Ang Kiukok: On Pain as Beauty

In national artist Ang Kiukok’s 1960 oil painting Crucifix, there is pain that does not seem to fade even with some understanding of the work that Christ did not feel good in terms of the physical torment that he underwent. This is because Ang’s expressionist technique always led him to heavy symbolism that provides layer upon layer of critiques on the hardships of existence.

Crucifix, hinges upon the dehumanised feel of the painting. Every person in it looks mechanical while the objects are the ones that seem more organic. He played a cruel irony on the fact that the art of his time relied on a colder understanding of the human being as object. In Crucifix the human suffering is so undeniable and yet the artist refused to paint on its being such.

The severely angular look of the Christ shows a human perspective that seeks to understand God by way of dissection and by treating the Creator as some piece of clockwork whose parts needed to be memorized and catalogued.

The overall shade of the painting is very much geared to earth tones further emphasize the human condition. It is Ang Kiukok’s way of professing the fact that the Christian God is Who He Is because He did not put Himself apart from His creations and made the ultimate sacrifice for them. Lighting is brightest at the radial centre created by the head and chest area of Jesus which then radiates throughout the whole piece. Again, this is a loaded decision on Ang’s part and the idea emerges that nothing exists save from what Divine Providence allows. Even the Virgin Mary is depicted in a low light area to indicate that she is nothing if it were not for her relationship with Jesus.

Only actual lines are all that are and everything else is somehow made to conform to them. This symbolizes Ang’s fearlessness in facing the weight of the human condition. For a long time people shunned his realist-expressionist perspective, but even those people who found his art revolting had no choice but to accept the truth in his work: everyone lives with suffering one way or the other. Because as C.S. Lewis put it: “Pain is the chisel with which God fashions great sculptures from us slabs of stone.”

Fernando Amorsolo: Rediscovering the Filipina

In art, in literature and painting most especially, the feminine ideal is something that is rationally arrived at rather than something existent and accepted. Too frequently, the artistic and social female falls slave to fad and other fleeting notions that do not really define her. Fernando Amorsolo, in portraying the Filipina in works such as Princess Urduja and Dalagang Bukid does justice to the woman by granting only forms that are inevitable or those that are really chosen by real women.

If the argument is to be backed simply by the use of colors then it would fail. True, Amorsolo does the Filipina proud by bringing out the real texture and sheen of the evenly tanned woman. But more than this, his paintings always place them in a position that dominates the canvas in their own way. Amorsolo is best known for his idealized paintings of women in the countryside and his illuminated landscapes, which often portrayed traditional Filipino customs, culture, fiestas, and occupations. His pastoral works presented and imagined sense of nationhood in counterpoint to American colonial rule and were important to the formation of Filipino national identity.

Amorsolo was educated in the classical tradition and aimed to achieve his Philippine version of teh Greek ideal for the human form. In his paintings of Filipina women, Amorsolo rejected Western ideals of beauty in favour of Filipino ideals and was fond of basing the faces of his subjects on members of his family. The typical “Amorsolo women” were brown, fair-complexioned, young, beautiful, and slender-figured.

Amorsolo’s swift handling of light so that the woman, from any given angle, often seems to get lighting from above unlike the more Western counterparts who mostly get it from under them to somehow give an embattled look. But in Amorsolo, even in a painting where the woman is indeed embattled, such as in his Defense of a Filipino Woman’s Honour, he does not let her succumb to the dark background but instead lets her shine equally as the bolo-wielding man in front of her. The technique goes even further with the use of bright colors that hint more of the rave of the ‘60s rather than classicism’s foreboding tones.

For Amorsolo, the woman is the striking half of the creative process and that her role as such should not hinder her from exploring things other than household chores. His painting philosophy emphasizes the realization that man, in his part in the creative process, brings in the destructive element while the women bring in the womb of chaos. This is seen when Amorsolo places male figures side by side with women and he does not put the men is such striking postures. Again, the man may be wielding a weapon, but near the woman it is kept low not only for pragmatic reasons but because the woman can show a strength that requires no tools at all.

On Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881)

As one of the foremost visual artists of Impressionism, Pierre-Auguste Renoir possessed an aesthetic sense that relied on the most immediate aspects of appearances, that is, impressions. His style depicts representations of reality that seem to mimic the subjectivity of human perception with their partially detailed look.

And one hallmark example from Renoir’s prolific practice is the Luncheon of the Boating Party. The work shows a couple of the artist’s friends, among them his future wife, Aline Charigot (the lady playing with a dog), enjoying a few moments after their afternoon meal on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise along the Seine River in Chatou, France. This oil painting is a display of the artist’s virtuosity with handling light. The two men in sleeveless shirts, in the foreground, serve to distribute the light coming from the balcony’s opening throughout the whole picture. The rounded forms and intensely light values of the apparel of the two men accord a sense of unity to the painting. Without them, the work would have possibly appeared as a stark, light and dark contrast meeting at the canvas’ diagonal area.

As for visual texture, the rhythmic repetition of feathery brush strokes lends a homogeneity that is neither monotonous nor fantastically surreal. Almost every element in the composition, perhaps even with such inanimate elements as the metal bars of the railings, has that sense of being viewed through either half-closed eyelids, or watery eyes. Yet even so, Renoir does not entirely abandon the beauty of detail as can be seen in the luncheon’s ‘debris’ on the table in the foreground. Half-filled wineglasses, fruits, and tinted wine bottles, besides counterbalancing the brightness of the mantle, show another dimension of detail and reality. Seen through glass, liquids look more vivid and fluid; and surfaces that have a natural sheen, such as grapes, gain greater visual weight and, therefore, have a greater fidelity to their more edible counterparts.

The entirety of the color spectrum appears to have been successfully traversed as proven by the soft contrasts and the harmonious meeting of light and dark. In essence, the color values used achieved a high degree of harmony despite their obvious disparity. Very few actual lines were used in keeping with the generality of vision, but there is a great deal of implied and actual lines used. Take for example the people’s, even the dog’s fur, which possess no outlines about them to show form but instead rely on contrasting colors and well-angled strokes to communicate the solidity or softness of actual forms. Scales of objects and people seem aptly faithful to the actual, though the same cannot be said of the works deepest background since the thrust of Impressionism is to look only at the most general appearances. Proportions are also well-defined, and close to the actual, as can be seen in the difference between the people in the foreground and those in the back and their relation to the things around them.

From a contemporary hermeneutic standpoint, what is most apparent in the work is an abandoning of the Hegelian dialectic between realism and surrealism. The ideology of partiality towards either the actual or the ideal cannot but bow to Renoir’s artistic prowess and sensibility. Why should there be a strict hegemony of one ideology over the other, when in fact, daily life stands testament to the melding of the ideal and the material worlds? On the one hand, cold realism shows the human being as helpless in the face of his environment and his senses. And on the other hand, surrealism calls one to retreat to the world of the mental and ethereal—yet another sign of cowardice.

But as the Luncheon of the Boating Party shows, such a contradiction can only go so far. First, Renoir’s impressionist art reminds people that though they can see, it does not mean that everything is clear: we learn little by little based on what and where we train our attention to. This is evidenced by the fleeting appearance of the painting, which also implies that the material world is not all that there is. Second, the Luncheon shows that happiness is all really a state of mind merely brought to life by willpower. Every face in the painting has its own maturity to it. Each tells a unique discourse about the lives they live, whom (or what) they share it with, and what it means to live. Though the characters and color shades are various, they all seem to say that the goal of living is happiness, and that getting there is a choice entirely up to you.

And most central to this argument for simple and harmonious living is the ‘girl with the glass.’ In Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film, Amelie, the mystery of the drinking girl (whom we shall refer to, for purposes of discussion, as ‘Kim’) in the middle ground is interpreted as a sort of numb participation with society’s workings—as one character in the movie remarked: “She is in the middle, yet she is outside.” True enough, a sort of center can be established with Kim as the reference. The railings running diagonally on the left side meeting with the thin post, near the two standing men behind Kim, together with the horizontal railing behind them establish three actual lines, or two angles, in the space which create the illusion of depth. But their more important role is to hint at another line—an implied line—that runs parallel to both of them: a parallel of angles. Following the table’s edge (the one closer to Aline Charigot), one finds a parallel for the diagonal line of the railing. At the same time, taking Kim’s figure as a vertical line, it is ultimately revealed how important she is to the whole composition as a focal point for asymmetrical balance and emphasis. With the implied lines just presented, it is also obvious that the dark tone to Kim’s left counteract the heavy use of light colors elsewhere in the painting. Everyone around Kim is happily preoccupied with someone or something as can be seen in their eyes and facial expressions. But Kim seems not to be staring into space; instead, she emanates the look of staring within herself.

The womb of the nineteenth century, which gave birth to nihilism and communism, saw the world either as a machinery of the people inexorably geared toward conflict in the hopes of proletariat domination, or as a mere cipher with man as a god-in-waiting. But Renoir saw in the world simply a mélange of people trying to get along, just wanting to be happy. His art sees the harsh realities of the world but does not give in to it. Instead, Renoir finds concord between the ideal and the real hoping always to strike a balance between a trust in the heart and the bleak unknown that is the world.

Renoir painted to give hope perhaps because he knew that a time such as ours would come, when people would either be caught in too much materialism, or too much dreaming. And the figure of Kim tells us to never lose hope in making earth a better place for our loved ones. Everyone else in the Luncheon of the Boating Party looks happy either for the present or in recalling the past, yet Kim is central because she is the embodiment of hope and living without regrets, thus always finding happiness for herself and others.

Like a quiet student who prefers to sit at the back of the room with a handkerchief to her lips, seemingly unprepared for the intellectual tortures, Kim knows that though there have been many trials and that many more trials are to come, she has, and never will cease believing in her self, her abilities, and in her loved ones.

The Gift of Fire: On the Stream of Consciousness and the Reinvention of the Novel From James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

-Ulysses (1922)

James Joyce

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

-Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Thomas Pynchon

One of the many waterloos in literary study is found whenever an author at hand goes into a fit of internal monologues, incoherent thoughts, interdisciplinary digressions, and downright intentionally discombobulated speech. The situation is so counterintuitive to the objective of reading that one is tempted to think that excellence is judged by the degree of “ivory-tower” mentality that is present in a given work. What one fails to perceive though is the beauty of the novel as something paying vibrant homage to the fount of a holistic human mind. Two writers, for this reader at least, have contributed greatly to the growth of a more enlightened and lively type of literature: James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. Though the former is the more canonical of the two, the latter is already raking in much controversy and debate, so much so that in 1973, the Pulitzer Prize Committee withheld its fiction prize for that year.

These two writers handle the word with much ease using techniques that seem hard to follow for most pen-wielders, namely, the stream of consciousness and the self-consciousness of the novel. Albeit this subject has been more comprehensively dealt with in books such as Brian Stonehill’s The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), the goal of this undertaking is merely to entice the uninitiated to the self-conscious novel by showing some of the fundamental mechanism of works in the said genre.

Stream of consciousness, a term that was first used by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a narrative technique in nondramatic fiction that aims to show the ‘stream’ of various impressions in an individual mind; for 20^th century novelists, the psychological novel now had the liberty to depict the mind at work by incorporating “snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993).” For the free realm of the novel, this means that the character and the author no longer have to be caught in the monotony of the singular third-person. There is greater individuality to each character as his mind pours attention on unique sets of things, in a manner all his or her own. For the author, this means that the ineluctable subjectivity of the narrator becomes a norm rather than something to be frowned upon.

Stream of consciousness, dedicated as it is to the realistic flow and pouring of thoughts, naturally begets the novel’s consciousness of itself. This simply means that the novel now possesses references to the world outside of the entire story within it, which in literary theory means breaking the fourth wall. Fourth wall is the academic term for the boundary that separates the world of the reader from the world that the literary artifact is asserting in its story or content. Self-consciousness of the novel is most noticeable when the narrative suddenly refers to the reader, or when characters in certain scenes gain objects from some nameless hand as though from a stage crew.

James Joyce easily blurs the line between first-person narrative and stream of consciousness. What of course sets apart the stream of consciousness from the first-person narrator is the pure display of thoughts within the character regardless of grammatical, or sometimes even logical, coherence. And the self-consciousness of his novel Ulysses emerges when the character’s narrative implies conversation with the reader while apparently flaunting Stephen Daedalus’ signature internal monologue:

“Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once… (Ulysses, 1960)”

For Thomas Pynchon, who is already being hailed as an heir to the Joycean legacy, the stream of consciousness is an opportunity to inject more palpable and grounded images and sensations through the narrative. And the role of narrator and character is easily blurred when one realizes that the point-of-view shifts without warning and from one character to another. In fact, the narrator in many cases within the novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), gets counted as another character. This is possible because in the final analysis, all that a novel works with is a specific set of minds set apart by the descriptions that accompany them. But in the stream-of-consciousness novel, instead of descriptions, the novel ‘characterizes’ its characters by showing the way their minds work:

“Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she’s down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine-colored ribbon—here what’s this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl “gam” yes right among these winter-pale clinic halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the uncarpeted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists… bold Maud, this is incredible […]—it’s happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he’s dreaming or has found the perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past… how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I’m coming. Am I? yes … well… and Maud, dear Maudie […] (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973)”

Albeit there are cases that the stream of consciousness technique is used as some sort of excuse for excessive profanity, the ‘purposeful’ portrayal of such things is easily discernible from instances that do not really call for it. Real art, when it shows wrongdoing in seeming glorification of it, does so in a manner that in the end displays the evil as evil and good as good just as shadows in a painting.

On the Poetry of Jose F. Lacaba

*The reader must first of all forgive the fact that there will be no biographical notes here because this paper holds onto the idea that the text captures the soul of its writer.

Any reading of Jose F. Lacaba’s work, or any master for that matter, always gives the sense of effortless creativity. And perhaps that is the magic of Lacaba’s poetry: for the reader to be made aware of conflicts, absurdities, and great truths in the gentlest form of rhetoric.

The Filipino mind is a highly inhibited perspective from which both true introspection and observation, in a more open manner, are nearly impossible. But the Lacaba’s craft can easily circumvent what C.S. Lewis calls “watchful dragons” within the human mind which prevent it from paying attention to larger questions. And whereas post-modernity demands and coerces our attention by bombarding us with vulgar enigmas, the subtlety of the poet in question makes no bones about revealing his concern for the reader—the effect of Lacaba’s work is very much akin to the truly paternalistic gestures of old.

In his anthology Kung Baga sa Bigas (University of the Philippines Press, 2002), Lacaba makes the overall dialectics of life simpler for everyone. And no, what occurs is not a trivialization of the world, but rather, a summarization of it.

“Lahat ng hindi ko kailangang malaman,

natutunan ko sa pelikulang For Adults Only”

Marumi and pulitiko, pero malinis ang budhi

ng puta.

Ipokrito ang pari, pero may ginintuang puso

ang puta.

Nagpapaaral ng kapatid na magpapari

ang puta.

Namumutiktik sa putang ina at anak ng puta ang malaswang bibig

ng puta.

Nalululong sa droga ang anak

ng puta.

Ayaw ng putang ina na ang anak niyang babae’y masadlak

sa pagpuputa.

Ang unang tikim sa luto ng Diyos ay ipinapatikim

ng puta.

Bukas ang simbahan kahit madaling-araw tuwing magdadasal

ang puta.

Nagbubulungan ang mga manang na nakakasalubong

ng puta.

Ginahasa ng tiyuhin ang puta kaya siya

nagputa.

Tulak ng kahirapan kung kaya nagputa

ang puta.

Hindi nagpapahalik sa labi

ang puta.

Kapwa puta ang mga kabarkada

ng puta.

Magandang lalaki ang nag-aalay ng tapat na pag-ibig

sa puta.

Masungit na ina ng magandang lalaki ang nag-aalok ng pera

para lumayo

ang puta.

Kung binabaril ang bidang lalaki, yumayakap at tinatamaan

ang puta.

Tanging kamatayan ang tutubos at magpapatawad sa kaputahan

ng puta.

Sigaw ng puta: Pare-pareho naman tayong

puta!

(Kung Baga sa Bigas, pp. 100-101)

Taken at its didactic value, this poem preaches the biblical lesson of taking the beam out of one’s eye before taking the speck from your neighbor’s. Yet even with this prudent layer of intention is the undeniable beauty of the technique employed. By repeatedly using the word ‘puta’ in every instance there is a looming feel of reverse psychology as it is told by a parent. If the lesson really were to teach a child not to be prejudiced with the people he meets then the method here is to show the youngster the fact that every human being has a little wrong in them, and that no one is in any real position to pass judgment on anyone else. The title already bespeaks a hard lesson to be learned and the device chosen for the task—a for-adults-only movie—only means that even people advance in years still find it difficult to accept and share the lesson offered since they have to keep it to their own demographic. Added to this is the formulaic crescendo of a slapstick Filipino love-story-cum-action film, which in the end slams into a counterpoint by a fresh insight seldom and often never heard, cry of the nubile prostitute.

This poem addresses the whole of a society that refuses to be judged but is so eager to give it. This seems most poignant in the line which says that only death can redeem the whore’s being a whore.

Why is it that we fail to forget the dignity of every person?

Lacaba’s reply is illustrated in the lines which depict the old devotees in church who murmur to each other whenever they run into the prostitute. People—who believe they are of higher value than others—hold so much to the visual and ethereal rites of religion, still require some concrete proof of their cheap ‘holiness.’ And this proof they find in the local whore. They may not see it but they need people like whores and other community ‘lowlifes’ to justify themselves in their unproductive version of good living, which is a great shame for Christianity.

And if Lacaba seems gifted with subtly putting great debates out in the open, he also possesses that eerie skill of getting into the reader’s head, so to speak, and there wreak some artistic havoc, which eventually leads to an ‘epiphany’ in the Joycean sense of the word.

“Pusa sa kalsada”

Ang abuhing pusa sa harap ng bahay

ay pusa naming tatlong araw na yatang

nawawala. Ngayon, eto siya, kampanteng

nakahilata sa kalsada, halatang

patay. Kung sino ang yumari at sino

ang nag-iwan dito ay hindi ko alam.

Ang alam ko’y kawatan ang aming pusa,

nagbubungkal gabi-gabi sa kusina

ng kung sinu-sino, hindi lang sa amin.

Kagabi pang ako’y nakakatulog na,

may naamoy akong parang naagnas,

pero dahil gabi’y hindi ko pinansin.

Madaling-araw nang ako’y magising. Nang

buksan ko ang bintana, tumambad agad

ang patay na pusa sa harap ng bahay

Isang aleng napaaga rin ng gising

ang nagdaan, nagtakip ng ilong, diring-

diri. Tinitigan ako nang masama.

Tiim-bagang akong nagpunta sa likod-

bahay, naghukay nang malalim. Pagkatapos,

dala ang pala, dustpan, posporo, diyaryo,

at samboteng gaas, pumasakalye ako.

Parang pawisan ang katawan ng pusa,

walang balahibo ang bundat na tiyan.

Pinaliguan ko ng gaas ang bangkay,

kinumutan ng diyaryo, at sinindihan

ang kumot—na agad nagliyab, nanliit.

Umanyong gigising ang pusa; umunat

ang katawan nito, tumaas ang paa,

parang naghihikab lang, nag-iinat—at

bumuka ang bibig, pumutok ang puwit,

parang bigas na biglang bumuhos ang mga

uod, puting-puti, maliit, malikot,

namamaluktot sa kalye, mga anak ng

apoy, nilalamon ng gutom na apoy.

Kinilabutan ang ilang nagdaraan.

Tinanggap ng dustpan ang tulak ng pala.

Hindi pa nagkasya ang ulo, sumuka

uli ng uod na nagkikisay.

Patakbo kong dinala sa naghihintay

na hukay ang pusang sunog, tinabunan ko

ang butas, pinukpok ng pala ang lupa.

Ni wala nga palang pangalan ang pusa

amin, hindi nabigyan. Balik sa kalye,

kunin ang bote ng gaas.

Uod, uod.

Hindi ako makakapag-almusal nito.

(Kung Baga sa Bigas, pp. 9-10)

Apart from his fine handling of imagery in this poem, Lacaba is also displaying skill in a poetic form of flash fiction. Just like Richard Brautigan’s The Scarlatti Tilt, the poem above exhibits the same elements that a normal short story requires. It begins with the problem of a kitchen-raiding cat which upsets everyone in the neighborhood, and so there are already characters, a setting, and a conflict. The climax is of course when someone really gets pissed off with the feline and decides to take matters into his or her own hands. And the descending action unfolds with the burning and burial of the cat by its owner. But even then, since it is fiction in poetry, a question inevitably lingers: was the act of killing the animal justifiable?

The brutal realism of the poem seems to give character to what truly is vintage Lacaba, which is basically an empirical perspective of truth. Though realism may not appeal to some, and more specifically to the age of today, Jose ‘Pete’ Lacaba gives not only art worthwhile studying and viewing, but a cultural heirloom for generations to come.

On James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Almost every review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (hereafter, A Portrait), does not fail to note the autobiographical significance of the novel. But if one if to see as Joyce’s primary aim for the novel as a means to share his life, then perhaps the novelist has failed to a great extent. For if readers are to consider the things against which Stephen Daedalus’ rebels against in the novel, such as religion, politics, etc. then the work loses much of its timelessness since the age of today sees ideas and actions against these institutions as commonplace. Even the display of the growth of an artist falls short of the novel’s true aim since it will appear in the end that the artist is nothing more than some egocentric bohemian. But this paper does not dismiss such layers of meaning or intent within the work.

From the technical viewpoint, A Portrait stands as a fine display of various literary techniques. Chief among them of course is the stream of consciousness technique. Stream of consciousness, a term that was first used by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a narrative technique in nondramatic fiction that aims to show the ‘stream’ of various impressions in an individual mind; for 20^th century novelists, the psychological novel now had the liberty to depict the mind at work by incorporating “snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993).” Albeit A Portrait does not employ stream of consciousness to a degree that matches its use in works such as Arthur Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl (1901), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), or even James Joyce’s very own Ulysses (1922), the novel in question still possesses the same technique at vital points from which it greatly benefits.

“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 a road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. (Chapter I, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”

The childish pig Latin and simplistic coherence of the opening sentence exhibits a psychological starting point for Stephen. Yet beyond this, it shows that one of the first barriers that the artist of the word must conquer before gaining freedom of any sort is the very language that serves his ends which be dealt with later on. Another thing for which the stream of consciousness technique works very well is for displaying Daedalus’ various ‘epiphanies.’ Joyce dedicated himself to these little creations while he was at the University College, Dublin. And though the word means beatific visions made available to mortals, for James Joyce, they meant a description of moments when real truth about a person or object was revealed. He made this into a kind of exercise that enabled him to develop a concise style while recording accurate observation (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993).

“A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face....

—Heavenly God! Cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.— (Chapter IV, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”

Though it may not seem like a stream of consciousness is at play here, if one notes the use of the word ‘softhued,’ which is lexically nonexistent, there comes the implied hint that the entire paragraph is a thought within Stephen’s highly inventive literary mind. Yet it is not only in a profusion of good and benevolence that the novel gives full view of the hero’s mind. At the close of the second chapter, where the young Daedalus gets his first taste of female flesh, readers are given a glimpse of the mind suffused by a darker aesthetic:

“With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour. (Chapter II, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Again, the stream of consciousness is more subtly applied in this area but is nonetheless present. In the last sentence, the tactile sensation, ‘softer,’ is applied to the illogical stimuli of ‘sound’ and ‘odour.’ This juxtaposition is not the mere use of some figure of speech as the sentence depicts a clear progress of the breakdown of one fallen into sexual pleasure.

Another technical excellence within A Portrait is its pithy and realistic characters. One might be compelled to think that this is just some cheap trick subscribing to the low hack’s excuse, that it or he is real. But in the case of James Joyce, where the stream of consciousness and the idea of an artist struggling to break free converge, the notion of reality is readily subordinated to the nobler objective of recreating life to produce beauty. Joyce reinvented himself in the form of Stephen Daedalus. Characters in A Portrait therefore, draw beauty not just from their being organic, but from the fact that their organic realism naturally elevates them to symbolic roles.

On the one hand is the dimension given by the name Daedalus. The epigraph that opens A Portrait explains the calling of the artist as something completely different from some fashion statement. “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes (Chapter I, A Portrait of the Artist of the Young Man), which is Latin for ‘And he applies his mind to unknown arts,’ comes from Ovid’s description of Daedalus in his Metamorphoses. Beautiful as the quote is, it is incomplete, something which may be considered as an intentional device on Joyce’s part. The line continues as “and changes the laws of nature.” Appropriate for the qualities that the hero of A Portrait must have, the mythical Daedalus captures the essence of the artist as someone who lives for nothing more than the consummation of human creativity. Just as Daedalus made the labyrinth to enclose the destructive Minotaur of Minos, Stephen remade for himself a refuge to keep out the shallowness of the rest of the world; and just as Daedalus made wings for himself and his son Icarus, Stephen used his own intelligence to fly from the “nets” of Irish living to go to Paris.

On the other hand of course is the name Stephen. “And let you, Stephen, make a novena to your holy patron saint, the first martyr who is very powerful with God, that God may enlighten your mind (Chapter IV, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man),” intoned the director of the young Daedalus’ school upon offering him to join the Jesuit order. The use of Stephen in the novel is clearly associated with martyrdom, so for Joyce, the life of the artist is a lonely road for which sacrifices must be made if the noble flame of creativity is to ever be kept alive. And the character of Stephen Daedalus does make the conscious sacrifice of fleeing nation and family, by a short-lived self-imposed exile to Paris (which is told in Ulysses) all in the pursuit of freedom for the sake of art.

Another excellence of characterization shows though the image of Emma. From the quotation above, in the scene where Stephen watches a maiden by the sea, readers are treated not only to Emma’s elevation as a symbol but also her evolution as a symbol of the feminine ideal. Albeit in the world of literature many beloved women become elevated to some higher image in the eyes of the lover, Emma Clery is perhaps the only one that achieves a truly dramatic and productive impact in the life of the main character. From the time of childhood, to Stephen’s first sexual encounter, even to Daedalus’ reconciliation with God via the Virgin Mary, and then to the eventual maturity accomplished through the lass standing by the shore, the ideal of Emma endured. But she is not stagnant like Dante’s Beatrice who just gets to become the female aspect of the Godhead, Emma can be found in every woman and in every instance of gentle beauty. She is Stephen’s liberated aesthetic. Proof of this is that even before Emma, the feminine ideal was already in the young Daedalus’ mind:

“…Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then? And he remembered the evening in the infirmary of Clongowes, the dark waters, the light at the pierhead and the moan of sorrow from the people when they had heard.

Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of the Tower of Ivory. (Chapter I, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”

And having this heavenly ideal of a woman in his mind from earlier years, Stephen merely finds a new fount from whom the ideal radiates as is obvious when the seraphim-like aspect of Eileen is later bestowed onto Emma:

“As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail, gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpetblast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? (Chapter III, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”

Another thing that has endowed James Joyce immortality is his unmatched skill with melding technique with content. And from the preceding quote about Eileen, readers taste how something so religio-politically loaded gets to be a moment of epiphany for young Stephen via a little imagination, a little Roman Catholic dogma, and an innocent but bold youngster’s internal monologue. One of the great issues that A Portrait touches upon is the perspective of someone from an Irish Catholic upbringing. Early 20^th century Ireland, at the time that A Portrait’s story is taking place, had been under British rule since the 16^th century. And the majority of Irish, including the Joyces, were Catholics and very much favored independence from British rule. According to H.G. Wells, in his review of the novel, the extent of the Irish-British conflict in A Portrait is so palpable that one perceives that Joyce made the people of Dublin naturally hate the English:

“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. (The New Republic, 1916)”

The most poignant scene of this conflict extending into the family of course comes through in the Christmas dinner scene in the first chapter. Parnell would have been a great Irish nationalist, and Catholic too at that, if only the Church had not found out about his affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea:

“He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping noise with his lips.

—Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before Stephen. It’s not right.

—O, he’ll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly—the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home.

—Let him remember too, cried Mr. Casey to her from her across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests’ pawns broke Parnell’s heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows up.

—Sons of bitches! cried Mr. Daedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Lowlived dogs! And they look it! By Christ, they look it! (Chapter I, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”

Stephen Daedalus’ may be just another story of pursuing the freedom for human expression, but more important is the gem of truth that however we may hate the evil that we have had to conquer they nonetheless chiseled us into whatever greatness we now enjoy. It was the great delusion of Daedalus that he would be able to free himself from all ‘fetters’ that can bind an artist from fulfilling his true potential, but he was consciously, or unconsciously, oblivious to the fact that his Roman-Catholic-Irish-Jesuit-Daedalus upbringing made him into what he had become at the end of the novel.

“—It is a curious thing, do you know—Cranly said dispassionately—how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.— (Chapter V, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”

Fortunately though, at the very end, Stephen clearly displays a reconciliation of all the forces within him. And that is the epiphany within this serialised, five-chapter revised version of Stephen Hero (1903?): true freedom is learning to accept the bounds where your freedom cannot be free yet in that space, be able to invite God to tread on earth.

“April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O 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. (Chapter V, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)”