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.
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