Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I’m making this book seem episodic – with the way I’m excerpting – and it’s totally not. Oh, well. Stephen, in Chapter 4, imposes on himself a rigorous religious discipline to atone for all his sins. He devotes every day to prayer, he carries rosary beads, he avoids women, he is disgusted by anything bodily – and yet he’s very big on mortification, in the true sense of the word – so he smells things that are disgusting, as penance. He struggles. It’s hard to be a teenage boy and be a puritanical priest-like personality – but he tries.
But now let’s talk about Joyce. Through the early chapters, true childhood, Joyce’s writing is lush, sensual, it’s all colors and sounds and sensations. In Chapter 3, when Stephen goes on the retreat which gives him the revelation that he is in a state of sin – all of that changes. Chapter 3 is mainly just the priest talking – with no narrative response from Stephen – until the end when he is in a panic at night, and goes to confession. But most of Chapter 3 is a monologue. In Chapter 4 everything has changed. We are now back in Stephen’s psyche, but the lush prose of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 is totally gone. Things are dry – and almost spare. We hear what Stephen DOES, long lists of his actions. Joyce is moving us here out of the body and into the spirit – but not true spirit yet, which can also be lush and sensual … It’s more intellectual. A self-willed growth spurt. Stephen is conscious now – but let’s say he’s not AWARE. The writing reflects that. This is one of the reasons why the book is such a tour de force, despite its coming-of-age plot which has been done to death. The writing itself morphs, as Stephen develops. And here: Stephen tries to become a saint. His sins are so beyond the pale that nothing less than absolute perfection will wipe the slate clean. And so the writing is now abstract, as Stephen abstracts himself out of all recognition. A priest at his school says he thinks the priesthood would be good for Stephen. We begin to realize, though, that the religious ecstacy and agony Stephen puts himself through … it’s not that it’s fake, it’s not at all – it’s totally real … but has it helped Stephen? What does the soul need? What is Stephen’s “calling”? Now we’re getting to it, the real heart of the matter: we all have a calling. Or maybe Joyce doesn’t feel we all have a calling … but Stephen does. And what is it? The priesthood sounds attractive … but is it the right thing? Who am I? What am I here for? “I have amended my life, have I not?” Stephen asks himself at one point – but you can hear the uncertainty even in that sentence. He’s not sure. And: is he waiting for a reward? You amend your life and then you get a cookie? What is the cookie? The priesthood? Stephen is attracted to the priesthood because of the images it puts into his mind – the rituals, being in charge of them, being seen as the holiest of men. It’s a strangely distant image – he sees himself from the outside (always a clue that something is not quite right). After the conversation with the priest, he walks home, deep in thought – and he passes a statue of the Virgin Mary and is almost cold to her. Something is definitely not quite right.
As always, lots is going on here. Joyce saw his art as a calling akin to the priesthood. It required sacrifice, devotion, and an almost religious sense of HAVING to do it. But it also required discipline and work. It was not an emotional thing, not only anyway. It had to do with the mind, and what the mind can do. An artistic calling also gives the promise of eternal life – with the art that one creates. This is the birth of Stephen as an artist. Or at least his consciousness that this is what he must do. I mention this because it’s important. A priest, who has followed his true calling, blends soul and spirit and mind in a way that seems organic and right. Stephen Dedalus is having a hard time with the whole blending thing. He can put himself through his paces, he can set religious tasks for himself every day … and he does … but does that make him a better person? Or closer to a state of grace? Joyce never asks these questions, at least not directly – but this is what Stephen struggles with, and you can see – or infer – that he is definitely not in a state of grace. More like an anxious OCD episode. But I judge. The point here is not to judge. The point is to follow Stephen’s development.
Eventually, Stephen does realize that the priesthood is not for him. But that he, like a priest, must dedicate himself to gaining wisdom – but not in a cloister, and not separated from the world. He must be out in the world, with all the “snares” it implies.
An important thing to mention, something I haven’t even touched on, is Stephen’s name. Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus was the dude who built the wings for his son Icarus. Dedalus and Icarus are imprisoned. Dedalus is a renowned artisan, and so he thinks he can find them a way out. Icarus, naturally, fucks that all up when he flies too high … but Stephen is not named Stephen ICARUS. Stephen is named Stephen DEDALUS. The last sentence of the book, with its fabulous phrase, “old artificer”, references Dedalus, the “artificer” who built the wings. Stephen has never considered his name before – but his friends, in this chapter, tease him, and call him by the Greek version of his name. Okay. So, as always with Joyce, more is going on here than meets the eye. Stephen has been on a religious journey, looking for what he needs in the Catholic Church. As he slowly realizes that the priesthood is not for him, and that he needs to be in the world … he stops looking to the Church as the be-all and end-all of existence – and begins to hearken back to mythology, pre-Christian times, for inspiration. Again, this doesn’t happen in as obvious or episodic way as I’m making it seem here. It’s slower, more contemplative. Greek mythology was obviously hugely important to Joyce (uhm, Ulysses) – eclipsing the Catholic Church’s influence on his psyche. This, to Joyce, was the hugest break of all. The most necessary. Stephen HAD to be in thrall to the Church, it was an important part of his development – but he also HAD to break free, in order to truly become. Chapter 4 is about that break. Dedalus is an artist. So, too, then, will Stephen become an artist. He has no choice. It takes on the feeling of a prophecy.
I’m going to excerpt the end of the chapter – where Stephen makes his realization. Because nobody does “realization” like Joyce.
Watch how – when Stephen’s buddies start to call out his name in ever-more-ridiculous Greek-sounding words – everything changes. It is as though they are keys – to another level, another plane. Out of the priest-ridden present into the mythological past. They act as passwords for Stephen’s soul, which is waiting to break free from the ties that bind. Wings that the artificer have made for him. His true calling.
Soul separated from body is a dry ascetic thing. But to merge the two? How glorious, how truly holy that could be … And watch for a couple of things in this excerpt: watch how the prose shifts, again, into something more far-flung and transcendent. The senses are back – only this time not to degrade him and mortify him – but to glorify his spirit. Also, he catches sight of a girl on the beach. She is a picture of beauty – from out of a book almost. Venus on the halfshell. Something symbolic and to yearn for. His disgust for women has dissolved. He is about to join the human race. But more than that, more than that: he is about to transcend. Being an artist is not about “joining” anything – Stephen’s isolation here from his peers shows that. There will always be those who want you to conform, be more like them, just knock it off with all that stuff – and be like us! To be an artist, you must be the essence of nonconformity. You must follow your own path.
it’s amazing to me, in reading this, how clear Joyce is. He tells us in no uncertain terms what is happening. Courage. To write like that.
EXCERPT FROM A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
— Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephenoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!
Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped City. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?
His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.
âOne! Two! Look out!
âOh, Cripes, I’m drownded!
âOne! Two! Three and away!
âThe next! The next!
âOne! UK!
âStephaneforos!
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.
âStephaneforos!
What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of deathâthe fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and withoutâcerements, the linens of the grave?
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?
He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.
Inca few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down the slope of the breakwater.
There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.
Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he?
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
âHeavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?
There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.
He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.
He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.
Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.
He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.
