James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 

An actual portrait of a young man has to settle for one image. What are possible different literary obligations—in relation to time and in relation to how the psyche can be represented in language? And how does Joyce use the notion of portrait to modify realism? By realism I mean the writing which attacked the romance imagination in the name of the real. Realism is the tradition in fiction which claimed to be accurate to how life is actually lived and to the secular forces that govern such lives. Joyce in effect asks how can there a realism after aestheticism and views of individuality that it cultivated? Or, better, Joyce asks if there can be a realism of aestheticism and an aestheticism bound by realism. One way to develop the force of this project is to ask how “the young man” part of the title help relate realism to aestheticism. Is Joyce being generic about artists as young men, or is he intensifying our awareness that this one particular history only concerns his youth. And does he then project what growing up might entail for him? Also one might ask whether the title refers to the author—portrait of the artist by a young man who is trying to figure out what is “young” and so subject to change in his sensibility.

I want to dwell first on examples that for me indicate what is distinctive about Joyce’s version of portraiture. What kind of portrait is involved in the moment when Steven is pandied on his hands and he gives this reaction—45-46, 47 (50-1 viking critical library). What role does the language play in the realism? And can one judge Steven for exaggerating the pity of it? By what standard would one judge him? And is the exaggeration because the young man’s experience was like that or because the writer himself is giving a portrait of what he thinks necessary for telling about himself as a young man?

Now take another quite different aspect of portraiture. What is being portrayed by the long treatment of the debate about Parnell during the Xmas dinner. Parnell was a great leader of Irish Nationalism but when the press found out he was having an affair with Kitty O’Shea, a married woman, the church hounded him and forced him to resign and I think he died shortly after. Now Joyce’s version. How does 32 (37) set up 35 (39)? I think the first passage indicates how Joyce wants us to imagine Stephen’s active listening. Then by the end of the episode we should be aware of how costly it is for Irish kids to have such strange and divisive passions so much a part of their lives. And I think it original that the significant realism occurs because of how one has to imagine characters listening—that is what a child does a lot and yet fiction rarely attends to those consequences. This is a portrait that captures what it means to be young in a way that adults are likely to miss. There are realisms that describe situations and realisms that actually render (Conrad’s word) qualities fundamental to the experience of situations. And such experience can be either in the projected response to the world, as this one, or in the terms of linguistic self-representation, as in the first example.

Now I will go back to how the chapter is structured, in part because structure here is more important than in most texts. Joyce seems to believe firmly in stages of existence and so patterns that one must go through—and structure helps see life in terms of patterns. In fact Joyce seems to believe that the stages are necessary because the childhood establishes what one “has to become” 232 (240). The adventure is not in finding out what happens but in testing whether we can appreciate how that necessity feels at various stages of a life. The main pattern is that every chapter ends with a triumph that then gets undone by the opening of the next chapter. Chapters one and three are triumphs in public space; 2 and 4 realizations of possibilities for his distinctive sensibility. Also in each chapter an important experience in listening is called upon to understand the possible terms of both the next triumph and the next excess.

Why is the opening distinctive as a portrait of the artist? --it wakens all the senses, the sense of play with language and possession of it as his song, the need to handle shame at behavior counter to what seems “civilized,” and the appeal to an audience as a basic formative phase, and the relation of shyness for which he is under threat and the terror of the threat to his eyes. Then life at Conglowes—the terrors of boarding school because of being alone and being so

eager to please that he interpellates the basic values of his society—e.g.15 (18).

Interpellation is the process by which we take on a culture as a second nature. Culture is not imposed against nature, as perhaps in Freud. Rather a culture gets embraced because it provides answers to the kinds of calls that ask for identity. Imagine how we learn to deal with imagined calls by authority figures saying who goes there. It is nice to have an answer like “this boy” (with a distinctive gender identity or “this son” with distinctive social commitments).

And it is crucial that he experiences awe at lawbreakers like the boys who drink from the chalice: interpellation also involved fascination with the other of the laws that make one deny certain possibilities of behavior. The boy’s “no” can be a strange yes. This is especially true in Ireland because of the authority of priests—does one seek identity through their values or in flight from them? How important a instrument of freedom is shame and transgression?

How the first chapter’s idealization works out. In effect he becomes a version of Parnell, as in 23 (27). The heroic choice seems natural and his individual sense of justice correlates with the boy’s needs for heroes. And above all there is no critical consciousness to see the ironies. The terms of Stephen’s heroism seem to me to involve graciousness toward others and, perhaps above all his accepting sounds like the sounds of his hands being struck—54 (59). The sense of heroism then is ultimately sensual. But we find out that Stephen’s first truly interpretive act where the puts his person on the line in fact served primarily for the amusement of the priests because he never managed to break through dependence on authority. Hence the pain of hearing his father’s story—67 (72). Again the most important realism is what we have to infer about Stephen’s hearing what others say, this time in relation to himself.

How does the triumph at the end of chap 1 generate excess and vulnerability in the beginning of chapter 2? It seems at first brilliantly as if he has gained social confidence to join the world of adult men; he. But it is the portrait of an artist, remember. So the world of men cannot suffice. He becomes tormented by other possible forms of heroism that he now thinks are his due. 57 (62) begins the passages where in effect as his family grown poorer materially (in their move to Dublin), he grows perhaps too rich imaginatively-- 60 (65). Then the poverty moves to psychological poverty—especially in hearing in his father’s story, so Stephen is torn between a sense of his utter inadequacy, especially in relation to girls, and his calling to imaginatively worthy roles. Having to realize his first triumph was illusion, the ugliness of his real life intensifies and also the efforts to escape—73 (78). Who is speaking here? The passage is ostensively in the third person but it gravitates into Stephen’s probably way of characterizing himself. Why does Joyce do this? Perhaps the relation of character to language is itself something that an ideal third person would observe and render. If the third person is to be vital in the novel it cannot just report but has to be a force for understanding, and inhabiting a person’s language is the key to understanding him or her.

The main forms of vulnerability in chapter 2 are the two basic features of social life. He becomes set apart from his peers because of his imagination, and so becomes a figure both envied and scorned. And he now sees his father as something to suffer. The listening in the this passage is to his father even as Stephen longs to escape from him. The heroism matching up to this shame is to bury himself in the arms of prostitutes—a great promise of both comfort and mystery.

Chapter 3 consists of the revenge of his Catholic upbringing on his sensuality. He loves the degradation of his sensuality. But also there is a strange conjunction of pride and genuine shame at being so fallen that he cannot envision the way back to the church. These extremes then make him a perfect candidate for the form of repentance and commitment that a retreat can produce. But characterizing this retreat provides a difficult challenge, one which Joyce loves. Why does he go on at such length in the priest’s voice? No non-Catholic would believe the power that his withdrawal from the world has if the retreat were only summarized. And any conversion Stephen made would seem weak on his part and willful on the part of the author. So he thought he had to take an immense risk and immerse the reader in the speaking of the priest giving the retreat. This allows Joyce to fill out the demand for a realism of listening that occurs in every chapter. And this demands that the reader see how by sheer force of repetition the soul can be affected. Notice how the shame that had been part of his pleasure now takes “ethical” form—109 (115). (Now the priest’s language pervades Stephen’s.) The sermon also satisfies Joyce’s perverse desire to show that he can produce a better retreat sermon than any believer. The critics call this the appeal of mimicry. I like best the moments that call on the imagination of the audience in order to explain the horrors of hell—since then Joyce shows that in effect the priests are imitating imaginative writers—e.g. 126 (132-33).

So where chapter 2 ends with defiling his body, 3 ends with him feeling that his body has been totally purified. But three problems remain. 1) Is he any more in possession of himself. Look at the language where he expresses his conversion 132-33 (139-40). So again others speak through him at moments when he feels mastery--especially in his hearing a command to “confess.” (Volvo story.) 2) How can he make use of his ecstatic moments in the dreariness of time, where repetition rather than vision is called for? 3) How can he keep up this sense of specialness that his new faith brings without becoming proud of it and thereby submitting to sin. The beginning of the fourth chapter shows the effects of these problems. He tries to structure time in order to be in possession of self, only to in fact be more dispossessed. And he tries the structure so that he can preserve the sense of faith. But repetition dulls the spiritual awareness. And worse, as he repeats he realizes that he has tremendous freedom to fail willingly. *And that recasts his sense of specialness as freedom rather than as faith 145, 146 (151, 152). Similarly the sense of shame and guilt that he can not be good enough will prove very useful in the complications of the artist’s psyche—where excellence feeds on articulate anxiety.

Joyce carefully marks the sense of increasing intellectual freedom just at the moment when he will be told he might have a vocation. The call to one vocation then creates his sense of another, deeper one to his freedom. But the key operator is again his hearing the priest out. It is as if Stephen discovers his freedom in how his being pulls against what then seems an demand on him from external sources. And he repeats the sense of hollow-sounds that he experienced with his family in chap 2—150 (156). Then all the imagining Stephen does as Father Stephen Daedalus SJ enables him to accept the sense of specialness that it will take for his very different choice of self (162, 165). So he utters his first poet’s words “A day of Dappled sea-borne clouds.” Not great writing perhaps. But the words matter for focusing self-consciousness and allowing a complex scene to form in which he has a heroic role to play. And now the mockery by his classmates can be figured in as the necessary misunderstanding the artists among us 162 (168-69). The stage is set for transforming the negatives about his failure to be a priest into an ecstatic positive. The shadowy female figure looming throughout the book becomes a presence as the woman-bird seems to confirm his choice of a path for his life—164-5 (173). I can’t be very good on this vision, but I hope you can. What are the basic elements that for a moment are transformed in his life? I see only the sense that sexuality need not haunt the spirit as sign of the body’s demand but can virtually compose the spirit by giving a direction for its freedom.

Now the book becomes difficult to interpret. Is the last chapter a necessary working out of the price he is has to pay for his freedom? Or is at ironic account of the gap between what he desires and what he is capable of doing as a young man? Or is there some third alternative that can balance irony with a sense of realization? And how will any interpretation correlate with a) the patterns of excess in the beginning of chapter 5, b) the pattern of a listening by Stephen that transforms the course of his noble intentions, and c) an ecstatic resolution? a)The opening is clearly a vision of excess again—his being late and disorderly parallels the sensuality at beginning of chapter 3. But this also may be a necessary resistance to the authority of the university, a resistance necessary if one is going to fly to the girl as a Daedalian artist. Notice how there is an incorporating of his vision into an acknowleged doubt that bodes well for him—169-70 (177). Probably the same question arises in relation to his friends. Is Stephen’s distance from them a sign of human inadequacy or a necessary condition of his freeing himself from the Irish hold on intellectuals as well as on middle class folk. Why does Davin’s story of the woman calling him to her bed matter [183]? Also note Stephen rejects a political view—[189-90] 196 (197-8, and 203)). Is this a cop out or a blow for freedom?

b) I think Joyce transforms the listening so that the reader now occupies the listening position as Stephen becomes the artist-speaker. And the key question is how convincing he is the in the role of artist? (1) how promising are Stephen’s attempts at poetry in relation to his valuing of language—171-2, 209-11 (179, 217-8). Is the poem a wet dream? (2). WE have to judge Stephen’s exercises in aesthetic philosophy. How good are they as aesthetics and what force do even good aesthetic principles have in relation to artistic creation. Can aesthetics be an evasion of art just as priesthood is an evasion of freedom? 196-7 (204ff)? I think the patterning suggests that this is something that the hearer should be suspicious of. 200-1 (208) is Stephen’s best prose, but can it handle the orientation required for the question that follows—what of the beauty of women? Stephen proceeds to offer two good hypotheses, but do they adequately attend to the intentions in the question or the place the question plays in the world of experience?

(3) But Stephen also exercises an important activity of hearing when he recognizes that the Dean's English has a national heritage that will always be alien to Stephen's Irishness-(182 [189] and "tundish"). This is part of a positive knowledge that cannot be made ecstatic but marks a direction for further thought.
Analogously other realities emerge about Stephen that can considered a necessary other side to what satisfies the imagination. Yet they are crucial features of what the artists life must dwell on. The last section of the novel sets in relation a sense of necessary irony about Stephen with glimpses of what he is the process of negotiating about the life of the artist that does not fit the glory-dismay oppositions of the young artist. So I think the ultimate realism is to how the young artist still messes up and melodramatizes but has the potentially right stuff-in the non-serviam and in the dawning awareness that what Stephen calls the lyric mode cannot suffice-he needs the world and he yet doesn't' know how to get it. a) For example there is the nagging question of how be Irish, and how separate the real women desired from the poet's terms of desiring 208, 209 (215). b) And then there is the role of conversation in the closing part of the novel-as a corollary I think of Stephen's own acknowledging his ambivalence and confused-eg his turn on his own thoughts 226 (234). I think the conversations occur because Stephen has to recognize that the information that matters for his ambition can no longer be generated only by self-reflection. He has outgrown the lyric phases of his development and he is not sure what follows. But almost by instinct he seems to be on the right path, if only because conversations require hearing himself speak in company in order to know or to test what he believes. This after all seems to be the main topic of the conversations. How can one say "I will not serve" 231 (239) -in essence to his mother and EC-without testing the pomposity of that gesture in a social context? And how utter such values without a social setting to bind one to them since he has doubts and might want to renege?
c) Why is the last part before the diary Cranly holding a confession ritual but Steven ultimately seeing through to Cranly's own needs-239 (247). Does this say something about Stephens' awareness of how his own needs enter conversation in a way that he almost recognizes them.
c) Then why end with the Stephen's diary-the opposite of conversation and indeed of art? The diary is at best a workshop for art. Can this activity of reading someone's private writing be paralleled to the activity of listening in other segments of the book? And how can this ending parallel the previous ecstatic endings. It is as if the attempt at objectification, and Stephen's aesthetic, break down because of the emotional pressure and the impossibility of any certitude. There is not an ecstatic self but a quite desperate and isolated young man. This may explain the difference between the assertion of April 26 and the prayer to old father, old artificer on april 27. He is still very much a son. And that may be the most important epiphany of all.