Topic Tracking: The Artist

Part 1

The Artist 1: Stephen shows some early signs of artistic temperament, including his
tendency to associate things he sees with what he's read in books. He also has a wandering
mind that is often led astray by beautiful sounds or things, as in "White roses and red roses:
those were beautiful colors to think of" (pg. 9).

The Artist 2: If the ability to be rebellious for what you believe in is a necessary quality of an
artist, Stephen shows a bit of this by telling on the prefect. His resolution to be "quiet and
obedient" (pg. 61) with the prefect, however, indicates that authority still has a strong pull on
him.

Part 2

The Artist 3: At Blackrock, Stephen feels more alienated--he isn't particularly moved by
Uncle Charles' religious devotion and he mistrusts Mike Flynn. It is The Count of Monte
Cristo, a work of literature, rather than the people around him that interests Stephen most.

The Artist 4: Like the characters in The Count of Monte Cristo, the characters Stephen sees on
the streets of Dublin stimulate his imagination. Stephen's imaginative life is blossoming.

The Artist 5: Stephen's thoughts as he tries to compose the poem to Emma give the first hint
of his aesthetic sensibilities, suggesting how he will create art if he does become an artist.

The Artist 6: Stephen increasingly feels the pull of "intangible phantoms" (pg. 88), phantoms
that presumably include the ambition to be an artist. But the pull to be a gentleman and a good
Catholic threaten to keep him from a life devoted to art.

The Artist 7: The fragment from a Shelly poem on pg. 102 suggests that weariness may await
the artist who forsakes companions and daily pleasures in pursuit of art. This concept of
"weariness" is mentioned often, sometimes suggesting that weariness befalls the artist, other
times that to not have art in one's life is what leads to weariness.

Part 3

The Artist 8: Even as Stephen is walking to confession, the physical world competes for his
attention with more heavenly thoughts. If indeed a fascination with the physical world, with
"the common accents, the burning gasjets in the shops, odours of fish and spirits and wet
sawdust, moving men and women" (pg. 152), is what makes an artist, it seems right to say
that Stephen has an artistic temperament.

Part 4

The Artist 9: In the process of making his decision to turn away from a life devoted to God,
Stephen finds himself thinking about words. His thoughts on p. 180 about what it is he loves
about words suggest that he's already beginning to try and nail down his philosophy of art.

Part 5
The Artist 10: At the university, Stephen is thought of by his classmates and teachers as a
poet, or at least a poet-in-training. So at this point his public image is that of an artist.

The Artist 11: Stephen finally completes his first poem. The poem is pretty, though not
spectacular. It is a bit of a relief, at any rate, that he's finally gotten beyond just talking about
art and into the business of trying to create some.

The Artist 12: By the end of the novel, Stephen has resolved in his mind that he will choose
the life of the artist, regardless of the exile and loneliness he may have to suffer because of
this decision.

Topic Tracking: Language

Part 1

Language 1: The language in the opening pages of the novel is disjointed and even babyish.
This is Joyce's signal that the narrative style of the book will change to reflect the changes in
Stephen's mood and mentality.

Language 2: Stephen's fascination with the word "suck" (pg. 8) shows him trying to come to
an understanding of the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning. His curiosity
about words, along with the way he is moved by the words of a song (pg. 22) are perhaps an
early indication that he will grow up to be a writer.

Language 3: Stephen's appropriation of the religious phrases "Tower of Ivory" and "House of
Gold" as phrases to represent the little girl Eileen show how his mind is flexible about
language. He is willing to take a phrase out of its common context and apply it to his own
experiences.

Language 4: When Stephen is filled with elation after having confronted the rector, the
language speeds up and is full of "horroos!" reflecting Stephen's own mood. These closing
pages of Part 1 also show the tendency of each part to end with a high, emotionally charged
feeling.

Part 2

Language 5: The language in Part 2 becomes increasingly sexually suggestive as Stephen gets
more preoccupied with sex.

Language 6: When Stephen sees the word "foetus" carved in the desk at his father's old
school, he has a very visceral reaction. He's startled to think that the boy who carved the word
might also have been thinking about sex, a preoccupation that Stephen seems to consider his
solitary, horrible hang-up. It's interesting that one written word can have more power to move
Stephen than all of his father's stories.

Language 7: Stephen's experience with the prostitute is something that's beyond words,
although it is linked with language with this description of the prostitute's lips. "They pressed
upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech...." (pg.
108).
Part 3

Language 8: The shift in language from the lyrical end of Part 2 to the gritty description that
opens Part 3 -"Stuff it into you, his belly counseled him" (pg. 109)--illustrates the pattern of a
shift from "high" to "low" language that happens between the end of each section and the
beginning of the next.

Language 9: The language of the sermons is interesting. It goes on for so long that it's as if
Joyce wanted the reader to be subjected to these sermons for as long and to the same degree
as Stephen himself.

Part 4

Language 10: The language used to describe Stephen's thoughts begins to soar after he makes
his decision not to join the priesthood. It references music and leaping flames:

"It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a
major fourth, upwards a tone and down a major third, like triplebranching flames leaping
fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood." (pg. 179).

Part 5

Language 11: The start of Part 5 has a marked tonal difference than the end of Part 4. As at the
start of Part 3, Stephen is surrounded by food, and words like "dripping," "dregs," and
"boghole" suggest that Stephen's mind has taken another dip from the lyrical possibilities of
language and life to its not-so-pretty everyday realities.

Language 12: As Stephen walks past the city shops, he's disturbed by the waste or misuse of
language; these signs have turned words with poetic possibility into "heaps of dead language."
(pg. 193).

Language 13: Stephen's conversation with the dean, an Englishman, makes him think about
how English is not really his own language. For the Irish, English is both "familiar" and
"foreign," always an "acquired speech."

Language 14: The conclusion of the novel with Stephen's diary entries means that the
narrative has shifted from the impersonal third-person point of view to the personal first-
person and suggests that Stephen is now ready to use his own words to determine and express
his own destiny.

Topic Tracking: Religion

Part 1

Religion 1: At Clonglowes, Stephen is very humble before God and religion. He is afraid to
not say his prayers and he has an implicit faith in the wisdom and goodness of his teachers
because they are men of God.
Religion 2: The explosive argument at Christmas dinner shows how important and how
politically heated religious issues are in Ireland at this time. Stephen also learns that religion
is worth getting worked-up about as he sees his father break down in tears over it.

Religion 3: Young Stephen's respect for religion is shown by the frightened dumbfoundedness
he has about the possibility that some of his classmates may have stolen church money or
church wine.

Religion 4: The unfair beating Stephen suffers, and Father Arnall's failure to set the prefect
straight, give Stephen his first reason to doubt the moral authority of religious men.

Religion 5: Stephen, although he has chosen justice over blind obedience to authority by
telling on the prefect, is still at this point humble before religious authority. He reminds
himself to be "quiet and obedient" (pg. 61) before the prefect.

Part 2

Religion 6: Stephen's indifference about going to church with Uncle Charles indicates that
he's lost some of his religious awe and faith at this point.

Religion 7: When Mr. Dedalus tells Stephen he had a good laugh with the rector and the
prefect over the time Stephen complained about being beaten, Stephen is forced to reinterpret
the past. The faith he felt in justice reigning at the end of Part 1 is completely shaken.

Religion 8: Despite his religious education, Stephen's visit to a prostitute at the end of Part
2 marks his decision to experience the world via sin rather than piety.

Part 3

Religion 9: Not only is Stephen sinning, he's being quite hypocritical by continuing to act the
part of a religious leader at school. His guilt, however, catches up with him early in the
religious retreat.

Religion 10: Father Arnall's sermons work on Stephen exactly as planned. Remembering that
one's fate--heaven or hell--is determined by one's actions on Earth, Stephen is persuaded by
fear and guilt to confess his sins.

Part 4

Religion 11: Stephen refuses the offer to join the priesthood--sensual life and experience are
too important to him. He feels this decision is a refutation not only of the priestly life, but of
religion itself, and senses his imminent "fall."

Religion 12: When he's walking home from the world of a religious father and into the
neighborhood of his own father, it is suggested that Stephen feels both these types of fathers
as possible models for his own life.

Part 5
Religion 13: In his conversation with Cranly, Stephen seems ready to completely turn from
religion in pursuit of art. He even quotes Lucifer, allying himself with the fallen angel: "I will
not serve" (pg. 260).

Stephen also has a particular tendency to wonder about words, suggesting that writing might
be the sort of art he'll eventually pursue. He thinks about the way one word can have two
completely different meanings. "That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a
fellow a belt" (pg. 5) He obsesses about the sound of words, like "suck," which has a queer
and ugly sound to him. And he gets particularly emotional about the words he reads. At one
point he is moved almost to tears by the line of a song, "Bury me in the old churchyard."

Topic Tracking: Language 2

Finally, we see in this second section that Stephen is clearly in a world of religion.
Clonglowes is run by religious men. His teacher is a priest, Father Arnall, and Brother
Michael runs the infirmary. Stephen says his prayers at night with the fear that he'll go to hell
if he doesn't, and he equates religion with smarts, "Father Arnall knew more than Dante
because he was a priest" (pg. 7).

http://www.bookrags.com/notes/por/PART1.html

Having known that he' s so likely to escape, I should have started falling out of love before.
So, what am I to do now when everything is silent, all that exists is his face, warm and
serious, looking at me without words, making me tremble inside, making me shout.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The mind wanders, on occasion, through many processions of thought. When at the beginning
of this text, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, I found it difficult to
follow young Stephen's meandering thoughts with any semblance of comprehension until I
finished reading the novel. I then began to research the novel and Joyce and realized the
significance of these seemingly random thoughts. These are the thoughts of a budding artist in
infancy.

As Stephen matured, so did his thoughts. His struggle with self is central to understanding the
novel. Without any indication of any other person's thoughts, Stephen's thoughts provoke our
own to fill in where Joyce left the narrative blank. His struggle with self deals with religion,
sin, sexuality, and prudence. Courage may be added to this list, but to a lesser extent. Stephen
feels it is sufficient to hide and keep silent more than to stand on a soapbox and say what he
thinks to a crowd.

Many of his mannerisms are learned responses from earlier dealings with schoolmates and
family. In Chapter 1, line 30, Stephen hides when he is in trouble for something unknown to
the reader. He hides his emotions on lines 81 and 82 of chapter 1 when his mother is crying as
she leaves him at school. He attempts to hide his shame, on lines 259-265 in the same chapter,
at not knowing the correct answer between kissing his mother or not doing so.

These learned responses of defense are somewhat, but not completely ignored when his
thoughts begin to mature and he forms his own philosophy of what is beautiful through the
study of others (Chapter 5, Lines 1161-1469). He speaks openly, to Lynch at least, about what
beauty is and what art is. Later, also in Chapter 5, he speaks openly to Cranly about religion
and his lack of belief therein. He believes that Cranly is friend enough not to tell others that
Stephen is, what might have been considered, a heretic.

In the last portion of the novel, the journal entries, he may be hiding again. He is certainly
getting ready for a journey. The statement he made to Davin, "the shortest way to Tara was via
Hollyhead" (chapter 5, lines 2701-2702), was a way to convey his intention of returning one
day as a great man. Perhaps a great man of words, or of vision.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is considered to

be one of the finest works of literature of all time. Herbert Gorman, an author

from the early twentieth century, stated that "so profound and beautiful and

convincing a book is part of the lasting literature of our age," and with good

reason. The main character of the novel, Stephen Dedalus, is a complex and

dynamic youth, and one who undergoes vast changes during the course of his life.

The main influences on him are family and religion. As his life passes,

Stephens' feelings towards these influences change drastically.

Stephen's family is very important to him. His father, Simon, plays a

major role in his early life, and Stephen has great respect for him. However,

there are instances when Stephen is angered by his fathers' actions, and resents

his statements. The growing debts incurred by Simon lead to his son's

transferring to a day school. Stephens' difficulties at his former educational

institution are relayed by his father, much to the chagrin of the younger

Dedalus. Later in the novel, Stephen loses even more respect for his father as

the familys' debts continue to grow and they are forced to move. Once, when the

two males travel to sell of the family estate, Simon returns to his former
school and converses with his former classmates. Stephen is upset to hear of

his father's wild behavior as a youth, and of his flirtatious nature. He begins

to rebel against his strict upbringing, striking back at his familys'

traditional values and way of life.

Religion is an ever present force in Stephen's life. He attends a

religious school from an early age, and is a devout Roman Catholic. He has

great reference for the priests at his school, and even fears the rector. As

his life progresses, Stephen experiences great feelings for women, and finally

gives into his desire when he encounters a prostitute in Dublin. From this

point forward, he views his life as an immoral one and makes many attempts to

correct it. He goes so far as to deprive all of his senses from any form of

pleasure. While attending a religious retreat, Stephen takes all that he hears

to heart. He believes that if he does not correct his ways, he will be banished

to an eternity in Hell. Deciding that he must confess his immoral act, Stephen

goes to a small parish where he is not known. He begins to overcompensate for

his sins, but to no avail. His sinful ways overcome his spiritual values, and

Stephen decides to abandon his religion. He vows to change his life for the

better, and begins studying at a university. Here, his artistic nature surfaces,

and Stephen embraces it. He explains his new theories to all who will listen,

and decides to move away from Ireland and his repressed beliefs, and to a new

life of freedom.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a literary work that has many

distinct aspects involved in it. The stylistic method of writing that Joyce
uses is perhaps the most notable of them. Not once in the novel are quotation

marks used, making it difficult to judge where dialogue begins and ends. This

very fact, however, lends itself towards the reader's determination of what the

author had in mind by using this style. In addition to this, the plot seems to

have large gaps in it at points. The time frame of the story, as well as the

simple determination of Stephen's age, is difficult to grasp during certain

instances. Joyce may have utilized this to allow the reader to bring a more

personal approach to the reading and understanding of the work. This, too, is a

fascinating aspect of the novel. Many critics believe that Portrait is an

autobiographical piece of fiction. Many similarities exist between the lives of

Stephen and Joyce. The strong religious upbringing of these Irishmen, their

financial hardships, and the family life of each male is strikingly similar.

Each attended the same schools, underwent the same mental development, and grew

strongly attached to their artistic interests. However many differences between

their lives, it is obvious that Joyce drew upon his own life when he created

this work. Although Joyce was more of an athlete, more extroverted, and

regarded his peers as equals or superiors, Stephen's life parallels his with a

vast deal of similitude. The personalities of Joyces' friends were changed, as

were the academic honors he was given, yet the fact still remains that the life

of Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce are intertwined to a great extent.

On the whole, this novel was an obvious work of great literary skill.

The mastery with which it was written, and the questions it turns up in the

reader's own mind, affirm the classic nature of Joyce's writing. The times at

which the story line is difficult to follow are more than compensated for by the
deep meaning of this portrayal. The life of Stephen represents the life of

Joyce, and all his struggles to become whom he felt that he was meant to. It

symbolizes an endeavor that everyone should take to heart; when one believes in

something for themselves, one should attempt to achieve their goals no matter

the difficulties that they must overcome.

How to Cite this Page

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Silence, exile, and cunning."- these are weapons Stephen Dedalus chooses in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. And these, too, were weapons that its author, James Joyce, used
against a hostile world.

Like his fictional hero, Stephen, the young Joyce felt stifled by the narrow interests, religious
pressures, and political squabbles of turn-of-the-century Ireland. In 1904, when he was
twenty-two, he left his family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the "dull torpor" of Dublin for
the European continent to become a writer. With brief exceptions, he was to remain away
from Ireland for the rest of his life.

It was a bold move for several reasons. In spite of his need to break away from constrictions
on his development as a writer, Joyce had always been close to his family. He still admired the
intellectual and artistic aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition that had nurtured him. And the
city of Dublin was in his soul.

(Asked later how long he had been away from Dublin, he answered: "Have I ever left it?")
But Joyce did achieve his literary goal in exile. The artistic climate of continental Europe
encouraged experiment. With cunning (skillfulness) and hard work, Joyce developed his own
literary voice. He labored for ten years on Portrait of the Artist, the fictionalized account of
his youth. When it appeared in book form in 1916, twelve years after Joyce's flight from
Ireland, it created a sensation.

Joyce was hailed as an important new force in literature.

Portrait of the Artist is usually read as an autobiography, and many of the incidents in it come
from Joyce's youth. But don't assume that he was exactly like his sober hero, Stephen
Dedalus. Joyce's younger brother Stanislaus, with whom he was very close, called Portrait of
the Artist "a lying autobiography and a raking satire." The book should be read as a work of
art, not a documentary record. Joyce transformed autobiography into fiction by selecting,
sifting, and reconstructing scenes from his own life to create a portrait of Stephen Dedalus, a
sensitive and serious young boy who gradually defines himself as an artist.

Still, Joyce and Stephen have much in common. Both were indelibly marked by their
upbringing in drab, proud, Catholic Dublin, a city that harbored dreams of being the capital of
an independent nation but which in reality was a backwater ruled by England. Like Stephen,
Joyce was the eldest son of a family that slid rapidly down the social and economic ladder.
When Joyce was born in 1882, the family was still comfortably off. But its income dwindled
fast after Joyce's sociable, witty, hard-drinking father, John Stanislaus, lost his political job- as
Stephen's father Simon loses his- after the fall of the Irish leader and promoter of
independence Charles Stewart Parnell. Although the loss of the post was not directly related to
Parnell's fall, Joyce's father worshipped "the uncrowned king of Ireland" and blamed his loss
on anti-Parnell forces like the Roman Catholic Church. (Joyce portrays the kind of strong
emotions Parnell stirred up in the

Christmas dinner scene in Chapter One of Portrait of the Artist.) Like Simon Dedalus, the
jobless John Stanislaus Joyce was forced to move his family frequently, often leaving rent
bills unpaid.

Joyce, though, seems to have taken a more cheerful view of his family problems, and to have
shown more patience with his irresponsible father, than did his fictional hero. He seems to
have inherited some of his father's temperament; he could clown at times, and he laughed so
readily he was called "Sunny Jim." He also inherited a tenor voice good enough to make him
consider a concert career. Many believe that musical talent is responsible for Joyce's gift for
language.

Joyce's father was determined that his son have the finest possible education, and though
precarious family finances forced the boy to move from school to school, he received a
rigorous Jesuit education. In Portrait of the Artist Joyce relives through Stephen the
intellectual and emotional struggles that came with his schooling. Joyce's classmates admired
the rebellious brilliance that questioned authority, but- like some bright students whom you
may know- he remained an outsider, socially and intellectually.

The religious training he received in the Jesuit schools also shaped Joyce, giving him first a
faith to believe in and then a weight to rebel against. Like Stephen, he was for a time devoutly
religious- then found that other attractions prevailed. By age fourteen he had begun his sexual
life furtively in Dublin brothels, and though he was temporarily overwhelmed with remorse
after a religious retreat held at his Catholic school, he soon saw that he could not lead the life
of virtuous obedience demanded of a priest. Instead, he exchanged religious devotion for
devotion to writing.
As a student at University College in Dublin, Joyce studied Latin and modern languages.
Although the Gaelic League and other groups were hoping to achieve Irish cultural
independence from Great Britain by promoting Irish literature and language, the
nonconformist Joyce spurned them. He felt closer to the less provincial trends developing in
continental Europe. He memorized whole pages of Gustave Flaubert, the French pioneer of
psychological realism and author of Madame Bovary, whose precision of style and
observation he envied. He also admired the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who shocked
the world by introducing previously forbidden subjects like venereal disease and immorality
among "respectable" citizens in his works. Both these writers drew, as Joyce would, on all
parts of life- the beautiful, the sordid, and the commonplace.

But realism wasn't the only influence on the young Joyce. The subtle and suggestive poetic
imagery of French poets like Stephane Mallarme and Arthur Rimbaud, who used symbols to
convey shades of meaning, appealed to his love for the musicality of words and for the power
of words to evoke unexpected psychological associations. Their example, too, is followed in
Portrait of the Artist.

Before Joyce had left the university he had already written several essays- one of them on
Ibsen- and he had formulated the core of his own theory of art, a

theory similar to Stephen's in Chapter Five. The renowned Irish poet William Butler Yeats
was impressed by the unkempt but precocious youth, and tried to draw Joyce into the ranks of
Irish intellectuals. But once again the arrogant newcomer rejected his homeland, choosing to
stay aloof because he felt Yeats and his group viewed the Irish past too romantically and
viewed its present with too much nationalism.

Instead, at the age of twenty, Joyce did what Stephen Dedalus is about to do at the novel's end,
and turned away from his family, his country, and his church. He ran off to the continent. In
1903 he returned to Ireland to visit his dying mother, but soon after her death (1904) he was
again bound for Europe, accompanied by the chambermaid with whom he had fallen in love,
Nora Barnacle. The uneducated, sensual Nora seemed an unlikely mate for Joyce, but she
proved (despite Joyce's cranky suspicions of her) to be a loyal, lifetime companion.

In Trieste (then a cosmopolitan city of Austria-Hungary), Joyce wrote incessantly and eked
out a living teaching English. He put together Dubliners, a group of stories based on brief
experiences he called "epiphanies." For Joyce, who believed in "the significance of trivial
things," an epiphany was a moment of spiritual revelation sparked by a seemingly
insignificant detail. A chance word, a particular gesture or situation could suddenly reveal a
significant truth about an entire life.

He also continued work on a novel he had started in Ireland. The first, brief version of what
we know as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been

curtly rejected in 1904, before Joyce left Ireland. "I can't print what I can't understand," wrote
the British editor who refused it. Undaunted, Joyce expanded the story to nearly one thousand
pages. It now bore the title Stephen Hero, and was a conventional Bildungsroman- a novel
about a young man's moral and psychological development. Other examples of such novels
might include D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) or Samuel Butler's The Way of All
Flesh (1903). (Some critics would be more specific and call Stephen Hero and A Portrait of
the Artist Kunstlerromane- novels about the development of young artists.) Then, dissatisfied,
Joyce decided to recast his novel into a shorter, more original form. The final version of
Portrait of the Artist was stalled by British censorship and it was not until 1914 that Joyce,
with the help of Yeats and the American poet Ezra Pound, was able to get it printed in serial
form in a "little review," The Egoist. Dubliners, long delayed by printers' boycotts because of
its supposed offensiveness, also appeared the same year. In 1916 Portrait of the Artist was
published in book form in England and the United States, thanks only to the efforts of Harriet
Weaver, editor of The Egoist, and Joyce's faithful financial and moral supporter.

When Portrait of the Artist did appear, critical reaction was mixed. It was called "garbage"
and "brilliant but nasty," among other things. Some readers objected to the graphic physical
description, the irreverent treatment of religious matters, the obscurity of its symbolism, and
its experimental style. But it was also

praised by others as the most exciting English prose of the new century. Joyce, who had fled
to neutral Switzerland at the outbreak of World War I, was hailed as "a new writer with a new
form" who had broken with the tradition of the English novel.

What sets Portrait of the Artist apart from other confessional novels about the development of
a creative young man, like D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Samuel Butler's The Way
of All Flesh is that the action takes place mainly in the mind of the central character. To
portray that mind, Joyce began to develop a technique called the interior monologue, or
stream of consciousness, in which he quoted directly the random, unshaped thoughts of his
hero. Joyce used this technique sparingly in Portrait of the Artist; he exploited it more fully in
his later novels.

Portrait of the Artist also differs from more conventional novels because it doesn't show
Stephen Dedalus' development in a straightforward chronological progression. Nor do you see
it through easily understood flashbacks to the past.

Instead Joyce presents a series of episodes that at first may seem unconnected but which in
fact are held together by use of language, images, and symbols. Joyce's language changes as
Stephen moves from infancy to manhood. The boy who is "nicens little baby tuckoo"
becomes the proud young artist who writes in his diary brave promises about forging "the
uncreated conscience of my race." Images and symbols are repeated to reveal Stephen's
innermost feelings. For example, a rose, or rose color, represents a yearning for romantic love
and beauty; the color yellow a revulsion from sordid reality; and birds or flight, an aspiration
to creative freedom (and, less often, the threat of punishment and loss of freedom). Such
images often relate to larger motifs drawn from religion, philosophy, and myth. Joyce framed
his novel in a superstructure of myth (see the section on the Daedalus myth) to relate his
hero's personal experience to a universal story of creativity, daring, pride, and self-discovery.

This constellation of words, images, and ideas gives Portrait of the Artist a complex texture
that offers you far more than a surface telling of Stephen Dedalus' story ever could. It's not
easy to explore all the layers of the novel.

Joyce removes familiar guideposts. Cause and effect is lost; scenes melt into one another, and
the passage of time is not specified. Joyce doesn't explain the many references to places,
ideas, and historical events that fill Stephen's mind. It's up to you to make the connections.
But if you do, you'll find the effort worthwhile.
You'll be participating with Stephen Dedalus in his journey of self-discovery.

After Portrait of the Artist, Joyce went even further in transforming the novel in his later
works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Both are virtually plotless and try to reflect the inner
workings of the mind in language that demands much from the reader. Stephen Dedalus
appears again, though in a secondary role, as a struggling young writer in Ulysses. This epic
novel connects one day's wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish Dubliner, with the twenty-
year wanderings of the ancient Greek hero Ulysses recounted in Homer's Odyssey.

Ulysses is in some ways a continuation of Portrait of the Artist.

Again, no English publisher would print Ulysses because of its sexual explicitness and earthy
language. It was printed privately in Paris in 1922.

Although its early chapters were published serially in the United States, further publication
was banned and it was not legally available in the United States again until 1933, when a
historic decision written by United States District Judge John Woolsey ruled that it was not
obscene.

By then Joyce was living in Paris, an international celebrity and the acknowledged master of
the modern literary movement. But even his warmest admirers cooled when Finnegans Wake
was published in 1939. He was disheartened by the hostile reactions to the extremely obscure
language and references in what he felt was his masterwork, the depiction of a cosmic world,
built from the dreams of one man in the course of a night's sleep.

Joyce was also increasingly depressed by his failing eyesight, as well as his daughter Lucia's
mental illness. His reliance on alcohol increased. Once again a world war sent him into exile
in neutral Switzerland. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.

James Joyce had lived to write. He became a priest of art, as he (Stephen) had promised in
Portrait of the Artist. Because of his original use of language to tell a story that simultaneously
combined mankind's great myths, individual human psychology, and the details of everyday
life, Joyce is now held by many to be the most influential prose writer of this century. His
influence was felt by many others, including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner,
Thomas Wolfe, and Samuel Beckett. He has left his mark on any writer who uses the stream-
of-consciousness technique (see the section on Style), or employs language in a fresh and
punning way. And for many writers, like the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, his use of myth
to give shape to the chaos of modern life had "the importance of a scientific discovery."

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Artistic Development

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had various themes which covered many areas. The
primary theme of the novel is the artistic development of the artist, Stephen, and this relates
specifically to the artists development in the life of a national language. Stephen experiences
many voices of Ireland as well as those of the writers of his education. Out of all these voices
emerges Stephens aesthetic theory and his desire to find his own manner of expression.
Stephen develops his own voice as a way of escaping these constraints.

One of the main constraints on the artist as Joyce depicts his life is the Roman Catholic
Church. However, it is both a constraint and an enabling condition for the artists
development. First, the Jesuit education Stephen receives, gives him a thorough grounding in
the classical and medieval thinkers. It also structures Stephens life in such a way that it
provides him with a basis for his own development as a moral and intellectual person. In
relation to his eventual development of a theory of art or an aesthetic theory, Stephen fully
draws on this tradition. He uses two central doctrines of the church in this theory. First, he
revises the doctrine into a way of imagining the relationship between art and the world it
describes. When Stephen develops his theory, he thinks of himself as taking on the role of a
"priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body
of everliving life." The second use of Catholic doctrine or tradition relates to its creation of a
priesthood, a class of men separate from the world who act as intermediaries between the
deity and the people. In Stephens idea of the artist, he is priestlike, performing the miracle of
turning life into art.

Joyce is in good company when he uses techniques to drive a wedge in the totalizing authority
of the church and in other forms of seriousness, even the artists own. When Stephen is
discoursing learnedly on his aesthetic theory, his friend Lynch critisizes him. He brings lust
into the picture of how and why art is created. He laughs at Stephens deadly serious use of
the scholastics to develop a theory of art. Earlier in the novel, when Mrs. Dante Riordan is
condemning Parnell and supporting his excommunication from the Catholic church, Mr.
Dedalus and Mr. Casey discourages her, describing fat priests, the way the priests eat, and
generally joking about the priests grasping for power. They win that argument. Mrs. Riordan
leaves. It serves a good lesson for the young Stephen, one he never employs himself, but
which Joyce certainly makes good use of. Even in describing Stephens process of writing a
poem to his beloved. He begins in poetic inspiration and ends in lust. Both are used to
produce the poem.

It is this both-and philosophy that characterizes the final version of Stephens ideas of the
function of art and the free life. Instead of the churchs idea of mortifying the flesh in favor of
the spirit, Stephen finally decides that the flesh should also be given voice. The novel itself
insists on the local as a site for theories of the universal, of the body as the place in which the
spirit resides. The final description of Stephens theory of art is not in the novels narrative it
is the novels narrative, as it incorporates all the voices of Stephens development,
orchestrates them, makes them speak to each other, and disables any one of them from an
authoritative hold over the free artist.

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Finding the True-self in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Through the course of a man's life, he will continually change until he becomes himself or his
true self, at least according to most Native American cultures. Oddly enough, in James
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this is the case even though the story is set in
Ireland around the time before the Independence in 1922. This book, one of Joyce's
masterpieces set in the sometimes hard to follow "stream of consciousness" manner of
narration has been hailed as both controversial and typical of it's time and place. In both
cases, Joyce was called a "ground-breaking" author and this semi-autobiographical piece is
truly a hallmark in English Literature. So what makes a masterpiece? Critics say it's because
it follows the Classical example of character development that tells of the coming of age of a
particular individual and surely this book is no special case. Interestingly enough, through the
ending of each chapter, Joyce shows the variegation of one young man, Stephen Daedalus
from one form to another, yet these "pieces" contribute to the "whole" at the end of the novel.

Joyce first shows Stephen's soft memories of what it was like to be young, almost infantile
in the first few sentences but by the end of the chapter he is a young, fearful servant of God, a
role that beleaguers him throughout childhood. However, the end of the second chapter sees a
completely different Stephen. He first throws himself at the mercy of the Fathers that teach
him while trying to get himself friends in the schoolyard at the same time and this proves to
be quite a task. Eventually, from a friend, he gets the courage to stand up to his unjust
whipping and humiliation in front of the class and it changes him forever. He now, at the end
of the first chapter is more confident that he can talk to adults and stick up for himself. On the
other hand, the Chapter II focuses on his break from childhood into his development as a
young man (Zimbaro, 41) as he has his first sexual experience with a Dublin prostitute. This
also happened to Joyce at the tender age of 14, so when Joyce tells about "the swoon of
sin"(109) it is probably his own account of his experience. Shortly thereafter, Stephen feels
immensely bad for what he has done because to him, he has committed the ultimate sin "of
lust." This is only part of his complete maturation.

After Stephen goes through his first violently sinful experience, he tries to repent for his
sins, not realizing that this unnecessary for him in order to be a devout Catholic. In the end, it
is his rejection altogether of Catholicism that lets him be a complete person, free from the
slavery which was his piety. He first listens to a lecture at a so-called "retreat" for the
students to share their experiences with Christ. Instead, he is given almost a migraine when
he listens to what Hell is like for its' inhabitants. Stephen, almost sure it is waiting for him,
becomes even more of a "saint" trying not to tempt himself from the indulgences of everyday
interactions.

"On each day of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven

gifts of the Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out day by day the

Seven Deadly Sins which had defiled it in the past... (154)"

Soon, this becomes wearing on him so he stops abruptly, only to embrace the artistic life
completely, described by Zimbaro as "the dawn of his new life as an artist (62)." The opening
of the flower (177) symbolically represents the opening of his eyes to not only have the ability
to see things now as a man, but as an artist (Zimbaro, 62) which again, changes him
completely. While he doesn't abandon the once St. Augustine-like piety he had, it merely
shifts into a more human and esoteric existence.

Stephen Daedalus' name is of course two references to both Christian and Greek mythology
(Zimbaro, 23). Saint Stephen was one of the martyrs, stoned to death as a test of faith to his
loving God. Daedalus was a man more notably the father of the famous Icarus, who flew too
close to the sun, yadda yadda. Daedalus himself was the architect of the Labyrinth of the
Minotaur, and was eventually imprisoned there himself. Fortunately, he was rescued by
Perseus who also slayed the Minotaur but ironically, this freedom ended in his son's death.
Stephen Daedalus therefore is both the martyr and the clever (sometimes too much for his
own good) artist. Stephen "flees" from the religious obsession, which nearly mentally kills
him to "take flight" as an artist, only as a young man to discover himself. His eyes are now
open to the rest of the world, over a vast ocean to another continent. His audience cannot help
but hope that he is "ever in good stead (253).

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123HelpMe.com. 15 Jan 2008
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