In “The Dead” Joyce covers important social and political issues in the Ireland of his time, while weaving them into a series of intimate familial, personal, and even marital relationships. As in previous stories, the reader is obliged to work against the narration at times, to see in the story of a merry holiday party dominated by a patriarchal figure, leading and caring for his family, a more hidden story of women ignored, discounted, and displaced with other concerns. Perhaps some justice has been achieved when, at the story’s end, Gabriel is awake after Gretta goes to sleep, thinking and feeling that his soul “had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead” (194).
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
It is difficult to pin down exactly when Joyce began writing his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By some accounts its first draft was a sketch produced in 1904, although the first attempts at the manuscript that became its prelude—titled Stephen Hero—might have appeared as early as 1903. No complete manuscript of Stephen Hero survived, although Joyce might have completed it by 1906 and begun sending it to publishers. After receiving a series of rejections, however, he nearly destroyed it in a fit of frustration. His friend and publisher, Sylvia Beach, later reported that Joyce shoved the manuscript into a burning stove and his wife Nora rescued as many pages as she could, burning her hands in the process. Joyce then began a new version of the novel in 1907 and in early 1914, with the help of his new admirer Ezra Pound, and his later patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began serial publication in the journal The Egoist. The first printed edition appeared in 1916, and thanks to Pound’s support, it received a generally enthusiastic reception in spite of some criticism of its treatment of religion.
The stories of Dubliners gloss only occasional moments and experiences in Joyce’s life, but Portrait is based more consistently on his educational experiences: first at the boarding school called Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, followed by his time at the Jesuit high school of Belvedere in Dublin, and his subsequent studies at University College, Dublin. Critic Morris Beja’s biography documents Joyce’s experiences at these institutions that found their way into Portrait: including his unjust punishment with a pandybat at Clongowes, the annual retreat and the prizes he won at Belvedere, and the romantic moment when he saw a young woman wading in a stream that revealed to him his vocation as an artist (James Joyce: A Literary Life). Joyce also enjoyed other experiences in those years that are not recorded in Portrait, or in the later Ulysses, such as his meeting with the distinguished poet William Butler Yeats, which took place in London while Joyce was on his way to study medicine in Paris.
What transitions does Joyce implement in moving from the short stories of Dubliners to the novelistic form of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? The book’s title makes it clear that its protagonist is a young artist. Like Dubliners, it begins in childhood, although at an earlier time of life than any found in “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” or “Araby.” As it proceeds, its narrative follows Dubliners in progressing systematically from an account of younger years to adolescence to young adulthood, but in the single figure of a protagonist named Stephen Dedalus, rather than in the series of boys and young persons found in the stories. The name Dedalus evokes “Daedalus,” the mythological artist and artisan mentioned by Homer, and thereby points to the importance of Classicism as a feature of Joyce’s art, a characteristic even more prominently displayed in the title of Ulysses. The Greek Daedalus sought to escape his confinement on the island of Crete by fashioning wings for himself and his son Icarus in order to fly across the sea. In Joyce’s novel, this mythical story will hint at Stephen Dedalus’s hope to leave Ireland for the Continent to pursue his artistic vocation.
Portrait confines itself to Stephen’s years from childhood through adolescence, and although he returns as a figure in Joyce’s Ulysses, we never learn how his life continues beyond his 20s. The more dramatic difference between Dubliners and Portrait is not thematic, however, but stylistic. The childhood stories of Dubliners are narrated from an arguably adult perspective, but the opening sentence of Portrait tells us how “a moocow coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo” (7). This language suggests that we are told this in the vocabulary and syntax of a small boy, but the narration continues in the third person and gradually matures as the boy matures. This symbiosis of stylistic and chronological maturation is, in a sense, the hallmark of A Portrait, as it transforms artistic awareness and ambition from a thematic characteristic of a young boy and young man into a stylistic enactment in its prose.
Before looking at both the thematic and stylistic developments in Portrait, it may be helpful to briefly examine Stephen Hero since this work also sheds light on the way Joyce decided to shape his revised version of Stephen Dedalus. Only a few critics have taken Stephen Hero seriously as significant in its own right, notably Joyce scholar Michael Gillespie who argues that “it would be a mistake to relegate it to an ancillary position in Joyce’s canon—either as a piece of juvenilia or as the rough sketch of later work” (Reading the Book of Himself, 43). He points out a difference in the focus of the two texts, with Stephen Hero devoted more to representing day-to-events rather than the mental ruminations of the protagonist. Critic Patrick Parrinder also attributes to Stephen Hero moments of “painstaking realistic narrative” (James Joyce, 32), pointing to one episode in particular that Joyce omitted from A Portrait. This is a painful conversation between Stephen and his mother, who is tending her very ill daughter. She comes into the room where he is sitting at the piano in the gloom of a late afternoon and asks him a question—“Do you know anything about the body?” (Stephen Hero 163). Her “excited face was crimson,” the narration tells us, and her voice is described as the “voice of a terrified human being.” Her concern is that “[t]here’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s . . . stomach,” but she cannot bring herself to be give a more specific name to the unmentionable body part, able to identify it only as “The hole . . . the hole we all have . . . here.”
There is a poignancy in this scene of a mother and son needing to communicate about a painful topic with some inevitable embarrassment, and critics can only guess that the reason it is omitted from Portrait is for just that reason—it is simply too dramatic and “raw,” as Parrinder describes it, to fit the narrative and stylistic spirit of understatement that characterizes the later work. But even so, this scene harks back to a feature already discussed in the stories of Dubliners—namely its provocation to prod the reader into trying to figure out what is going on, what the language is suppressing and why. The realism of distinctive moments like those in the scene above continues in the sharp detail of many ensuing scenes of Stephen Hero, and its overall narrative lays the groundwork for the story of artistic development that will be the central focus of Portrait. It offers an insight into Stephen’s relationship with family and friends, the contributions and trials found in the process of education, the difficulties posed by the strictures of religion, and the liberating but also intellectually challenging commitment to a life devoted to art.
As we proceed chapter by chapter, Portrait’s central focus will be on the relationship between Stephen’s familial and social development as a thematic topic and the development of the narrative language and style as it reflects his emotional and intellectual development. This focus on development places Portrait in the tradition of the Bildungsroman, a novelistic genre that is generally traced back to the 18th century and to the work of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe titled Wilhelm Meister. In his discussion of Portrait, Joyce critic Breon Mitchell points out that the Bildungsroman has a specific agenda: it aims to show how a young man’s experiences can make him “a well-rounded individual who is both knowledgeable and wise,” and how he can best be prepared “to take his meaningful and rightful place in society” (63).
This process entails an ex
ploration of the effects of upbringing, education, and cultural influences that shape a person’s outlook, values, and ambitions. But by its title, A Portrait of the Artist also places itself in the more specific category of the Künstlerroman, the genre that complicates the development narrative by making it the story of the genesis and growth of the artist and the artistic imagination. We will certainly see this in young Stephen Dedalus’s conflicts with friends and institutions, his yearnings and needs, his work to make sense of his condition and that of the world surrounding him, and his reflections on the results of these efforts—not only in the production of but also in his conceptualization of art.
But as noted previously, Joyce goes beyond the Künstlerroman tradition and does something quite extraordinary by making the telling of the artistic development performative, as it were—that is, he has the narration act out or demonstrate the artistic development it is discussing in the language and style of the narration itself. In a curious way, when reading Portrait, we have the sense that the artist’s development or Bildung has indeed been completed in a highly successful way, given how his story is told. This will require a double focus as we take up each of the chapters of Portrait. At the same time that we learn of Stephen’s experiences, we also need to explore the language in which they are presented to us. One benefit of this double perspective is that it further complicates the work generically, by giving its novelistic prose a highly poetic dimension that requires us to function not only as readers but also as literary critics. Here is what Stephen seems to observe as he walks and talks with his friend Cranly: “The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with their greenwhite slime” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 228). The scene is factual in one respect yet nuanced by words and concepts: rain that is “heavy” “still” and falling “ever,” creating a metaphoric “shield” on the lake. The swans that we may picture as flying gracefully over water and shore also function as living creatures rather than mere images with the “greenwhite slime” they deposit over the water. This is not mere story-telling but artistic and poetic in its style.
Chapter I
The first chapter of Portrait tells, in four sections, the story of Stephen Dedalus’s early childhood with each part organized around a trauma that the young boy experiences. The first one appears to focus on the period right after infancy, when the little boy is old enough to hear childhood stories but before he goes to school. It is unclear why he hides under the table or why his mother says, “O, Stephen will apologise” (8). But his functional “aunt” Dante’s elaboration, “O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes” makes it clear that the little boy has done something punishable that ends up creating a traumatic experience for him.
The second section shows Stephen at the private Jesuit boarding school—one that Joyce himself attended—Clongowes Wood College, located about 40 miles from Dublin in County Kildare. If that section has an autobiographical basis, we can judge Stephen’s age at this point to be around seven years old. Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann tells us that when Joyce arrived at Clongowes, he was asked how old he was and his reply was “[h]alf past six, a phrase that became for some time his school nickname” (James Joyce, 27).
The trauma of this first Clongowes section is not actually represented, but we learn indirectly that a classmate had pushed little Stephen into the water of a cold ditch, an experience that landed him in the infirmary the next day with chills and fever. This event appears to have taken place before Christmas, the time of the third section, when Stephen is home celebrating the holiday at a family dinner attended by his father’s friend, the Irish nationalist Mr. Casey. The lovely dinner turns into a debacle when the conversation turns to Irish politics, and Stephen is obliged to witness an altercation between the religious Dante and Mr. Casey. The conflict Stephen sees played out operates on two levels—between family and friends, but also on the national level, where the Catholic Church’s attack on the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell created a historical crisis in Ireland.
After this devastating Christmas dinner, Stephen returns to Clongowes where he experiences another trauma, this time not at the hands of a classmate but from a priest who visits the classroom and punishes the boy by striking his hand with a bat, presumably because he assumed that Stephen broke his glasses to get out of school work. This fourth section ends triumphantly, with little Stephen deciding to get justice by reporting the unfair punishment to the school’s rector. His classmates cheer when he returns and tells them of his success.
When the next chapter begins, things are not going so well with the Dedalus family, and we see a pattern that perdures throughout Portrait—that of having chapters end on a highly positive and encouraging note only to have things brought back down to the dismal earth at the beginning of the next.
The infancy section of Chapter I starts with the standard beginning of fairy tales: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road” (7). A moment later we learn that this was what the little boy was hearing, a story told to him by his father. The narration is in the third-person, but as the father is described, we realize that the narrator’s vocabulary is that of a small child. “[H]is father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.” The little boy does not yet know the words “monocle,” “spectacle,” “glasses,” “mustache” or “beard.” His toddler state is further demonstrated by the observation “[w]hen you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold,” describing what he actually experiences when he wets the bed. But a few lines later, the little boy seems to have matured a bit. When he describes Dante’s maroon and green brushes, he understands that the colors are symbolic and is even able to name Michael Davitt and Parnell, the men they symbolize, even if he does not yet understand their political agendas. He then describes some apparent neighbors, the Vances, and their daughter Eileen with whom he appears to have a close friendship—“When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen” (8). And it is then that we hear Stephen’s mother telling him he must apologize, and Dante’s threat that the eagles will pull out his eyes if he does not. This is the gist of the infancy introduction, but it also repeats songs, melodies, and rhymes that he hears, about a wild rose that blossoms, the sailor’s hornpipe “Tralala lala,” and the ominous rhyme of “Pull out his eyes,/ Apologise.” This is the little boy’s first encounter with art, we surmise, with music and poetry both lovely and dangerous. We have also learned his name—“O, Stephen will apologise”—and a sketch of family. It includes a father who tells stories, a mother who plays the piano, an Uncle Charles, and Dante (a live-in friend who functions like a German Tante or aunt), and their clapping when Stephen dances to his mother’s piano music.
The skillful deployment of the narrative language in this section lets the Künstlerroman begin with a literary performance that enacts Stephen’s childhood maturation—not only in the details of the narrative but also in the language and manner in which it is represented.
The first Clongowes section of the chapter opens on a football field where a game is in progress. But Stephen does not really play, “feigning to run now and then” (8). “He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery.” It is a chilly evening and “his hands were bluish with cold” (9) and “he shivered as if he had cold slimy water next to his skin” (10). This turns out not to be a metaphor but reference to a recent experience. “That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Wells’s seasoned hacking chestnut.”
This narrative gives us a sketch of Stephen’s life at the boarding school where he suffers from both physical and social vulnerability. He is not athletic, making him a target for bullies. On this particular evening, his mind continually goes back to his comfortable home in Dublin, where he remembers “Mother was
sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea.” This memory is sparked by his wish “to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands” and think of some poetic sentences in his spelling book.
Stephen is clearly a shy, but bright little boy attuned to words and poetry, less interested in the white and red roses of the houses of York and Lancaster as portrayed in history books, than in the wild rose that blossomed in the rhymes of his infancy. He also shows a philosophical bent, thinking about the universe—“was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped” (16)—and about the nature of God.
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