the crucial moments of decision, birds and flight figure strongly in Joyce’s telling. For Stephen these moments are predicated on new experiences and discoveries about himself. Heinevitably envisions his escape from the pastas a flight. Near the end of Chapter Four when he has made his decision to follow art, he senses himself “soaring sunward.” And as his earthbound friends call out a Greek version of his first name, Stephen feels himself freed from the entanglements of the everyday.

His throat ached with a desire to cryaloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle onhigh, to cry piercingly of hisdeliverance to the winds. This was thecall of life to his soul not the dullgross voice of the world of duties anddespair, not the inhuman voice that hadcalled him to the pale service of thealtar. An instant of wild flight haddelivered him and the cry of triumphwhich his lips withheld cleft his brain.

— Stephaneforos!(169 –70/183–84)

Home and church seem “gross” and “inhuman”from these rare heights. The ironic return ofthe eagle should of course be immediately noted, now no longer agent of retribution, but severe begetter of deliverance. And just as he seems to have ascended to the highest point in this inward flight, Joyce puts before Stephen one more ‘bird’, yielding a


rapturous epiphany, a slender girl, alone andstill, gazing out to sea. “She seemed,” he thinks, “like one whom magic had changed intothe likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird” (171/185).

Another similar moment of ecstatic flight occurs in the final Chapter when Stephen finally completes the villanelle “Are you not weary of ardent days? ” After he finishes allthe words of the poem, there is a break in the text of the novel and we find Stephen on the steps of the university library suddenly struck by the darting, swerving flight of many swallows. For two pages he meditates on these creatures of the air, and their swooping soaring life. His thoughts reflect amore complex state of mind than the young manravished by a vision of the bird-girl on the seashore. A more mature Stephen is now conscious of the ambiguity of the birds as symbols. Are they, he asks, symbols “of departure or of loneliness” (226/245). To choose to stand outside of the social community, implies not only freedom, but isolation and loneliness. Is he ready for this challenge? Can he still take the step? The journal entries


that end the novel make clear that he is ready for what lies ahead on his chosen course. These passages in the novel are beautifully written and might be fruitfully compared to another Irish literary work whichevokes the flight of birds, W. B. Yeats’s “Wild Swans at Coole.”

But Joyce maintains the complexity of Stephen’s awareness by counterpointing the flight of birds at the end of the novel with an increasing consciousness of human fate as not only bound for spiritual transcendence, butof the human body as bound to the earth in notvery romantic ways. “A louse crawled over thenape of his neck, and putting his thumb and forefinger deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it” (233/254). Here is the true human complexity, the life of the spirit and the life of the body — “ill clad, ill fed, louse-eaten” — composing a single entity. Yes,flight is the crucial metaphor for the creative spirit, but his body will never let him forget that it is, after all, only a metaphor, and that the earth and the earthbound is, whether we like it or not, theironic and final destination of all our lives.

1.

VIMetaphors of flight and the imagery of

birds is only one strand in a complex weave of image patterns and themes. In addition to flight, there are skeins of images that referto religious experience, to the sexual awakening of Stephen, especially his ambivalent relations to a series of shadowy female figures in the novel, and perhaps mostsignificantly for Joyce, to art and aesthetics. In the progressive continuity of


the novel, ChapterFive brings the whole process to ahead. All the various threads inthe weave are gathered into a single fabric. Butthe most brightly coloured strand isthe aesthetic. At the end of the novel, Stephen reaches the highest point of his intellectual development, although critics disagree whether he has also achieved a corresponding emotional or pyschological maturity (giving rise to a particularly fine example of Joyce’sironic


vision). However, in the realms of pure thought, he is certainly operating at a very high level.

Having rejected the conventional priesthood, Stephen enters the new priesthoodof art. It is not accidental that Joyce uses religious symbolism as a way of modulating Stephen’s change of vocation and his entry into a new calling. When Stephen wades in thesea at the end of Chapter Four, for example, we have a kind of baptism of the artist in the element from which life springs. In the final Chapter, Stephen even mounts a pulpit,so to speak, to deliver a sermon. This parallels Father Arnall’s blistering sermon on the pains of hell in Chapter Three, which itself parallels the political sermons in Chapter One. Stephen’s splendid homily is delivered only to his friend Lynch and it is on the subject of aesthetics rather than redemption, but nevertheless it’s a start forthe young artist.

These passages at the end of the novel arejustly famous, for they give us an explicit formulation of aesthetic ideas that were popular (but not necessarily in this form) among the modernists in the early part of thecentury. All the early modernists (with perhaps the exception of Lawrence) developed variations on Stephen’s theme. His ideas represent a lucid exposition of aesthetic philosophy by a very clever, intellectually gifted young man. He is confident in his own rational powers and that is very much a part of Joyce’s design in bringing Stephen to maturity. But Stephen’s aesthetic meditationscan be probed for a rather more complicated subtext that has more to do with Stephen’s blindness to his own deeper fears and to possibly crippling psychological complexes.This subtext is also part of Joyce’s design.


We are meant to hear in Stephen’s elegant formulations of aesthetic philosophy another,more shadowy rhetoric at work. The unconscious drama of his own unresolved repressions, appetites, and passions silentlycounterpoints the bright flight into theory. As a result, Stephen’s subjectivity is a product of this more complicated state of affairs.This is illustrated in his opening propositions about aesthetic sensibility in the discussion with Lynch.

Arguing from points made by Aristotle about Greek tragedy in the age of Sophocles,Stephen asserts that the “esthetic emotion” is not characterized by any kind of arousal that provokes either desire or loathing. “Thefeelings excited by improper art are kinetic,” he asserts (204/222). This may be exemplary philosophy, but it is also an interesting, but unconscious, self-characterization. So much of Stephen’s adolescent development has been the product of the struggle between desire and loathing,especially in the matter of sexual experience. Arts that stimulate these debasedforms of feeling he calls “pornographical ordidactic” (205/222), neatly summing up his own youthful experiences of sex and religion.The


proper form of aesthetic emotion is stasis, he says, “the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” Is this philosophy or the longing to escape from the iron laws of one’s own passions? To give Stephen his due, these ideas, which seem to speak so meaningfully to his inward dilemmas,are also viable aesthetic propositions with along and famous history in Western culture.

He continues his discourse, after some companionable banter with Lynch, by explaining further what he means by desire and loathing. These are not really aesthetic emotions, he says, not only because they are kinetic, “but also because they are not more than physical.”

Beauty expressed by the artist cannotawaken in us an emotion which is kineticor a sensation which is purely physical.It awakens, or ought to awaken, orinduces, or ought to induce, an estheticstasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror,a stasis called forth, prolonged, and atlast dissolved by what I call the rhythmof beauty. (205 – 6/223)

His final elegant phrase confuses Lynch for a moment. After explaining what he means by rhythm, the relational basis of a work’s coherence, Stephen then turns to that most difficult of all concepts in aesthetics, the concept of beauty. In a formulation that ought to remind us of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Stephen boldly declares that “beauty is the splendour of truth” (207/225).It is not any more clear what this means coming from Stephen as it does in Keats’s famous philosophical lyric.

Truth is beheld by the intellect which isappeased by the most satisfying relationsof the intelligible; beauty is beheld bythe imagination which is appeased by themost satisfying relations of the


sensible.

Remember that the word “sensible” here is being used in its primary philosophical meaning, as something pertaining to the senses. These relations of the sensible must correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension and these, in their turn, must embody the three essential qualities of beauty: wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Stephen has adopted these qualitiesfrom the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. In Latinthey are integritas, consonantia, and claritas.

The first quality — wholeness or integritas — separates the work of beauty from the rest ofthe universe of things, so that the work can be apprehended in and for itself, that is as itself and not as another thing. This is the foundation of Joyce’s famous theory of the aesthetic epiphany, first explored in the stories of Dubliners.The thing is apprehended in its irreducible otherness, something separate and distinct from the observer and from all other things, and therefore known as such (Kenner 145). Thesecond stage of


apprehension — harmony or consonantia — directs our attention to the internal relationships of the work, to the balance of part against part, of part and whole, whereby one comes to“feel the rhythm of its structure” (212/230).And finally the third quality — radiance or claritas — brings to consciousness the work’s supreme essence, its ‘whatness’ or to use another term from scholastic philosophy, the work’s quidditas, its thing-ness or primordial being in an epiphanic illumination of its meaning. It is these qualities in beauty thatarrest the mind and permit transcendence.

Stephen, the theorist of beauty, reveals agreat deal of intellectual sophistication in the lecture to Lynch. But what of Stephen thepractitioner of beauty? After all, he doesn’tsimply want to talk about art, he wants to make it. The pages of Chapter Five which follow Stephen’s lecture, concretely evoke the creative process that produces beautiful artworks. He writes a beautiful little lyric poem in a highly elaborate verse form that completes the demonstration on the nature of beauty begun a dozen pages earlier. But we should note that it is a ‘little’ poem. Afterlistening to Stephen’s forceful propositions about art and beauty, we can’t help but feel that the mountain of aesthetic philosophy seems to have produced a veritable mouse of apoem. It is a pretty little thing, but perhaps one might have expected more from a mind capable of these powerful and elegant formulations. Are we meant to hear Joyce’s sly chuckle in the background? I think so.

Having accomplished the slight but perfected work of art, Stephen is unburdened and takes wing. But this ensuing aetherialismis counterpointed by the heavy dross of disgusting realities, like the lice mentionedabove which are seen falling through the air


as a kind of antiphony to the sublime ascent of the beautiful (233/254). Joyce seems to besaying that in the same way that the paradise of the Catholics is opposed by the Catholic inferno, so the heaven of the artist is opposed by the grossly material earth. W. B. Yeats also recognized that the ladder of ascent towards beauty and transcendence, was rooted in carnality, in what he called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” (“The Circus Animal’s Desertion”).

A Portrait ends with a series of journal entries, as Stephen readies himself for flight into exile. In the final entry he brings the myth of Daedalus back into focus, but significantly Daedalus as his father, to whom he appeals in this moment before flight.Stephen reveals himself as Icarus, the adventuresome son, freed from the Irish labyrinth, taking wing into the brooding unknown, full of danger. If we hear the echoes of the myth across the centuries, we may perhaps have some cause for predicting another fall.


1.

Avery, Gillian. Nineteenth Century Children: Heroesand Heroines in English Children’s Stories, 1780 –1900. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965.

Brown, Richard. James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

* Burgess, Anthony. Here Comes Everybody. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.

Grayson, Janet. “’Do You Kiss Your Mother?’: Stephen Dedalus’s Sovereignty of Ireland.” James Joyce Quarterly 19 (Winter1982): 119 –26.

Hegel, Georg. “Preface.” In Phenomenology of Mind (1805).

Trans. J. B. Baillie. London: RKP, 1969.

Henke, Suzette, ed. Women in Joyce. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. Boston: Beacon Press, 1956. Pater, Walter. “Author’s Preface,” “The School of Giorgione,”

and “Conclusion.” In The Renaissance: Studies in Art &Poetry (1873), several modern paperback editions are available.


Peake, C. H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

Radford, F. L. “Daedalus and the Bird Girl:Classical Text and Celtic Subtext in A Portrait.” James Joyce Quarterly 24 (Spring 1987): 253–74.

Roche, Anthony. “‘The Strange Light of SomeNew World’: Stephen’s Vision in A Portrait.” James Joyce Quarterly 25 (Spring 1988): 323–32.

Rossman, Charles. “The Reader’s Role in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In James Joyce: An International Perspective. Eds. Suheil Badi Bushrui and Bernard Benstock. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982: 19 –37.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying” (1889). In De Profundis and Other Writings. Penguin Books, 1976.

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Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man