James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Contents
1. Introduction:
1. Ireland: social and political situation
2. James Joyce: life and character
3. The Irish Literary Renaissance (or Revival)
4. Ireland and Exile
2. Structure of A Portrait
3. The narrative technique and point of view
1. Focalization / Interior Monologue
2. Time
3. Point of view
4. Intertextuality
5. Symbols
6. Leitmotifs
7. Repetition
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
6. Themes
7. Early critical responses
1.1. Ireland: political situation
• Irish literary revival: preoccupation with history-as-legend and legend-as-history.
• Catholics inherited a tradition of legal and cultural repression: Anglo-Irish aristocracy and land ownership.
• 18thc penal laws.
• 1829: Emancipation Act (useless for the Catholic peasantry).
• 1845-48: The Great Famine.
• 1848-ff: “devotional revolution” demanding political independence.
• 1846-91: Charles Stewart Parnell: Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord demanded Home Rule for Ireland.
• 1882: Two British officials, Lord Frederick Cavendish, chief secretary for Ireland, and Mr. Burke,
undersecretary, were murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, by the “Invincibles” (possibly a Fenian splinter-
group).
• 1889-90: Letters forged by an Irish journalist named Richard Pigott and published with its blessing by The
London Times accused Parnell of advocating the murder.
• 1889-90: Captain O’Shea, one of Parnell’s political associates, filed for divorce on grounds of adultery. Parnell
was discredited. The Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy openly opposed Parnell’s leadership.
• 1891: Parnell died. Nine-year-old James Joyce wrote a broadside poem. “Et tu Healy” against Parnell’s
betrayers.
• W. B. Yeats, the leader of the Irish Literary Revival presented Countess Cathleen at the Abbey
Theater (the Irish Literary Theater), a story about an aristocrat who sells her soul to the devil in
exchange for food for her starving people. It was considered “a libel on Irish womanhood.”
• Stephen refuses to sign a petition against the play: he chooses art over politics. This is
autobiographical. He admired Yeats as a poet and probably decided to write prose because he felt
he could not compete with Yeats.
• Joyce separated from the Irish Literary Revival because all the major figures were of the
Protestant landholding class.
• He did not subscribe the Gaelic League either because he saw it as bigoted, backward-looking,
and church-dominated.
• Joyce, like Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” was put off by the Gaelic League. Gabriel remains in
Ireland and can only become a literary critic for the conservative The Daily Express. Joyce wanted
to become a writer.
1.2. James Joyce: life and character
• Norman ancestors settled in the Galway area (”the Joyce Country” still bears their
name).
• Joyce’s family on the father side were from Cork and claimed a connection with
Daniel O’Connell, “the liberator” and a noble descent (coat of arms with motto
Mors aut honorabilis vita: an honorable life or death).
• James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Feb. 2, 1882, in Rathgard, a Dublin suburb).
• Oldest of 8 children. Catholic family.
• Parents: John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray Joyce: musical talent; from
father: a talent for playing with words and telling stories.
• John Joyce liked to drink and spend money: gradual impoverishment and forces
(nearly 20) changes of address; Joyce knew all quarters of Dublin.
• James was sent to Clongowes Wood College (best Jesuit boarding school; he was
an outstanding student); financial loss took him to Jesuit day school of Belvedere
College.
• (Catholic) University College, Dublin, where he obtained an BA in Modern Languages, but
Joyce had already estranged himself from church and country.
• While at college wrote an article about Henrik Ibsen: notoriety
• Met other writers (W.B. Yeats)
• 1914-15: A Portrait serialized in The Egoist in London (25 installments).
• Fame but relative poverty. Eye problems. Lucia’s mental illness.
• Harriet Shaw Weaver settled a trust on Joyce in 1919.
• A Portrait published first in America (B.W. Huebsch, 1916); English edition 1917.
• He regarded himself as a genius and refused to pursue commercial success.
• He depended heavily on the people, events and environments of his own life. A Portrait
follows closely Joyce’s life from birth to the age of 20, and family, friends, streets, hotels,
etc. all appear under their real names.
• Met Nora Barnacle (from rural Galway).
• Both move to Trieste (Italy): language teacher.
• Lived in the continent except for two short visits to Ireland: to start a failed cinema
business and to visit Galway.
• German invasion of France in 1940; Joyce and family moved to Zurich; died in 1941.
Production
• Chamber Music (1907).
• Dubliners (1904; 1907; 1914): profane language, real names and
places.
• Stephen Hero revised into A Portrait of the Artist as a Youn Man
(1916).
• Exiles (1918); only play. The least successful work.
• Ulysses (1914-21; pub. 1922).
• Finnegans Wake (17 years; pub. 1939).
• Cultural climate:
• The nationalists demanded an art serving the national self-image
• Catholic and Protestant moralists demanded an art that would inculcate Victorian morality
• The symbolists demanded art-for-art’s sake aestheticism
• The naturalism of Ibsen and Zola favored “the ethical and the prophetic”
• Ibsen is absent from A Portrait in spite of Joyce’s own personal interests.
• Warning about biographical readings:
• In Stephen Hero the beloved is always called Emma Clery
• In A Portrait, she is called 3 times Emma (III, 217-18), never Emma Clery, otherwise she is
“she” and only once “E—C—” (II, 171). (The same person?)
• Critics assume Emma abandons Stephen because he has proposed a one-night affair, but that
never happens in A Portrait, although it is so in Stephen Hero.
• (Yet her image is always floating on Stephen’s mind in A Portrait).
Exile
• To achieve objectivity about his city, Joyce self-exiled.
• Paris (study medicine?): published reviews in the Dublin Daily Express.
• Return to Dublin because his mother was dying (August 1903, at age 44).
• Joyce stayed in Dublin for 2 years: writing, singing, teaching at a boys’ school.
• Cultural and political confusion may be an answer (The Irish Literary Revival was covertly political
and overtly cultural).
• Additionally, in Ireland, politics and religion go hand in hand: traditionally, Catholics (90% in 1890)
are nationalists while Protestants are unionists. Although a majority, it acted as a “tormented
minority” (which it was in political, economic and cultural terms).
• Choosing English instead of Irish as a language also had political, religious and cultural overtones.
• There was no or little space for independent, anonymous middle ground for an artist (which
brought multilateral attacks).
• An intolerant, unfriendly society both before and after independence in 1922, with a lot of
unofficial censorship.
Structure and exile
• To stop the paralysing influence of Dublin (family, religion, country, fleshly
desires) Stephens rejects all middle-class values to acquire objectivity and
distance, both artistic and physical.
The process is what A Portrait shows:
• Title: not a self-portrait (thus, more “objective”)
Structure
• 5 chapters covering 20 years
• Several self-contained scenes or episodes in every chapter (“portraits”)
culminating in an epiphany (usually during a trivial incident).
• Epiphanies are undercut by “anti-epiphanies” (shift in tone: poetic vs. mundane
language signaling the paradoxes of life).
• Analogy with Ovid’s story of Daedalus (Greek for “cunning artificer”) and Icarus (p
105); the “flight and fall” pattern matches the rhythm of the novel.
• (Or at least the myth works as a global correlate to Stephens attitudes).
• There are episodes that recall D’Annunzio’s Il Fuoco (1900) and Il Piacere (1889),
(and perhaps Ibsen’s Brand [1866] but not his ideology/literary outlook).
• See handout.
2. Structure (cont.): repetition and echoes
• Stanley Bolt suggested that the repetition and echoes of episodes
work as a structuring element in A Portrait. (See 2.3. Handout
Structure of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on Blackboard)
3. The narrative technique
• A note on punctuation:
• Not normally an issue, but so with and after Joyce, who used unusual
punctuation.
• No quotation marks but a m-dash to indicate speech by a character
(sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the voice of a character or the
narrator)
• Restricted use of commas (many long sentences look like “run-on” sentences;
to reflect the “run-on” nature of thoughts?)
3. The narrative technique
• Influenced by late 19th century aestheticism (Walter Pater’s theories):
• Literature is not “a philosophical or ethical statement”.
• Literature promotes awareness (aesthetically).
• The artist as a maker must be “impersonal” (T.S. Eliot)
• The work of art must be “self-contained” and “self-sufficient” (Ezra Pound).
• (Ibsen’s) naturalism
• Stephen tries to “vivisect” reality.
• But there is no immediate social aim: Stephen rejects didacticism in art in
favour of art as a “static” perception (“a state of mental satisfaction resulting
from contemplation of the truth”).
3. The narrative technique
• Realistic pull (as in Dubliners) is superseded by his attempt to “show”
both reality and its significance.
• The comparison of the writer to a priest in consecration is central to the
novel: in “transubstantiation” the raw material is transformed without
altering its attributes.
• This is also the notion of Modernist epiphany: art as a revelation of true
meaning.
• Originally the idea might have been to combine imagination and realism.
• Symbolism or Imagery (more than correspondences and analogies?). Ex.: food.
• The metaphysical conceit (?)
• Symbols, leitmotifs, internal time, interior monologue: combine to create a
feeling of the “truly real” beyond external events.
3.1. The narrative technique and point of view
• Interior monologue or free indirect speech?:
• Narrative in the 3rd person
• Tries to show what happens without explaining the events that it shows.
• No plot in the traditional way: no continuity, gaps in chronology.
• Focuses on Stephen’s consciousness: to give the reader access to his
experiences.
• Mimetic style for the early chapters (Stephen as a toddler; no comment on
the argument between Mr. Casey and Aunt Dante because he does not quite
understand it; protagonist is less aware than author or reader, but this is
realistic); also for ch.5: discussions on art and aesthetics read like nonfiction
philosophy.
3.1. The narrative technique and point of view
• 3rd person Point of view?
• Difficulty: only one character telling about his life experience.
• If there are “two narrators” there is one single voice: the younger one under
the control of the older narrator?
• Is the interior monologue then ironic?
• Is there interior monologue from the very beginning (a quotation from the
mind of an infant)?
• An extended interior monologue through the indirect presentation (3rd
person) of an extradiegetic narrator?
• (Joyce) the narrator includes some “stage directions” (120; 194).
• Ch. 3: free indirect speech? (properly reported sermons) or interior
monologue (and questionable because filtered through Stephen’s mind).
3.1. The narrative technique and point of view
• 3rd person Point of view?
• As Stephen grows as an artist he becomes more conscious of technique:
• Ch. 4 (273-74): “the bathing girl epiphany”: ironically marred by artificiality
and rhetoric? (fin de siècle romantic, lyrical prose far from earlier interior
monologue).
• Ch. 5 abandons interior monologue in the two sections about aesthetics and
art (or it doesn’t? and Stephen’s mind has achieved that discursive skill?);
final section (entry for April 14 on 358-59 is pure interior monologue; the final
entries sound like a prayer or a Biblical prophecy, as Melvin Friedman says).
• Evolution of style: impressionistic interior monologue, romantic
adolescent style, serious philosophical dialectic, return to interior
monologue; it seems to close a cycle.
3.2. The narrative technique: time
• Interior monologue subscribes Bergsonian or inner time.
• Flashback and free association.
• Stephen’s mental time hardly ever coincides with the situation he is
in. (Ch. 1 becomes the more difficult to follow).
• Ex: the episode of the “square ditch” (“It would be nice to lie…” 109-
to “that was heartburn” 110):
3.2. The narrative technique: time
1. present wish projected into the future: “It would be nice ...” (a sort of
stage direction)
2. present event resulting from a “past event 1”: “falling into the square”
3. his wish takes him to a “past time 2” further away in time “Mother was
sitting ...”
4. association of Mother with Dante and of Dante with Father Arnall (but
the digressive movement does not seem to be enough to bring him back
to the present at Clongowes, but adds something else about the past
time 2: about Dante)
5. possible explanation: the desire to escape the present unpleasant
situation of cold is stronger than any logical time association.
6. Flash-backs may take us in and out of the protagonist’s mind (as a child).
The purpose may be the creation of verisimilitude.
3.3. The narrative technique: Point of View
• Dealt with in “3.1. Interior Monologue”
• (Will return to it in “5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity”).
3.4. The narrative technique: Intertextuality
• Many references to songs, books, plays.
• Often the reason why Stephen connects them is hard to explain or document.
• John Gifford’s Annotations are very helpful.
• But even Stephen’s “misquotations” function perfectly. Ex: J. S. Atherton proves that
Stephen’s quotations of Newman are not Newman’s but come from an anthology,
Characteristics from the Writing of John Henry Newman (London: 1875); but it gives the
impression that Stephen is widely read, although he treats his quotes for their sound and
rhythm, not its content. But this reflects the Jesuit method of teaching. The same
happens with Aristotle, Aquinas, minor Elizabethan poets, Hugh Miller’s Testimony of the
Rocks, from Luigi Galvani, etc.
• Relevance: all the quotes have been appropriated and used dramatically in Stephen’s
context to his personal use.
• Irony? Ex. A poetic quote from Shelley is followed by Luigi Galvani’s “enchantment of the
heart” (318) (but Galvani referred to what happens to a frog’s heart when a needle is
inserted in its spine).
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
• As seen, the mixture of realism (naturalism) and symbolism is an
attempt to present things as they (truly) are and what they (truly)
mean.
• The five senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch) are recurrent
symbols.
1. Sight: most important? Fear of loosing it: “pull out his eyes /
Apologise”; he refuses to apologise several times (metaphoric risk
of losing his “vision” as an artist?); Mr. Casey’s story about spitting
in a woman’s eye; Father Dolan punishing Stephen for having
broken his glasses…
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
2. Religious symbols:
• The priest soutane
• The censor
• The sacraments of confession and communion
• Stephens’ identification with Jesus Christ
• Cranly’s identification with John the Baptist (the precursor)
• St. Stephen
• Lucifer (“bearer of light”): ”I will not serve” identifies with Prometheus (bringing the
forbidden fire of knowledge to mankind).
3. Birds
• Eagles
• Heron (his friend and rival) associated to “birds of prey”
• Stephen sees himself as a “hawklike man” (that can view society from a distance and aloof
from it).
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
4. Through his last name:
• Daedalus’ labyrinth and the maze of Dublin Streets.
• Stephen’s imaginative flights and falls (Icarus’ story; correspondence with
epiphanies).
5. Napoleon
6. Parnell
7. The Count of Montecristo
8. Dante

• Perhaps not symbols in their own right, but accumulation establishes

connotations.
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
9. The cow (or moocow):
• the reference to the Irish legend creates helplessness in Stephen; rather than
on the story he focuses on the language that he appropriates in the form of a
song;
• later he delights in accompanying the milkman until he finds the foul green
puddles of cow-dung;
• appears in his wandering whether an accidental carving of a cow is art or not;
• cow and moocow suggest connections with maternity, tradition, church
(elements he must overcome to find freedom as an artist).
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
10. The rose:
• A Neoplatonic symbol for the woman who exemplifies transcendent beauty and the poet’s
path to the divine world (but complicated by Stephen’s artificial “green rose”).
• Green rose: red-green opposition: green is associated to imagination, fertility, Ireland; red
suggests British authority, the Church, hellfire, etc.
• White rose: purity (the academic war of the roses); his prayers are white roses (247) while
the red rose suggests passion (275).
• Usually associated to women, the rose also symbolizes Stephen’s creative powers.
• Mercedes, who owns a rose garden, suggests the Virgin Mary (Mercy) but also remoteness,
exile and revenge (The Count of Montecristo).
• The wading girl embodies mortal beauty, Emma, the Virgin, the rose, the womb of
imagination.
• The common girl who offers flowers to him in the street is connected to the kitchen girl who
sings Irish songs (later associated to the girl singing “Rosie O’Grady” (“my dear little rose”),
while Cranly’s “Mulier cantat” links her to the woman in the liturgy of the Church and all
other symbolic women (350). (Yet, he needs the real world: “I want to see Rosie first”; 351).
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
11. The bird:
• Develops from oppressive eagle (106) and threatening Hero to a symbol of
escape (the birds above the library) and the hawklike Daedalus (271).
• The wading girl is also “a strange and beautiful seabird” (274).
• E—C— has a “bird’s heart” (321).
• Emma is “batlike,” like Davin’s woman (“a batlike soul,” 285-6).
• Also a symbol of departure and loneliness (331), associated with water
(through the journey into exile).
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
12. Water:
• Either warm or cold, agreeable or frightening.
• Linked to bullying at school and tenderness at home.
• Associated to the sound of cricket (142), to pandy-bats, to bats and authority,
women, Ireland, Great Britain.
• Moments of creative joy are also pervaded by the sound of water (321).
3.5. The narrative technique: Symbols
• Symbols are so recurring and repetitive that they may be considered
leitmotifs (thematic elements) that are even used to create rhythm in
the novel.
• Other symbol-motifs are dogs, darkness, light, blindness and sight,
etc.
• Problem: symbols are by definition ambivalent if not ambiguous.
• What is the meaning of bridges? (Stephen often crosses a bridge at important
moments in the novel: 263; 267-68)
• Why does Cranly read a book on Diseases of the Ox (332) and Stephen is
called “Bous Stephanoumenos” (“garlanded ox” in 270)? Cranly is not a
veterinarian.
3.6. The narrative technique: Leitmotifs
• The innocent guilt of the protagonist.
1. “Apologise”: “he was going to marry Eileen” (106; unspecified crime of sex)
• Eileen is Protestant (unspecified crime of religion)
• Stephen disobeys his mother and Dante (crime of disobedience)
• “Pull out his eyes” turns it into a verse (doggerel) and associates it to Prometheus (a crime of creativity taking
inspiration from a mysterious source; a Romantic vision of the artist?)
2. Catechism-like questions about his father’s job (107)
• Asked by Nasty Roche (> “nasty rock” > “nasty Peter” > “nasty Church”) and about his name.
3. Wells asks him whether he kisses his mother (113)
• Stephen ignores the correct answer but feels guilt (sexual: his mother; religious: St. Louis Gonzaga never kissed
his mother) and blushes “under his eyes”
4. Father Dolan punishes him for breaking his glasses on purpose (150-52)
1. Again, guilt liked to blindness; his victory in his visit to the rector makes him (unconsciously perhaps) already
decide that he will never again apologize.
5. The mock “Confiteor” that Heron makes him recite in his questioning about Byron is an ironic
version in Catechism format of the same leitmotif (179).
6. Father Arnall’s sermon on Hell (219-26); Stephen confesses terrified of the punishments of Hell
(a version of the “pull out his eyes”).
3.6. The narrative technique: Leitmotifs
• The innocent guilt of the protagonist.
• Noises
• Mother-lover-Church
• Exile
• Departure
• Religion
• Art
• Determination to become an artist.

Joyce’s obsession with “total relevance.”

3.7. The narrative technique: Repetition
• (already considered)
• Repetition of similar episodes in all 5 chapters (suggested by Stanley Bolt)
• Repetition of symbols, themes, and motifs.
• Repetition of words: works directly on the emotional coating of the
reader’s response: usually imperceptible and perhaps functioning
subconsciously on the reader (Stephen tries to show himself as cerebral
and aloof). Consider:
• Ch. 1: repetition creates the feeling of the “already seen, lived and experienced” by
the reader during his/her school years.
• 167 and 170 (“the cork”)
• 143 and 179 (“the trail of bunting on the flag-staff”)
• Sounds…
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Stephen’s education is Jesuitical: selected passages, key points or moments (text
books were Synopsis of the Philosophy of …).
• On 313: Stephen’s aesthetics is ”applied Aquinas”: only a series of quotations. But
the point is on Stephens dramatic process (not on Joyce’s knowledge of Aquinas).
• Stephen is simply making use of his training.
• Stephen is Joyce’s mouthpiece (?); or is it Lynch when he says that Stephen’s
discussion has ”the true scholastic stink” (319).
• Joyce was very much influenced by medieval concepts and methods:
• Symmetry and the theory of correspondence (macro- and microcosms) are like Dante
Alighieri’s.
• Consonantia, the principle of “all in all” (akin to today’s “butterfly effect”).
• Stephen pays attention to the medieval iconography of the paintings at
Clongowes (156).
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Epiphany: definition in Stephen Hero
“By an epiphany he [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether
in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind
itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with
extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and
evanescent of moments.”
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Three types of epiphanies:
1. Identifies “claritas” with “quiditas”
• Ex: the song from the street, in contrast with the serious Director who tries to convince
Stephen to enter novitiate (262): the “revelation” is presented without narrative
reconstruction of past events that may help explain it.
2. Focuses on the effect on the beholder
• Ex: the wading girl (273-74): Stephen, and the reader through Stephen, experiences both
the revelation and its effect.
3. The image with its radiance attached to itself, rather than to Stephen’s
consciousness
• Ex: the flight of birds about college library (329), symbolizing the artificer (Dedalus): for
Irene Hendry Chayes, it is the last stage of impersonal creation completely achieved (see
320) showing the radical absence of an intervening consciousness (not even mediating
indirectly through the use of language), so that characters are fully “left to themselves.”
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Some critics see epiphanies everywhere (55; in every thematic
movement)
• If understood narrowly, epiphanies are close to a mystical experience
(therefore, there are not too many):
• Ex: the very last section (360) loaded with narrative and emotional meaning.
• For Theodore Spencer, epiphanies are lyrical, rather than dramatic, as
they are essentially static and timeless (qted. In Morris 152).
• The theory of epiphanies is linked with Stephen’s aesthetic theory as
presented to Lynch (316-20): the three conditions of beauty are those
of Thomas Aquinas’ integritas, consonantia and claritas.
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Integritas: ”wholeness” or the perception of an aesthetic image as
one thing "self-bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable
background of space or time which is not it" (317).
• Consonantia: symmetry and rhythm of structure. The aesthetic image
is seen as "complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its
parts and their sum, harmonious" (317) .
• Claritas: is “radiance” and equated with “quidditas” (another
Thomistic term), the “whatness” of a thing. In Stephen Hero it is
explained like this:
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second
quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and
discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany.
First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we
recognise that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact:
finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are
adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which
it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its
appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of
which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its
epiphany.
4. Epiphany and aesthetic theory
• Epiphanies are not exclusively Joyce’s, but he formulated the
aesthetic experience, used it more consciously and with greater
variations.
• Additionally, besides a theory that allows Joyce to present the
evolution of Stephen in a lyrical, then an epical and then a dramatic
progression, if through integritas and consotantia, claritas is happily
materialized in quidditas, it would be the most realistic of approaches
to reality.
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization
• Stephen Dedalus is both the artist and the young man.
• Different from most other characters in fiction: the only focus; events are filtered
through his consciousness; pervades the book.
• Based on Joyce himself.
• Name is symbolic.
• Stephen is sensitive, perceptive, intelligent (but often self-deceived), curious, but
also aloof and arrogant, self-important.
• He undergoes a process of maturation, but there is no plot.
• His character develops in a series of epiphanies and anti-epiphanies.
• A very original way to present a character: an objective presentation through a
detail or an object to which it has only a fortuitous relation.
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization: The Bildungsroman tradition
• Harry Levin (1941) treated A Portrait as autobiography and saw little
irony in Joyce’s treatment of Stephen. He presented the novel as a
Bildungsroman, a novel of development (Stephen sees his boyhood
gone for good on 273).
• According to Maurice Beebe, since the 18th century, the genre
includes characters with the following features:
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization: The Bildungsroman tradition
1. Always sensitive
2. Presented as having a good chance to become an artist (but discipline is required)
3. Introverted
4. His story finishes without fully accomplishing his goal
5. Self-centered
6. He has a need to reject domestic, social and religious demands to achieve self-identity
7. Passive
8. He always rejects love, life, God, home, country (until he is left with his true self and his wish to
become an artist: the artist-exile)
9. Capable of abstracting himself (absent-minded or possessed)
10. Quest for self is the dominant theme and because self is usually in conflict with society, the
other common theme is that of the opposition between art and life.
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization: The Bildungsroman tradition: common sub-themes.
• The divided self: man and artist. The man is tied to the processes of living and dying;
the artist is free, detached, concerned with transcendence and with becoming one
with his work and thus escaping the bonds of time.
• Difficulty created by divided point of view (already discussed but…)
• Jung, the psychologist, finds in this division the basis for his theory of the artist: “Every creative person
is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory attitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a
personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process.”
• As a person, he may be subject to psychoanalysis, as an artist we can only study his works. The writer
as author plays a role. For Jung:
• Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is
not a person endowed with a free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize
its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but
as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man”—one who carries and shapes the
unconscious, psychic life of mankind. (C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F.
Barnes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company, 1945) 194-95).
• For Maurice Beebe, this may explain Stephen Dedalus’s “uncreated conscience of my race” (349).
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization: The Bildungsroman tradition:
common sub-themes.
• The Ivory Tower: exalts art above life and places the
artist aloof, “like the God of creation” (320).
• It equates art with religion rather than experience: the
modern artist is “successor to the old God” and his
work is superior to the real world (352).
• Freud interprets this: the artist compensates his
inability to participate in an active social life and / or
to live a satisfying passional life.
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization: The Bildungsroman tradition: common sub-
themes.
• The Sacred Fount: this tradition equates art with experience and
assumes that the true artist lives not less, but more fully and
intensely than others.
• Art and life are interchangeable: the divided self of the artist lies
between the Ivory Tower and the Sacred Fountain, the source of art
in his experience.
• In A Portrait this theme appears in relation with women: Stephen
must go to “Woman” in order to create although this may destroy
part of his own self.
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.1. Characterization: Emma as character
• No data about her appearance or personality.
• She takes Gaelic lessons (an Irish phrasebook).
• Her flirtations are only conveyed through Stephen.
• She disappears to the point of becoming E—C—
• Her physique attracts Stephen, but her intellect is despised because
Stephen associates it with the Church and the Irish Nationalistic
Movement.
• Only an instrument to present some of Stephen’s ideas?
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.2. Irony and ambiguity
• Stephen struggles, falls, but never really redeems himself.
• Hugh Kenner (“The Portrait in Perspective,” 1948): argues that the method is not the use of
epiphanies, but the repetition of a pattern showing Stephen embracing a dream in contempt of
reality and then seeing that dream destroyed: “the movement … is dialectical; each chapter
closes with a synthesis of triumph which in turn feeds the sausage-machine set up in the next
chapter.”
• Kenner argues that we are to see Stephen as an “indigestible Byronic” hero, and therefore
ironically throughout.
• His Neoplatonic aesthetic is not Joyce’s, his romanticism is scorned by Joyce, an egotistic, prudish
“parlor esthete.”
• Is the novel ironic? Not easy to determine: at times the irony is clear, at times it is not. Is the
“Villanelle of the Temptress” a success or a failure?
• Is Stephen’s misogyny ironic? Joyce was sympathetic to feminism.
• Stephen goes back to the kitchen after everyone of his “ecstasies”: is this ironic or serious?
5. Narrator-character: irony and ambiguity
5.2. Irony and ambiguity (some episodes for
discussion; impossible to include all)
• 110: Dante is well read (for female standards)
• 111: White roses...
• 113: Do you kiss your mother?
• 143: She had put her hand into his pocket . . . Tower of Ivory ...
• 146: Shivery ... let down your trousers (homosexuality in context vs. Stephen’s
innocence)
• 148: Napoleon: “the happiest day of my life was that of my first communion”
• 148-49: ...a priest would know what a sin is and would not do it ...
• 154: The senate and the Roman people declared... (the civil law/rights of Roman origin
do not apply in Clongowes Wood’s Jesuitical administration of punishment)
6. Themes
1. Consciousness
2. Artists and society
3. Coming of age
4. God and religion
5. Sin
6. …
Chapter I
• Theme: relevance of childhood and schooldays at Clongowes in forming the artist;
background for later attitudes on family, religion and politics.
• Style: mostly realistic? (similar to Dubliners); narrator is external but limited (Stephen’s
perspective); language evolves as character grows (mimetic). All other characters are to
be understood based on their words and actions.
• Focalization: through the senses: odours (105; 106, 109; 117, 119); sounds: (110; 142);
touch (121); sight (the earth in the geography lesson); taste (turkey and ham).
• Interior monologue passages become more and more prominent (118-19; 123-24).
• Epiphanies (?):
• school scenes culminate in illness at the infirmary.
• The Christmas party at home (127).
• Struggle against the bullying of mates and the tyranny of Jesuit discipline.
• Leitmotif: sounds suggest passivity (Stephen’s experience is by hearsay) but they also
make him conscious of the sounds of words and poetry (105, 107, 120, 127, 140, 144,
148).
Chapter II
• Theme: Stephen’s changes and growth from childhood to adolescence; from Blackrock
into Dublin; from Clongowes to Belvedere; from respect to his father and church to
scepticism (his “victory” at Clongowes has become a source of mockery); from romantic
love (the girl in the tram) to paid-for sexual satisfaction.
• Style: similar to Chapter I, but with more emphasis on Stephen’s mental reactions to
external events.
• Epiphanies (?): Nostalgic portrait of the idyllic life in Blackrock (walks with Uncle Charles,
glimpses of the adult world; reminiscences of romances and the creation of a chivalric
world with a Mercedes who is unawares of her “lover”) ends in his transfiguration (166).
The inexistent Mercedes gives way to the real Emma but writes a poem about kissing her
rather than doing so. He is only happy when he is far from his school mates and from
home and prefers reading “subversive writers” (179-80). He resolves on doing good
things (joining the Irish National Revival, restoring his family fortunes) but prefers to “run
away” after the theatrical performance to appease his “wounded pride and fallen hope
and baffled desire” (187). Stephen realizes he is separated from his “manly” father by
“an abyss of fortune or of temperament” (197). He tries to recover his family and
establish “order and elegance” spending the money of his prize, but to no avail.
• Leitmotif: noises and lust
Chapter III
• Theme: Stephen’s “crisis of the soul” in 3 episodes: sin followed by remorse, repentance,
and final redemption.
• Style: mainly dominated by interior monologue (the boy’s mental agony) and two
“objective reporting” of sermons full of emotional oratory (in reported speech?). It can
be read as a long epiphany.
• Epiphanies (?): re-assessment of sensual pleasures, the lewd kisses, the burden of his
sins, the approach to the Blesses Virgin Mary, the retreat (with its apocalyptic sermons:
incessant rain and the eternal tortures of Hell). Adoration of the Virgin Mary reveals his
romanticism. He finds it difficult to accept his sin and to revolt against it, and also to
repent and confess. The retreat becomes a turning point in his life although he sees the
gap between himself and life outside: but the natural world turns beautiful again when
he returns to grace and faith (even death would be beautiful). A long walk and confession
bring him happiness: he sees it reflected in the simplicity of life. Yet, although sincere,
one senses his conversion is only in his head, not in his heart.
• Leitmotif: physical and spiritual punishment; the grotesque figures (out of Hieronymus
Bosch’s ”The Garden of Earthly Delights”?)
Chapter IV
• Theme: Stephen’s new life of devotion and mortification has the effect of dismantling his
perception of beauty (his “rosary” is “unearthly,” 249); sins keep tempting him; his
efforts towards piety are not recognized; his soul becomes darker and he rejects a call to
the priesthood in favour of the complete life of the writer (to learn his own wisdom apart
from others (264); his mother does not understand his wish to attend university). Proud
to have escaped community, he feels ready for a new beginning.
• Style: almost completely dominated by interior monologue.
• Epiphanies (?): moved by the call to the priesthood conveyed by the director (260), but
repelled by the passionless life of the order (262). Disorder, misrule, confusion attract
him more. Recognition of the worldly chaos in his family new eviction and awareness of
his rejection of priesthood. Entering university and anticipation of a new adventure fills
him with exaltation. He realizes that what happens in the mind is more important than
what happens externally: words mean more than things (). This implies experimentation.
Takes courage in the image of Dedalus: ars longa. He recognizes beauty in a girl (the
purely feminine without shame or wantonness). This is a new world to Stephen.
• Leitmotif (?):
Chapter V
• Theme: earlier themes combine to shape Stephen and his course as an artist. All themes are
resolved as Stephen meets conflicting forces, old ones (family, religion, politics) and new ones
(aesthetics, science): to fulfil his end he resolves to live abroad and write about Ireland.
• Style: mixture of realism? (2 episodes about university life) and interior monologue (the process
of poetic creation). The diary summarises all themes.
• Epiphanies (?): all episodes can be read as epiphanies. Laughing about the word “tundish” he
acknowledges he is nor Irish, but he is neither English. The priest warns him about inaction.
Learning is seen as futile. The girl on the tram is paid homage (his mental image is far more
important than the one from the real world) but seen as a trap (seen as ”all women,” she is
representative of race and country). His sexual orgasm is linked with “the liquid letters of speech.”
He, like Satan, must fall to become an artist. He thinks himself more powerful than the rest (pride
and desire for freedom move him). To become truly Irish he decides to exile himself. He is free
now, even to suggest that he really loves the girl in the tram. The ships he will sail on are like
wings to escape from prison. His purpose is a little pretentious (to forge the uncreated conscience
of his race) and brakes with everything, but the last words sound like a prayer.
• Leitmotif (?)
7. Responses to A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
• Pay attention to the presentation of Worksheets.