A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (3 page)

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. (208)

In the interstices, he writes a villanelle to a ‘temptress’, unnamed but clearly ‘E——C——’. In the final pages of the novel, we are given Stephen’s ‘diary’ as he prepares to leave Ireland, and for the first time the narrative proceeds in the first person. In his last entry he implores Daedalus: ‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’ (213).

Such an account presents the novel as in the mode of the usual novel of development, and reads Stephen’s life 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’ (213). Within each chapter a similar pattern of rising action can be seen: each opens with Stephen in humility and ends with him triumphant. The careful selection and arrangement of events differs markedly from that episodic plodding of
Stephen Hero
.

‘a mosaic of jagged fragments’

But if in standing back from the novel and examining the relations of its five chapters to its overall structure, we discern a pattern, early reviewers did not detect it. H. G. Wells typified their reactions when
he described the book as ‘a mosaic of jagged fragments’.
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Open the book and look at it: it breaks repeatedly into sections within chapters. Each break marks a temporal and geographical shift. Each new section opens without any consoling narrator explaining where we are or how we got there or how much time has elapsed since the last section. Each chapter breaks even more decisively with its predecessor. Even within sections, the narrative shifts. Take the opening of
Chapter III
, for example. We follow Stephen’s thoughts as he contemplates another visit to the prostitutes only to discover that he is actually sitting in a classroom during a mathematics lecture. Thoughts seldom follow a straight line; in following Stephen’s thoughts, the narrative moves from imagined future event to the mundane present setting within which that future is contemplated. Once the maths lesson ends and the rector of the college announces the forthcoming religious retreat, the narrative breaks off. The next words are those of Father Arnall as he opens his sermon on Hell. Things have happened, we imagine (as though Stephen were a real person living an actual life), between the maths lesson and the retreat, but they are not recounted. A continuous developmental narrative only emerges when we stand far enough back and draw bold lines connecting the discrete dots that constitute individual sections and chapters.

The point here is simple: the events presented are not scrupulously faithful to every detail of Stephen’s lived experience. They are selected by Joyce, who with remarkable spareness and precision provides the telling detail. Things happen in this novel because of their significance to the portrait of Stephen that Joyce wishes to draw, because they reveal something about him (and the culture in which he exists). Take as an example another small difference between
Stephen Hero
and
Portrait
. In the former, Stephen has twice the number of acquaintances he has in
Portrait
, and ten times as many conversations with them. By reducing these to the three salient conversations of
Chapter V
, Joyce intensifies Stephen’s isolation and allows the narrative to do double duty. The three conversations represent quite specifically the claims of nation, family, and Church against which Stephen articulates his independence and elaborates his imagined escape through art. Similarly, in
Stephen Hero
Stephen is repeatedly described in terms of his ‘ineradicable egoism’; he
is ‘the wholehearted young egoist’ who possesses an ‘ingenuous arrogance’: in expecting that Stephen will ‘follow the path of remunerative respectability’, his family ‘first fulfilled him with egoism; and he rejoiced that his life had been so self-centred’.
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Critics of
Portrait
have often remarked Stephen’s callowness and his arrogance. But a striking shift in terminology from
Stephen Hero
to
Portrait
marks a precise and significant difference between the two Stephens. In the latter, he is identified not by his ‘ego’ but by his ‘pride’. His is a ‘pride of silence’ (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’ (147). ‘Pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves’ (139). Unlike ‘arrogance’ or ‘egoism’, ‘pride’ carries with it an element of justification: one is justly proud of one’s accomplishments. And the Stephen of
Portrait
uses his pride to give him strength to leave family, Church, and homeland. Significantly, however, in shifting Stephen’s egoistic arrogance to pride, Joyce again extracts a double meaning. ‘Pride’ carries another association which, in a pattern of careful repetition, Joyce points out. When Stephen declares to Cranly, ‘I will not serve’ (which he does twice: 201, 208), he echoes another, as Cranly calmly notes (‘That remark was made before’: 201). As Father Arnall (twice) tells his ‘dear boys’, Lucifer, a.k.a. Satan, that son of the morning who fell from heaven dragging with him a third of the hosts of heaven, committed ‘the sin of pride’ when he uttered ‘
non serviam: I will not serve
’ (99). ‘[A]n instant of rebellious pride of the intellect made Lucifer … fall from … glory’ (112–13). Stephen’s pride sustains him, but the echo suggests that his pride, like its proverbial equivalent, may precede a fall.

‘he confesses in a foreign language’

Joyce had a mind intrigued by the ‘not-quite-samenesses’ of things, by, that is, the ways in which things are at once distinctively themselves and like other things, the ways things can be themselves and still be metaphors or symbols. The habit was nurtured by the culture of that Catholic Church he left behind. There, every element of church ritual has a meaning beyond itself, whether it be the altar, the candles, the chalice, the priest’s vestments or the gestures he
performs. In writing
Portrait
, Joyce exploited this potential doubleness of things. So, Stephen is both like and unlike Lucifer, just as he is both like and unlike his two namesakes, St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and Daedalus, Ovid’s archetype of the artist.
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And he is both like and unlike James Joyce.
Portrait
is famously autobiographical. The book opens with a story of a moocow coming down the road where ‘a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo’ lived (5). The real, historical John Joyce told this story to his real, historical son James.
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The close resemblance of the characters within the novel to actual persons, persons with whom James Joyce was demonstrably personally acquainted (many of whom afterwards claimed such identifications
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), and of events in the novel to those that Joyce experienced, the fact that biographies and critiques have been written taking the proximity of fictional to real persons as premiss,
²⁶
and the fact that any novel written by any novelist about one who becomes a writer will provoke the suspicion that that novel might well be derived from the details of that novelist’s own life, have led to the endlessly reiterated description of this novel as ‘autobiographical’. Of course it is—autobiographical, that is.
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James Joyce shared with Stephen Dedalus a Jesuit education at Clongowes Wood, Belvedere, and University Colleges. He lived, like Stephen, in a series of decreasingly salubrious houses in Bray, Blackrock, and Dublin. He lived, like Stephen, in an Ireland dominated by the
Catholic Church and occupied economically, linguistically, and governmentally by ‘foreigners’. Like Stephen, he acted the part of a ‘farcical pedagogue’ in a school play, flirted with the idea of becoming a priest, but chose instead to become a writer. And, like Stephen, he left Ireland. He, too, passed through a phase of intense aestheticism, read Aquinas and Aristotle, and fashioned an aesthetic, but unlike Stephen he emerged the other side and wrote a novel Stephen could never have written. As Stanislaus remarked: ‘Jim is thought to be very frank about himself but his style is such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign language—an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue.’
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That ‘foreign language’, the language of art, makes Stephen something other. Hugh Kenner describes him as a Joycean ‘shadow self’. Such ‘shadow-selves’, he argues, ‘are not the author. They are potentialities contained within the author. They are what he has not become.’
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In creating the ‘portrait’ that is Stephen, Joyce exploited the potential fecundity of meaning latent in the actual material history of his own life. He gave to mundane reality a shape, an aesthetic form, and squeezed out of things every last drop of metaphoric and symbolic significance.

‘He sang that song. That was his song’

But if this is true, Joyce is no mere symbolist. Remember that critic who claimed ‘He is a realist of the first order’? Well, he is … and he isn’t. We’ve already noted the truthfulness of his including in this novel the ‘improprieties’ often missing from fiction. Similarly, Joyce insistently placed his characters in real space: Stephen walks through real Dublin streets, passes or enters real Dublin pubs or colleges or churches. Of his later
Ulysses
Joyce famously remarked that he wanted ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of [his] book’.
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In trying to get his earlier
Dubliners
into print, Joyce had had to contend with publishers who thought names of real places did not belong in any fiction but certainly not in such indecorous fiction as this. In retaliation, Joyce insisted that ‘he is a
very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard’.
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This insistent fidelity to fact runs through all three of these works. So, in
Portrait
, if the narrative mentions the ‘marbles’ in the chapel at Clongowes, you can bet that the wooden columns in the chapel at Clongowes were painted to look like marble.

But unlike
Dubliners
and
Ulysses
,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
is tied intimately and inextricably to a single character. Joyce ties this knot between narrative and character by focalizing it through Stephen: the action is viewed through Stephen’s eyes; what we read is what he sees, or thinks, or feels. Because of this, material details come to the reader already filtered through a particular apprehension of them, their appearance in the story requiring that Stephen has perceived them. But, in doing this, Joyce does not make the novel a first-person narrative. Until the diary entries in the last section of the book, the narrative stays insistently third person. Stephen does not narrate this novel; he is narrated by it. And yet the language of the novel seems utterly unlike the usual language deployed by omniscient third-person narrators. Look again at that first page: ‘The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt’ (5) or ‘When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell’ (5). Utterly suited to an attentive, perceptive, inquisitive but naïve child, one for whom the circumambient world registers with vivid sensory immediacy, this language appears to be not that of the invisible third-person narrator, but that of Stephen. The narrator appropriates Stephen’s language to narrate this tale: not only his vocabulary, but his grammar, his arrangement of words, in short, his idiolect. (By ‘idiolect’ we mean the
form of language
used by a particular individual, an idiosyncratic ‘style’, one characteristic of this person and not that, the original Greek word itself being cognate with that for ‘private property’,
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as though Stephen’s idiolect were
his personal possession.) And yet the narrative stubbornly remains in the third person. This may be Stephen’s idiolect but the narrator has appropriated it to his own ends.

This technique differs subtly from free indirect discourse which presents characters’ words and thoughts indirectly rather than directly (as quoted by the narrator: ‘he said’, ‘she thought’). Through free
indirect
discourse, the narrative can move surreptitiously into those thoughts while still staying grammatically strictly in the third person and without signalling that such a move has occurred. So, for example, the narrator in Jane Austen’s
Emma
(1816): ‘He stop[ped] again, rose again, and seemed quite embarrassed.—He was more in love with her than Emma had supposed; and who can say how it might have ended, if his father had not made his appearance?’
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This appears to come as the omniscient narrator’s objective analysis; only later do we realize that the narrator is here presenting Emma’s assumptions. The technique provides great opportunities for irony, and Austen exploits them fully. Joyce, too, uses free indirect discourse in
Portrait
when the third-person narrator moves into Stephen’s thoughts without signalling directly that he has done so.
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But his use of it differs markedly from Austen’s. The language of the narrative in
Emma
remains relatively stylistically consistent throughout the novel no matter what is being related or whose thoughts are being relayed. By and large,
Emma
’s style is Austen’s. From the opening page of
Portrait
, the narrative proceeds in Stephen’s idiom: Joyce uses language, style, idiolect not to embellish an identificative authorial signature, nor as indicators of his own cast
of mind, or of the wisdom or folly of the narrator, but instead as markers of character.
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