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)”