by James Joyce
Theater
Fitting for a story imbued with music, “The Dead” opened on Broad-way in January 2000 as the musical play James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Winning a Tony Award for the book by Richard Nelson, it featured music by Shaun Davey, with whom Nelson wrote the lyrics. The two received a Tony nomination for their original score, which they derived from nineteenth-century Irish parlor music, ballads, and poetry. The cast featured Christopher Walken as Gabriel, Blair Brown as Gretta, and Stephen Spinella as Freddy Malins in an understated production. After a short but successful run in New York, the play was well received in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago before closing.
Literature
The artistic work most directly linked with Portrait is Joyce’s own autobiographical Stephen Hero. Joyce began writing what was to become Stephen Hero in his teens and abandoned the project halfway through. Portrait represents his second effort at autobiography, a rewriting. Stephen Hero, the book finally published in 1944 after Joyce’s death, is what survives of the early manuscript. Considerably longer than Portrait, Hero takes the reader through only the latter third of Stephen’s development as presented in Portrait.
Though artistically inferior, Stephen Hero allows readers to chart Joyce’s magnificent progress as a writer. Even at a very early age, Joyce had clear ideas about his writing style, approaches that would define his entire career. The following passage taken from Stephen Hero sheds light on Joyce’s use of the “epiphany”:By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
Another work by Joyce connected with both Portrait and Dubliners is his 1922 masterpiece Ulysses, widely described as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Joyce originally thought of his Odyssean cycle as a short story to be included in Dubliners, but he recognized its true scope once he began committing it to paper. The finished, lengthy novel comprises a single day, June 16, 1904, and imbues daily modern life with epic as well as ironic implications. Ulysses centers on Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, who is Joyce’s Odysseus, but also makes use of several familiar faces from the pages of Dubliners and gives particular attention to the further development of Portrait’s Stephen Dedalus. Stephen, now a full-fledged writer and teacher, corresponds to the Telemachus figure from the Odyssey, in that he is a spiritual son to Bloom. A rich tapestry that gains in complexity and meaning with each reading (followers of the prose stylist call repeated readings “re-Joycing”), Ulysses stands as a major hallmark of modern literature.
Stream of Consciousness
Among novels in English, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pioneered the use of the stream of consciousness writing technique, which eliminates the mediation of the narrator, providing a direct, unadulterated view of a character and the actual process of his or her thought formation. For example, the opening chapter of Portrait is not solely the account of a third-person narrator who describes or interprets the inner thoughts of young Stephen Dedalus; instead, this outside perspective alternates with an interior one, emerging from Stephen’s mind and revealing the thoughts themselves in all their fragmented, incoherent variety.
The phrase “stream of consciousness” was coined by psychologist and philosopher William James, elder brother of writer Henry James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890). Joyce cited a French novel as his inspiration for employing the idea as a writing technique; he first read Édouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupes (1888; published in English as We’ll to the Woods No More) when he was in self-imposed exile in Paris in 1902. Joyce expanded his use of stream of consciousness in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939).
British writer Virginia Woolf was well known for her ability to enter the minds of her characters with stream of consciousness writing, notably in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Woolf said in a letter to painter Jacques Raverat that it was “precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the ‘formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream.’” Among Americans, William Faulkner wrote his tale of Southern degeneracy, The Sound and the Fury (1929), with almost no narrative intrusion, making it one of the most complex and experimental novels to emerge in twentieth-century America.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the texts, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ histories. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
Comments
JAMES JOYCE
The Dublin papers will object to my stories as to a caricature of Dublin life.... At times the spirit directing my pen seems to me so plainly mischievous that I am almost prepared to let the Dublin critics have their way.
-from a letter to Stanislaus Joyce (July 19, 1905)
H. G. WELLS
It is no good trying to minimize a characteristic that seems to be deliberately obtruded. Like Swift and another living Irish writer, Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation....
Like some of the best novels in the world [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] is the story of an education; it is by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that does altogether render with extreme completeness the growth of a rather secretive, imaginative boy in Dublin. The technique is startling, but on the whole it succeeds. Like so many Irish writers from Sterne to Shaw Mr. Joyce is a bold experimentalist with paragraph and punctuation. He breaks away from scene to scene without a hint of the change of time and place; at the end he passes suddenly from the third person to the first; he uses no inverted commas to mark off his speeches. The first trick I found sometimes tiresome here and there, but then my own disposition, perhaps acquired at the blackboard, is to mark off and underline rather fussily, and I do not know whether I was so much put off by the thing itself as anxious, which after all is not my business, about its effect on those others; the second trick, I will admit, seems entirely justified in this particular instance by its success; the third reduces Mr. Joyce to a free use of dashes. One conversation in this book is a superb success, the one in which Mr. Dedalus carves the Christmas turkey; I write with all due deliberation that Sterne himself could not have done it better; but most of the talk flickers blindingly with these dashes, one has the same wincing feeling of being flicked at that one used to have in the early cinema shows. I think Mr. Joyce has failed to discredit the inverted comma.
The interest of the book depends entirely upon its quintessential and unfailing reality. One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction. And the peculiar lie of the interest for the intelligent reader is the convincing revelation it makes of the limitations of a great mass of Irishmen. Mr. Joyce tells us unsparingly of the adolescence of this youngster under conditions that have passed almost altogether out of English life. There is an immense shyness, a profound secrecy, about matters of sex, with its inevitable accompaniment of nightmare revelations and furtive scribblings in unpleasant places, and there is a living belief in a real hell. The description of Stephen listening without a doubt to two fiery sermons on that tremendous theme, his agonies of fear, not disgust at dirtiness such as unorthodox children feel but just fear, his terror-inspired confession of his
sins of impurity to a strange priest in a distant part of the city, is like nothing in any boy’s experience who has been trained under modern conditions. Compare its stuffy horror with Conrad’s account of how under analogous circumstances Lord Jim wept. And a second thing of immense significance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself. I am afraid it is only too true an account of the atmosphere in which a number of brilliant young Irishmen have grown up. What is the good of pretending that the extreme Irish “patriot” is an equivalent and parallel of the English or American liberal? He is narrower and intenser than any English Tory. He will be the natural ally of the Tory in delaying British social and economic reconstruction after the war. He will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England. It is time the American observer faced the truth of that. No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different from the liberal English in training and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are, as completely as this most memorable novel.
-from New Republic (March 10, 1917)
PADRAIC COLUM
Joyce, when I knew him first, was a student in the Old Royal University (since organized as the National University). He was very noticeable among the crowd of students that frequented the National Library or sauntered along the streets between Nelson’s Pillar and Stephens’s Green. He was tall and slender then, with a Dantesque face and steely blue eyes. His costume as I see him in my mind’s eye now included a peaked cap and tennis shoes more or less white. He used to swing along the street carrying an ashplant in his hand for a cane. (That ashplant is celebrated in Ulysses; Stephen Dedalus carries it with him all through the day and frequently addresses it.) Although he had a beautiful voice for singing and repeating poetry, he spoke harshly in conversation, using many of the unprintable words that he has got printed in Ulysses. Stories were told about his arrogance. Did not this youth say to Yeats, “We have met too late: you are too old to be influenced by me.” And did he not laugh in derision when Arthur Symons spoke to him of Balzac? (Balzac at this hour of the day!) We, the fry swimming about in the National Library, looked with some reverence on the youth who already had an article published in the Fortnightly Review. He had taught himself whatever Scandinavian language Ibsen wrote in—he used to repeat Ibsen’s lyrics in the original—and when We Dead Awaken was published in English his essay on it came out in the Fortnightly— William Archer had it published as a sort of preface to his translation....
After I had made his acquaintance he went to Paris for a while and then returned to Dublin. It was then that he wrote the stories that are in Dubliners and began the writing of Portrait of the Artist (Dublin 1904—Trieste 1914). After he had begun that book he went abroad to take a place as a teacher of English in a Berlitz school. A few years later I met him when he was back in Dublin. He had his son, a little boy, with him, of whom he was very proud. He was more mellowed than I had ever known him before. It was then that he told me the title of the book he was writing-the book that was being referred to in Dublin as “Joyce’s Meredithian novel.” It was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a book that is by no means Meredithian.
He was glad he had left Dublin—he was glad to be away from a place where “the reformed conscience” had left its fetter and away from the fog of Anglo-Saxon civilization. His little boy went to all the operas in the Italian city they lived in, and he would not be brought up to speak English.
... I am reminded of an incident that might find a place in Dubliners or in Ulysses—an incident that seems a parody on the plans that now and again occurred to him. He came to me one day and asked me for that rare coin with student Publiners—a golden half sovereign. By a miracle I had one. A financial scheme was involved in its use.
Joyce had been given a pawnticket by a medical student. Now, to any one else a pawnticket would be a minus quantity, but to Joyce it was something realizable. The ticket was for books, and 6 shillings was the amount they were in for. They were medical books, for a certainty, and valuable. And we would take them to our friend George Webb on the Quays and sell them and make 50, or even 100, per cent.
It was an attractive proposition. We handed in 7 and 6, and the redeemed parcel came across Terence Kelly’s counter to us. Hastily we undid the wrappings! And behold! The books were Walter Scott’s, an unsellable edition of the Waverley Novels, with one volume missing!
There was a wan hope in going to Webb’s. That most knowing of all booksellers received Joyce cordially, for he had his eye on the Italian books that Joyce was then selling. We opened the parcel and exhibited the wretched, papier-mâché bound set! Very loftily, indeed, did Joyce talk to the incredulous Webb—“Webb, I have brought you some particularly good books.” He would not believe that Joyce was serious. “You have some Italian books with you, haven’t you, Mr. Joyce?” he kept on saying. When he gathered that Joyce was serious and that he had released the books on the prospect of selling them, he had them wrapped up for us. “There is only one thing to do, boys,” he said. “Take them back to Terence Kelly. Pawn them again, and he may let you have 6 shillings on them.” So we did.
-from the New York Times (June 11, 1922)
Questions
1. While thinking about the title of Joyce’s first novel, would you emphasize A Portrait of the Artist or would you emphasize as a Young Man? Do you think Joyce was justified in writing “portrait of the artist” rather than “portrait of an artist”?
2. Compare the conclusion of “Araby” with the conclusion of “The Dead.” In the first story, the young man sees himself as a “creature driven and derided by vanity” (p. 254). In “The Dead,” Gabriel “saw himself as a ludicrous figure, ... orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts” (p. 409). What have they done to deserve this self-criticism ? Is Puritanism involved? Are these male characters unmanly, too self-conscious to make it in life? Should we approve or disapprove of—or just discover—their overreaction to a disappointment that is not their fault? Or is it?
3. Joyce said he wrote Dubliners “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.” Do the stories suggest either the cause of or cure for this paralysis? Consider the conclusion of “Eveline.”
4. At the very end of Portrait, Stephen vows “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Assuming that by “race” Stephen means “countrymen,” how can writing fictions create their conscience ? Can you think of any writer of any nation whose fictions created the conscience of his or her race?
5. Padraic Colum portrays Joyce as convinced of his own genius at an early age. Is this related to the character of Stephen Dedalus? How do you think Joyce’s persona, as described by Colum, resembles the heroes and heroines of his stories and novels?
FOR FURTHER READING
Also by James Joyce
Chamber Music, 1907
Exiles, 1918
Ulysses, 1922
Pomes Penyeach, 1927
Finnegans Wake, 1939
Stephen Hero, 1944 (posthumous)
Biography
Bradley, Bruce. James, joyce’s Schooldays. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1982.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956.
Criticism
Attridge, Derek, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James joyce. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Benstock, Bernard. Narrative Con/Texts in “Dubliners.” Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Bidwell, Bruce, and Linda Heffer, eds. The Joycean Way: A Topographic Guide to “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Bloom, Harold, ed. James Joyces “Dubliners.”New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Buttigieg, Joseph A. A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987.
Dettmar, Kevin J. H. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Jackson, John Wyse, and Bernard McGinley, eds. James Joyce’s “Dubliners”: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Joyce, James. Critical Writings. Edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959.
————. Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ” Revised edition. Edited by Theodore Spencer. London : Cape, 1969.
