Today is also the book’s birthday!! That’s a picture of Joyce as a college student, an “artist as a young man”. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
April 27 Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
The 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). 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 Frank Sinatra: “Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?” 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 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 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 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.
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 one of Joyce’s main contributions to literature as we know it. No other writer even comes close to accomplishing what he did – 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, or because he thought the past was worthless. 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 its 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. 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. 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. 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, 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, 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 – which again, I’ll get to in my excerpts.
In the meantime: here’s a taste of the famous scene:
— 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.
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.
Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce, old father, old artificer, we are forever in your debt.
