“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by J. Joyce traces the growth of a young Irish Catholic artist –to-be, Stephen who embraces “Life” by refusing to submitting to any authority for the sake of art. The indefinite article “A” attached to the noun ”portrait” marks the familiarity of profiles as being any one of several. The article “The” would have added a plus of uniqueness to the portrait. Stephen’s goal is to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” when leaving the Irish community to convey the voice of his nation through art.
“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.” (J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
A modernist piece of writing + A Bildungsroman
The novel opens “Once upon a time” it self-consciously draws attention to itself as a story , as a narrative. The opening pages of this novel lay a firm foundation for the plausibility of Stephen’s final decision to become “an artist”.: “Stephen Dedalus is my name,/Ireland is my nation/ Clongowes is my dwellingplace/ And heaven my expectation” (Joyce,150 )
The novel deals with themes that are incorporated in the sphere of modern writing: Stephen’s exceeding his limits through art, psychological struggles due to cultural contrasts, self-consciousness, 3rd person r / 1st person singular used in narrating the events.
Critics whether praising or condemning the novel, stand astonished at Joyce’s ability to present what JC Squire describes as “sheer undecorated, unintensified truth” (J.C.Squire, “Mr James Joyce” in Jeri Johnson ”Introduction”).
“A portrait of the artist as a young man” is a bildungs-roman as it pursues to evoke Stephen’s evolution to the point that he walks out of the novel on the last page seemingly self-determiend and self-determing. Thus, the appearance of Stephen as independent is an effect of the fact that walking out of the novel at the end is the last thing he does, through the diary he writes.
“Joyce moves the narrative center of consciousness from an independent third person narrator to one which exists between Stephen and the third-person narrator. Events and characters take their significance from Stephen”. Each individual episode mirrors, in effect, the general movement of the whole, each is a “minidrama of rising from lowliness to triumph”. (Jeri Johnson, Introduction)
Within each chapter Joyce follows a similar pattern of rising action: each opens with Stephen in humility and ends with him triumphant. Even if he quits the tradition, he envisions his writing as a service to the community as it has created and shaped his identity. HG Wells (Wells in “Introduction” Johnson) described the book as a “mosaic of jagged fragments”, a feature of a Bilgdungs-roman. The book breaks itself into sections within chapters, each of them marking a temporal and geographical shift.
Chapter I describes Stephen’s early childhood: Stephen at Congowes Wood College where he is unjustly pandied by one schollmaster and, having pleaded this injustice before another, emerges triumphant
Chapter II reflects a pattern of Stephen’s fantasies which registers: in his longing to the beautiful Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo, in his writing verse to E—C–, in his reeling from finding the word “foetus” carved into the bench of the physics theatre, in his ideals, and finally in his visit to the prostitute with which the chapter ends.
Chapter III concerns itself entirely with the religious reawakening which culminates in Stephen’s repentance and confession. Stephen still in mortal sin at the chapter’s outset, attends a retreat with the other Belvedere boys. There Father Arnall is holding a sermon on the torments of Hell that concerns those with unrepentant sins. Stephen feels his “trembling body.. with whimpering lips”.
Chapter IV traces the disintegration of Stephen’s religious commitment and its replacement with art.
Chapter V describes Stephen’s slough off friends, family, community and religious demands to answer the call of art. The language of art turn Stephen into a “shadow self”, as Hugh Kenner asserts (“The cubist Portrait” in Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds) “Approaches to Joyce’s Portrait: Ten Essays”, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976; p. 178-9 in Johnson, “Introduction”). Such shadow selves he argues “are not the author. They are potentialities contained within the author. They are what he has not become” (Hugh Kenner in Johnson) Thus, we might characterize Joyce’s writing as duplicitous or “double in action” due to his realistic symbolism that typifies the novel at once vividly “true to life” and aesthetically finely wrought. Stephen aspires to be an artist, whose medium will be language. For this purpose, Stephen repeatedly ponders words, their meaning, their effects and their textures. “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead”. (Joyce, 213).
“The reality of experience” in Stephen’s view
In chapter IV when walking on the strand, he encounters a young woman whom he imagines a fabulous creature, “one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird” (Joyce, 144). In the meantime he declares to Cranly: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning”(Joyce, 208) reflecting the idea of free-expression.
Moreover, concerning Stephen’s vision of hell emerging from his attendance to the sermon, this makes him sensible to spirituality „His flesh shrank together as if it felt the approach of the ravenous tongues of flames.” He lives „He, he himself, his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it! Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse.” (Joyce 170)
“Uncreated conscience” vs “Race”
Stephen’s life is perceived as a gradual and inevitable movement towards triumphant independence when on the final page he sets off to “forge in the smithy of (his) soul the uncreated conscience of (his) race” ( Joyce 213).
In the opening of Chapter III, we follow Stephen’s thoughts as he contemplates another visit to the prostitutes only to find out that he is actually sitting in a classroom during his Maths class. Thoughts seldom pursue a straight line; the narrative shifts from imagined future event to the mundane present setting. Once the lesson ends the rector announces the religious retreat and the narrative breaks off.
The events are not scrupulously faithful to every detail of Stephen’s experience. They are selected so as the portrait to reveal Stephen’s identity as well as the culture in which he exists.
The three silent conversations of Chapter V intensify Stephen’s isolation and allow the narrator to do double duty. They represent the claims of nation, family and church against which Stephen articulates his independence and elaborates his imagined escape through art.Critics of the novel have remarked Stephen’s recklessness and his arrogance. In the novel, Stephen is identified not by his “ego” but by his pride. He is a “pride of silence” (Joyce, p.148) “His father’s whistle, his mother’s mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth” (Joyce, p.147), “pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves” (Joyce, p.139). Unlike “arrogance” or “egoism”, “pride” supposes justification: one is justly proud of one’s accomplishments, and Stephen uses his pride to give him strength to leave family, Church and homeland “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead”. (Joyce, 213).
Stephen reaches to control the splintering through “all the different languages in the world” of the whatness of this thing, this place, this God: “God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God” (Joyce 157 ). Walking the streets of Dublin, he found himself glancing from one casual word to another in solid wonder that they had ben silently emptied of deeply sense. “His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms” (Johnson): “The ivy whines upon the wall/ And whines and twines upon the wall/ The ivy whines upon the wall” (Joyce 163 )
“England colonized Ireland and with it attempted to suppress and supplant the indigenous culture; English remains “foreign”, “an acquired speech” for his Irishman” (Johnson). During the late nineteenth century, in Ireland sprang various movements aimed to re-establishing “authentic” Irish Culture, most notably the Gaelic League. Its effects can be noticed in the novel, from Emma’s attending “league classes” (where she could be learning Gaelic) to Davin’s enthusiasm for hurley (a genuinely Irish sport) with which Stephen will have no truck: “I shall express myself as I am (…) My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fency I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? (…) No honorable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold them to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another”(Joyce, 170)
Stephen’s anger arises at the claim of playing a part in a drama he seeks to avoid, fancying instead his individuality as an artistic genius who flies free of shackles. “The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in these moments I told you. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than any birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from light. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (171) By the end of the novel, Stephen asserts that “the shortest way to Tara (is) via Holyhead (Tara was the ancient seat of Irish kings, Holyhead, the port in north Wales where ships heading east from Dublin landed) (Joyce, 211): to encounter Irish culture one must leave Ireland.
His last words in the novel: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead (Joyce 213) – signal his aspiration to soar with Dedalus whose self-fashioned wings allowed him to escape that labyrinth of his own making (Johnson, “Introduction”).
Moreover, the Greek various versions of his name – “Stepheanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos” make Stephen attempt to take it as a prophecy“. Meanwhile, “he seems to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the wave”s, vision that foreshadows Stephen as “a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea”, which evokes the “symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?” (Joyce 142) The contemplation might pre-figure his future as artist, “the end he had been born to serve”, and stirs his blood: “His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight”/ “An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes, and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs” (Joyce 142)
In conclusion, Stephen struggles to control his self-image and to wave his words so that they will bring about the future he longs for.
Bibliography
Jeri Johnson, Introduction in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Oxford University Press Inc,2000 (1964) (downloaded from AnyBook)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Oxford University Press Inc,2000 (1964) (downloaded from AnyBook)
Francis Hackett, “Green Sickness”, New Republic, 10/122 (3 Mar.1917), repr in Deming (ed), “Critical Heritage”, London : Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1987 i. 94 in J.C.Squire, “Mr James Joyce”, New Statesman, 9 (14 Apr. 1917), in Jeri Johnson, Introduction in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Oxford University Press Inc,2000 (1964) (downloaded from AnyBook)
HG Wells in Deming (ed), “Critical Heritage”, London : Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1987 in Jeri Johnson, Introduction in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Oxford University Press Inc,2000 (1964) (downloaded from AnyBook)
Hugh Kenner (“The cubist Portrait” in Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds) “Approaches to Joyce’s Portrait: Ten Essays”, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976; p. 178-9 in Johnson, “Introduction”