by James Joyce
In Dubliners, a handful of writers and would-be writers make up a supporting cast: The protagonist-narrators in the first three stories clearly have literary pretensions, as do Little Chandler (“A Little Cloud”), Mr. Duffy (“A Painful Case”), Joe Hynes (“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”), and Gabriel Conroy. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, of course, a would-be artist is at the absolute center of the novel’s action and narration: a presence so central that, in ways that were being fleshed out in physics and astrophysics at the very time Joyce was writing Portrait, all other objects are more or less deformed in his field. In the novel, the competing claims of religion and art are laid out, and in chapters 3 and 4, especially, we see them at war: One thing not often remarked upon in the criticism of Portrait, however, is that within the novel’s pages, it is far from clear that art comes out on top. In the sermons of chapter 3, a poetic and rhetorical inventiveness is brought to bear that dwarfs anything our young artist himself musters; the mystic, scholar, and writer Thomas Merton, for instance, converted to Catholicism as a result of reading them. By comparison, the writing that Stephen himself produces during the course of the novel is pale and bloodless; we read about a poem rehearsing romantic platitudes on “the maiden lustre of the moon,” for instance, and his artistic production for the period covered in the novel culminates in his “Villanelle of the Temptress,” which represents an advance only in that Stephen is parroting fin-de-siècle rather than earlier-century clichés.
The scene describing the writing of Stephen’s first poem, in the second “scene” of chapter 2, is instructive. In a passage recalling the discussion of epiphany in Stephen Hero, Joyce describes Stephen Dedalus’s habits of attention: “He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret” (p. 58).” What follows, though not labeled as such in the text, are precisely three epiphanies: Two of them, in fact, are based on incidents recorded in Joyce’s own epiphany notebook. Like the Dubliners stories, these vignettes are spare, closely observed, and slightly mysterious; and the third, describing the tram ride back from Harold’s Cross in which Stephen’s intials-only love interest E—C—seems eminently embrace-able but remains unembraced, is the provocation for the poem Stephen then attempts to write. These three brief prose sketches—based on what we see in Dubliners, for instance, as well as the mature prose sections of Portrait—represent something like what Joyce thought twentieth-century literature ought to be accomplishing, that “style of scrupulous meanness” he saw as a kind of moral ideal.
In explicit contrast, Stephen’s poem is ... well, strictly speaking, it’s just not there at all. We watch Stephen write; but we’re shown no writing. Just when it seems that his attempts to write the poem will fail, even by Stephen’s standards, he pushes forward by “brooding” on the tram incident, and in the process of writing the poem,all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both (p. 6).
Whereas Joyce’s own practice insists on focusing on the actual details of a scene until they come starkly into view-chronicling with patience what one sees—his artist “as a young man” instead “broods” (never a good sign, in Joyce) until everything real falls away, and all that’s left is a sodden lump of romantic clichés. A sharply observant prose like that of the Dubliners stories is written about Stephen’s experience, but he himself can write only a vaporous and derivative poetry. (Joyce emphasizes the schoolboy quality of the poem by having Stephen write it in a school exercise book, with the motto Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam [“to the greater glory of God”] at the head and Laus Deo Semper [“praise to God always”] at its close, the obligatory topoi of his classroom writing exercises under the Jesuits.) As if the point were not yet clear, the paragraph concludes: “Having hidden the book, he went into his mother’s bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressing table.” A very Narcissus in Dublin.
In the course of this scene, and others beside (compare, for instance, the prose describing the “bird girl” in chapter 5 with the jejune villanelle he makes out of the same episode), Joyce seems to be suggesting that if poetry had been the leading edge of literary innovation in the nineteenth century, it would be prose that would lead the way in the twentieth. (On the far side of the twentieth century now, we can’t help but be impressed by Joyce’s prescience.) As long as Stephen fetishizes writers like George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, the authentic literary voice of the twentieth century, the modern world, will remain gagged. As a young writer Joyce first thought of himself as a poet, though had his reputation depended on his poems, his name would now be forgotten: A perusal of Joyce’s own first volume of poems, Chamber Music, quickly confirms that his prose was as avant-garde as his poetry was derriere-garde. Thus the move from poet to prose writer was one that Joyce knew something about, for it was a move he himself had already made by the time he wrote Portrait. As the example of Stephen’s first poem makes clear, Portrait supports a very complicated narrative structure: It is an autobiographical novel about a former self—a self about whom the author now has some misgivings, even feels some embarrassment. But in strict accordance with what critic Maud Ellmann has called modernism’s “poetics of impersonality” (her book bears this title), Joyce forbids himself anything like explicit, third-person commentary on Stephen’s beliefs, positions, and actions: The novel contains only dramatic “showing,” no authorial “telling,” and the aesthetically calculated juxtaposition (the prose and poetic versions of Stephen’s tram ride, for instance) is the most explicit commentary Joyce will allow himself. This stealthy mode of criticizing his protagonist, providing a kind of ironic counterpoint, differentiates Portrait from the abortive draft Stephen Hero, in which Joyce did indulge, in small doses at least, in commentary on the callowness of his protagonist. In Stephen Hero, when Stephen flies a bit too high, for instance, the narrative calls him a “fantastic idealist”; in Portrait, this kind of criticism must remain always unspoken, merely implied, so that, for example, Stephen believes the most sublime and transcendent moment of The Count of Monte Cristo to be Dantes’s utterance of his “sadly proud gesture of refusal”: “—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.”
Hence the overarching structural irony of Portrait, which has made the tone of the book so very hard for so very many readers over the years to discern: It’s a novel about a devotee of an anachronistic literary cult, written by a writer who has himself outgrown his infatuation with that same cult but who writes with a conviction that the only legitimate form of critique is precisely the patient and detached description found in Stephen’s epiphanies. Joyce’s reluctance to “weigh in” has made for an interesting reception history; as in Dubliners, in Portrait Joyce seeks to hold up his finely polished looking-glass to us for our inspection. But since we readers tend to identify with, rather than criticize, the aspirations and idealism of Stephen Dedalus—because his foibles are so nearly our own—we have tended not to see Joyce’s understated criticism. This, finally, is what makes Joyce’s writing in Dubliners and Portrait so powerful for so many readers: We’re never allowed simply to sit in judgment of their characters, but must instead recognize that their follies are our own. We are drawn, propulsively, into an imaginative identification with these characters and their plights. The reader whose heart doesn’t respond to Stephen Dedalus’s high-flown aspirations (“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience” [p. 225]), or who doesn’t fervently hope that Eveline Hill will get on that ship with Frank, hasn’t truly engaged these texts in the spirit with which they w
ere written. Regarding his most famous protagonist, the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Madame Bovary, c‘est moi”: Flaubert held himself neither superior to, nor different in kind from, his deeply flawed character. And like Flaubert, the reader of Dubliners and Portrait must be able to say, when she has come to the end: “Gabriel Conroy, c’est moi,” and “Stephen Dedalus, c’est moi.” For in the letter quoted above, Joyce promises not (as Shakespeare does, in Hamlet) to “hold ... the mirror up to nature”—but instead, much more menacingly, he holds the mirror up before his readers, that they might “[have] one good look at themselves in [his] nicely polished looking-glass.”
Portrait, in other words, moves the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman into the twentieth century, although in the process it drags along with it a resolutely nineteenth-century protagonist. In one of his last diary entries Stephen attempts to outdo his fellow countryman and poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats, who had referred to himself as one of Ireland’s “last romantics,” expresses the desire through his character Michael Robartes to “press / My heart upon the loveliness / That has long faded from the world” (W. B. Yeats, “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” The Wind Among the Reeds, New York: J. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1899); with even more romantic hunger than Robartes’s nostalgic longing betrays, Stephen expresses his desire “to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world” (p. 224). While Joyce does not allow the narrative of Portrait to level any explicit criticism at Stephen, other characters are free to do so, and seeing the great gulf opened up between Joyce’s prose and Stephen’s poetry, we might sympathize with Lynch’s closing comment on Stephen’s discourse on aesthetic philosophy: “—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable God forsaken island?” (p. 191). What, indeed?
One point upon which these two books agree is the absolutely fundamental role that language plays in our being-in-the-world; in both Dubliners and Portrait, Joyce forces us to pay careful attention to the language in which we cast our dreams, and to which we perforce bend our realities. Here again Joyce anticipates new discoveries made in the sciences, in this case the human science of linguistics. The idea, called in one of its early formulations the “Whorfian hypothesis,” is that we never use language without language at the same time using us: Language is not merely descriptive of, but in fact constitutive of, what we know as “reality.” Words, Joyce realized early on, always drag along with them the history of their prior associations and usages; words, in one sense, are never purely aesthetic objects, “certain good” in Yeats’s phrase, but are always already political objects. Stephen recognizes this, if inchoately, when he muses on the English-born dean of studies’ condescending attention to Stephen’s use of the word “tundish”:—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (p. 167).
While Stephen may desire to press in his arms “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world,” there is an awareness at the textual level, if not perhaps at a conscious level, for Stephen, that he has not “made or accepted” the words of any human tongue, but must instead accept them at second hand. And this hand-me-down language, Stephen can’t help but notice from the very earliest pages of the novel, is always somewhat shopworn. Stephen’s vision of pure artistic creation from nothing (ex nihilo), something completely fresh and new, requires a pristine and univocal language: And yet everywhere, language equivocates. In the same conversation with the dean of studies, Stephen calls attention to this problem, using as his example the various connotations of the word “detain”; and confirming his worst fears, the dean misunderstands Stephen’s point initially because his own usage is loose and sloppy. In Alice in Wonderland (a text that enthralled Joyce, as Finnegans Wake clearly evidences), Humpty Dumpty insists to Alice that “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”; like Humpty Dumpty, Stephen would like to exert complete mastery over language and meaning, but his experience consistently brings home the fact that none of us has such power. He may complain, in Ulysses, that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” but he realizes that he must do so in a language conditioned by that very history.
The inherently equivocal structure of language (and to be clear, this is the structure of all human languages, not just English)—language’s consistent difference from itself—has both this historical dimension and another, ahistorical component. The words upon which Stephen muses while talking with the dean of studies, “home,” “Christ,” “ale,” and “master,” all resonate differently for Stephen owing to the history of colonial subjection of Ireland by Great Britain; for the ambiguity of these words, to quote the Englishman Haines in Ulysses, “it seems history is to blame.” But even if this history could be factored out, language is always at odds with itself. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has termed this frustrating and elusive structure of language différence; it means that the momentum of writing is always centrifugal, always toward what Derrida calls the “dissemination” of meaning, rather than its consolidation, as the idealized will of its author, in a text. In his best-known example, Derrida examines the way that the word “supplement” (which he comes across in a passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) means both “surplus” and “remedy for a deficit”: The supplement is the surplus that (inadvertently) betrays a lack. Such, according to Derrida, is the fundamental structure of all human language.
Though no linguist, Joyce seems intuitively to have had a sense of this dynamic; this principle is observable on both the level of the individual word, and on the larger level of phrases, sentences, and narrative units, in all of Joyce’s writing. (In an early example, Joyce punningly titled his first volume of poems Chamber Music, betraying both the poems’ delicate beauty and invoking the sound of urine in a chamber-pot.) The truth of language’s inherent slipperiness is first made manifest to Stephen Dedalus just a couple of pages into Portrait. Stephen, cold while playing football in the fall air,kept his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow had said to Cantwell:
-I’d give you such a belt in a second (p. 6).
Belt as security, belt as violence: “belt,” it would seem, is an especially paradoxical word, something like its own antonym. In truth, however, as Stephen soon discovers, language is full of similarly slippery terms: In quick succession he is given to contemplating the mystery of words like “suck,” “queer,” and most famously of all, “smugging.” Indeed at the very close of the novel, which the diary-entry form suggests that Stephen himself has written, the final formulation of his artistic credo is undermined by just such a slippage: “Welcome, 0 life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (p. 225). “Forge,” like the good old English word “cleave,” is its own antonym. Using the metaphor of a blacksmith working metal, Stephen promises to “forge ... the uncreated conscience of his race,” by heating and hammering the red-hot metal of the English language, bending it to his will. But to forge is also, of course, to counterfeit: Forgery, whether in one’s smithy or in one’s basement, is an act of criminal deception, an attempt to pass off the ersatz as the genuine article. Is Stephen aware of the equivocation in his declaration, the différence between intention and utterance, the dissemination of his meaning every which way? We cannot know the answer to this question; the next sentence is the text’s last, as Stephen invokes the protection and aid of his mythic forebear, the Dædalus of the novel’s epigraph. But there may be, too, a meaningful difference between Stephen’s own awareness of h
is writing’s betrayal, or lack thereof, and our understanding as readers. Perhaps, even if Stephen has not, we are able to enjoy a kind of hard-won epiphany; and while our “artist as a young man” wrestles to make an intractable language conform to his meaning, his author instead focuses our attention on the stubborn materiality and historicity of language. A wiser writer—like Joyce, perhaps—would learn to work in accord with language’s stubborn resistances, rather than trying in vain to master them.
As suggested earlier, it’s not simply individual words that slip—as if that weren’t bad enough. But phrases, too, sometimes carry with them untoward baggage, refusing to mean simply what they appear to say. On an early page of the novel, for instance, the affluence of one of Stephen’s classmates at Clongowes Wood School is invoked: “Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory.” A hamper in the refectory means simply that Rody Kickham has a private supply of food available to him in the dining hall—a luxury that Stephen’s family certainly cannot afford for him. The phrase “greaves in his number,” however, is a bit more layered. The standard annotations will tell us that it means “shin-guards in his locker,” suggesting the possibility that shin-guards are not issued to all the boys at Clongowes as standard equipment: Again, the Kickham family’s wealth buys young Rody a degree of luxury that Stephen cannot afford, and when playing football Rody gets kicked in the greaves, while Stephen takes it in the shins. However, a look into the historical Oxford English Dictionary suggests a further dimension: The word “greaves” is quite rare, out of use since the late nineteenth century, and the OED gives as its literary exemplars passages from an obscure poem of Lord Byron, “The Bride of Abydos,” as well as a passage from a far more familiar poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shallot”: “The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves, / And flamed upon the brazen greaves / Of bold Sir Lancelot.” Hence “greaves” isn’t just any old word for shin-guards, but a particularly literary one (the OED also tells us that the word “shin-guards” was in use back in the 1880s); further, it’s not just literary language, but language retaining the flavor of its earlier usage in Tennyson: an identifiably Tennysonian affectation on Stephen’s part (if, as is common in the criticism, we assume Stephen’s consciousness to be shaping, if not exactly writing, the prose of this section). With this Tennyson connection unearthed, it’s easy to look back to a sentence earlier in the paragraph and find Tennyson’s fingerprints there, too: “The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the foot-ballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light” sounds a lot more like something from Idylls of the King or “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or even “The Lady of Shallot” once we’re alerted to Tennyson’s lurking presence in the passage. Further, the early flirtation with Tennyson that lingers around these images and archaisms sheds an interesting light on a later episode in the novel, when Stephen is beaten up by his classmate Heron and his goons for suggesting that Byron is a better poet than the “rhymster” Tennyson. Stephen’s Tennysonianism suggests he had not always thought so.
