by James Joyce
Moving up one level, we witness Stephen’s growing attraction to the story of the “dark avenger” of The Count of Monte Cristo throughout the first two chapters of the novel. Stephen’s grasp on the specifics of the plot seem somewhat shaky, but one thing he knows for certain:He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image [of the love interest in Monte Cristo, Mercedes] which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment (p. 56).
While Stephen seems to be imagining some sort of amorous tryst, his imagination has not yet been fed any of the stark details of actual, physical sex: Like his poem about riding the tram home with E—C—just a few pages later, his inexperience leads him here to the brink of a scene that he is unable to imagine. The Count of Monte Cristo, too, is evasive on these questions; and precisely because the story he wishes to act out has skirted the issue, Stephen’s imagination runs into a kind of wall when the actual moment of his “fall” is to take place.
Stephen’s fall from sexual innocence into experience takes place in the closing pages of chapter 2; and when he wanders into the red-light Nighttown district of Dublin, and ends up in the bed of a prostitute, every feature of his earlier fantasy centering on Mercedes is ironically fulfilled. Not knowing where to look for Mercedes, his feet seemingly of their own accord take him “into a maze of narrow and dirty streets.” He knows that his role in his encounter with his Mercedes will be entirely passive, and in his transaction with the prostitute, Stephen “would not bend to kiss her,” and later “swoons” or perhaps, less poetically, passes out. He does indeed “fade into something impalpable under her eyes”; but this is Monte Cristo with an ironic difference. With the veil of a romantic fantasy interposing itself between Stephen and the prostitute, it’s almost as if he’s not present at his own deflowering. The narrative, in this case, both trumps and dictates the real.
One lesson, then, that we might take away from these two exquisitely well written books is that narrative in particular, and language in general, is in a sense the “prison-house” that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, another near-contemporary of Joyce’s, claimed that it was: Reality, or “the reality of experience,” is unavailable to human vessels excepting through the somewhat distorting vehicle of human language. Some, like young Stephen Dedalus, might expend their energies wishing for, working for, a language that would escape all such limitations: a sort of pre-Babel super-language, infinitely adaptable to the infinitely shifting shapes of the real. Another response suggests itself, however—one that Joyce was to work out in greater detail, and with greater care, in his next novel, Ulysses: that if stories are the only means we have to “encounter reality,” it matters very much which stories we carry around in our heads. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both stories that, on one level, counsel caution about the stories with which we furnish our imaginations, make a very good start.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar is Professor of modern British and Irish literary and cultural studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has published a study of James Joyce and the stylistics of postmodernism and has edited or coedited three volumes of essays: on modernism’s relationship to commodity culture, on the intersections of literary modernism and postmodernism, and on theoretical approaches to contemporary popular music. He also serves as coeditor of the twentieth-century materials for the Longman Anthology of British Literature, and as a chapter coordinator for the James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in Hypermedia project. He is past president and member of the Executive Board for the international Modernist Studies Association.
Dettmar is currently researching and writing two studies that reflect the range of his scholarly interests: one, a book on the cultural history of the notion that “rock is dead,” and the other, a study of James Joyce’s relationship to the Great Books tradition.
NOTE ON CURRENCY AND COINAGE
During the early years of the twentieth century, during which the events of the Dubliners stories and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man take place, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and used British money.
Until Great Britain switched to a decimal system for its money in 1971, with 100 pence to the pound, British money followed a somewhat idiosyncratic system. The chart below gives the primary denominations of pre-1971 British money, along with any slang terms, and the approximate buying power these denominations would have represented in 1910, given in current (2004) U.S. dollars.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The copy text for our edition of Dubliners is the 1914 first edition (first printing), published in London by Grant Richards; that for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1916 first edition (fifth printing, 1922) published in New York by W. B. Huebsch. Many factors have contributed to the appearance of errors in these early editions; Joyce complained to Richards, for instance, that he read the page proofs of Dubliners very quickly because he expected to be sent a second set of proofs, which never materialized. For this edition obvious errors have been silently emended.
The punctuation of direct speech in Joyce’s fiction is an area that has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention over the years. In standard British usage—and though an Irishman, Joyce wrote as a (somewhat reluctant) British subject until Irish independence was granted in 1922—direct speech is ordinarily indicated by enclosure between single quotation marks, or inverted commas:‘He was too scrupulous always, ’ she said.
Joyce thought this convention unsightly; he referred jokingly to the punctuation as “perverted commas,” and pleaded with the London publisher of Dubliners to use dashes instead to indicate direct speech. As it was first typeset, Dubliners did in fact indicate direct speech by enclosing it between em-dashes:—He was too scrupulous always,—she said.
But this edition, printed for Maunsel & Co. in Dublin, was destroyed before being distributed, and this typography never saw the light of day (Maunsel feared being sued for obscenity and/or libel). When the book was re-set for the Richards publication, the dashes were changed back to the conventional inverted commas.
With A Portrait, however, Joyce got something closer to his wishes. The Huebsch edition indicates direct speech with an introductory dash: —0, Stephen will apologise.
But the convention in this edition is employed inconsistently; indeed, the very next quotation on the same page uses not just a single introductory dash, but a closing dash as well:—0, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.—
For the most part, the first half of the novel punctuates direct speech with a single, introductory dash; but halfway through the novel, the convention switches to both introductory and closing dashes, with no apparent textual logic to support the switch.
Finally, British publishing conventions dictate that for a quotation embedded within direct speech, double quotation marks be enclosed within single quotation marks:‘Annoyed! Not he! “Manly little chap! ” he said.’
In the early printings of Portrait, however, in which dashes are used to introduce direct speech, italics are (irregularly) used to indicate a quotation within direct speech, and that convention has been adopted in this edition:—Annoyed! Not he! Manly little chap, he said.
Given this hodgepodge of editorial decisions—and with little sense of which of these conventions Joyce finally preferred—we have chosen to punctuate direct speech uniformly with the single introductory dash, a technique that we know Joyce favored by the time Ulysses was published in 1922. In that novel, it is clear that Joyce valued the am
biguity a single introductory dash lent to a paragraph that might begin with direct speech but then wander off into interior monologue or even third-person narration, with these different registers of discourse remaining unmarked. While the clues to Joyce’s preferred style early in his career are somewhat contradictory, by the time he was in a position to have his texts set in the way he wanted, he chose to indicate where a quotation began, but not where it ended. This willful ambiguity is altogether characteristic of the slippery stylistics of the greatest English prose writer of the twentieth century.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188 a
CHAPTER I
ONCE UPON A TIME and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass:b he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.c
0, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.d
He sang that song. That was his song.
0, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet.e That had the queerf smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipeg for him to dance. He danced:Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
Uncle Charles and Danteh clapped. They were older than his father and mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante.
Dante had two brushes in her press.i The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell.1 Dante gave him a cachouj every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:—O, Stephen will apologise.
Dante said:
—O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise.
The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefectsk urged them on with strong cries. 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. He kept on the fringe of his line,l out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.
Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his numberm and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket. And one day he had asked:-What is your name?
Stephen had answered: Stephen Dedalus.
Then Nasty Roche had said:
-What kind of a name is that?
And when Stephen had not been able to answer Nasty Roche had asked:-What is your father?
Stephen had answered:
-A gentleman.
Then Nasty Roche had asked:
-Is he a magistrate?
He crept about from point to point on the fringe of his line, making little runs now and then. But his hands were bluish with cold. He 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.
Cantwell had answered:
-Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I’d like to see you. He’d give you a toe in the rump for yourself
That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college.n Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castleowhen she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two five-shilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peachp on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rectorq had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutaner fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:-Good-bye, Stephen, goodbye!
-Good-bye, Stephen, goodbye!
He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawton’s yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. Soon they would be going home for the holidays. After supper in the study hall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from seventyseven to seventysix.
It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from which window Hamilton Rowans had thrown his hat on the hahat and had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers’ slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of shortbread that the communityu ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbeyv was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.
Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey
Where the abbots buried him.
Canker is a disease of plants,
Cancer one of animals.
It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those sentences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditchw because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Wells’s seasoned hacking chestnut,x the conqueror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on the fendery and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell! Dante knew a lot of things. She had taught him where the Mozambique Channel was and what was the longest river in America and what was the name of the highest mountain in the moon. Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest but both his father and Uncle Charles said that Dante was a clever woman and a wellread woman. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then put up her hand to her mouth: that was heartburn.
A voice cried far out on the playground:
