Happy Birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

joyce2.jpg

A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man had been serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist – in 1914, 15 (speaking of Ezra Pound) – but yesterday was the day it was published as a whole, in 1916.

Dubliners had already been published – and very controversial were those stories – not embraced by his own country of course (they hit too close to home). Joyce had known what the reaction would be. He had found much more acceptance “on the Continent” than in his native land.

But it was Portrait of the Artist which really firmed up his reputation as a writer. Portrait, a book broken up into five long chapters, details Stephen Dedalus’ journey from unknowing unthinking participant of life to artist. In order for Stephen Dedalus to put on the wings of Icarus, so to speak, he had to divorce himself from his influences: family, politics, church, language, and country. James Joyce himself wrote:

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning. … I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

Portrait is one of the most self-involved books of all time. Fatherland needed to be jettisoned. So did family. So did church.

It ends with the famous lines:

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

It is that word – “artificer” – that is the clue to the book’s power. What is art but artifice? This is not a bad thing in Joyce’s lexicon. As a matter of fact, it is the whole point. It is the other things, the things we receive passively but without questioning (nationality, religion, our place in our own families) that are the true artificial entities … Only art is real.

Then, naturally, 1922 brought the world Ulysses which changed everything. According to TS Eliot, Joyce “killed the 19th century” with that book.

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, who is great enough to be appreciated on his own). How does one get Shakespeare out of the way in order to appreciate the lesser accomplishments of his contemporaries? It’s very difficult.

Kinda like that great quote from Bing Crosby, no slouch himself, on his contemporary rival Frank Sinatra: “Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in mine?”

Ulysses has the same effect – not just on Joyce’s other writing, but on all other writers writing at that time (and they all knew it AS it was happening. Ulysses came out and it was like a bomb went off – the reverberations felt the world around).

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 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 (excerpt here) or Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) – 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 beginning his internal journey, the one where he, as a writer, would try to break down what life actually felt like, moment to moment to moment … For example, in the third chapter of Ulysses (excerpt here), Stephen Dedalus (again the protagonist) goes for a walk on the beach. At the end of Portrait, we learned that Dedalus has broken his glasses. Joyce does not remind us of this fact in chapter three of Ulysses. As a matter of fact, it never comes up again in the entire 800 page book. He mentions it just once. But in that walk on the beach, all of the sensations come to Dedalus as either blurry images or sound, just the way they would if you had lost your glasses. But Joyce doesn’t spell it out, he does not say, “Having lost his glasses, Dedalus saw the world as blurry.” Instead, he shows us this, he tries to put us inside that experience with lines like:

The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

Brilliant. The dog itself is not seen clearly or perceived. But the dog’s bark runs towards him, stops, and runs back again.

Ineluctable modality of the visible.

Joyce complained once:

“Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?”

Trying to describe and experience “the mystery of the conscious” was what Joyce’s life-work was all about.

Here is an excerpt from Richard Ellmann’s masterful James 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 dramatic 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.

If you go back and read the book again (or if you haven’t read it – and are reading it for the first time), 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 Joyce’s main contribution to literature as we know it. No other writer even comes close to accomplishing what he did – although many imitate him. Many probably imitate him without even realizing who it is they are imitating, that is the level of Joyce’s influence. 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 be a rebel, or because he thought the past was worthless. On the contrary. He wrote the best way he knew how. He said later, “With me, the thought is always simple.” And this is true in the stories of Dubliners, and it’s true in the “gibberish” of Finnegans Wake. The structure may be complex, and it usually is with Joyce – but “the thought is always simple”. Literature was old, tired, and language itself had no meaning in and of itself.

Remember: Joyce was an Irishman. The Irish language had been stomped out by British imperialism. Whatever language he wrote in, and he wrote in English, he knew that it was not really his own. Joyce wrote:

“Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The British, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget — the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.”

Joyce also said:

“I’d like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.”

Portrait, without becoming polemical, without turning itself into Irish nationalistic propaganda (something Joyce had contempt for), describes one Irishman’s journey to divorce himself from that tradition. Joyce wrote his books about Ireland, but they were not really FOR Ireland. The funny thing is: Joyce lived most of his life outside of Ireland. But he could not write about anything else. He had a lot of anger towards Ireland. My words there are not really appropriate. Anger? Try rage. The provincial nature of the culture, the priest-ridden social life (Joyce said, “In Ireland, Catholicism is black magic”), the inability of its inhabitants to live freely, to “touch one another” (not just sexually, altlhough he meant that as well) … He knew he offended his countrymen by telling the truth about what really went on in Ireland, but he didn’t care. First of all, he came to the realization at some point that “I can’t write without offending people”, and he also realized:

“It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.

Rage.

Joyce got in there WITH the language – and made it do what he needed it to do. He said that he would like a language that is “above all other languages”. And so he set out to create it. Shakespeare did the same thing. Chaucer did the same thing. 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. 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. This is one of the reasons why he felt that the Celtic revival of his time, and all of the Irish language classes that started popping up again, were so ridiculous. Why would Ireland want to go backwards? Religion and language were the things that were holding Ireland back in the first place. He, unlike Yeats, unlike Synge, unlike the other big writers of that time, had no interest in cavorting with the peasantry in the west of Ireland. Joyce was a city boy, first of all, strictly urban … and his gaze was turned permanently towards Europe. His first big influence was Ibsen. Dubliners is filled with stories where the characters yearn to get out, to flee … they stare at the boats in the quays (excerpt here), boats from places like Norway and Argentina (excerpt here), and they know that getting out is their only chance of soul-survival.

Most writers who come from countries who were colonized have these feelings about language – it’s a very interesting dialogue. If he COULD express himself fully – it would have to be in some OTHER kind of language (which is where Finnegans Wake came from.) Language ITSELF needed an overhaul. Again – you can count the writers on one hand who actually have this sense about language – and who are actually genius enough to pull it off. Joyce rebelled against that tradition of language, but unlike lesser talents, he didn’t rebel against it by ignoring or belittling Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, or Chaucer, 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, propel him … He loved language, and puns, and derivations … He felt there was a deeper meaning to all of it, something that was quite universal. By retreating into the Irish language, Joyce felt that the Irish were damning themselves to irrelevance.

But he never forgot that English was NOT, in fact, his “native” language. It propelled him forward. It helped him be free of his influences (but not without a struggle), it helped him write from the inside, as opposed to narrate from the outside. This is one of the reasons why you can tell, just by looking at the page, that something is by James Joyce. His stuff doesn’t LOOK like other people’s stuff. It is instantly recognizable, not just by sound, but by sight as well.

The first chapter of Portrait is told from the point of view of Stephen Dedalus as a small child. Instead of either making the child precocious and able to narrate his own tale (like most writers do when writing from the point of view of children), or just deciding, “what the hell, he’s a child, but he will speak with MY voice” … Joyce opens the book with a cascade of senses, sound, sounds, colors, random comments, strange connections, nursery rhymes … He was writing AS a child. What it might be like to BE a child. It is an act of ventriloquism.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.

Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

— O, Stephen will apologize.

Dante said:

— O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.–

Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.

Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.

This type of writing is par for the course now. Joyce’s influence was as wide-spread as Marlon Brando’s was in the world of acting. If you watch Streetcar now, it may not seem as revolutionary, because that is the style of acting practiced by pretty much everyone now (although without as much talent!). But that is only because of Brando’s power and range in those early roles. He set the standard. There were others, of course, but his name will always be attached to that revolution in acting. Joyce’s contemporaries – Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and others – were also working in the same vein as Joyce. This was not a singular journey, it was part and parcel of the mood of the time (same with Brando’s new naturalistic style of acting).

As the book moves on, Stephen leaves childhood behind, and begins to open his eyes to the world around him. He is not immediately a rebel. On the contrary. He does not know yet that he is an artist. He is still a “young man”. He wanders the streets of Dublin arguing about aesthetics and Aquinas with his friends. He resists, for some reason, signing petitions supporting Irish nationalism. The group will never be “for” Stephen Dedalus. Even before he knows who he is, he remains solitary, uncommitted. He will not be a joiner. Although he flirts with it. He becomes deeply religious in one chapter, terrified of the fires of hell (mainly because of his lustful thoughts and his masturbation). The pendulum swings to one side, and Dedalus feels he cannot keep up with his own sinning … not enough praying in the world will make that sin vanish. The pendulum then swings back, and after the fire of religious piety fades, you get the sense it will never return. Dedalus has left it behind, shedding that self along his journey. He will now be free.

Language must also be jettisoned.

This is clearly shown in the “tundish scene”, the most famous episode in the book. It is also (in my opinion) the most overtly angry, although you have to really pay attention … Joyce requires you, the reader, to do some work here.

— 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. The funnel.

— 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.

On the surface, that might seem like a benign moment. An intellectual moment. A moment of appreciating the difference of the languages and cultures. But that is a mistake with Joyce. If you take only the surface of it, you will never understand “what the big deal is” about this writer. Seen in its context, the “tundish scene” is one of the angriest moments in all of Irish literature, hell – all of literature, period. So yes, with Joyce, the “thought is always simple”. In that scene, the English priest is unaware of the language of the country he actually lives in. It has never occurred to him that there might be another word for the “funnel”, and he is fascinated by that prospect. But seen from the other side of the fence, the Irish side, the priest’s ignorance of what his own culture has done to the culture it now sits upon, to know that a very fine word, “tundish”, has been stomped out of existence … and to have the priest be unaware of that fact, and also curious about it in mainly an intellectual way …

It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

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 deean 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.

The end of Portrait fractures. The narrative voice has left us. The story fragments into Dedalus’ journal entries. He is now free from family, church, the pull of Ireland … he is now free to go inward and see where his soul wants to go. The wings of Icarus. It has not been an easy journey. Becoming free never is. But Dedalus now sees that he is an artist, he does not know what that means – he hasn’t even created anything yet … but he is ready … ready … for whatever what will come next.

Portrait of the Artist is the launching-off point.

For Ulysses.

Here are the excerpts I posted from each chapter of Portrait:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As with most other things, this book is so full of my father for me – that I can’t tell where the book ends and my dad begins. He is woven into it. He taught me how to read it. He was there to talk with me about it when I wanted to talk, or ask questions. He showed me how to see.

Joyce, old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

This entry was posted in James Joyce, On This Day and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Happy Birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  1. Michael Thomas says:

    That this marvelous post not go commented upon: Wow! I have not re-read Portrait since first encountering it as an adolescent. I will carry this memory forever. Joyce’s rendering of the damnation that will come from the things that young boys surely do placed terror in my soul.

  2. Michael Thomas says:

    That should be “uncommented upon.” Oh well.

  3. red says:

    Michael – yes, that whole religious section, after he goes to that retreat … It is indeed terrifying.

  4. MrG says:

    I am reading the book now…finally. I will have to come back to this post as soon as I’m finished. And I can’t wait.

  5. red says:

    MrG – I am so jealous you will be experiencing the book for the first time!

    There are sections where I found it tough going – the 30 page long sermon at the retreat Dedalus attends, for example – but hang tight … Joyce does have a point!

    The quote in my banner is from Portrait. It’s a great book – perhaps the best – about the journey towards becoming an artist.

  6. MrG says:

    Day one (yesterday) – the weather was nice hear so i decided to sit outside and read. no sooner did i read a few pages than the temptation (or excuse) for irish beer came upon me. being that it was a little early for that kind of endeavor didn’t stop me unfortunately. it did however slow my reading capabilities as i suddenly felt a nap coming on. I did make it through chapters one and two though and so today its to the hammock and i look forward to finishing it.

  7. MrG says:

    oops weather was nice here (AZ) i meant…

  8. artist says:

    I am reading the book now…finally.

  9. Pingback: Rejoyce. It’s Bloomsday. | The Sheila Variations

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.