A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Criticism)

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Hochman, who teaches at Portland Community College, analyzes whether Joyce's hero should be viewed as either serious or absurd, and he discusses references to Greek mythology in the book.

James Joyce's first published novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), recounts Stephen Dedalus's struggle to understand and then break free of family, church, and country. The journey of this representative young artist is a growing apart or wrenching away from increasingly imprisoning influences, in Stephen's case, from an economically impoverished home, a theologically impoverished Catholic Church, and the politically impoverished nationalism of Irish independence. Crucial here is that familial, religious, and national "railings" that first fascinate and guide the child increasingly become "bars" that imprison the adult. The task of the artist, then, is to break free of these constraints and from their bars forge new and better formations. The artist will create not only the guide-posts and protective railings of the future, but in the process will likely have to sacrifice his well-being and perhaps a bit of his sanity as well. For Joyce, the image of the artist apart conjures up ambivalence, specifically, excitement alternating with dread.

At the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist, Stephen is not only a very young child, an "object" protected and guided, but an object in a story, a character (baby tuckoo) "written" in by his father's narration. Stephen is the near-opposite of a man apart — he is the very young child whose story is being created by another. Stephen is at once both a child shaped by his parents and a character embedded in a story he didn't create, a combination producing an object who is anything but apart. Later, at home and in Catholic school, Stephen is either speechless (at Christmas dinner) or victimized (knocked down by schoolmates and beaten on the palms by a prefect). Stephen's only independence revolves around his sensitivities to words ("belt," "iss," "suck") and stimuli, especially temperature, moisture, and smell.

By the end of Chapter One, however, Stephen commits his first real act of independence: he protests his palm-whipping. At the end of Chapter Two, the increasing apartness Stephen feels as the result of his family's sudden poverty and his sen-sibilities — which separate him from his father and his surroundings — culminates in his "French kiss" with a prostitute, the prelude to a period of whoring that would seem to break his ties to Catholicism. The social apartness created by Stephen's whoring is less a creative, artistic separation than a destructive, uncreative separation, a mere rebellion. Therefore, in Chapter Three, Stephen gradually regrets his falling away from the Church until, at the end, he not only confesses but readies himself for the Host. In this chapter, Joyce creates, after a gradual slope toward the heights of separation, a fall: this physically central chapter of the book is a loss of Stephen's momentum toward apartness, a reversal, a device to create audience conflict and make final victory more sweet: the reader, cheering Stephen on toward separation, wonders, "Can he do it, can he really break free?"

Joyce keeps reader conflict alive as Stephen decides to mortify his flesh and devote himself to prayer. But Stephen's movement toward separate-ness cannot, of course, be stopped: interior apartness is manifested when Stephen declines an offer to join the Jesuits; exterior apartness is forced on him when his family must move because they cannot pay the rent. Later, Stephen wanders alone on the beach meditating on his apartness from immature peers and staring at multiple figurings of his solitude: little islands of sand amidst the sea; the moon as a body detached from earth, solitary in the evening sky; a hawklike man confused for a god.

Chapter Five cuts once and for all Stephen's ties to family, religion, and nation. Leaving the house, Stephen figuratively leaves behind the economic and spiritual poverty that make him feel apart. Then he asserts his interior solitude. Arriving at the Catholic university, he scorns a dean for his cloistered lifelessness, attends a boring physics class with cobwebbed windows and a droning professor, and denounces a political gathering for its unthinking worship of hero and nation. In conversations with friends, and in a poem he writes to the shawled girl, E. C., or Emma Clery (fully named in Stephen Hero, Joyce's first and only unpublished novel from which A Portrait of the Artist was taken), Stephen asserts aesthetic independence. Finally, Stephen asserts his independence from nation when he tells Cranly he will leave Ireland. Here then, is a heroic odyssey into apartness, one ending far from its beginning: from a character (baby tuckoo) in someone else's story and real life drama (his family's) to, at the end of the book, Stephen's diary entries, those solitary, mini-narratives, where others become, for Stephen, characters in his story. Stephen traverses the distance from a character inextricably interconnected to a creator apart.

A recurring debate in Joyce criticism concerns this issue of Stephen's heroism. The question is whether Stephen's journey from character in a story to the creator of stories is heroic. Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, regarded the title he invented, Stephen Hero, as deliberately ridiculous. Wayne Booth states and asks, "The young man takes himself and his flight with deadly solemnity. Should we?" F. Parvin Sharpless answers, "Joyce's classicism sees all aspects of human life as meaningful and absurd at the same time. This is true even of things which he might be expected to value most: the creative process of the literary artist." While Sharpless's answer is a good one, it might be better if Booth's question were broken into two more specific questions. First, Is Stephen an exciting victor or a tragic loser? Second, Is Stephen a serious or absurd figure?

Searching for an answer to the winner/loser question, readers can look back to the last name Stanislaus Joyce invented for Stephen, "Dedalus." Daedulus, "Old father, old artificer" as Stephen calls him in the last line of the book, was a mythical Greek figure whose name means "cunning craftsman." Recall here Stephen's declaration: "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." Daedulus is an ambivalent figure. A renowned sculptor and engineer, he apprenticed his nephew, Talos, but pushed him off a cliff when Talos proved a greater genius than Daedulus and when it was discovered Talos was having incestuous relations with his own mother, Daedulus's sister. Daedulus also built several ambivalent devices. First, a hollow wooden cow so King Minos's wife Pasiphae could have sex with a magnificent white bull. Second, the labyrinth, which kept in the half-man/half-bull minotaur (the monstrous product of the coupling mentioned above) but also kept his food — humans — from getting out. Finally, Daedulus created the famous wax wings that melted and caused Icarus's fall.

In summary, Daedulus, the mythic character on which Joyce builds his novel's character, is not just skillful but deceitful or cunning. Further his devices are ambivalent, both good and bad. The depiction of Daedulus, and other artificers in mythology, points to the idea that human creation and creations have their price, their down side, just as valued knowledge of good and evil produced its price: the Fall from the Garden of Eden.

The reader should also recall the Latin epigraph (opening quotation) from Portrait of the Artist that Joyce borrowed from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Here is a translation: "And [Daedulus] altered/improved the laws of nature," written in the context of constructing the waxy wings. The figure of the great artist and grand artificer are myths still having purchase on the present, on the role of the artist, but especially for our own times, on the ambivalent state of technology: that all creations are ambivalent, not only in their effects upon their creators, but upon nature and humanity. The artist, then, is both hero and, like Daedulus, Icarus and Talos, victims who when approaching too close to the gods or the "laws" of nature, must either be punished or sacrificed. This is key to understanding Stephen's friends calling him "Bous Stephanomenos" and "Bous Stephanoforos." As Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch explains, Bous is Greek for bull. Foros is the bull as powerful victor and menos is the bull as sacrificed animal. Stephen, as artist, is this bull, an ambivalent symbol of powerful victor and tragic victim.

While the bull symbol still has application to the pagan bullfight, it has largely been replaced by the Christian symbol of a meek sacrificial lamb. The lamb may have less magical ambivalence because it is not both strong and weak, but it does have greater application to the more common defeat of the weaker by the stronger. Armed with all of this classical mythology, it should be clearer why Stephen has been represented as a bull rather than a lamb: he is strong, or resolved, and un-Christian; further he is becoming a pagan, a lover of nature, the senses, and experience.

Now to the question of whether Stephen is absurd or serious, which may, in turn, be broken down into multiple specific questions. Here are just three of many that could have been asked. Is the recently self-excommunicated Stephen absurdly selfish or uncompromisingly principled when he refuses to do his "easter duty" for his mother? Is Stephen's villanelle to be taken by readers as an adolescent poem or a serious work of art? Is Stephen's own association with Daedulus, including the line, "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," to be looked on as the product of foolish youth, or as an inspiring declaration. There is little doubt that Stephen views his principles, artistic output, and philosophy as serious. But, echoing Booth, should we? This is a far more difficult question than whether Stephen is a winner or loser for this answer depends far more on taste. While Joyce, as I hope I have shown, furnishes ample and hard hints that Stephen is both winner and loser, Joyce does not tell the reader what his — Joyce's — tastes are.

Some might sympathize with Stephen's principled rejection of his "easter duty" feeling that his mother will get over it. And some of us might like Stephen's anti-love poem which combines images of mother, Virgin, and Emma Clery; womb and mind; gestation and artistic creation; the child, the poem, the art object; religious devotion, sexual attraction, and self-sacrifice. But others might view the poem and its creation as elementary. But there is still the question of whether we readers should regard Stephen's most famous declaration above as absurd or serious. In other words, should we understand this line as an example of childish megalomania, hubris, and youthful pride bound for an adult fall? Or is this serious stuff, the artist as smith of a new conscience, new ethics, a new way of seeing and understanding the world?

Perhaps this question can have no answer, since we cannot know what Joyce meant here (unless it is stated somewhere clearly in his letters). Without evidence we must decide for ourselves. Perhaps it is just as well. Even if we interpret Stephen as a selfish and foolish youth, it is less the rightness or wrongness of his struggle that is at issue than depicting the struggle itself. And, after all, if Stephen is selfish and foolish, this is, after all, a portrait of a young man, not a mature one. Had Stephen's principles, poems, and aesthetic philosophy been mature and fully formed, these would not have belonged to the realist portrait of a young man.

Whether or not one likes the way Stephen handles his struggle, it does show the effects of the battle fought by anyone refusing to act on certain received ideas or act out particular received practices: ostracism, loneliness, self-doubt, and conversely, intolerance, selfishness, hubris. In many ways, Joyce knew these problems as his own. Should readers fault either Joyce or Stephen — or both — if they deem Stephen's principles selfish, his poem adolescent, and his declaration overblown? Or should they credit Joyce for a realistic portrait of youth? As answering involves knowing the thoughts of Joyce, perhaps it is better to shift focus from mere evaluation of talent toward his work's effect on the world. Perhaps we might say the following: If Stephen and Joyce can be faulted for anything, it is far less for what they said and did than what they didn't say or do. That is, in Portrait of the Artist both concentrated almost exclusively on how the artist, him or herself, must suffer and be sacrificed for freedom. On the other hand, precious little in Portrait of the Artist indicated how the artist's "alteration or improvement of nature," as Ovid put it in Joyce's epigraph, impacts upon the world.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Dubliners is James Joyce's first published book of fiction. It is a collection of fifteen short stories about ordinary characters in Dublin in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The themes are childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age. Some of the stories first appeared in an Irish magazine in 1904, under the pseudonym "Stephen Dedalus." The last and most famous story, "The Dead," was finished in 1907, but publication of the book was delayed until 1914.
• The character Stephen Dedalus also appears in Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses, a classic of literary modernism. The action is set in a single day, June 16, 1904 (the date on which Joyce met his future wife, Nora Barnacle). The story follows Stephen, a newspaper advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom, and Bloom's wife Molly as they go about their business in Dublin. This elaborately structured novel parallels Homer's classic epic The Odyssey. Each chapter is written in a different prose style, and Joyce makes much use of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
• The Country Girls, published in 1960, is the first novel by Edna O'Brien, Ireland's most famous female writer. Two girls leave their homes in the Irish countryside and go to Dublin to escape their strict Catholic upbringing and seek excitement. Because of its feminist viewpoint and frank treatment of adolescent female sexuality, this book caused much controversy when it was published.
• Fools of Fortune (1983), by William Trevor, is about a doomed love affair during the Irish civil war as seen through the eyes of a young boy. Born in Ireland in 1928, Trevor is considered one of the finest Irish writers of his time and is particularly known for his poignant short stories.
• Christopher Nolan's Under the Eye of the Clock (1987) is a remarkable autobiography by a young Dubliner who is severely physically disabled and unable to speak. Nolan overcame great obstacles to write a book that critics have compared to the work of Joyce.
• Richard Ellmann's James Joyce (1959, revised 1982) is the definitive biography of this author.
• For a different view of Joyce's life in Europe, read Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, by Brenda Maddox. Published in 1988, this book shows how Nora Barnacle helped Joyce as he struggled to create great literature in the face of economic and personal hardship.
• The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, edited by R. F. Foster and published in 1989, is a good introduction to Irish history. Chapter Six, "Irish Literature and Irish History," by Declan Kiberd, provides a useful survey of Irish writers and their relationship to the culture from which they sprung. Among the many interesting pictures is a photograph of James Joyce at the piano.