Happy birthday “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

April 27 Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

On this day, in 1916, James Joyce’s first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published. (The last line of the book is above) Dubliners had already been published – and very controversial they were – not embraced by his own country of course (it hit too close to home) – I don’t think they were even PUBLISHED in Ireland, come to think of it – but it was Portrait of the Artist which really firmed up his reputation as a writer. Then, naturally, 1922 brought the world Ulysses which changed everything – with that book Joyce, according to TS Eliot, “killed the 19th century”. Portrait is a huge accomplishment in and of itself, and it is best to look at it outside of the influence of Ulysses – because Ulysses is one of those things that casts such a long shadow in every direction – it’s hard to see anything clearly. It’s like trying to appreciate the OTHER playwrights during Shakespeare’s time (everyone besides Marlowe, I mean – one can appreciate Marlowe fully, even when he’s standing next to Shakespeare – but everyone else just wilts and becomes about half an inch tall). I mean – how does one get Shakespeare out of the way in order to appreciate the lesser accomplishments of his contemporaries? It’s very difficult. Ulysses has the same effect – not just on all other writers writing at that time (and they all knew it AS it was happening – amazing – this is not retrospect – Ulysses came out and it was like a bomb went off – the reverberations felt the world around, a bar had been raised, a gauntlet thrown down – what have you) – but on the rest of Joyce’s writing.

I love Portrait of the Artist. I have read it many times, and each time I come to it I find something new. It’s one of THOSE books. A book you can grow up with. At times in my life I find Stephen Dedalus frustrating. At other times I find him exciting, illuminating. It seems like the book changes with me. I also feel like I will never get to the bottom of the book. It’s much more of a straight narrative than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake – but it still has a lot of mystery in it. It’s not nonsensical – it’s not mysterious for the sake of being mysterious – it’s just that it’s a deep deep pool. Joyce was a genius, after all. His mind didn’t work like everyone else’s.

Here is an excerpt from the masterful Richard Ellman biography of Joyce:

To write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce plunged back into his own past, mainly to justify, but also to expose it. The book’s pattern, as he explained to Stanislaus, is that we are what we were; our maturity is an extension of our childhood, and the courageous boy is father of the arrogant young man. But in searching for a way to convert the episodic Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce hit upon a principle of structure which reflected his habits of mind as extremely as he could wish. The work of art, like a mother’s love, must be achieved over the greatest obstacles, and Joyce, who had been dissatisfied with his earlier work as too easily done, now found the obstacles in the form of a most complicated pattern.

This is hinted at in his image of the creative process. As far back as his paper on Mangan, Joyce said that the poet takes into the vital center of his life “the life that surrounds it, flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.” He repeated this image in Stephen Hero, then in Portrait of the Artist developed it more fully. Stephen refers to the making of literature as “the phenomenon of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction,” and then describes the progression from lyrical to epical and to dreamatic art:

The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event and this form progresses till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea … The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life … The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished.

This creator is not only male but female; Joyce goes on to borrow an image of Flaubert by calling him a “god”, but he is also a goddess. Within his womb creatures come to life. Gabriel the seraph comes to the Virgin’s chamber and, as Stephen says, “In the virgin womb of the imagination, the word is made flesh.”

Ellman goes on to discuss Joyce’s structural choices for this book – much of it tied up with the fact that Nora (his wife) was pregnant at the time of writing:

His brother records that in the first draft of Portrait, Joyce thought of a man’s character as developing “from an embryo” with constant traits. Joyce acted upon this theory with characteristic thoroughness, and his subsequent interest in the process of gestation, as conveyed to Stanislaus during Nora’s first pregnancy, expressed a concern that was literary as well as anatomical. His decision to rewrite Stephen Hero as Portrait in five chapters occurred appropriately just after Lucia’s birth. For A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul, and in the metaphor Joyce found his new principle of order. The book begins with Stephen’s father and, just before the ending, it depicts the hero’s severance from his mother. From the start the soul is surrounded by liquids, urine, slime, seawater, amniotic tides, “drops of water” (as Joyce says at the end of the first chapter) “falling softly in the brimming bowl.” The atmosphere of biological struggle is necessarily dark and melancholy until the light of life is glimpsed. In the first chapter the foetal soul is for a few pages only slightly individualized, the organism responds only to the most primitive sensory impressions, then the heart forms and musters its affections, the being struggles towards some unspecified, uncomprehended culmination, it is flooded in ways it cannot understand or control, it gropes wordlessly toward sexual differentiation. In the third chapter shame floods Stephen’s whole body as conscience develops; the lower bestial nature is put by. Then at the end of the fourth chapter the soul discovers the goal towards which it has been mysteriously proceeding — the goal of life. It must swim no more but emerge into air, the new metaphor being flight. The final chapter shows the soul, already fully developed, fattening itself for its journey until at last it is ready to leave. In the last few pages of the book, Stephen’s diary, the soul is released from its confinement, its individuality is complete, and the style shifts with savage abruptness.

Fascinating. If you go back and read the book again, keep in mind the underlying structure. It’s subtle – it’s all done through metaphor, imagery, and language – but it’s there. The development of the soul is never described – it is experienced. Through Joyce’s language choices. This is one of Joyce’s main contributions to literature as we know it. His accomplishment is breathtaking in this regard, and still cannot be touched. No other writer even comes close – although everyone imitates him. But Joyce was imitating no one. He had many influences – his sense of the tide of literature is encyclopedic – but he knew he was breaking with the past. He didn’t break with the past just to break with the past. He wrote the best way he knew how. Literature was old, tired, and language itself had no meaning. Joyce got in there WITH the language – and made it do what he needed it to do. Shakespeare did the same thing. Chaucer did the same thing. I mean, this is the level we’re at here. Writers who didn’t just accept language as it is. Writers who, through their own work, catapulted language to another level. We cannot think about the English language without talking about Shakespeare. Or Chaucer. It still has the power to take my breath away if I think about it too much. Joyce, with his status as an Irishman, had a lot of feelings about all of this – because the English language was imposed upon his country. It wasn’t imposed on him personally – he grew up speaking English – but it was imposed on his ancestors, and he had internalized that cultural disconnect. Most writers who come from countries who were colonized have these feelings about language – it’s a very interesting dialogue. Derek Walcott speaks about this, Seamus Heaney speaks about this … English was the language of the oppressors. If he COULD express himself fully – it would have to be in some OTHER kind of language (which is where Finnegans Wake came from, basically. Huge simplification – but that was what he was working on there. Making a language that would express him. Making a language that was natural for him.) Language ITSELF needed an overhaul. Again – you can count the writers on one hand who actually have this sense – and who are actually genius enough to pull it off. Joyce said once, about writing in English: “I cannot write a word in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.” Joyce, being a genius, rebelled. He rebelled against that tradition. He didn’t rebel against it by ignoring Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, or all of the great influences on the English language. No. He accepted that tradition, and he took from it what he felt would help him. But he never forgot that English was NOT, in fact, his “native” language.

This is most clearly defined in the famous “tundish” scene from Portrait:

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. He crossed the hall and took the corridor to the left which led to the physics theatre. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the jesuit house extra-territorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly and approached the fireplace.

– Good morning, sir! Can I help you?

The priest looked up quickly and said:

– One moment now, Mr Dedalus, and you will see. There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.

– I will try to learn it, said Stephen.

– Not too much coal, said the dean, working briskly at his task, that is one of the secrets.

He produced four candle-butts from the side-pockets of his soutane and placed them deftly among the coals and twisted papers. Stephen watched him in silence. Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and busied with the disposition of his wisps of paper and candle-butts he seemed more than ever a humble server making ready the place of sacrifice in an empty temple, a levite of the Lord. Like a levite’s robe of plain linen the faded worn soutane draped the kneeling figure of one whom the canonicals or the bell-bordered ephod would irk and trouble. His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lord – in tending the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden – and yet had remained ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty. Nay, his very soul had waxed old in that service without growing towards light and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity – a mortified will no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than was to the thrill of love or combat his ageing body, spare and sinewy, greyed with a silver-pointed down.

The dean rested back on his hunkers and watched the sticks catch. Stephen, to fill the silence, said:

– I am sure I could not light a fire.

– You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty.

– Can you solve that question now? he asked.

– Aquinas, answered Stephen, says pulcra sunt quae visa placent.

– This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will it therefore be beautiful?

– In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell, however, it is an evil.

– Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head.

He rose nimbly and went towards the door, set it ajar and said:

– A draught is said to be a help in these matters.

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. Similiter atque senis baculus, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

– When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

– From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

– These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

– If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws.

– Ha!

– For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.

– I see. I quite see your point.

– I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.

– Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by. You know Epictetus?

– An old gentleman, said Stephen coarsely, who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.

– He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the character of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp next day instead of the iron lamp.

A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean’s candle butts and fused itself in Stephen’s consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest’s voice, too, had a hard jingling tone. Stephen’s mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest’s face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?

– I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.

– Undoubtedly, said the dean.

– One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.

– Not in the least, said the dean politely.

– No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean –

– Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: detain.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.

– To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

– What funnel? asked Stephen.

– The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

– That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

– What is a tundish?

– That. Thefunnel.

– Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

– It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.

– A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all but given through – a late-comer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden in winding up to the end like a reel of cotton some fine-spun line of reasoning upon insufflation on the imposition of hands or the procession of the Holy Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zinc-roofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence?

The dean repeated the word yet again.

– Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!

– The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth, said Stephen coldly.

– The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

– The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

– And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean added, to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts. These are some interesting points we might take up.

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean’s firm, dry tone, was silent; and through the silence a distant noise of many boots and confused voices came up the staircase.

– In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is, however, the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking. It may be uphill pedalling at first. Take Mr Moonan. He was a long time before he got to the top. But he got there.

– I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.

– You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in us. I most certainly should not be despondent. Per aspera ad astra.

He left the hearth quickly and went towards the landing to oversee the arrival of the first arts’ class.

Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet briskly and impartially every Student of the class and could almost see the frank smiles of the coarser students. A desolating pity began to fall like dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful serving-man of the knightly Loyola, for this half-brother of the clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he would never call his ghostly father; and he thought how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during all their history, at the bar of God’s justice for the souls of the lax and the lukewarm and the prudent.

All one can do when one reads that passage is to just say: “Hats off, Jimmy. I can’t write like that, I can never write like that, but whatever man, hats feckin’ OFF.”

Back to Ellman’s analysis of the development of Portrait:

The sense of the soul’s development as like that of an embryo not only helped Joyce to the book’s imagery, but also encouraged him to work and rework the original elements in the process of gestation. Stephen’s growth proceeds in waves, in accretions of flesh, in particularization of needs and desires, around and around but always ultimately forward. The episodic framework of Stephen Hero was renounced in favor of a group of scenes radiating backwards and forwards.¹ In the new first chapter Joyce had three clusters of sensations: his earliest memories of infancy, his sickness at Clongowes (probably indebted like the ending of “The Dead” to rheumatic fever in Trieste), and his pandying at Father Daly’s hands. Under these he subsumed chains of related mometns, with the effect of three fleshings in time rather than of a linear succession of events. The sequence became primarily one of layers rather than of years.

In this process other human beings are not allowed much existence except as influences upon the soul’s development or features of it. The same figures appear and reappear, the schoolboy Heron for example, each time in an altered way to suggest growth in the soul’s view of them. E— C—, a partner in childhood games, becomes the object of Stephen’s adolescent love poems; the master at Clongowes reappears as the preacher of the sermons at Belvedere.
² The same words, “Apologise”, “admit”, “maroon”, “green”, “cold”, “warm,” “wet”, and the like, keep recurring with new implications. The book moves from rudimentary meanings to more complex ones, as in the conceptions of the call and the fall. Stephen, in the first chapter fascinated by unformed images, is next summoned by the flesh and then by the church, the second chapter ending with a prostitute’s lingual kiss, the third with his reception of the Host upon his tongue. The soul that has been enraptured by body in the second chapter and by spirit in the third (both depicted in sensory images) then hears the call of art and life, which encompass both without bowing before either, in the fourth chapter; the process is virtually compete. Similarly the fall into sin, at first a terror, gradually becomes an essential part of the discovery of self and life.

Now Stephen, his character still recomposing the same elements, leaves the Catholic priesthood behind him to become “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life.” Having listened to sermons on ugliness in the third chapter, he makes his own sermons on beauty in the last. The Virgin is transformed into the girl wading on the strand, symbolizing a more tangible reality. In the last two chapters, to suit his new structure, Joyce minimizes Stephen’s physical life to show the dominance of his mind, which has accepted but subordinated physical things. The soul is ready now, it throws off its sense of imprisonment, its melancholy, its no longer tolerable conditions of lower existence, to be born.

¹ It is a technique which William Faulkner was to carry even further in the opening section of The Sound and the Fury, where the extreme disconnection finds its justification, not, as in Joyce, in the haze of childhood memory, but in the blur of an idiot’s mind. Faulkner, when he wrote his book, had read Dubliners
and A Portrait; he did not read Ulysses until a year later, in 1930, but he knew about it from excerpts and from the conversation of friends. He has said that he considered himself the heir of Joyce in his methods in The Sound and the Fury. Among the legacies may be mentioned the stopped clock in the last chapter of A Portrait and in the Quentin section.

² In both these instances Joyce changed the actual events. His freedom of recomposition is displayed also in the scene in the physics classroom in Portrait, where he telescopes two lectures, one on electricity and one on mechanics, which as Professor Felix Hackett remembers, took place months apart. Moynihan’s whispered remark, inspired by the lecturer’s discussion of ellipsoidal balls, “Chase me, ladies, I’m in the cavalry!” was in fact made by a young man named Kinahan on one of these occasions. In the same way, as JF Byrne points out in Silent Years, the long scene with the dean of studies in A Portrait happened not to Joyce but to him; he told it to Joyce and was later displeased to discover how his innocent description of Father Darlington lighting a fire had been converted into a reflection of Stephen’s strained relations with the church.

Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce, old father, old artificer, we are forever in your debt.