Despite the self-indulgent qualities of the epiphanies, Stephen’s working by
contraries is a step toward achieving the fluctuation of perspectives that we
encounter in his thinking and his life in Joyce’s later works. The putting into
practice of Blake’s precept that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ and
Wilde’s ‘truth of masks’ has only just begun in Stephen Hero. Eventually,
the alternation tending toward a process of extremes merging and modifying
one another becomes an important structural principle for Joyce, one
that responds to divisions within his artist character and within Irish society.
His contrasting styles in A Portrait present a character whose experiences
regularly involve opposing forces that seem irreconcilable, such as the violent
political and religious antagonisms that Stephen witnesses during the
Christmas dinner in part i. The strongly divergent aspects of the book’s language
pertain simultaneously, though in different ways, to the writer who
has learned to work with contrasts and to the character whose life and social
context are filled with them. Various judgements about Stephen become possible
in the frame of a new complexity that arises from Joyce’s differential
style for capturing the shifting qualities of conflict and memory. The complexity
arises as well from a narrative structure that emphasizes repetition
rather than continuous, chronological development and from the merging
of the personal with myth and with history.
In A Portrait we see the swerving in Stephen’s life more clearly and regularly
than in Stephen Hero.11 At the end of each of A Portrait’s five parts,
Joyce uses elevated language to suggest that Stephen achieves a momentary
insight and intensity through a transforming experience: his communion
with nature and his fellow students after complaining to the Rector at the
end of part i; his sexual initiation in the encounter with a prostitute at the
end of part ii; his post-confession, pre-communion peace at the end of part
iii; his commitment to art climactically presented as an encounter with an
idealized woman at the end of part iv; and the exclamations about hopes
for the future in mythic and racial terms at the end of Stephen’s journal. At
the start of each succeeding part, Joyce counters ironically the intensity of
the preceding conclusion by switching immediately and unexpectedly to a
realistic style and realistic details: the bad smell of Uncle Charles’s tobacco
in part ii; the craving of Stephen’s belly for food in part iii; the mechanical,
dehumanized character of Stephen’s religious discipline in part iv; and in
part v the dreary homelife that is the daily context and one frame of reference
for Stephen’s aesthetic ambitions. The pattern of contrasts is also repeated at
various minor junctures in the narrative, for instance, at the end of the first
section and the beginning of the second section of part ii, when Stephen’s
revery about Mercedes is followed by the ‘great yellow caravans’ (P 54)
arriving to remove the family’s belongings. By juxtaposing extremes, Joyce
arranges the events of Stephen’s life without relying primarily on continuous
action. Like Stephen Hero, A Portrait is episodic, with little or no transition
from one situation to another, but the later work provides an orienting
sequence of rises and falls for Stephen’s development. Joyce emphasizes the
pattern by abandoning narrative continuity to make moments that are separated
in time contiguous in the narration.
Even within the individual, juxtaposed moments of elevated, climactic
insight and countering, realistic perception, a pattern of contrast and possible
merger sometimes appears. When this happens, a highly complex process
of reading can ensue that may mimic Stephen’s process of recollection. The
possibilities for this kind of reading are most evident late in the narrative,
once the reader knows Stephen’s thinking and its language well. Stephen
seems to remember at some level his earlier elevated experiences in a way that
connects them. The situation is complicated because he apparently remembers
and connects elevated moments not just as a group but in relation to the
realistic moments that follow them. And he remembers and links other experiences
as well. Rather than presenting Stephen explicitly recollecting opposing
moments, Joyce depends on the reader’s remembering, connecting, and
anticipating. And he presents Stephen’s thoughts in language that, through
repetitions from earlier scenes, suggests that a remembering and crossingover
may be taking place. In addition, we encounter regular reminders of
the mythic details that Stephen’s story embodies in transformed ways.
A feedback is created whereby Stephen’s later experiences, which in some
ways repeat earlier ones, repeat with a difference because they occur against
the background of what has gone before. The reader has access to this feedback
through the increasingly mixed language that leads back to earlier
scenes of different kinds. Because the language is complexly layered, the
reader comes to every scene with frames of reference derived from earlier
elements of the narrative, but each scene in turn results in new retrospective
framings of what has gone before and new prospective framings of what
is to come, and so on until the various frames overlap or nest within one
another. The unusual effect mimics the process of Stephen’s remembering his
complicated, differential past as he encounters each new experience, but the
effect depends on the reader’s active recollection of earlier passages.
In the closing pages of part iv, for example, Stephen has an intense experience
on the beach, reported in Paterian language, after which he naps in a
nest-like, sandy nook. Having decided to lie down, he feels the heavens above
him ‘and the earth beneath him’ (P 145). When he wakes, ‘recalling the rapture
of his sleep’ (P 145), Stephen holds these oppositions together briefly.He
imagines a merging of two realms in his image of the moon embedded in the
earth: ‘He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening
had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of the sky like the
rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast
to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in
distant pools’ (P 173). Visionary and material, heaven and earth, sea and
land, process and stasis merge and interact in a vivid promise of harmonious
union. Not only do heaven and earth merge as silver blends with grey, but
the tide, though flowing fast, has been humanized: her waves whisper.
The conjoining of opposites extends and momentarily fulfils Stephen’s
intense experience on the beach, which, like the earlier elevated moments, is
quickly followed by its opposite. At the beginning of part v, Stephen drinks
‘watery tea’, chews ‘the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him’,
stares ‘into the dark pool of the jar’ of tea, remembers ‘the dark turfcoloured
water of the bath in Clongowes’, and rifles idly with ‘greasy fingers’ through
a box of pawntickets, whose lid is ‘speckled with lousemarks’ (P 146). As at
the beginning of the three preceding parts, a debunking takes place through
style. But the situation is more complicated now, because the language closing
part iv already anticipates details of the realistic passage to come. Those
details include pools of liquid and past participles (‘fallen’, ‘embedded’) that
are displaced by the numerous past participles at the start of part v (‘fried’,
‘scattered’, ‘scooped’, ‘rifled’, ‘scrawled and sanded and creased’). The pool
of tea enables an ironic recollection of the pools of seawater for Stephen and
the reader, but the additional recollection of Clongowes embeds these later
pools in memories that make any simple contrast of two isolated moments
impossible. The overlap between the two scenes creates a stylistic double
helix, in which visionary intensity with its elevated language and a grimy reality
with its material details mutually frame one another. They have become
styles of memory that engage with each other and evoke the unlikely bridging
of contrary views. We begin to see each through the lens of the other, as
Stephen may have begun seeing them. One effect of the specific combination
at this crucial juncture in the story is to invite a judgement about the Paterian
aesthetic impulse from the perspective of an impoverished, specifically Irish,
social and economic situation.
Joyce enables us to recognize a crossover and not just a contrast in the styles
that close and follow the beach scene, because he has given us only a few
pages earlier a kitchen scene as a prelude for both later moments. The ‘knife
with a broken ivory handle . . . stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover’
(P 137) that Stephen sees in that earlier scene anticipates the later scattered
breadcrusts, but it also anticipates the moon embedded in the sand. Stephen
on the beach may himself be recalling the earlier image as he half-perceives
and half-creates the later one. If so, he is reaffirming what took place in
the kitchen on his return home after having decided not to become a priest,
when, perhaps to his own surprise, he joined his ragamuffin brothers and
sisters in their singing. When Stephen rejects a religious vocation and chooses
art, he allies himself with the sobering but communal realities represented
by the family situation and not just with heightened, aesthetic experience.
Because the embedded moon carries a memory of the broken knife and
the family along with it, the family situation nests within the visionary scene
rather than simply debunking it. The relation between these portions of the
narrative parallels the relation between modern events and myths in Joyce’s
writing; those relations are not simply ironic. The two kitchen scenes frame
and implicitly comment on the beach scene that comes between them, but
since the framed and framing scenes overlap, the implications are multiple.
They open possibilities for the artist character and the reader rather than prescribing
a single perspective. We carry the mutually-framing recollections of
these earlier related scenes into the second section of part v. Stephen writes
his villanelle in a room in which a soupplate from the previous night’s supper
remains on the table as a link to the descriptions of the kitchen (P 184).
Although Stephen is intent on ‘shrinking from’ the ordinary world, his memories
and his surroundings keep thrusting that world into his thoughts. In
this section, the two apparently antagonistic styles of aesthetic intensity and
objective realism merge, though they continue to alternate. In creativity, as
Joyce here presents it, fantasy, perception, and memory mingle as imaginative
production. Rather than serving a common purpose of protesting convention,
as in the epiphanies, or of mutually debunking one another, fantasy and
realism converge in a style that renders the attempt to produce something
new. The convergence occurs under the auspices of memory, both explicitly
presented and inscribed in phrases repeated from earlier sections. With this
convergence, the style of Stephen’s thinking not only in A Portrait but also
in Ulysses becomes possible. The flame Stephen attempts to keep burning
as he writes is both the visionary intensity of his dream and the emotion he
feels for a real woman. His flame-tending proceeds next to a table on which,
in the midst of composing, he notices a real, burnt-out candle, ‘its tendrils
of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame’; he must write out
his poem as best he can on the back of a torn ‘cigarette packet’ (P 184).
The two styles have been conjoined and transformed to represent writing
proceeding not just as it pleases but against and by means of the limits of
circumstance. Stephen retains the intensity of Pater’s aestheticism, but his
candle is a material object.
The interacting styles of A Portrait begin actualizing a potential in Stephen
for self-correction that is only hinted at in Stephen Hero. But the combination
of self-criticism with intense commitment in his journal suggests goals that
are largely over the horizon. Stephen explicitly distances himself there, for
instance, from his earlier enthusiasm for Yeats’s visionary heroes: ‘Michael
Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round,
he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world.
Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not
yet come into the world’ (P 212). Although Stephen rejects nostalgia about a
delusory past, he does not present convincingly the beauty to come. Stephen
can laugh at some of his own tendencies in ways that anticipate Ulysses, but
he accepts, as most readers probably also do, the truth of his mother’s remark
that he still has much to learn about the heart (P 213). Stephen’s emotional
potential and his artistic talent remain to be developed when he writes the
last, hopeful entries in his journal. The question remains whether Stephen
can take advantage of the disparate conflicting perspectives and experiences
that inform his tale and its telling to forge as the voice of his race the hybrid
style of writing that Joyce constructs as one vehicle for Stephen’s story. Like
Fanon’s ‘zone of occult instability’, Stephen’s portrait turns out to be the
name of a question about the future and its relations to the past, about our
duty not to escape from history but to rewrite it and reinvent ourselves.
sâmbătă, 3 septembrie 2011
Stephen Hero: from restraint to extravagant defiance (The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce)
The fragments of Stephen Hero present Stephen’s interest in the occult, not
in relation to Pater, as in Ulysses, but through his reverence for Yeats’s mystical
short stories. In chapter 23, during Stephen’s second year at the university,
he devotes himself to his literary enthusiasms, including Yeats’s stories
from The Tables of the Law concerning Owen Aherne, Michael Robartes,
and mystical excess. At the same time, he pursues whimsical research into
Renaissance Italian writings at a little-used Dublin library. His recollection in
Ulysses of reading ‘the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas’ ‘in the stagnant
bay of Marsh’s library’ (U 3.107–8), which occurs just before the memory
of the epiphanies, refers to this period. In A Portrait Yeats’s characters are
barely mentioned, and in Ulysses Stephen distances himself from other artists
with mystical tendencies. In Stephen Hero, however, he can ‘believe in the
reality of their existence’ (SH 183/178). Identifying with these ‘outlaws’
(SH 183/178) who possess secret wisdom, Stephen can take a stand against
the restrictive conventions of Irish culture. His writing of epiphanies reflects
the same attitude.
In this work, Yeats’s writing provides a turning point for Stephen that is
rendered largely in terms of his character rather than through style. After
reading Yeats’s stories, he protests extravagantly against the restrictions of
Irish culture. As had many English and Irish artists of the 1890s, including
Oscar Wilde, Stephen chooses the road of excess to protest middle-class
conventions. Around the time that he recites publicly from memory Yeats’s
story, ‘The Tables of the Law’, ‘A certain extravagance began to tinge his
life’ (SH 184/179). His uninhibited behaviour reaches a memorable climax
at the end of the next chapter when he interrupts his Italian tutorial and runs
after Emma Clery to propose a night of lovemaking.
‘The Tables of the Law’ and the spiritual aestheticism it represents contribute
to Stephen’s change in behaviour by providing an artistic focus for his
intense anger against Irish culture. That anger emerges in the aftermath of
his sister’s illness and death, for which there are no equivalents in A Portrait.
Despite unconventional views, eccentricities, frustrations, isolation,
and arrogance, Stephen’s public conduct before her death remains largely
within the bounds of convention. Even though he baits Father Butt with
a question about unseemly passages in Twelfth Night (SH 34/28), Stephen
tolerates for a time the contradictions in his culture, which he reacts to with
amusement (SH 35/29). Later, when the paper he delivers at the Debating
Society is attacked, he still responds in a restrained way, then decides gradually
to withdraw without clamour from groups and activities. Prudence and
tolerance serve Stephen well until he realizes that the issues demand a less
restrained response.
In presenting the death of Isabel due to a serious illness in Stephen’s presence
at the beginning of chapter 23, Joyce draws on his realistic epiphany
concerning the decline toward death of his younger brother Georgie (PSW
179). Besides Stephen’s brother Maurice, Isabel is his only appreciative auditor.
By this point in the narrative, he has largely given up not only on the
Debating Society but also on the young people who gather regularly at
the Daniels’ household, for whom he would sometimes play the piano and
sing. Stephen’s playing for Isabel is obviously motivated by neither desire,
which he feels for Emma, nor rebellious, intellectual comradeship, which
he shares with Maurice. There is desperation and determination, as well as
pathos, in Stephen’s pretence that Isabel is not near death. Stephen cannot
save her, but they achieve a special kind of understanding when ‘once or
twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from
the bed had guessed his meaning’ (SH 166/161). In these scenes we witness
Stephen putting on his mask of seriousness for a more humane purpose than
self-protection. It enables him to undertake a work of kindness and establish
communication with an audience that matters to him. Like Isabel, the
success is short-lived, and Stephen’s moods of selfish indulgence recur, at
times in a style that is the precursor for the Paterian ending of part iv of A
Portrait: ‘in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane’
(SH 167/162).
Rather than disappearing after Isabel’s death, Stephen’s reveries and his
commitment to the kind of spiritualized art he finds in Yeats intensify. But
the situation has changed. In a way that is exceptional in Stephen Hero,
Joyce renders the change briefly through style by describing the funeral in
chapter 23 realistically: ‘Standing beside the closed piano on the morning of
the funeral Stephen heard the coffin bumping down the crooked staircase’
(SH 171/167). Given the piano’s regular appearance and its importance in
the previous chapter, the closed instrument reiterates the shift indicated
stylistically by the disturbing news that Stephen’s mother has reported:
‘There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s . . . stomach’
(SH 168/163). After the funeral, Stephen finally breaks significantly with
decorum by choosing to drink a pint with the carriage drivers rather than
having a more genteel drink with the middle-class mourners. The gesture
marks a permanent shift in his conduct, his relationships within the family,
and his attitude toward the family’s Irish social context.
By juxtaposing in Stephen Hero a Paterian style and a realistic style, though
briefly, Joyce presents Stephen’s difficult, contradictory situation and the
opposing extremes of his attitudes in a way that anticipates his extended
use of those styles in A Portrait. But neither style is suitable for capturing
the energy with which Stephen sometimes thinks and reacts in Stephen Hero
and in the later books. That energy emerges as clowning and laughter in
numerous scenes both preceding and following Isabel’s death. In response
to a self-deprecating story Maurice tells him, for example, he ‘exploded
in laughter’ (SH 64/59). He has to resist the impulse to express his antic
disposition to the President when they discuss the censoring of his paper
(SH 99–103/94–7). During a Good Friday sermon, he indulges ‘his gambling
instinct’ by trying to outpace the priest’s various translations of Consummatum
est, running quickly through a list of possibilities, wagering ‘with
himself as to what word the preacher would select’ (SH 125/120). Much
later, well after Isabel’s death, Stephen and Lynch have a funny conversation
about love and sex (SH 195–7/191–2), and he parodies the mechanical
catechism of his Italian lessons by composing his own humorous alternative
Joyce moves in such passages toward presenting Stephen not only as serious
but as energetically engaged in the way he sometimes is in parts iv and v
of A Portrait and in Ulysses. When Stephen deceptively wears a serious mask
to cover a mocking interior response, he has already begun practising the
‘silence, exile, and cunning’ (P 208), announced near the end of A Portrait,
by which he will refuse to serve home, fatherland, and church. But Joyce has
yet to find an adequate style for presenting at length Stephen’s ‘scornful mind
scampering’ (SH 102/97) in active dialogue with itself and its surroundings.
By contrast with the condensed, allusive internal dialogue we have already
seen in the early part of Ulysses, Stephen’s thoughts in Stephen Hero have a
ponderous, awkward quality that does not capture the energy he sometimes
humorously expresses.
His self-reflections regularly take the form of self-doubts in which Stephen
recognizes that he, like his culture, is full of inconsistencies. He thinks about
or experiences vacillations at various times, including a moment near the end
of chapter 22. The contradictions emerge in Stephen’s doubts about himself:
‘Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger
upon every falsehood it contained’ (SH 167/162). Such misgivings are presented
more extensively shortly after the culminating episode with Emma in
a segment (SH 208–11/204–6) that is stylistically unusual in Stephen Hero
because it seems to present at length, though awkwardly, an internal colloquy.
‘An embassy of nimble pleaders’ from the Church state their positions
(SH 208/204), but these ‘ambassadors’ must be internal ones, since Stephen
is involved in ‘reflections’. The implications for Stephen’s character are clear.
He is criticizing and testing himself, motivated by residual fear and insecurity
about continuing temptations to conform in order to succeed. In
short, he has yet to move entirely beyond the crisis of his break with the
Church.
Because he knows he may be self-deceived, Stephen’s self-doubt involves
ambivalences that are different in kind from the ones he despises in his culture,
which is oblivious to them. After Isabel’s death, Stephen’s encounters
with the cultural contradictions elicit some new responses. He realizes, for
instance, that the members of the Debating Society ‘revered’ the ‘memory of
Terence MacManus’, a revolutionary patriot, ‘not less . . . than the memory
of Cardinal Cullen’, an ultra-conservative clergyman who spoke out against
the nationalists (SH 178/173). Earlier, Stephen might have responded with
restrained amusement, but his response now is total withdrawal and sarcasm.
Stephen’s sensitivity to contradictions leads him to literary projects,
such as love verses and epiphanies, that allow him to resist his society by
working with opposing elements in combination.We hear first about the love
poetry, on which Stephen labours instead of pursuing his academic studies,
between the death of Isabel and his infatuation with Yeats’s stories. Inspired
by Dante’s Vita Nuova, he expresses his love in ‘feudal terminology’, but also
‘a little ironically’: ‘This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with
so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal
fealty because we recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy’
(SH 179/174). In his typically ambivalent fashion, Stephen sees both loss
and gain in transforming the idealizing language of love. What it loses in
‘fierceness’ it gains in ‘amiableness’. Stephen humanizes his poetry by tempering
exaggeration with a sense of human limitations. That Stephen takes
this direction just before he discovers Yeats’s mystical stories suggests that
he will not follow the path of ahistorical, visionary fantasies for long. In his
retrospective response to his verses, Stephen recognizes his own excesses. In
chapter 26, he tells Maurice he has burned them because ‘they were romantic’
(SH 232/226). This judgement about his earlier efforts anticipates Stephen’s
thinking about his epiphanies in Ulysses.
Introduced late in Stephen Hero, the epiphanies enable Stephen to proceed
by means of contradiction. In writing them, he can employ both stark
realism and visionary experience in a mode that, like his love poetry, has
the potential for being internally differential. In the representing of a vacuous
reality, the artist recognizes and rejects its defects; in the evocation
of visionary experience, the artist displaces debased, ordinary reality with a
spiritual alternative. In Stephen Hero, however, Stephen never transforms his
dual epiphanic procedure into anything more than a double gesture of defiance.
An exaggerated swerving between extremes could become the vertigo
of madness, as Stephen himself senses. Despite their excessive, narcissistic
qualities, the epiphanies hold out distantly the possibility of juxtaposing and
merging opposites stylistically to present the oscillations of thought and to
generate alternatives for the future. The stylistic mingling can realize Fanon’s
‘fluctuating movement’ as the dialogical interaction of discourses in an internally
divided culture that, by simultaneously looking forward and looking
back, begins to take on new, unpredictable forms. Joyce moves toward
such stylistic and conceptual possibilities only after abandoning Stephen
Hero.
in relation to Pater, as in Ulysses, but through his reverence for Yeats’s mystical
short stories. In chapter 23, during Stephen’s second year at the university,
he devotes himself to his literary enthusiasms, including Yeats’s stories
from The Tables of the Law concerning Owen Aherne, Michael Robartes,
and mystical excess. At the same time, he pursues whimsical research into
Renaissance Italian writings at a little-used Dublin library. His recollection in
Ulysses of reading ‘the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas’ ‘in the stagnant
bay of Marsh’s library’ (U 3.107–8), which occurs just before the memory
of the epiphanies, refers to this period. In A Portrait Yeats’s characters are
barely mentioned, and in Ulysses Stephen distances himself from other artists
with mystical tendencies. In Stephen Hero, however, he can ‘believe in the
reality of their existence’ (SH 183/178). Identifying with these ‘outlaws’
(SH 183/178) who possess secret wisdom, Stephen can take a stand against
the restrictive conventions of Irish culture. His writing of epiphanies reflects
the same attitude.
In this work, Yeats’s writing provides a turning point for Stephen that is
rendered largely in terms of his character rather than through style. After
reading Yeats’s stories, he protests extravagantly against the restrictions of
Irish culture. As had many English and Irish artists of the 1890s, including
Oscar Wilde, Stephen chooses the road of excess to protest middle-class
conventions. Around the time that he recites publicly from memory Yeats’s
story, ‘The Tables of the Law’, ‘A certain extravagance began to tinge his
life’ (SH 184/179). His uninhibited behaviour reaches a memorable climax
at the end of the next chapter when he interrupts his Italian tutorial and runs
after Emma Clery to propose a night of lovemaking.
‘The Tables of the Law’ and the spiritual aestheticism it represents contribute
to Stephen’s change in behaviour by providing an artistic focus for his
intense anger against Irish culture. That anger emerges in the aftermath of
his sister’s illness and death, for which there are no equivalents in A Portrait.
Despite unconventional views, eccentricities, frustrations, isolation,
and arrogance, Stephen’s public conduct before her death remains largely
within the bounds of convention. Even though he baits Father Butt with
a question about unseemly passages in Twelfth Night (SH 34/28), Stephen
tolerates for a time the contradictions in his culture, which he reacts to with
amusement (SH 35/29). Later, when the paper he delivers at the Debating
Society is attacked, he still responds in a restrained way, then decides gradually
to withdraw without clamour from groups and activities. Prudence and
tolerance serve Stephen well until he realizes that the issues demand a less
restrained response.
In presenting the death of Isabel due to a serious illness in Stephen’s presence
at the beginning of chapter 23, Joyce draws on his realistic epiphany
concerning the decline toward death of his younger brother Georgie (PSW
179). Besides Stephen’s brother Maurice, Isabel is his only appreciative auditor.
By this point in the narrative, he has largely given up not only on the
Debating Society but also on the young people who gather regularly at
the Daniels’ household, for whom he would sometimes play the piano and
sing. Stephen’s playing for Isabel is obviously motivated by neither desire,
which he feels for Emma, nor rebellious, intellectual comradeship, which
he shares with Maurice. There is desperation and determination, as well as
pathos, in Stephen’s pretence that Isabel is not near death. Stephen cannot
save her, but they achieve a special kind of understanding when ‘once or
twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from
the bed had guessed his meaning’ (SH 166/161). In these scenes we witness
Stephen putting on his mask of seriousness for a more humane purpose than
self-protection. It enables him to undertake a work of kindness and establish
communication with an audience that matters to him. Like Isabel, the
success is short-lived, and Stephen’s moods of selfish indulgence recur, at
times in a style that is the precursor for the Paterian ending of part iv of A
Portrait: ‘in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane’
(SH 167/162).
Rather than disappearing after Isabel’s death, Stephen’s reveries and his
commitment to the kind of spiritualized art he finds in Yeats intensify. But
the situation has changed. In a way that is exceptional in Stephen Hero,
Joyce renders the change briefly through style by describing the funeral in
chapter 23 realistically: ‘Standing beside the closed piano on the morning of
the funeral Stephen heard the coffin bumping down the crooked staircase’
(SH 171/167). Given the piano’s regular appearance and its importance in
the previous chapter, the closed instrument reiterates the shift indicated
stylistically by the disturbing news that Stephen’s mother has reported:
‘There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s . . . stomach’
(SH 168/163). After the funeral, Stephen finally breaks significantly with
decorum by choosing to drink a pint with the carriage drivers rather than
having a more genteel drink with the middle-class mourners. The gesture
marks a permanent shift in his conduct, his relationships within the family,
and his attitude toward the family’s Irish social context.
By juxtaposing in Stephen Hero a Paterian style and a realistic style, though
briefly, Joyce presents Stephen’s difficult, contradictory situation and the
opposing extremes of his attitudes in a way that anticipates his extended
use of those styles in A Portrait. But neither style is suitable for capturing
the energy with which Stephen sometimes thinks and reacts in Stephen Hero
and in the later books. That energy emerges as clowning and laughter in
numerous scenes both preceding and following Isabel’s death. In response
to a self-deprecating story Maurice tells him, for example, he ‘exploded
in laughter’ (SH 64/59). He has to resist the impulse to express his antic
disposition to the President when they discuss the censoring of his paper
(SH 99–103/94–7). During a Good Friday sermon, he indulges ‘his gambling
instinct’ by trying to outpace the priest’s various translations of Consummatum
est, running quickly through a list of possibilities, wagering ‘with
himself as to what word the preacher would select’ (SH 125/120). Much
later, well after Isabel’s death, Stephen and Lynch have a funny conversation
about love and sex (SH 195–7/191–2), and he parodies the mechanical
catechism of his Italian lessons by composing his own humorous alternative
Joyce moves in such passages toward presenting Stephen not only as serious
but as energetically engaged in the way he sometimes is in parts iv and v
of A Portrait and in Ulysses. When Stephen deceptively wears a serious mask
to cover a mocking interior response, he has already begun practising the
‘silence, exile, and cunning’ (P 208), announced near the end of A Portrait,
by which he will refuse to serve home, fatherland, and church. But Joyce has
yet to find an adequate style for presenting at length Stephen’s ‘scornful mind
scampering’ (SH 102/97) in active dialogue with itself and its surroundings.
By contrast with the condensed, allusive internal dialogue we have already
seen in the early part of Ulysses, Stephen’s thoughts in Stephen Hero have a
ponderous, awkward quality that does not capture the energy he sometimes
humorously expresses.
His self-reflections regularly take the form of self-doubts in which Stephen
recognizes that he, like his culture, is full of inconsistencies. He thinks about
or experiences vacillations at various times, including a moment near the end
of chapter 22. The contradictions emerge in Stephen’s doubts about himself:
‘Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger
upon every falsehood it contained’ (SH 167/162). Such misgivings are presented
more extensively shortly after the culminating episode with Emma in
a segment (SH 208–11/204–6) that is stylistically unusual in Stephen Hero
because it seems to present at length, though awkwardly, an internal colloquy.
‘An embassy of nimble pleaders’ from the Church state their positions
(SH 208/204), but these ‘ambassadors’ must be internal ones, since Stephen
is involved in ‘reflections’. The implications for Stephen’s character are clear.
He is criticizing and testing himself, motivated by residual fear and insecurity
about continuing temptations to conform in order to succeed. In
short, he has yet to move entirely beyond the crisis of his break with the
Church.
Because he knows he may be self-deceived, Stephen’s self-doubt involves
ambivalences that are different in kind from the ones he despises in his culture,
which is oblivious to them. After Isabel’s death, Stephen’s encounters
with the cultural contradictions elicit some new responses. He realizes, for
instance, that the members of the Debating Society ‘revered’ the ‘memory of
Terence MacManus’, a revolutionary patriot, ‘not less . . . than the memory
of Cardinal Cullen’, an ultra-conservative clergyman who spoke out against
the nationalists (SH 178/173). Earlier, Stephen might have responded with
restrained amusement, but his response now is total withdrawal and sarcasm.
Stephen’s sensitivity to contradictions leads him to literary projects,
such as love verses and epiphanies, that allow him to resist his society by
working with opposing elements in combination.We hear first about the love
poetry, on which Stephen labours instead of pursuing his academic studies,
between the death of Isabel and his infatuation with Yeats’s stories. Inspired
by Dante’s Vita Nuova, he expresses his love in ‘feudal terminology’, but also
‘a little ironically’: ‘This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with
so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal
fealty because we recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy’
(SH 179/174). In his typically ambivalent fashion, Stephen sees both loss
and gain in transforming the idealizing language of love. What it loses in
‘fierceness’ it gains in ‘amiableness’. Stephen humanizes his poetry by tempering
exaggeration with a sense of human limitations. That Stephen takes
this direction just before he discovers Yeats’s mystical stories suggests that
he will not follow the path of ahistorical, visionary fantasies for long. In his
retrospective response to his verses, Stephen recognizes his own excesses. In
chapter 26, he tells Maurice he has burned them because ‘they were romantic’
(SH 232/226). This judgement about his earlier efforts anticipates Stephen’s
thinking about his epiphanies in Ulysses.
Introduced late in Stephen Hero, the epiphanies enable Stephen to proceed
by means of contradiction. In writing them, he can employ both stark
realism and visionary experience in a mode that, like his love poetry, has
the potential for being internally differential. In the representing of a vacuous
reality, the artist recognizes and rejects its defects; in the evocation
of visionary experience, the artist displaces debased, ordinary reality with a
spiritual alternative. In Stephen Hero, however, Stephen never transforms his
dual epiphanic procedure into anything more than a double gesture of defiance.
An exaggerated swerving between extremes could become the vertigo
of madness, as Stephen himself senses. Despite their excessive, narcissistic
qualities, the epiphanies hold out distantly the possibility of juxtaposing and
merging opposites stylistically to present the oscillations of thought and to
generate alternatives for the future. The stylistic mingling can realize Fanon’s
‘fluctuating movement’ as the dialogical interaction of discourses in an internally
divided culture that, by simultaneously looking forward and looking
back, begins to take on new, unpredictable forms. Joyce moves toward
such stylistic and conceptual possibilities only after abandoning Stephen
Hero.
Transformations of style and history: from Stephen Hero to Ulysses (the Cambridge Companion to James Joyce)
We can begin measuring the distance Stephen and his creator travel away
from aestheticism by comparing the central character of Stephen Hero, called
Stephen Daedalus, with Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Near the end of what
has survived of Stephen Hero, Stephen claims that one function of writing
is ‘to record . . . epiphanies’, ‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’
(SH 216/211). By epiphany he means ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase
of the mind itself’. Stephen’s interest in writing evocative prose vignettes, of
the sort Joyce himself wrote, is aesthetic, but ‘vulgarity’ invites a realistic
style. Joyce moved beyond Pater’s influence when he produced the realism
of Dubliners (written 1904–7), which is antithetical to Pater’s lush, late-
Romantic writing. Stephen has yet to take that step in A Portrait, where he
thinks admiringly in part iv of ‘a lucid supple periodic prose’ (P 140) that
derives from Pater. His thoughts include a diction of ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trembling’
(P 145) that also evokes Pater. The continuing or lingering influence
of aestheticism on Stephen Daedalus and his counterpart in A Portrait and
Ulysses complicates the impression that he may be moving toward the kind
of writing that Joyce himself produced.
The evidence concerning Stephen’s artistic potential, including his readiness
to face and affect historical realities, is mixed, and the problem of judging
him is difficult for several reasons.7 Prior to Ulysses, we may be dealing
with two characters, both named Stephen, about whom different judgements
can be made, since the narratives of Stephen Hero and A Portrait differ in
more significant ways than the spelling of the character’s surname. Although
these characters resemble each other, only provisional identification is warranted.
Later, in Ulysses, Stephen’s experiences and views from A Portrait
carry over but not with any great force or frequency. Joyce complicates our
response to the artist character(s) by assigning many details from his own life
to Stephen. In his own publishing career, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Stephen
Daedalus’ (JJ 164) when he published early versions of three Dubliners stories.
Joyce’s frequent intimate renderings of Stephen’s thinking in A Portrait
and Ulysses further contribute to blurring the boundary between narrator
and character, despite the third-person narration. Since Joyce is writing fiction
and not pure autobiography, it is important not to identify the real
author in any absolute way with the young artist character; nevertheless, the
texts frequently encourage us to consider the alignment.
In presenting Stephen prior to Ulysses, Joyce employs the two epiphanic
modes of stark realism – ‘the vulgarity of speech or of gesture’ – and visionary
fantasy – ‘a memorable phase of the mind itself’ – as delimiting extremes in his
character. In both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, Stephen alternates between
visionary and material, internal and external. He continues to feel attracted
by visionary possibilities until the end of A Portrait and is influenced by
them when he writes both his villanelle and his journal. But the evocations of
Stephen’s competing allegiances differ substantially in the two narratives that
focus primarily on him. In Stephen Hero Stephen is both ruthlessly analytical
and visionary.At a crucial moment in his development, his encounter with the
disturbing reality of death intensifies both his critical bent and his visionary
yearnings. In A Portrait, by contrast, Joyce presents the two perspectives of
realism and fantasy not primarily as aspects of character but fundamentally
as aspects of style. Having emerged as mutually modifying and mutually
challenging attitudes, these styles of Stephen’s thinking overlap and evoke
each other. In A Portrait realistic and visionary are complexly intertwined
elements in a style emphasizing memory. The double temporal orientation
points toward Joyce’s more allusive initial style in Ulysses.
Memory is not just personal inAPortrait and Ulysses. It is also cultural and
historical. Joyce’s writings recognize equally the cultural memory of myth
and the historical realities of contemporary life, as well as the process by
which those present realities have come into being. One of Joyce’s achievements
that eludes Stephen even in Ulysses is the merging of these kinds of
memory in styles that also acknowledge the personal and the aesthetic. In
Ulysses Stephen says that he is ‘trying to awake’ from the nightmare that
is history (U 3.377). Instead of treating history as a bad dream from which
we might wake up and escape, Joyce engages with history, using a realistic
style strategically in a mixture of styles that interprets and transforms history
and realistic detail by merging them with myth. When Joyce attributes
mythic aspects to characters in styles that both recognize and challenge the
ostensible limits of realism and history, he actualizes a potential that Stephen
has yet to grasp. In his dialogue on art, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Wilde
has Gilbert say that ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.’8 Joyce
accepts this duty but understands that when we make history we cannot
do so just as we please. By calling his artist character ‘Dedalus’, a name
simultaneously passed on from Stephen’s Irish father and bestowed by the
Irish writer of the narrative, Joyce realizes a cultural memory that invites a
forward direction toward what ‘has not yet come into the world’ (P 212).
Dedalus is simultaneously the artist character’s heritage and a name that he
can live up to only by influencing the history of the future. In A Portrait, it
is not obvious that Stephen is ready to take a step that neither repeats the
past nor escapes from history. The dates at the close of the book, 1904 and
1914, however, point forward from the narrative’s end to a future a decade
later in which Stephen is more likely to take such a step.
In Ulysses Stephen remembers his former commitment to an art that captures
spiritual manifestations and transcends history. During the recollection,
which occurs in the third episode, Stephen is again on the beach and
may remember his former allegiance to a spiritual, Paterian notion of art
because the surroundings remind him of the earlier beach scene reported
in A Portrait. An important event has intervened between these two scenes.
Stephen’s mother has died during the unnarrated period following the end
of A Portrait and preceding the beginning of Ulysses. During the day of
Ulysses, the fact of her death almost exactly one year earlier is the often
unstated background for Stephen’s thinking, including this memory. Joyce
turns to an encounter with death, like the one involving Stephen’s sister in
Stephen Hero, as he composes an alternative for both realism and fantasy.
Those earlier styles are being complicated and displaced by a mixed style
that involves a recognition of death, that is, a hybrid style that evokes our
mortality and the mortality of the artist.
Stephen’s remembrance, in which he addresses himself, focuses on his
epiphanies:
I was young . . . Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you
read his F?Oyes, but I prefer Q. Yes, butWis wonderful.Oyes,W. Remember
your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if
you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone
was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico
della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages
of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .
(U 3.136–46)
The passage provides stylistically the position Joyce reaches soon after A
Portrait. There is nothing quite like this allusive, parodic, internal dialogue
in either Stephen Hero or Dubliners. The style of A Portrait comes
closer to it, prepares the way for it, but does not fully reach it. The language
reflects on and reinterprets the past. In this self-mocking moment,
Stephen retrospectively places his epiphanies among his grandiose, youthful
projects, as adolescent fantasies. He has turned mystical traditions to ironic
purposes.
With its exaggerated use of the impersonal pronoun, ‘one’, and its evocation
of art’s timeless quality, the passage makes fun of Pater’s essays, in particular
his ‘Pico della Mirandola’.9 This is not the first time Stephen has turned
away from enthusiasms. The turning away is always only partial because an
effect remains. The most obvious example of the pattern is Stephen’s commitment
to the Catholic Church. As many critics have pointed out, his religious
upbringing, including especially his education by the Jesuits, continues to
inform the way he thinks. The mixture of intimate knowledge and scepticism
in the Ulyssean Stephen’s thoughts, his former attraction but present
aversion to the aesthetic reverence that inspired the epiphanies, points to one
of Joyce’s major stylistic achievements. Joyce develops this double temporal
perspective, the perspective of memory, in the works written before Ulysses,
especially in A Portrait and ‘The Dead’. By means of it we can experience
simultaneously both scepticism and the deeply-felt impact of thoughts and
events in the central character’s changing sensibility. Joyce’s inherently double,
or multiple, interiorized style renders the ambivalence and dissonance
of Stephen’s mental life, especially the interplay of self-scrutiny with recollection.
As Joyce complexly presents them, ambivalence, dissonance, and
interplay inform the mental process of creativity. They also embody what
Wilde called ‘the truth of masks’, that is ‘a truth in art’, an insight whose
‘contradictory is also true’.10
Joyce’s early fiction moves from the episodic fragments of Stephen Hero,
through the realistic stories of Dubliners, to the discontinuous narrative and
flamboyant narration of A Portrait. The shift is from either fantasies or seemingly
objective, realistic presentations to recollections or other moments of
mental activity, structured like memories, that mingle the imaginative and the
ostensibly objective in ways that enable a judgement and movement forward.
The mediation announces itself stylistically, often through obscure allusions
and personal references that hinder as well as enhance our understanding;
this style is opaque rather than transparent. Because of the differences from
the earlier narratives, including stylistic ones, the passage from Ulysses gives
us a version of Stephen’s development, through and away from mystical
aestheticism, against which we can gauge the earlier versions. Although his
trajectory is toward allusive mental play and self-mockery, the frame for
Stephen’s sometimes carnivalized thinking in Ulysses and earlier is his situation
as Irish and an artist. He is able, literally at times, to close his eyes to his
surroundings, but the reader recognizes, as Stephen also must, that he faces
pressure from both his Irish friends and the English: Davin and the English
priest and, in Ulysses, Buck Mulligan and the Englishman, Haines.
from aestheticism by comparing the central character of Stephen Hero, called
Stephen Daedalus, with Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Near the end of what
has survived of Stephen Hero, Stephen claims that one function of writing
is ‘to record . . . epiphanies’, ‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’
(SH 216/211). By epiphany he means ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase
of the mind itself’. Stephen’s interest in writing evocative prose vignettes, of
the sort Joyce himself wrote, is aesthetic, but ‘vulgarity’ invites a realistic
style. Joyce moved beyond Pater’s influence when he produced the realism
of Dubliners (written 1904–7), which is antithetical to Pater’s lush, late-
Romantic writing. Stephen has yet to take that step in A Portrait, where he
thinks admiringly in part iv of ‘a lucid supple periodic prose’ (P 140) that
derives from Pater. His thoughts include a diction of ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trembling’
(P 145) that also evokes Pater. The continuing or lingering influence
of aestheticism on Stephen Daedalus and his counterpart in A Portrait and
Ulysses complicates the impression that he may be moving toward the kind
of writing that Joyce himself produced.
The evidence concerning Stephen’s artistic potential, including his readiness
to face and affect historical realities, is mixed, and the problem of judging
him is difficult for several reasons.7 Prior to Ulysses, we may be dealing
with two characters, both named Stephen, about whom different judgements
can be made, since the narratives of Stephen Hero and A Portrait differ in
more significant ways than the spelling of the character’s surname. Although
these characters resemble each other, only provisional identification is warranted.
Later, in Ulysses, Stephen’s experiences and views from A Portrait
carry over but not with any great force or frequency. Joyce complicates our
response to the artist character(s) by assigning many details from his own life
to Stephen. In his own publishing career, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Stephen
Daedalus’ (JJ 164) when he published early versions of three Dubliners stories.
Joyce’s frequent intimate renderings of Stephen’s thinking in A Portrait
and Ulysses further contribute to blurring the boundary between narrator
and character, despite the third-person narration. Since Joyce is writing fiction
and not pure autobiography, it is important not to identify the real
author in any absolute way with the young artist character; nevertheless, the
texts frequently encourage us to consider the alignment.
In presenting Stephen prior to Ulysses, Joyce employs the two epiphanic
modes of stark realism – ‘the vulgarity of speech or of gesture’ – and visionary
fantasy – ‘a memorable phase of the mind itself’ – as delimiting extremes in his
character. In both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, Stephen alternates between
visionary and material, internal and external. He continues to feel attracted
by visionary possibilities until the end of A Portrait and is influenced by
them when he writes both his villanelle and his journal. But the evocations of
Stephen’s competing allegiances differ substantially in the two narratives that
focus primarily on him. In Stephen Hero Stephen is both ruthlessly analytical
and visionary.At a crucial moment in his development, his encounter with the
disturbing reality of death intensifies both his critical bent and his visionary
yearnings. In A Portrait, by contrast, Joyce presents the two perspectives of
realism and fantasy not primarily as aspects of character but fundamentally
as aspects of style. Having emerged as mutually modifying and mutually
challenging attitudes, these styles of Stephen’s thinking overlap and evoke
each other. In A Portrait realistic and visionary are complexly intertwined
elements in a style emphasizing memory. The double temporal orientation
points toward Joyce’s more allusive initial style in Ulysses.
Memory is not just personal inAPortrait and Ulysses. It is also cultural and
historical. Joyce’s writings recognize equally the cultural memory of myth
and the historical realities of contemporary life, as well as the process by
which those present realities have come into being. One of Joyce’s achievements
that eludes Stephen even in Ulysses is the merging of these kinds of
memory in styles that also acknowledge the personal and the aesthetic. In
Ulysses Stephen says that he is ‘trying to awake’ from the nightmare that
is history (U 3.377). Instead of treating history as a bad dream from which
we might wake up and escape, Joyce engages with history, using a realistic
style strategically in a mixture of styles that interprets and transforms history
and realistic detail by merging them with myth. When Joyce attributes
mythic aspects to characters in styles that both recognize and challenge the
ostensible limits of realism and history, he actualizes a potential that Stephen
has yet to grasp. In his dialogue on art, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Wilde
has Gilbert say that ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.’8 Joyce
accepts this duty but understands that when we make history we cannot
do so just as we please. By calling his artist character ‘Dedalus’, a name
simultaneously passed on from Stephen’s Irish father and bestowed by the
Irish writer of the narrative, Joyce realizes a cultural memory that invites a
forward direction toward what ‘has not yet come into the world’ (P 212).
Dedalus is simultaneously the artist character’s heritage and a name that he
can live up to only by influencing the history of the future. In A Portrait, it
is not obvious that Stephen is ready to take a step that neither repeats the
past nor escapes from history. The dates at the close of the book, 1904 and
1914, however, point forward from the narrative’s end to a future a decade
later in which Stephen is more likely to take such a step.
In Ulysses Stephen remembers his former commitment to an art that captures
spiritual manifestations and transcends history. During the recollection,
which occurs in the third episode, Stephen is again on the beach and
may remember his former allegiance to a spiritual, Paterian notion of art
because the surroundings remind him of the earlier beach scene reported
in A Portrait. An important event has intervened between these two scenes.
Stephen’s mother has died during the unnarrated period following the end
of A Portrait and preceding the beginning of Ulysses. During the day of
Ulysses, the fact of her death almost exactly one year earlier is the often
unstated background for Stephen’s thinking, including this memory. Joyce
turns to an encounter with death, like the one involving Stephen’s sister in
Stephen Hero, as he composes an alternative for both realism and fantasy.
Those earlier styles are being complicated and displaced by a mixed style
that involves a recognition of death, that is, a hybrid style that evokes our
mortality and the mortality of the artist.
Stephen’s remembrance, in which he addresses himself, focuses on his
epiphanies:
I was young . . . Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you
read his F?Oyes, but I prefer Q. Yes, butWis wonderful.Oyes,W. Remember
your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if
you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone
was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico
della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages
of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .
(U 3.136–46)
The passage provides stylistically the position Joyce reaches soon after A
Portrait. There is nothing quite like this allusive, parodic, internal dialogue
in either Stephen Hero or Dubliners. The style of A Portrait comes
closer to it, prepares the way for it, but does not fully reach it. The language
reflects on and reinterprets the past. In this self-mocking moment,
Stephen retrospectively places his epiphanies among his grandiose, youthful
projects, as adolescent fantasies. He has turned mystical traditions to ironic
purposes.
With its exaggerated use of the impersonal pronoun, ‘one’, and its evocation
of art’s timeless quality, the passage makes fun of Pater’s essays, in particular
his ‘Pico della Mirandola’.9 This is not the first time Stephen has turned
away from enthusiasms. The turning away is always only partial because an
effect remains. The most obvious example of the pattern is Stephen’s commitment
to the Catholic Church. As many critics have pointed out, his religious
upbringing, including especially his education by the Jesuits, continues to
inform the way he thinks. The mixture of intimate knowledge and scepticism
in the Ulyssean Stephen’s thoughts, his former attraction but present
aversion to the aesthetic reverence that inspired the epiphanies, points to one
of Joyce’s major stylistic achievements. Joyce develops this double temporal
perspective, the perspective of memory, in the works written before Ulysses,
especially in A Portrait and ‘The Dead’. By means of it we can experience
simultaneously both scepticism and the deeply-felt impact of thoughts and
events in the central character’s changing sensibility. Joyce’s inherently double,
or multiple, interiorized style renders the ambivalence and dissonance
of Stephen’s mental life, especially the interplay of self-scrutiny with recollection.
As Joyce complexly presents them, ambivalence, dissonance, and
interplay inform the mental process of creativity. They also embody what
Wilde called ‘the truth of masks’, that is ‘a truth in art’, an insight whose
‘contradictory is also true’.10
Joyce’s early fiction moves from the episodic fragments of Stephen Hero,
through the realistic stories of Dubliners, to the discontinuous narrative and
flamboyant narration of A Portrait. The shift is from either fantasies or seemingly
objective, realistic presentations to recollections or other moments of
mental activity, structured like memories, that mingle the imaginative and the
ostensibly objective in ways that enable a judgement and movement forward.
The mediation announces itself stylistically, often through obscure allusions
and personal references that hinder as well as enhance our understanding;
this style is opaque rather than transparent. Because of the differences from
the earlier narratives, including stylistic ones, the passage from Ulysses gives
us a version of Stephen’s development, through and away from mystical
aestheticism, against which we can gauge the earlier versions. Although his
trajectory is toward allusive mental play and self-mockery, the frame for
Stephen’s sometimes carnivalized thinking in Ulysses and earlier is his situation
as Irish and an artist. He is able, literally at times, to close his eyes to his
surroundings, but the reader recognizes, as Stephen also must, that he faces
pressure from both his Irish friends and the English: Davin and the English
priest and, in Ulysses, Buck Mulligan and the Englishman, Haines.
The fates of Irish Artists: Wilde, Joyce, aestheticism, and nationalism( The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce)
Early readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) aware of
the recent history of Irish writing would probably have heard an echo of
Oscar Wilde (1856–1900) in Joyce’s title. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891) concerns an artist, the painter Basil Hallward, who produces
a portrait of the young Dorian Gray that, like Joyce’s work, portrays and
reveals the artist himself. Hallward’s painting of a young man is ‘a portrait
of the artist’, as Hallward declares in the first chapter of Wilde’s book.1 The
Greek names given to the central characters in both works invite the association,
which yields a difference: Stephen Dedalus’s story of intended escape
from Ireland’s limitations contrasts with Dorian Gray’s self-destruction in
England. Dorian murders the artist and kills himself, while Stephen tries to
bring himself into being as an artist. Wilde is never mentioned in A Portrait,
as he is in Ulysses (1922), perhaps because Joyce was more at ease later in his
career about acknowledging his precursor’s place in his work. He may also
have felt that the similarity of the titles was sufficiently evident to conjure
Wilde’s book and his life as important contexts for reading A Portrait.2
Joyce’s essay, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of “Salom´e”’, confirms that he was
thinking about Wilde and Dorian Gray while he was writing A Portrait.
The occasion for the essay, published in an Italian newspaper, was the 1909
performance in Trieste of Richard Strauss’s opera, Salom´e, whose libretto
was inspired by Wilde’s play of the same name. 1909 was the mid-point of
the decade, noted at the end of A Portrait, that it took Joyce to transform
his manuscript of Stephen Hero (begun in 1904) into A Portrait (published
serially beginning in 1914). The article indicates that Joyce knew Wilde’s
works well, that he recognized Wilde’s deeply Irish qualities, and that he
blamed the English for Wilde’s downfall. Joyce also mentions the influential
English writer, Walter Pater (1839–94), who taught at Oxford when Wilde
studied there. The important role Pater plays in Wilde’s novel and in Joyce’s
essay arises from his praise of both beauty and the wisdom to be gained
through art. Pater’s writings were central to English aestheticism of the 1880s
and 1890s, a movement whose attitudes were identified in the public mind
with the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’. Wilde and Pater, a maligned Irish writer
and an influential English writer, both associated with aestheticism, provide
contexts and significant details for Joyce’s writing. Although influenced by
Pater’s aestheticism, mediated primarily by Wilde and the Irish poet, W. B.
Yeats (1865–1939), Joyce and his young artist character encounter difficulties
and project goals that require a different engagement with history and
material reality than the Paterian worship of beauty enables.
After his imprisonment in England for unlawful acts of ‘gross indecency’,
Wilde, the most brilliant playwright of the English theatre in the 1890s, died
in poverty in France in 1900 during Joyce’s second year of university studies
in Dublin. Joyce’s antipathy for the English with regard to Wilde’s case,
particularly his sense that Wilde was their victim, is clear when he asserts
that Wilde shared the fate of his namesake, Oscar, only son of Ossian in
Celtic myth, ‘tragically killed by the hand of his host while sitting at table’
(OCPW 148). Joyce takes exception to the idea that Wilde was ‘a monster
of perversion’ who emerged inexplicably from ‘the modern civilization of
England’, describing him instead as ‘the logical and inevitable product of the
Anglo-Saxon college and university system, a system of seclusion and secrecy’
(OCPW150). The ‘English authorities’ punished him, in Joyce’s view, not for
committing a crime but rather for provoking a ‘scandal’ (OCPW 150), that
is, for bringing into the public eye acts that many others had committed as
well. In this regard, Wilde resembles the Irish parliamentary leader, Charles
Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), an advocate of Irish Home Rule, or limited
autonomy, who is mentioned prominently in parts i, ii, and v of A Portrait.
LikeWilde, Parnell was hounded by the English press, who made sensational
news out of sexual scandals. By leaving out of the narrative of A Portrait
the death of Stephen’s sister, harrowingly described in Stephen Hero, and the
death of his mother, mentioned emphatically in Ulysses, Joyce heightens the
impact of Parnell’s death on his young character and on readers early in
A Portrait. That impact is not primarily personal, as are the deaths of his
sister and mother, but political in ways that affect our response to the rest of
Stephen’s story. Instead of Oscar Wilde’s death, we are invited to consider
the fate of a mythic figure, Icarus, who, like Wilde, flew dangerously high.
Unable to fulfil their promise of achievement, the political leader, the artistic
precursor, and the mythic youth combine to colour from the outset our sense
of the issues and the risks for Stephen.
Considering Wilde’s fate, it is understandable that, rather than following
his path to England, Stephen Dedalus chooses the Continent to make a
writing career, as did Joyce. The decision is one step toward changing a history
of disappointments by avoiding a repetition. As critics have frequently
noted, Stephen’s resentment toward the English is clear in the lengthy scene in
part v (P 154–60) in which he talks with the English priest who is the dean
of studies at University College, Dublin, where Stephen is a student. The
scene’s mixture of styles is also significant. Because the priest is an English
convert to Roman Catholicism, he represents two foreign presences within
Irish culture. Just before the encounter, Stephen asks himself if the College,
as a Jesuit building, is ‘extraterritorial’, a place where he is ‘walking among
aliens’ (P 155). Stephen and the priest are at odds over the English language,
specifically the words tundish and funnel, both part of the English lexicon,
though tundish is rarer. When Stephen thinks to himself ‘How different are
the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine’, he has in view
differences in pronunciation and in meaning. Especially because Parnell’s
Home Rule initiative for Ireland had not succeeded, the Irish as a nation did
not think of home with the same sense of autonomy and security as could
the English. Despite the fact that the priest is ‘a countryman of Ben Jonson’
(P 159), whose songs please Stephen (P 148), he misunderstands Stephen’s
figurative use of the word ‘lamp’ (P 157) during their conversation. The
divergences are multiple.
In his critical probing of English attitudes, Joyce follows Wilde in Dorian
Gray by echoing Pater’s writings. The echoing occurs as an embedded joke
in the language and action of the scene involving the English priest. The
Englishman is presented as intellectually flatfooted in the act of trying to
teach Stephen ‘an art’, one of ‘the useful arts’, ‘lighting a fire’ (P 155). The
priest’s action and speech embody mundanely and ironically one of Walter
Pater’s best-known assertions, from the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance,
concerning art’s ability to stimulate impressions with an intensity like fire:
‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is
success in life.’3 Pater teaches not the lighting of a literal fire but the kindling
and maintaining of an internal flame. Further, in the long passages of
thought, Stephen responds critically to the priest with language that derives
from Pater. Just after the priest reveals ‘one of the secrets’ of building a
fire, ‘Not too much coal’, Stephen thinks about the man’s lack of ‘beauty’,
despite a history of ‘tending . . . , bearing . . . , waiting . . . , striking’ (P 155).
Stephen’s rhetoric of beauty and his present participles evoke Pater, whose
formulations frequently include them. This Irish student has internalized the
techniques of an English writer for use against another Englishman whose
act of flame tending is itself a bathetic embodiment of the English writer’s
own statements. He mimics in order to undermine. The ironic framing and
multiple implications of the language representing scene and thinking keep
the style from being reducible to any single perspective. Rather than being
univocal, the style tends toward a polyphony that challenges the literal without
abandoning it.
Like Wilde in Dorian Gray, Joyce uses Paterian language without providing
explicit indications in the narrative that we should accept or reject it.
The lack of overt guidance leaves the reader to consider how to measure the
irony, which in Wilde’s case is arguably deep and directed with a vengeance
against English attitudes that he links to aestheticism.4 Joyce’s strategy is
to provide a mixture of styles as the context for challenging and measuring
the adequacy of aesthetic tendencies, whose rhetoric he turns against
itself. Although still under the influence of Pater at the end of A Portrait,
Stephen has come a long distance toward breaking away, in part by means
of a countervailing, grittier style of thinking that is reflected in the writing.
Joyce responds ironically and sceptically to Pater when he has the English
priest tend a flame and when he juxtaposes in Stephen’s experiences Paterian
aesthetic moments with contrary realistic ones. In turning away from Pater
toward writing that takes the body and history into account, Joyce’s artist
resists a siren call from England. He hears but does not obey, heading instead
for other shores on which the Irish writer is less likely to meet the fate of
Oscar Wilde.
The mixture of styles that begins developing in A Portrait renders memory
in ways that engage readers in a process of looking back critically and also
looking forward. The engaged and engaging mix takes advantage of the
diverse, contradictory Irish situation that Stephen faces in order to displace
more single-minded styles that might tend to perpetuate the way things have
been. The shift is from aestheticism, which appears apolitical in its emphasis
on beauty, toward an aesthetic politics, an art that recognizes its embodiment
and its responsibilities within history. A Portrait develops toward the more
extravagantly diverse writing of Ulysses, toward a hybrid style that, through
mimicry, amalgamation, and transformation, allows us to occupy multiple
perspectives virtually simultaneously. The tendency is toward self-correction.
Conceptually and politically, the mixed style corresponds to the ‘zone of
occult instability’ and ‘fluctuating movement’ that Frantz Fanon identified
as the third stage in generating a national consciousness within a culture that
has been dominated from the outside, as Ireland had been by England.5 Joyce
was not in sympathy with the Irish tendencies that correspond with Fanon’s
first two stages: assimilation to the values and customs of the dominant
culture, followed by aggressive rejection of that culture through advocating
indigenous practices. Joyce was neither a ‘West Briton’ (D 149, SH 69/64),
that is, a British sympathizer who behaved as though Ireland were a western
province of England, nor a supporter of Irish nationalism as an uncritical
return to cultural roots.6
Stephen’s critical attitude toward the English priest is matched by his determination
in his conversation with his Irish nationalist friend Davin a few
pages later (P 169–71) not to accede to Irish pressures to conform. Asserting
that ‘a man’s country comes first’, that it has priority over being ‘a poet
or mystic’ (P 171), Davin advises Stephen to ‘Try to be one of us’ (P 170).
Stephen responds that, although Davin thinks him ‘a monster’, ‘This race
and this country and this life produced me’ (P 170). His statement echoes
Joyce’s assertion that Wilde was the product of cultural institutions, not a
‘monster of perversion’.
Stephen’s insight about himself and how he is mistakenly viewed is cognate
with an insight about Wilde that may be true of the artist in general,
with these Irish artists as central instances. In Stephen’s case, however, the
threat to his freedom is not primarily England but Ireland, whom he calls
‘the old sow that eats her farrow’ (P 171). Stephen identifies the ‘nets flung
at’ the soul in Ireland ‘to hold it back from flight’, including ‘nationality,
language, and religion’. Rather than trying to be ‘one of us’, he will ‘try
to fly by those nets’ (P 171). His statements here are double. By flight he
means both leaving the earth with the equivalent of wings and a more practical,
but necessary, flight, literal escape from the pressures to conform in
Ireland. ‘Fly by’ suggests avoiding the nets, but it can also mean flying by
means of them, that is, turning them to advantage selectively and strategically.
Stephen’s Paterian rhetoric directed against the English priest is one
example of transforming a potentially entangling net, though not an Irish
one. Joyce’s mixing of distinctly Irish elements of scene, behaviour, thinking,
and speech in a composite style also turns nets, those that Stephen mentions,
to other purposes. By contrast with more single-minded, monological styles,
Joyce’s diverse style remembers rather than forgets as part of a dialogical
process that resists instead of accepting. A critical style of recollection that
collects and transforms diverse elements is not, however, available to Joyce
or to Stephen from the start. Joyce earns it over time. Whether his artist
character will do so is an open question.
the recent history of Irish writing would probably have heard an echo of
Oscar Wilde (1856–1900) in Joyce’s title. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891) concerns an artist, the painter Basil Hallward, who produces
a portrait of the young Dorian Gray that, like Joyce’s work, portrays and
reveals the artist himself. Hallward’s painting of a young man is ‘a portrait
of the artist’, as Hallward declares in the first chapter of Wilde’s book.1 The
Greek names given to the central characters in both works invite the association,
which yields a difference: Stephen Dedalus’s story of intended escape
from Ireland’s limitations contrasts with Dorian Gray’s self-destruction in
England. Dorian murders the artist and kills himself, while Stephen tries to
bring himself into being as an artist. Wilde is never mentioned in A Portrait,
as he is in Ulysses (1922), perhaps because Joyce was more at ease later in his
career about acknowledging his precursor’s place in his work. He may also
have felt that the similarity of the titles was sufficiently evident to conjure
Wilde’s book and his life as important contexts for reading A Portrait.2
Joyce’s essay, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of “Salom´e”’, confirms that he was
thinking about Wilde and Dorian Gray while he was writing A Portrait.
The occasion for the essay, published in an Italian newspaper, was the 1909
performance in Trieste of Richard Strauss’s opera, Salom´e, whose libretto
was inspired by Wilde’s play of the same name. 1909 was the mid-point of
the decade, noted at the end of A Portrait, that it took Joyce to transform
his manuscript of Stephen Hero (begun in 1904) into A Portrait (published
serially beginning in 1914). The article indicates that Joyce knew Wilde’s
works well, that he recognized Wilde’s deeply Irish qualities, and that he
blamed the English for Wilde’s downfall. Joyce also mentions the influential
English writer, Walter Pater (1839–94), who taught at Oxford when Wilde
studied there. The important role Pater plays in Wilde’s novel and in Joyce’s
essay arises from his praise of both beauty and the wisdom to be gained
through art. Pater’s writings were central to English aestheticism of the 1880s
and 1890s, a movement whose attitudes were identified in the public mind
with the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’. Wilde and Pater, a maligned Irish writer
and an influential English writer, both associated with aestheticism, provide
contexts and significant details for Joyce’s writing. Although influenced by
Pater’s aestheticism, mediated primarily by Wilde and the Irish poet, W. B.
Yeats (1865–1939), Joyce and his young artist character encounter difficulties
and project goals that require a different engagement with history and
material reality than the Paterian worship of beauty enables.
After his imprisonment in England for unlawful acts of ‘gross indecency’,
Wilde, the most brilliant playwright of the English theatre in the 1890s, died
in poverty in France in 1900 during Joyce’s second year of university studies
in Dublin. Joyce’s antipathy for the English with regard to Wilde’s case,
particularly his sense that Wilde was their victim, is clear when he asserts
that Wilde shared the fate of his namesake, Oscar, only son of Ossian in
Celtic myth, ‘tragically killed by the hand of his host while sitting at table’
(OCPW 148). Joyce takes exception to the idea that Wilde was ‘a monster
of perversion’ who emerged inexplicably from ‘the modern civilization of
England’, describing him instead as ‘the logical and inevitable product of the
Anglo-Saxon college and university system, a system of seclusion and secrecy’
(OCPW150). The ‘English authorities’ punished him, in Joyce’s view, not for
committing a crime but rather for provoking a ‘scandal’ (OCPW 150), that
is, for bringing into the public eye acts that many others had committed as
well. In this regard, Wilde resembles the Irish parliamentary leader, Charles
Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), an advocate of Irish Home Rule, or limited
autonomy, who is mentioned prominently in parts i, ii, and v of A Portrait.
LikeWilde, Parnell was hounded by the English press, who made sensational
news out of sexual scandals. By leaving out of the narrative of A Portrait
the death of Stephen’s sister, harrowingly described in Stephen Hero, and the
death of his mother, mentioned emphatically in Ulysses, Joyce heightens the
impact of Parnell’s death on his young character and on readers early in
A Portrait. That impact is not primarily personal, as are the deaths of his
sister and mother, but political in ways that affect our response to the rest of
Stephen’s story. Instead of Oscar Wilde’s death, we are invited to consider
the fate of a mythic figure, Icarus, who, like Wilde, flew dangerously high.
Unable to fulfil their promise of achievement, the political leader, the artistic
precursor, and the mythic youth combine to colour from the outset our sense
of the issues and the risks for Stephen.
Considering Wilde’s fate, it is understandable that, rather than following
his path to England, Stephen Dedalus chooses the Continent to make a
writing career, as did Joyce. The decision is one step toward changing a history
of disappointments by avoiding a repetition. As critics have frequently
noted, Stephen’s resentment toward the English is clear in the lengthy scene in
part v (P 154–60) in which he talks with the English priest who is the dean
of studies at University College, Dublin, where Stephen is a student. The
scene’s mixture of styles is also significant. Because the priest is an English
convert to Roman Catholicism, he represents two foreign presences within
Irish culture. Just before the encounter, Stephen asks himself if the College,
as a Jesuit building, is ‘extraterritorial’, a place where he is ‘walking among
aliens’ (P 155). Stephen and the priest are at odds over the English language,
specifically the words tundish and funnel, both part of the English lexicon,
though tundish is rarer. When Stephen thinks to himself ‘How different are
the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine’, he has in view
differences in pronunciation and in meaning. Especially because Parnell’s
Home Rule initiative for Ireland had not succeeded, the Irish as a nation did
not think of home with the same sense of autonomy and security as could
the English. Despite the fact that the priest is ‘a countryman of Ben Jonson’
(P 159), whose songs please Stephen (P 148), he misunderstands Stephen’s
figurative use of the word ‘lamp’ (P 157) during their conversation. The
divergences are multiple.
In his critical probing of English attitudes, Joyce follows Wilde in Dorian
Gray by echoing Pater’s writings. The echoing occurs as an embedded joke
in the language and action of the scene involving the English priest. The
Englishman is presented as intellectually flatfooted in the act of trying to
teach Stephen ‘an art’, one of ‘the useful arts’, ‘lighting a fire’ (P 155). The
priest’s action and speech embody mundanely and ironically one of Walter
Pater’s best-known assertions, from the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance,
concerning art’s ability to stimulate impressions with an intensity like fire:
‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is
success in life.’3 Pater teaches not the lighting of a literal fire but the kindling
and maintaining of an internal flame. Further, in the long passages of
thought, Stephen responds critically to the priest with language that derives
from Pater. Just after the priest reveals ‘one of the secrets’ of building a
fire, ‘Not too much coal’, Stephen thinks about the man’s lack of ‘beauty’,
despite a history of ‘tending . . . , bearing . . . , waiting . . . , striking’ (P 155).
Stephen’s rhetoric of beauty and his present participles evoke Pater, whose
formulations frequently include them. This Irish student has internalized the
techniques of an English writer for use against another Englishman whose
act of flame tending is itself a bathetic embodiment of the English writer’s
own statements. He mimics in order to undermine. The ironic framing and
multiple implications of the language representing scene and thinking keep
the style from being reducible to any single perspective. Rather than being
univocal, the style tends toward a polyphony that challenges the literal without
abandoning it.
Like Wilde in Dorian Gray, Joyce uses Paterian language without providing
explicit indications in the narrative that we should accept or reject it.
The lack of overt guidance leaves the reader to consider how to measure the
irony, which in Wilde’s case is arguably deep and directed with a vengeance
against English attitudes that he links to aestheticism.4 Joyce’s strategy is
to provide a mixture of styles as the context for challenging and measuring
the adequacy of aesthetic tendencies, whose rhetoric he turns against
itself. Although still under the influence of Pater at the end of A Portrait,
Stephen has come a long distance toward breaking away, in part by means
of a countervailing, grittier style of thinking that is reflected in the writing.
Joyce responds ironically and sceptically to Pater when he has the English
priest tend a flame and when he juxtaposes in Stephen’s experiences Paterian
aesthetic moments with contrary realistic ones. In turning away from Pater
toward writing that takes the body and history into account, Joyce’s artist
resists a siren call from England. He hears but does not obey, heading instead
for other shores on which the Irish writer is less likely to meet the fate of
Oscar Wilde.
The mixture of styles that begins developing in A Portrait renders memory
in ways that engage readers in a process of looking back critically and also
looking forward. The engaged and engaging mix takes advantage of the
diverse, contradictory Irish situation that Stephen faces in order to displace
more single-minded styles that might tend to perpetuate the way things have
been. The shift is from aestheticism, which appears apolitical in its emphasis
on beauty, toward an aesthetic politics, an art that recognizes its embodiment
and its responsibilities within history. A Portrait develops toward the more
extravagantly diverse writing of Ulysses, toward a hybrid style that, through
mimicry, amalgamation, and transformation, allows us to occupy multiple
perspectives virtually simultaneously. The tendency is toward self-correction.
Conceptually and politically, the mixed style corresponds to the ‘zone of
occult instability’ and ‘fluctuating movement’ that Frantz Fanon identified
as the third stage in generating a national consciousness within a culture that
has been dominated from the outside, as Ireland had been by England.5 Joyce
was not in sympathy with the Irish tendencies that correspond with Fanon’s
first two stages: assimilation to the values and customs of the dominant
culture, followed by aggressive rejection of that culture through advocating
indigenous practices. Joyce was neither a ‘West Briton’ (D 149, SH 69/64),
that is, a British sympathizer who behaved as though Ireland were a western
province of England, nor a supporter of Irish nationalism as an uncritical
return to cultural roots.6
Stephen’s critical attitude toward the English priest is matched by his determination
in his conversation with his Irish nationalist friend Davin a few
pages later (P 169–71) not to accede to Irish pressures to conform. Asserting
that ‘a man’s country comes first’, that it has priority over being ‘a poet
or mystic’ (P 171), Davin advises Stephen to ‘Try to be one of us’ (P 170).
Stephen responds that, although Davin thinks him ‘a monster’, ‘This race
and this country and this life produced me’ (P 170). His statement echoes
Joyce’s assertion that Wilde was the product of cultural institutions, not a
‘monster of perversion’.
Stephen’s insight about himself and how he is mistakenly viewed is cognate
with an insight about Wilde that may be true of the artist in general,
with these Irish artists as central instances. In Stephen’s case, however, the
threat to his freedom is not primarily England but Ireland, whom he calls
‘the old sow that eats her farrow’ (P 171). Stephen identifies the ‘nets flung
at’ the soul in Ireland ‘to hold it back from flight’, including ‘nationality,
language, and religion’. Rather than trying to be ‘one of us’, he will ‘try
to fly by those nets’ (P 171). His statements here are double. By flight he
means both leaving the earth with the equivalent of wings and a more practical,
but necessary, flight, literal escape from the pressures to conform in
Ireland. ‘Fly by’ suggests avoiding the nets, but it can also mean flying by
means of them, that is, turning them to advantage selectively and strategically.
Stephen’s Paterian rhetoric directed against the English priest is one
example of transforming a potentially entangling net, though not an Irish
one. Joyce’s mixing of distinctly Irish elements of scene, behaviour, thinking,
and speech in a composite style also turns nets, those that Stephen mentions,
to other purposes. By contrast with more single-minded, monological styles,
Joyce’s diverse style remembers rather than forgets as part of a dialogical
process that resists instead of accepting. A critical style of recollection that
collects and transforms diverse elements is not, however, available to Joyce
or to Stephen from the start. Joyce earns it over time. Whether his artist
character will do so is an open question.
James Joyce's The Portrait Of the Artist As a Young Man- about the writer
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 to Mary Jane Murray Joyce and John Stanislaus Joyce. He was the eldest son of a large family of nine sisters and brothers.
Stephen’s father began with an inheritance which placed him and his family in the Irish middle class, but as Stephen grew up, his father gradually lost his position in that class and the family ended very poor. At six years old, James was sent to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school for boys of the middle class. James had to leave Clongowes when his father no longer could pay the tuition. He stayed at home for two years and then went to Belvedere College at the school’s expense. He stayed at Belvedere from the time he was eleven to the time he was sixteen. Then he went to University College, Dublin, also a Jesuit institution. While at the university, James wrote a number of critical essays as well as poems and short stories. He called the latter epiphanies, a term drawn from the Roman Catholic calendar, and used by Joyce to mean moments of revelation in the depiction of a character.
When he had graduated from the university at the age of twenty, Joyce moved to Paris, but his stay was cut short when he received a telegram from his father that his mother was dying. He returned to Ireland and his mother died four months later. Then he stayed in Dublin for a year teaching and beginning the novel that would later become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man under the working title Stephen Hero. He also wrote short stories for a magazine. In June of 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle who was a chambermaid at a hotel in Dublin. They decided to leave Ireland since they wanted to live together without getting married. They lived in Trieste, a seaport in northern Italy on the gulf of Trieste, an inlet of the gulf of Venice, for the next eleven years. They had a son, Georgio, and a daughter, Lucia Anna.
Joyce spent a great deal of frustrated energy trying to get his works published. They were so unconventional that publishers often rejected them out of hand. He had a book of short stories called Dubliners, which, when finally accepted, was subjected to censorship. The publisher didn’t like the fact that Joyce used real names of people and places, nor the fact that Joyce used the language of common people who often curse and talk about sex.
While this business was going on, Joyce went back to his early novel Stephen Hero to revise it into what he called "a work in five chapters." Both works, the latter under its present title, were published in 1914 when Joyce was thirty-two. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in sections in the magazine The Egoist that year and, two years later, was published as a novel. With the publication of these two works, Joyce had made his name as a major writer of his time.
During World War I, the Joyces moved to Zurich and lived there from 1915-1919. Joyce made his living by giving private English lessons and he worked on his massive novel Ulysses. Its seed was a short story, "Mr. Hunter" from Dubliners. As its title suggests, Joyce uses the story of Ulysses of the epic poem the Odyssey as a framework for the novel. He sets the novel in Dublin, on a single day, June 16, 1904. Stephen Dedalus reappears, here playing the role of Telemachus of the Odyssey, who was sent to look for his missing father. Leopold Bloom is the father figure of the novel. He is an advertising salesman and a Jew, an ironic version of the epic Ulysses. He is married to Molly Bloom, a woman with a beautiful voice and a tendency to engage in extramarital affairs, an ironic version of the faithful Penelope.
When the war was over, the Joyces moved to Paris in 1920. Joyce no longer had to worry so much about making a living. He was receiving grants and patronage. His new worry was his eyesight. He experienced terrible pain from iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts. He had twenty-five operations, and his vision remained poor. Joyce also had another set of troubles to face.
When his novel Ulysses was published in 1922, Joyce was beset by criticism for its so-called obscenity. It was banned in the U.S. and in England. It wasn’t until 1933 that a U.S. court rule that the book was not obscene. While all this was going on, Joyce was hard at work on another book, which he called a night book to complement Ulysses, his book about a day. It was eventually titled Finnegan’s Wake and was published in 1939. Just after it was published, the Joyces had to leave Paris to escape another war, World War II, and in 1941, Joyce died of a perforated ulcer in Zurich.
James Joyce is now known as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Even during his time, he was respected as one of the best writers of his generation. Still, his works were so experimental that he was not read by the general public and was often misunderstood even by his contemporary writers. His writing became more and more hard on readers. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man often confuses readers who are not used to experimentation in form, but Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are rarely read in their entirely even by people trained in such experimentation.
Joyce was not alone in experimenting with form. He was part of a larger movement in the arts called Modernism. Modernism reached its height in the 1920s, but its innovations in form and subject are present in writing and art today. Modernists saw themselves as breaking from the past, especially from old methods of representing reality. Instead of the realistic depiction of life in its statistical details, they wanted to depict life as it is lived on the inside of people’s heads. Modernists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner experimented with representing people’s consciousness and each in her or his own way created some version of what we now call stream of consciousness narration. Readers of A Portrait will recognize this style. It is a style which attempts to capture the flow of the characters’ thoughts without sequencing them in logical order.
Other experimentation was done in regard to subject matter. Aspects of life which were considered off limits for the refined readership of novels, began to enter the novel with modernism. Chaucer and Rabelais might have had characters farting, but no respectable eighteenth or nineteenth century novelist did. The modernists also brought in lowly, unheroic characters, and placed them center stage as a commentary on modern life. They saw themselves as opposed to the middle class way of thinking-- marriage, nation, and money as the ends of the good life. Therefore, they didn’t write to teach their readers some kind of status quo moral, but to disrupt their readers’ faith in the status quo.
A Portrait is frankly autobiographical. The reader will notice that the names of Joyce’s schools are used in his novel. The streets of Dublin are named as Stephen walks along them. Joyce’s family’s fortunes are represented in generally the same way that Joyce experienced them in his life. It is a novel, not an autobiography, but the line between those two genre is a thin one. It is therefore tempting to see all that Stephen thinks about art as Joyce’s own view of art. However, readers will sense Joyce, the writer’s ironic distance from Stephen, the fictional figure of the artist.
A Portrait is a bildungsroman, a story of an artist’s development from childhood through adulthood. This development of a voice and vision is present in all the sensitivity to sound, to conversation, to regional accents and sayings, to the drama of the Christmas dinner argument over Parnell, to the fantasies of the ghost of the Marshall announcing Parnell’s death, to the loner boy who questions what the crowd assumes unthinkingly, and finally to the exuberant vision of the artist "forg[ing] in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race."
James Joyce's The Portrait Of the Artist As a Young Man- conflict and themes
CONFLICT
Protagonist
Stephen Dedalus, a young boy who grows up with the predisposition to become a writer.
Antagonist
Ireland as Stephen sees it, and more generally, the constraints of social conventions.
Climax
Stephen is walking on the beach and sees a girl wading in the water. He feels joyous at the sight of her, connecting her image with his idea of himself as an artist who will render the earthly reality of experience into something life-giving and timeless.
Outcome
Stephen leaves Ireland to search for a way to live freely.
THEMES
Main Theme
The artist’s development in the life of a national language. Stephen experiences the many voices of Ireland as well as those of the canonical writers of his education. Out of all these voices emerges Stephen’s aesthetic theory and his desire to find his own manner of expression.
Minor Theme
The constraints of social conventions on the artist and his struggle to keep himself free of them.
MOOD
The mood of this novel is reflective. Most of the narration is of Stephen’s thoughts as he remembers significant conversations and events.
Abonați-vă la:
Postări (Atom)