Joyce is the most intimately autobiographical of writers.
(Hugh Kenner)

By thinking of things, you could understand them.
(Stephen Dedalus as a boy)

Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about them.
(Stephen’s boyish fascination with words)

Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
(Motto of the Jesuit order who run the schools where young Stephen is educated)

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, published in 1916, was the second book and first novel by Irish writer James Joyce, following Dubliners, published in 1914. It is a Bildungsroman, a German term for a novel which describes the growth of a personality or mind, in this case, as the title indicates, it is pretty much a self portrait of the development of Joyce’s mind, although cast in the shape of his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.

The meaning of his name

Like everything in Joyce, Stephen Dedalus’s name is highly symbolic or meaningful. Stephen was the first Christian martyr, suggesting that the character is the inventor of a new aesthetic, mocked and martyred for a new vision of art. While his surname obviously alludes to Daedalus, the skilled artificer of Greek mythology who built the labyrinth to contain the monstrous Minotaur begging the question, Are the complex texts Stephen creates also designed to hide and contain some monstrous secret? The character is well aware of the connection.

Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy… Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore [Dedalus], a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

One-stop synopsis

So the narrative traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, divided into 5 chapters or phases. In a nutshell, Stephen grows up in a Catholic family which is initially wealthy enough to send him to a private Jesuit school but which then slowly sinks in the world. His education by systematic and intellectual Jesuits decisively forms Stephen’s mind, which becomes highly intellectual and systematic in its turn.

There are various boyhood and schoolboy adventures (the injustice of being ‘pandybatted’ (hit on the palm of his hand by a pandybat) when he had done nothing wrong; an extended passage around a theatrical performance at his secondary school) before Stephen hits puberty in chapter 3 and, as far as I can tell, becomes addicted to masturbation and sleeping with Dublin prostitutes.

This generates feelings of self-loathing which climax when his class at school goes on a four-day Catholic retreat. Here Stephen and his schoolmates are subjected to a series of sermons about hell and damnation which are brilliantly written, unrelenting in their Jesuitical logic, and terrify young Stephen so much that he overcomes his fears and goes to confession for the first time in eight months, and compulsively lists his sexual sins. To my amazement the text tells us that Stephen is, at this stage, still only 16 years old.

After this psychological purgation Stephen feels wonderfully liberated and cleansed and the shortish chapter 4 shows him undertaking a life of devout religious fervour, continually praying, counting off his rosary, observing all the Catholic feast days, and so on. His devoutness brings him to the attention of his teachers and he is called in by the Dean of his school who asks him to reflect on whether he has a vocation to become a priest, prompting the boy Stephen to reflect, not for the first time, on what this life would be like as Father Stephen Dedalus S.J. (i.e. of the Society of Jesus). Only towards the end of the chapter are there signs that he is starting to doubt his own sincerity, starting to doubt how effective his incessant religious practice really is.

The final chapter, chapter 5, is the longest and is set in real time rather than a scene-skipping retrospective. It shows Stephen as a student at Dublin university, placing him among a cohort of students of his own generation. Without much explanation he has shaken off the fervent religious faith and practice we were told about in the previous chapter and is now a cynical, worldly student.

At least that’s how he comes over to his peers, who are also playing at being cynical worldly students. In reality Stephen has retained a lot of his youthful idealism but it has been redirected away from conventional religion towards a religion of Art. (This, of course, very much reflects the fin-de-siecle movement right across Europe towards Art for Art’s Sake and Aestheticism which was – exactly as with Stephen – an attempt to create a secular religion of Art to replace the traditional Christian faith which had been so undermined by all aspects of nineteenth century life, from industrialisation to Darwin’s theory of evolution see Symbolism by Michael Gibson.)

Entirely in keeping with all this, we learn from a conversation he has with the Dean of Studies, that Stephen is working on a long essay on a theory of aesthetics. In chapter 5 he attends a university lecture then walks around Dublin, accompanied by a student friend who (conveniently enough) asks him about his essay, prompting Stephen/Joyce to a long and systematic explanation of his aesthetic theory.

Among other things he speculates that there is an evolution in art forms from the lyric – which is entirely about the artist, a magnification of the artist’s own feelings – to the dramatic, at the other end of the spectrum – in which the artist completely effaces themself in order to present the subject as objectively as possible. However, the artist can never completely eliminate themselves and so, even though they nowhere refer to themselves, their personality remains present in their choice of subject matter and style. This is the context of Stephen’ famous statement:

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible aesthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Throughout the text, Joyce had dropped in umpteen phrases indicating Stephen’s alienation from his surroundings, from his family, from his friends, from the same old repetitive political issues (Irish nationalism) all of whom he regards with a kind of mocking detachment – and, finally, from the Catholic religion which he at one point embraced with all the enthusiasm he was capable of, before finding his faith slipping away from him. This lifelong sense of being an outsider looking on at everyone else is what underpins the book’s other famous declaration, in the last few pages, where Stephen tells us that he needs to escape the ‘nets’ which trap him.

— When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Which he amplifies and explains further:

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. 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.

And so the book ends with Stephen determined to fly all the nets which threaten to imprison him and leave Ireland for good. As Joyce himself, of course, did.

Autobiographical timeline

First readers of any of Joyce’s works, especially those featuring Stephen Dedalus, sometimes ask how autobiographical the work is. The answer is, very autobiographical. Here are the relevant dates from Joyce’s own life – you can see how closely they match the career of Stephen Dedalus:

• 1882 Joyce is born in Rathgar, Dublin on 2 February
• 1888 Joyce begins school at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare
• 1891 Has to leave Clongowes when his father could no longer pay the fees; studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin
• 1893 Starts attending Belvedere College, a fee-paying day school for boys run by Jesuits; attends for 5 years
• 1898 Begins college at University College, Dublin, to study English, French and Italian

Publication history

‘A Portrait’ began life in 1904 as ‘Stephen Hero’ — a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After writing 25 chapters, in 1907 Joyce abandoned ‘Stephen Hero’ and set about reworking its themes and protagonist into the condensed five-chapter novel we have now. He abandoned the first novel’s strict realism and switched to making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to directly share Stephen’s developing consciousness, to feel, see and hear things from Stephen’s point of view.

The American modernist poet Ezra Pound arranged for the novel to be serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of ‘A Portrait’ just two years after the short story collection ‘Dubliners’ (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism, a position which was, of course, to be clinched by the scandal and notoriety surrounding the publication of Ulysses, which began to be published in serial form in the literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, finally published in book form in 1922. 1914, 1916, 1918, a concentrated burst of publication which helped cement his reputation.

Here are sometimes abbreviated notes on the individual chapters.

Chapter 1 (48 pages)

Father’s nursery rhyme. Home life with Dante (Mrs Riordan) the nationalist. At school at Clongowes Wood College. Being bullied. Football. The sound of the word suck.

Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

Thoughts about God and the universe. Holidays and prayers. The story of the ghost. The mystery of kissing:

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

After being pushed into a mucky ditch by another boy, Wells, Stephen gets a cold. In the infirmary. Friendship with Athy.

He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of the paper they got every day up in the castle.

Later, in Chapter 3, Stephen looks back at life at Clongowes which he summarises as: ‘the wide playgrounds, swarming with boys, the square ditch, the little cemetery off the main avenue of limes where he had dreamed of being buried, the firelight on the wall of the infirmary where he lay sick, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.’

Home for Christmas dinner, which is scene to a flaring row between Mr Dedalus, his friend Mr Casey and inflexible Dante about whether Parnell was hounded to his grave by lackey priests, or deserved punishment for being a fornicator. Story of the famous spit. Mr D says the Irish are ‘A priestridden Godforsaken race!’ When Casey says Ireland must be free of religion (‘No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!’) devout Dante storms out while Mr Casey burst into tears for his lost leader.

Back at school, gossip about why some fellows (Simon Moonan and Tusker) got a flogging (is it for some kind of homosexual escapade referred to as ‘smugging’?). Because Stephen’s glasses are broken (someone bumped into him and they fell and broke on a cinder path) Father Arnell gives him permission not to write, but when the sadistic Prefect of Studies, Father Dolan, visits his class, he ignores this excuse, accuses Stephen of slacking, calls him to the front of the class and hits him on the hands with a pandybat, inflicting intense pain. Stephen’s sense of injustice is so strong he overcomes his own fear to go down the special corridor to the rector’s room and report it. The rector assures him it must be a mistake and shakes hands. Back among the fellows, Stephen is cheered as a hero.

Chapter 2 (40 pages)

Opens with the Dedalus family enjoying an extended summer holiday in Blackrock, a seaside suburb of Dublin. Stephen accompanies old Uncle Charles on shopping trips. At the park, he is ‘trained’ as a runner by unhealthy looking Mike Flynn, mate of his dad’s, a fad which doesn’t last. On Sundays Stephen goes with his father and grand-uncle on huge walks. He is reading ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and sees himself as the book’s hero Edmond Dantès seeking for his equivalent of the heroine, Mercedes.

Friendship with Aubrey Mills and they set up a gang but at the end of the summer the gang breaks up. He senses change at home, where his father’s fortunes are failing which is why he isn’t sent back to the fee-paying Clongowes school. The beginnings of the adolescent sense of frustration and aloneness:

The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet.

A fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue… his restless heart… The noise of children at play… made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others…

Removal vans turn up and move the household stuff from Blackrock to a new house in Dublin. Stephen doesn’t like the city, finds it overwhelming. More alienation:

• his mood of embittered silence… He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses… He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret…

The text breaks down into short vignettes which demonstrate how ‘His silent watchful manner had grown upon him’. In the last of which a young woman is near him on the tram steps. Haunted by her, he goes home and tries to write a poem i.e. burgeoning sensuality and sensitivity.

His father arranges for him to go to a Jesuit day school, Belvedere. Long passage describing the first night of a school play at Belvedere, where Stephen is ragged by his frenemy, Heron. He’s now in the sixth form and filled ‘with unrest and bitter thoughts’. He goes onstage, performs and is so pumped with adrenaline when he comes offstage that he runs right past his waiting parents and wanders the streets till he’s calmed down and can go back.

Stephen accompanies his father on the latter’s nostalgic journey back to Cork. This is mainly to sell some of his remaining property at an auction, a financial necessity reflecting the family’s declining fortunes, but Mr D uses it to recapture his long-vanished youth. Stephen is appalled at his father’s sentimental drinking sessions with his old buddies. He is now permanently filled with self-disgust.

A leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind… Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust.

Stephen wins money for an exhibition (to college?) and a prize, and blows it all on luxuries for his family.

He feels completely alienated from his father, mother and brother (Maurice). He keeps talking about secret riots and orgies (‘dark orgiastic riot’) and living in sin (‘the wasting fires of lust’) so it began to dawn on me maybe all this refers to masturbation. He wanders the streets in a fever of lust. All this leads up to a visit to a prostitute. Lust leads to all other sins:

From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

Chapter 3 (39 pages)

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul.

Stephen has become a regular frequenter of Dublin’s red light district, sauntering and taking prostitutes as his fancy takes him.

He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment.

At Belvedere he now holds the position of prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, responsible for supervising the young boys at Mass, which sits bitterly ironically alongside his night-time debauchery but ‘ The falsehood of his position did not pain him.’

A little way into Chapter 3 his class are sent on a religious retreat which is marked by the series of sermons given by Father Arnall (who appears to be on secondment from Clongowes – after all, they’re both Jesuit establishments). The sermons’ subject is the four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell, and it triggers ‘a crisis of guilt and piety’ in Stephen, prompting a period of profound introspection and desire for repentance but which reads more, to me, like a panic attack:

The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help!

The sermons describe in exquisitely logical detail: the original sin of Lucifer and his fellow angels who fell from heaven at God’s command; the torments of hell in terrifying detail, beginning with the physical horrors: the pestilential air of hell; the stench of rotting bodies; the nature of the fires of hell which rage intensely and eternally; how the blood and the brains of the sinner boil with no hope of relief; the torment deriving from the squalid company endured by every soul in hell, devils as well as other sinners.

This first sermon leaves Stephen paralysed with fear and convinced that he, personally, is going to hell. After chapel he listens to the trivial talk of the other students who are not as affected by the sermon as he is. There is an academic class, then it’s back to the chapel for another sermon in which Father Arnall continues his tour of hell, switching from physical to spiritual torments, chief among which is the pain of separation from God.

Stephen is terrified all over again. When he goes to his room he hallucinates a devil waiting in it to attack him. When he closes his eyes he has an image of being stuck in a muddy swamp with devil creatures, forever. He runs to the window, throws it open and gasps for air.

Walking through the city that evening he asks an old woman the way to the nearest church, restlessly waits his turn, and then makes a big confession to the priest. We learn that it is 8 long months since his last confession, and that he is a mere boy of 16. The priest offers forgiveness and Stephen walks home feeling light and purged and full of grace.

Chapter 4 (24 pages)

Following on from his confession and feeling of having been born again, Stephen becomes a religious fanatic, living every day and every hour according to optimum best practice, praying all the time, saying his rosary etc. This reaches a climax when he is called in by the director of Belvedere College and asked to ponder whether he thinks he has a vocation for the priesthood which, in fact, is something he has often wondered…

Only slowly, towards the end of the chapter, do doubts set in – and the whole chapter is capped by a walk on the beach where he sees a young woman with her skirt hitched up standing in a stream, and his whole being is shaken, not with lust exactly, but a rarefied sense of her transcendent beauty. I take this moment as symbolising the waning of his religious vocation, and its replacement by a romantic aestheticism.

Chapter 5 (71 pages)

— I have a book at home, said Stephen…

Chapter 5 is the longest one and describes Stephen the university undergraduate. He wakes up, his mother washes his neck, his father yells down the stairs asking whether he’s gone to the campus yet, so Stephen hurries off, reflecting on the urban scene, is briefly accosted by a beggarwoman selling lavender. I’ve given headings to the episodes which follow:

Stephen’s sense of English as an alien tongue

At the university buildings he comes across the Dean of Studies, who is English, and has a famous exchange in which he reflects on how natural the English language sounds on his lips and yet how Stephen can’t help feeling it alien. This all starts because the Dean is filling a lamp with oil and Stephen tells him the device he’s using to do so is called a tundish, a word the Dean has never heard before.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:
—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Why consider English foreign but Latin as somehow Irish?

This all very is stirring but I nowadays I perceive it as facile: we all speak a foreign tongue; or, to put it another way, which of us invented the language we speak? None of us. Stephen’s thought is incomplete and doesn’t go far enough. All of us speak words invented by others. If you want to be super-sensitive, we are all oppressed by the un-usness, the non-us origins of the language we are compelled to speak. So what difference does it make whether he speaks words invented by long-dead Gaelic ancestors or long-dead Anglo-Saxons (and Vikings and Normans)? All of us speak words created by long-dead peoples. What alternative is there? Making up our own language?

Inconsistency between Stephen’s attitude to language and to religion

There is also a glaring inconsistency between Stephen’s nationalist approach to language and but subservient approach to religion. He resents speaking ‘another race’s language’ but has no problem at all believing another race’s religion.

Did Stephen invent Christianity? Obviously not. Christianity occurred against the background of Judaism, the sophisticated religion first developed by Jews speaking Hebrew at least two and a half thousand years ago in Palestine; it was created and spread among Jews who spoke Aramaic at the dawn of the Roman Empire; its leading theologians were initially eastern Greeks writing in Greek (the four Gospels are all written in Greek); only centuries later was it co-opted by Romans speaking Latin and then imposed across their empire, under duress – in fact after 380 AD under pain of death – by the brutal Roman Empire.

Which bit of this derived from the Celtic inhabitants of Ireland? Absolutely none of it.

Stephen goes to a school run by Jesuits, a religious order founded by a Spaniard, based in Rome, tasked with wiping out heresy and independent thought all across Europe and then around the brutally exploitative Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal. Stephen prides himself on his independence, on casting off all shackles, but for a while in chapter 4 he contemplates joining this repressive foreign order.

If he feels that English from a few hundred miles away is a foreign imposition on Gaelic-speaking Celts, then why accept 1) a religion created 2,500 miles away (Palestine) which is 2) expressed in a language created 1,100 miles away (Rome)? Why rebel against English linguistic imperialism and whole-heartedly accept Roman religious and linguistic imperialism?

Anti-Britishness

Because Britain was the current imperial oppressor of Ireland when Joyce wrote, and anti-British, pro-independence Irish nationalism was the dominant political issue of his time and the time he describes in his works (the pre-war Edwardian era). This passage describing his alienation from the English language only makes sense against the atmosphere of Irish nationalism i.e. the desire to overthrow everything English as part of a wider Irish national liberation, which pervaded the culture he was raised in and describes.

If he really wanted to escape the detested coloniser’s language a simple solution was ready to hand: why not write in Gaelic, the native speech of what he calls ‘his race’? Like Patrick Pearse, Liam O’Flaherty, and Seán Ó Riordáin? That would have been a simple and decisive statement of independence.

But he didn’t. We know that Joyce studied Gaelic for a while, and knew enough from his general upbringing in Dublin to sprinkle a handful of phrases into his texts. And he wrote in his stories and novels a number of fine-sounding anti-English passages like this. But they’re not borne out by his actual choices. Stephen says ‘I have not made or accepted its words’ but he has, hasn’t he? What language is he writing, thinking, arguing in? Which author does Stephen deliver a long analysis of in ‘Ulysses’? Shakespeare. Not exactly Ireland’s national writer, is he?

I think Joyce is making the character Stephen pose as a linguistic Irish nationalist. In the same way as Stephen will outgrow his high-flown romantic rhetoric by the time of ‘Ulysses’, in the same way as he will have moved drastically on from the aesthetic theory he expounds to Lynch (see below), I think in the same way Stephen will reject this linguistic nationalism. Although part of his sensitive soul will always rebel against it, English it will be.

Davin asks Stephen to ‘Join us…’

Back to the narrative, Stephen attends a lecture in physics, in which various student mates horse around and make clever remarks and continue to do so after the lecture ends and they mill around in the corridors. He encounters fellow students in a semi-schematic way, each one standing for a cause or issue, thus allowing Joyce to state his position on them: the nationalist one, the hearty one, the cynic, the joker and so on.

A case in point is Davin the nationalist who tells Stephen it’s his duty to join the Irish nationalist cause. This dialogue gives rise to a series of much-quoted declarations in which Stephen vehemently rejects Davin’s Irish nationalism.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

What does this mean for the anti-English passage about the tundish? I think it means Stephen felt himself between a rock and a hard place. With his immense sensitivity to language he resiles against the feel of English words in his mouth. And yet he in no way wants to be hamstrung and confined by the crude rhetoric of Irish nationalism which we see him angrily rejecting here, and brutally lampooning in the Cyclops episode of ‘Ulysses’. The only way out of feeling trapped by all these fences, is to get out, to flee the country which places him in this (and other) impossible quandaries.

This is why the Irish have such an ambivalent attitude towards Joyce. He provided them fine-sounding nationalist quotes such as the one quoted above. But scratch the surface, actually read Dubliners, let alone ‘Ulysses’ and you come to think that he maybe despised his own fellow countrymen as much as he resented British cultural rule.

Stephen expounds his aesthetic theory to Lynch

Tiring of his argument with Davin, Stephen takes his mate Lynch for a walk in which Stephen lays out the main points of his essay on aesthetics. He makes some lofty definitions:

—Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

He tells Lynch that literature is ‘the highest and most spiritual art’ – which will come as a surprise to all composers and musicians.

He claims to have achieved what Aristotle failed to do, which is to provide clear definitions of pity and fear, thus underpinning the ancient Greek’s analysis of tragedy as a genre. The central idea is that the highest aesthetic experience is static – any artistic artefact which creates kinetic feelings (for example, desire or repulsion) is impure. The highest art is static and, as he goes on to explain, utterly detached.

Stephen posits four types of literature

He suggests that it comes in four forms or genres which exist on a spectrum defined by the writer’s relationship with their material: At one end, 1) the lyrical represents a direct expression of the writer’s feelings; 2) the epical arises when the writer thinks of himself in relation to an epical event; 3) the narrative is when ‘the personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea’; and 4) the dramatic is reached when ‘the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life’. At this point, Stephen speaks a passage which became famous and much quoted:

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Brief reaction to Stephen’s aesthetic

This and what follows is fine and clever and has been quoted and debated over for a century. But it is, in a sense, irrelevant. From Dada and surrealism onwards, art has increasingly been whatever artists say it is and an artist is someone who is accepted as such by the self-policing community of artists, critics and curators.

Of course there’s been extremely clever debate about aesthetics for as long as human beings have been writing, some two and a half thousand years, and certain ideas – or maybe a better word is ‘obsessions’ or maybe ‘dead ends’ – recur again and again. But the mere fact that there has been so much energetic debate proves the simple point that there is not now, and never has been, any broad agreement about art and aesthetics. Any definition of art you settle on will leave out huge swathes of what people think of as ‘art’, while artists themselves have come up with all kinds of definitions of art which generally supported whichever kind of art they happened to make.

The study of aesthetics is a bottomless pit, an endless ocean, which it’s fun to swim and play in. But anyone who expects to discover some kind of ‘truth’ or settled definition, doesn’t understand the nature of the game they’re playing.

Joyce’s theory doesn’t even apply to his own book

So I read Stephen’s aesthetic theory with interest, noted his invoking of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the work of art as requiring three qualities – integritas, consonantia and claritas – but yet another intellectual fussing about Aristotle’s two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old definitions of pity and tragedy, or worrying about the formal attributes of ancient Greek literary genres, or redefining Thomistic terminology, couldn’t be further from our modern reality.

None of Stephen’s elaborate theory really applies to this book itself. ‘A Portrait’ is not an ‘aesthetic object’, not a picture or a statue you can pick up and move around, but a text which contains hundreds of passages and moments, most of which are far from static and far from isolated in the sense which the Thomas term integritas implies but are, on the contrary, part of a continuous narrative or flow of text, each element leading on to the next, each new element adjusting and changing your understanding of the previous ones, a process which continues after you’ve finished reading the book and dip into the secondary literature around it, or go on to read another book by the same author or from the same period or about the same subject.

The actual lived experience of reading this, as any, book is the precise opposite of an isolated moment of aesthetic stasis but is instead a collection of Joyce-flavoured passages within the endless flux of texts which themselves form part of the broader, never-ending flux of our lives.

The role of comedy in debunking Stephen’s high-falutin theories

So Stephen’s long disquisition reaches its climax with the claim that the godlike detachment of the writer mirrors the non-kinetic, godlike stasis triggered by the ideal work of art. But throughout the lecture, Joyce has been well aware of how pompous and pretentious this all risks sounding – and this is why he has Stephen 1) not write it out in one continuous essay 2), nor think it to himself, but 3) enunciate it all in dialogue with Lynch, and the main reason for this is so that Lynch can keep interjecting jokes.

Lynch fails to understand bits, takes the mickey out of Stephen’s phrasing, makes mock tributes, tells Stephen he’s forgotten key definitions so Stephen has to repeat them, and so on and so on. In other words, Joyce puts a lot of effort into dramatising the presentation of his theory; and, in my opinion, this is partly what makes it so memorable.

This strategy of Joyce’s tends to be overlooked or forgotten by critics who extract from the extended dialogue the bits they need to quote to summarise the theory but, in my opinion, it’s the way it is part of an extended and often comic dialogue which makes it so memorable.

Thus, as Stephen reaches the climactic part of the theory, it starts to rain and Lynch jokes:

—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.

(Incidentally, a few days later, I was reading Hugh Kenner’s book about ‘Ulysses’, in which he quotes Ezra Pound saying that Joyce complained to him, ‘If only someone would say the book was so damn funny.’ So I’m agreeing with Joyce’s opinion of his own works. Woven among the Jesuitical theology and the Thomist aesthetics, there are lots of sly Irish gags.)

Stephen’s invisible girlfriend

The outbreak of rain ends Stephen’s long disquisition, as he and Lynch hurry to take shelter under an arcade of the university, and it is here that Stephen sees his girlfriend (again). Now the notes tell me that the beloved young woman who haunts this final chapter is called Emma Clery but her name is very well hidden: a control + f search of the entire online text reveals just three mentions of ‘Emma’ and none at all of ‘Clery’, so I’m puzzled how commentators have extracted her name so confidently.

Reflecting on her near invisibility, I wondered whether she isn’t named because her role is to be The Woman With No Name; more precisely, her function is to be a semi-abstract peg for Stephen’s resentment and jealousy, notably when he sees her (in two earlier scenes I haven’t mentioned yet) joking with a priest and/or flirting with Cranly. I’m not sure we even get to hear her speak, certainly Stephen doesn’t have a dialogue with her as he does with his male friends. So she’s the Nearly Invisible and Totally Silent Woman.

Maybe there’s another, more bucket reason. It was arduous enough for Joyce just to nail down Stephen’s aesthetic theory and relationships with fellow male students. As it is, this final chapter which contains all this intellectual content is longer than the preceding four and already contains several abrupt cuts of scene. Maybe if Joyce had embarked on describing a full-blown love affair for Stephen, it would have doubled or tripled the size of the chapter and ended up distracting attention away from his political and artistic statements. Seen in this practical way, maybe Emma’s elusiveness and the role assigned her simply reflect the lack of space for her in Joyce’s overall design.

Whatever the precise reason, Emma’s role as a fleeting presence who never speaks but nonetheless haunts Stephen’s consciousness certainly fits with the rest of his character. It is entirely characteristic of the alienated outsider we have seen him to be in so many previous situations, that Stephen makes no effort to go and talk to her even when she’s only ten yards away, but prefers to watch, and bubble over with resentment and jealousy, from a distance.

Stephen composes a poem (by Shelley)

I mentioned abrupt cuts. One occurs in the middle of the chapter. After the long walk with Lynch and the exhaustive exposition of aesthetic theory ends with the pair taking shelter in the arcades and spotting his lady love at a distance, does the scene develop in any natural way i.e. Stephen goes after her, talks to her, or goes on to hang with his pals maybe go for a drink?

No, none of those. There is a line space and suddenly the narrative cuts to the next morning and Stephen waking up in his bedroom from a lovely dream and reaching out for pen and paper to write down a poem which has come to him. The next few pages are presumably Joyce’s attempt to describe the state of mind in which lines of poetry come to you, you shape and perfect them, and they trigger more until the poem feels ‘finished’ i.e. you have no more to say. I’ve had this experience many times as, I imagine, have hundreds of millions of other people, maybe most of my readers… It’s a common enough sensation among bookish people.

Here’s the first verse of Stephen’s poem:

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

What’s really striking is the fantastically old-fashioned Shelleyan style of the poem. In fact it may be deliberately echoing the famous Shelley fragment which Stephen quotes in chapter 2:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless…?

Although the line length is different, the wistful sentiment is very similar. In fact, having read and reread it I’ve realised it’s as much late-Victorian, fin-de-siecle as Shelleyan. ‘Lure of the fallen seraphim’ is deliberately langorous and sensual, with hints of naughty Wildean transgressions (in strict Christian theology there is nothing alluring about the fallen angels; they are devils pure and simple; only in the naughty Nineties did lots of poets and artists flirt with blasphemy, black magic, Salome etc etc). Maybe it would be more accurate to attribute it to Swinburne, the naughty boy of Victorian poetry, rather than Shelley the romantic angel.

Anyway, the writing of the poem takes place across several pages of the novel. Maybe it’s meant to be a practical demonstration of the creation of a literary work which fits the aesthetic theory he outlined at such length to Lynch the day before; maybe Stephen is putting his money (metre) where his mouth is.

The pages describing the composition are also meshed with Stephen’s feelings about his beloved (the elusive Emma he saw the day before) who he is cross with for flirting (he thinks) with one of the priests. In angry jealousy Stephen says he doesn’t care if she throws away her beauty (and lovely body) on ‘the unworthy’. In other words, even here at the end of the novel he is displaying standard Goth, alienated teenager feelings.

Stephen wants to be free as a bird

Cut to later on this second day and Stephen standing outside the National Library and looking up at birds wheeling in the sky. Are they swallows which migrate from the south? This introduces the theme of flight and exile.

He comes across some mates inside the library, they chat and then, mindful of being told off for talking, leave, engaging in banter in the corridors: these buddies are Cranly, Temple, Dixon, O’Keeffe, Goggins. Older and less impressed by Stephen’s purist theories, I am (as I explained above) more entertained by the humour of these student scenes.

The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:
—Did an angel speak?

Amid all this banter, Stephen again sees HER walking away from the library and is mixed up in a confusion of memories, something to do with her body and her smell but also a teenage attempt to save himself by damning and scorning her.

Well then, let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her.

Reading this you realise that, for all his precocious reinterpreting of Aristotle and Aquinas, Stephen is emotionally still a child.

Stephen’s last walk with Cranly

Stephen goes for the last of the walks which characterise this chapter, this time with his best friend Cranly. Their conversation turns to the fact that Stephen has argued with his mother: she wants him to take mass at Easter and he refuses to. In a half-joking way, Cranly presents a series of arguments for why Stephen should, from theological reasons (is he not afraid of damnation?) to humane (his mother has had a hard life; if he disbelieves in religion, why not go through this performance in order to make her happy?). The dialogue is crafted to build up to Stephen’s angry declaration that he will not submit or as he puts it, a bit more pompously, he will not serve.

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. 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.

This is often quoted as a version of Joyce’s own manifesto. Less noticed is the way it is undercut by Cranly making jokes, much as Stephen’s earlier disquisition about aesthetics was undercut by Lynch’s joshing. Less impressed by Joyce’s rhetoric than I was as a young man, what I notice this time round is how all the high-minded statements appear in dialectic tension with comic responses. Stephen rarely makes any serious declaration without having some school or student buddy around to deflate him.

Stephen’s diary

In the last four pages the text disintegrates (again). Right at the start, ‘A Portrait’ opened with the disjointed perceptions of a very small child. Now, right at the end, the continuous narrative falls back into disintegrated fragments, in this case into four pages of brief diary entries, starting 20 March and ending on 27 April, so covering 38 days in total. They end with a phrase Joyce must have realised sounds ridiculously immature and overblown:

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.

This kind of thing is widely quoted as expressing Joyce’s attitude. But in my opinion, like the overblown romanticism of other final passages, it instead indicates Stephen’s emotional and intellectual immaturity. I.e. it is a limited, imperfect and slightly ludicrous character who says this, not the canny author (aged 34 when the novel was published).

Cast

Sometimes creating a cast list sheds different light on the text, highlights characters as motifs, suggests alternative routes through the story. Also, it’s just handy to remember key attributes of leading figures.

Family

• Stephen Dedalus – the main protagonist, who we follow from small boyhood, through junior school, secondary school and on to university, as he experiences all the stages of growing up from being bullied at school to adolescence where he goes through phases of sexual debauchery, then of religious enthusiasm, before his final dedication to a religion of art; named Stephen because Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and Dedalus after the ingenious inventor from Greek mythology
• Simon Dedalus – Stephen’s father, a former medical student whose fortunes decline throughout the book, forcing the family to move from a large house in the suburb of Blackrock into a smaller house within Dublin itself; he’s a good man but, like many sons, Stephen is embarrassed by his sentimentalism and increasing drunkenness
• Dante (Mrs. Riordan) – governess to the two Dedalus children, Stephen and Maurice, a devout and fiery Catholic who has a bitter argument with Simon and his friend about the fate of the Irish nationalist leader Parnell. In ‘Ulysses’, chapter 17, detail is given: ‘Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the house of Stephen’s parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms Hotel owned by Elizabeth O’Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of [Leopold] Bloom who resided also in the same hotel.’
• Uncle Charles – Stephen’s great uncle who lives with the family. Young Stephen enjoys taking long walks with his uncle and listening to Charles and Simon discuss the history of both Ireland and the Dedalus family
• Mike Flynn – a friend of his father’s who tries to train Stephen as an athlete with little success
• Aubrey Mills – friend his own age Stephen forms a gang with for adventures one summer
• Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother, a shadowy figure who rarely appears or talks: who tries to keep the peace at the big Christmas day argument, a lot later chides Stephen for being late to lectures; her most notable appearance is when, at the start of chapter 5, she washes his neck and face from a bowl of hot water
• Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at university who he confides in

At Clongowes Wood College (as a boy)

• Nasty Roche –
• Saurin
• Cantwell
• Jack Lawton
• Wells – taunts the boy Stephen for kissing his mother before he goes to bed, and one day he pushes Stephen into a dirty cesspool, causing Stephen to catch a bad fever and be sent to the infirmary
• Rody Kickham
• Simon Moonan
• Tusker
• Corrigan
• McGlade
• Fleming – who gets pandybatted
• Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee
• Cecil Thunder

Staff

• Father Conmee – rector i.e. headmaster of the school
• Father Arnall – Latin teacher who stands by and lets Stephen get pandybatted; he later reappears on the religious retreat from Belvedere and delivers the series of sermons which terrify Stephen
• Father Dolan – bully who unfairly pandybats Stephen
• Brother Michael – the kindly brother who tends to Stephen and Athy in the Clongowes infirmary after Wells pushes Stephen into the cesspool

At Belvedere (as a teenager)

• Vincent Heron – Stephen’s antagonist, always ready to rap his calves with his cane
• Boland – Heron sidekick
• Wallis – Heron sidekick
• Nash – Heron sidekick
• Doyle – producing the school play which Stephen appears in
• Mr Tate – English master, erroneously thinks he detects Stephen committing a heresy in an essay

At the beach he sees some of his schoolfriends stripped to their trunks:

• Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar
• Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp
• Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless sidepockets

At university

• Davin – the peasant student who tells the story of a peasant woman, Irish nationalist, asks Stephen why he doesn’t learn Gaelic and become ‘one of us’; his insistence that Stephen devote himself to the cause of Irish independence prompts one of Stephen’s famous outbursts: ‘—Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.’
• Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at the university, a kind of secular confessor
• MacCann – politically committed student who tries to recruit Stephen to the causes of world peace etc: ‘MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar’s rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament, arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.’
• Temple – with his dark gypsy eyes, literal-minded and limited he admires and tries to copy the cleverer students, leading Cranly to mock him: ‘You flaming floundering fool! I’ll take my dying bible there isn’t a bigger bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody world!’
• Lynch – a coarse and dryly sarcastic student who is even poorer than Stephen; big and muscular with a ‘whinny like an elephant’; but it is Lynch that Stephen explains his theory of aesthetics to as they walk round Dublin
• Moynihan – witty student, prone to whispering comic remarks to Stephen
• Donovan – member of the university field club
• Glynn – a student who gives private tuition, Cranly calls him ‘a bloody ape’

Theology

Clearly the central chapter containing the hellfire sermons is awash with precise and detailed theology. I am not qualified and not particularly interested in enumerating and analysing it.

He found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences…

The sermons are constructed with impressive logic and have an awesome rhetorical and emotional effect… And yet I was more entertained by a passage where Stephen dwells on the absurdities which theological speculation can lead you into:

If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to amass a huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had stolen only or the pound together with the compound interest accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism pour the water before saying the words is the child baptised? Is baptism with a mineral water valid? How comes it that while the first beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart, the second beatitude promises also to the meek that they shall possess the land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

This has more the feel of Rabelais or scholastic satirists of the minutiae of Catholic philosophising.

Style

Initially I was impressed by the sensual lyricism of many passages, dawn or dusk in the city, the soft beauty of women etc. But as in ‘Dubliners’, I was also aware that Joyce’s prose is not as relaxed as it first appears; after a while you realise it is more studied and detached than it seems, more calculating.

When I read ‘A Portrait’ as a boy I was duly terrified by the series of retreat sermons; now, 40 years later, I am still impressed by the power of the rhetoric but what I notice is Joyce’s careful structuring of his material: the overall structure of subject matter, its crisp division into focused paragraphs, and, within individual sentences 1) an insistence on the logic of the content or 2) an intense attention to the detail of description, both of which take precedence over everyday word order and rhythm.

They are just the most obvious way in which Joyce’s careful and elaborate phrasing can make many of his sentences feel clotted and effortful, a little stilted, a little formal, pedantic, continually drawing attention to their own grammatical correctitude. Officiously accurate. Nitpickingly precise. Even at his most lyrical, there’s always a kind of metallic finish to Joyce’s prose.

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.

I know this particular passage is meant to be sensual and overblown romantic. I know it also indicates the way Stephen’s taste is still adolescent and immature. But I also feel the tremendous control and intentionality of it.

Detachment battles passion

The text bombards us with messages about Stephen’s cold, aloof, detachment:

His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games…

He, apart from them and in silence..

‘You’re a terrible man, Stevie, said Davin, taking the short pipe from his mouth, always alone.’

And yet at the same time we know from the hundreds of passages of free indirect speech, that Stephen’s mind is a seething swamp of angers and resentments, of lusts and self-hatred or, as Cranly puts it: ‘You’re an excitable bloody man, do you know.’

I’ve already argued that the aesthetic of stasis and detachment which Stephen so famously expounds is wildly inappropriate for a form like the novel, and especially Joyce’s own novels, which unravel in all directions and are thus the precise opposite of detached and static objets d’art.

But there’s another way of thinking about Stephen’s theory, namely it could be interpreted in psychological terms as a man permanently driven by wild passions trying to establish control of himself. That it’s not just an aesthetic aim but a psychological goal. That what he’s really talking about is a kind of therapy. He wishes his mind was more calm and cold and detached and static, and not the seething swamp of lusts and resentments which the novel very vividly describes it as being.

Super-romanticism

One subset of Stephen’s stormy, troubled personality is his penchant for exceedingly lush hyper-romantic visions and sensations. On and on he goes about logic and detachment and yet the novel abounds in passages which demonstrate the precisely opposite qualities:

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

Is this parody or does he actually believe in writing like this? Many a natural description throughout the book is in this tenor:

Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

‘Cleft’? No wonder young Stephen tells Heron his favourite poet is Lord Byron. When, half-way through chapter 5, he awakes from an enchanted sleep with a poem echoing in his mind and hurries to write it down, it is a clear pastiche of Shelley or his mid-Victorian avatar Swinburne.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And here is young Stephen is sounding even more like Shelley in prophetic mode, imagining himself as:

a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

Joyce may have been taken up by Pound as a saint of modernism but reading the many, many passages like this can’t help but convince that his core values are arch-Romantic. And the characteristic aspect of romanticism is self-indulgence, indulgence of The Self, a grandiose rejoicing in the importance of our own emotions:

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence…

A few pages later he watches birds flying which triggers a snatch of poetry and responds:

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

I can see it’s beautifully, sensitively written. But I am also aware behind everything he published of Joyce’s steely focus.

Aesthetic

The last third or so of the book deal with Stephen’s development of an aesthetic. This has provided grist for tens of thousands of books, articles and papers. What struck me as key to his entire attitude is Joyce and Stephen’s poor sight as described in this passage.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:
—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Having poor sight, Joyce is less distracted by the richness of the actual visual world and leans more towards its description in words. Indeed, as we have seen, the text repeatedly describes Stephen’s fascination with the sound of certain words (kiss, tundish, mulier) right from the start.

The focus of all his writings on the quality of words and language have proved a goldmine to academics, accompanying as they do the entire twentieth century ‘linguistic turn’, the turn towards endless theories of language, its structure, its fugitive nature, the way it creates and encodes reality and much more. Joyce is like the patron saint of this movement whose handful of revolutionary texts provide an endless reservoir of reinterpretations.

Poverty

Anyway, rereading Joyce as a middle-aged man who’s struggled to raise a family, I am less impressed by the flashy manifesto commitments of an over-intellectual youth and this time round noticed other, less prominent aspects of the novel. I’ve mentioned the sly ubiquity of the humour, easy to miss if you’re dazzled by the nationalist posing, the theology and aesthetics. Another is Stephen’s sheer poverty.

In the course of the book, the Dedalus family really goes down in the world. At the start of chapter 5 they are living in a poor dirty house. As he prepares to leave for his morning lecture, Stephen looks with pity at his younger brothers and sisters who will never enjoy the privileged education he had. They use jam jars instead of teacups. When he wants to write his poem down Stephen has to do it on a torn-open fag packet. When he walks in the street, he stumbles because the broken soul of his shoe snags in a grating. At the university physics lecture he has to ask a colleague for a sheet of paper to make notes on because he has no paper of his own. Breakfast is watery tea and crusts of fried bread. Supper is a bowl of rice, like a poor Chinese peasant. None of this is dwelt on but is what struck me this time round.

And the other members of his swarming impoverished family? His father and great-uncle Charles loom large in the early chapters but there’s no mention of Charles (presumed dead) at the start of the climactic chapter 5, where his father only makes an off-stage appearance, a voice yelling down the stairs to see whether he’s left for university yet, and his mother actually appears but only briefly, to wash his neck and tell him off for being late.

But it’s his kid brothers and sisters which get me. Before he leaves their slum for the university, Stephen looks at them with pity, knowing they’ll never have the advantages he’s had. At one point he tells Cranly in an offhand manner that his mother bore nine or ten children and that some died (!). We never learn how many there are, although a couple of names are casually mentioned (Katey, Maggie, Boody). What did they think of him, Mr Linguistic Nationalism, Mr Romantic Poet? What did they make of their too-clever, self-obsessed, lucky older brother, the one who fled to the continent and abandoned the family to its poverty?

I wonder if anyone’s ever written a short story or novel about Stephen Dedalus’s siblings in which the great Martyr to Art appears as the self-centred narcissist that he so clearly is?

Comparison with Katherine Mansfield

I read all of Joyce while still at school and then reread ‘Ulysses’ when I had to study it at university. I was swept up by the depth of Joyce’s intellectual worldview and readily agreed with the idea that he had a Shakespearian grasp of language. But now, 40 years later, I’m not so convinced. The persistent romanticism, the frequent passages of olde worlde, Shelleyan lyricism, now come across to me as very dated and as dating the entire text. While its main appeal, from the hellfire sermon onwards, is in the rigour and thoroughness of Stephen’s intellectual positions, 1) first Catholic, 2) then aesthetic.

I have, I think, two objections: One is that I now have no sympathy at all with any of his intellectual positions; I can 1) appreciate the thoroughness of the sermon and the intellectual structure of his Catholic belief, and 2) I sort of sympathise with the aesthetic position he reaches, but I just disagree with both.

My worldview is based on 1) biology, biochemistry and Darwinian evolution (Stephen explicitly dismisses Darwin at one point, which I simply regard as a profound intellectual mistake), and 2) my aesthetic position is an acceptance of the wild chaos of aesthetic theories produced by the twentieth century, not to mention the new ones being created by the digital age. The world, and the world of art, are so chaotic there is no point restricting yourself to one theory or type of response. The opposite; you should be open to as many ways as possible of receiving and responding to works of art. Stephen’s scholarly reintepretations of Aristotle and Aquinas strike me as impressive achievements which are completely irrelevant to anyone except scholars and students having to write about them.

The second objection is that the whole things seems too calculated; it too obviously has designs on me and on all its readers. ‘A Portrait’ is packed with not just subtle symbolism, but the structuring of incidents and the narrative as a whole according to clever references and precedents, are designed to encourage attentive readers to spot them, unravel them, and construct multiple frameworks of interpretation.

In this it was a spectacular success: there was already a cohort of fans busily decoding the text’s meanings even before ‘Ulysses’ was published, based on the instalments published in the Little Review. The advent of the finished book signalled the start of the Joyce industry which has grown hand-in-hand with the growth of Literary studies as an academic discipline. A century later, there are more essays, papers, articles and books written about Joyce than any one person could read, along with more seminars, lectures and conferences than any one person could possibly attend.

When I was a student I contributed my grain of sand to this mountain (I was particularly proud of an essay which compared the use of the ‘epiphany’ in the works of Joyce and Kafka) but now it turns me off.

And so to my own surprise, of the works I’ve read over the past few months, I’m surprised to find myself preferring Katherine Mansfield’s short stories to Joyce. I can see and understand Joyce’s mastery as a writer, his astonishing control of structure and symbolism, his fluency. But whether due to age and fatigue, or to having had a family of my own and been through various tribulations, I find life stranger and more uncanny than ever; and so I find the systematisation in Joyce – the creation of multiple systems of symbolism, resonance and meaningful structuring – I find his control to be metallic and repelling.

Whereas the 33 Mansfield short stories I read before Christmas are a) less controlled and systematic and so more accurately reflect the chaotic unplanned nature of life; and b) within each story the meanings are beautifully fugitive, fleeting; at every moment in a Mansfield story strange things happen, people’s lives are disrupted, events and emotions they can’t control derail their intentions, upsetting their entire understanding of their lives, and even what it means to be alive. This, it seems to me, is more what life is like, even the etiolated intellectual life Joyce is ostensibly recording.

There is no strangeness in Joyce; everything is controlled, every detail is subordinated to a very canny plan, and this is all very well in its own terms – nobody ever constructed a bigger, more multi-levelled matrix of meanings and symbols and associations than ‘Ulysses’. And yet one short story by Katherine Mansfield says more to me about the strangeness, the uncontrolledness and the uncanniness of human existence, than all of Joyce.

Credit

‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce was published in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch.

Related link

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man online

Related reviews

• James Joyce reviews