A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: contraries and the name of a question (The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce)

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.