A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (6 page)

‘His language’ not ‘mine’. England colonized Ireland and with it attempted to suppress and supplant the indigenous culture; English remains ‘foreign’, ‘an acquired speech’ for this Irishman. But the fight being fought between funnels and tundishes is not a fight between an English and an Irish word. Both are English, though ‘tundish’ more ‘solidly’ so, deriving as it does from the two Old English words
tunne
and
disć
while ‘funnel’ only arrives into English in the late medieval period having probably at that point crossed the channel from France. The ironies abound: the Irishman uses the older and more solidly English word, the Englishman the French
arriviste
; Ireland, having suffered occupation by the English, has preserved an English culture now absent from England; the dean of studies, having attempted to teach, ends up being taught his own language by one whose ‘soul frets in [its] shadow’.

If Stephen acknowledges that language is the site of historical and political contestation, he harbours no sentimental ideas that an indigenous Irish language and culture might be superior to, more authentic or less ‘foreign’ than, the English of the invaders. During the late nineteenth century there sprang up in Ireland various movements devoted to re-establishing ‘authentic’ Irish culture (as against the invidious invaders’ imported version), most notably the Gaelic League. Its effects can everywhere be seen in
Portrait
, from Emma’s attending ‘league classes’ (where she would be learning Gaelic), to Davin’s enthusiasm for hurley (a genuinely Irish sport). But it is a movement with which Stephen will have no truck:

—This race and this country and this life produced me, [Stephen] said. I shall express myself as I am.

—Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.

—My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

—For our freedom, said Davin.

—No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first. (170)

‘Damned.’ That’s pretty strong language for one who has so recently
recovered from the devastating effects of his own contemplation of damnation. (He damns one other in the novel, the dean of studies: ‘Damn him one way or the other!’) And there is little doubt that in part the strength of Stephen’s reaction comes because he still harbours an intense (sentimental?) resentment at Parnell’s treatment by his fellow countrymen, especially the devoutly Catholic who would not tolerate his adultery, a resentment he has learned at his father’s knee on Christmas Day. Stephen’s anger arises here too partly at the claim being made on him to play a part in a drama he seeks to avoid, fancying instead his own alternative romantic myth of the proud, individual man of artistic genius who flies free of the shackles with which others would bind him. As he continues with Davin:

—The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. (171)

By the end of the novel, Stephen will assert that ‘the shortest way to Tara [is]
via
Holyhead’
⁴⁴
(211): to encounter (or even engender) Irish culture one must leave Ireland. But what Stephen does not recognize is his very indebtedness, indeed inevitably inextricable indebtedness to that culture he wishes to leave behind. His own words betray him: ‘I shall try to fly by those nets.’ Prepositions are tricky things, and the small one here is duplicitous: ‘by’ can mean either ‘past, beyond’ (I shall fly beyond, fly past and so escape those nets) or (and this meaning is the older of the two) ‘through the agency, means or instrumentality of’ (Those nets will be the very means whereby I shall fly). Far from escaping nationality, language, religion, Stephen will carry them everywhere with him. Despite all Stephen’s sophisticated understanding of the waywardness of words, he imagines still that he is master of his own.

‘a winged form flying’

He similarly presumes that he can assume the mantle of the ‘cunning artificer’ whose name he bears. His last words in the novel—‘Old
father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’ (213)—signal his aspiration to soar with Daedalus, whose self-fashioned wings allowed him to escape that labyrinth of his own making. Earlier in the novel, before its epiphanic crisis
⁴⁵
in which he encounters his ‘envoy from the fair courts of life’, Stephen has been wandering on the strand in self-absorbed reverie. In the water, school friends taunt and tease, calling in schoolboy Greek various versions of his oddly Greek name—‘Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!’ Stephen attempts to take the mention of ‘his strange name’ as ‘a prophecy’:

[A]t 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 hawklike 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? (142)

The contemplation of such a possibility, that his name might pre-figure his future as artist, ‘the end he had been born to serve’, stirs his blood: ‘His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight’. ‘An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs’ (142). It is the intensely self-absorbed, repetitious, precious self-consciousness of these lines as Stephen whips himself into ‘an ecstasy’ that gives one sympathy for those early critics who maintained that the narrator’s adoption of the idiolect of the character allowed no room for
irony to breathe.
⁴⁶
But irony there most assuredly is, for Stephen’s words are followed immediately by shouts from the boys: ‘—One! Two! … Look out! —O, Cripes, I’m drownded!’ (142). Stephen ignores them and continues his reverie. But the reader notes the proximity of ‘drowning’ to Daedalus’s soaring flight. In placing Stephen’s self-absorbed fantasy cheek-by-jowl with the boys’ banter, the narrative ironically metamorphoses Stephen from Daedalus, the father, into Icarus, the son, who drowned. Icarus’s arrogant, ecstatic pleasure at being able to fly caused him to soar too close to the sun; the wax from which his wings were made melted, and he fell into the sea. Stephen struggles to control his self-image and to weave his words so that they will bring about the future he longs for. And the narrative in deploying Stephen’s euphoric language capitulates, but only so far. ‘He’ is subject to other readings than his own, not least that which the narrative suggests here: in his youthful, egoistic arrogance he overreaches his grasp.

Here we see an instance of the narrative structure of this tale pulling against, even as it at times colludes with, Stephen’s desires. There are others. For example, as a
Bildungsroman
, this novel delineates the growth and development of Stephen to the point that he walks out of the novel on the last page seemingly self-determined and self-determining. To a certain extent, the appearance of Stephen as independent is an effect of the fact that walking out of the novel at the end is the last thing he does.
⁴⁷
Nothing narratively happens after the last page, and the final picture of the protagonist asserting his independence reaches into that final emptiness. This novel’s ending with Stephen’s invocation of Daedalus leaves the ‘artist’ not yet having flown, not yet having created very much,
⁴⁸
but aspiring to a great deal. It is a powerful ending and how we read it will tell us much about ourselves. The momentum produced by the
Bildungs-roman
form might well sweep us up in its force and sweep Stephen into flight. But another rhythm has already been set up in
Portrait
,
one which undermines the plausibility of Stephen’s soaring successfully. The structural rhythm of the novel, established in the five discrete and tightly formed chapters, pulls against the consistently rising action that the novel of development requires. As we have seen, the movement of each chapter mimics the rising action of the novel as a whole: each begins with Stephen in humility and ends with him triumphant. And then the next opens again in humility.
⁴⁹
A rhythmic movement of repeated rise and fall emerges which counters the supposed single movement of an insistent and inexorable rise. This rhythm presents not rising action culminating in triumph, but rising action followed invariably by a fall, followed by rising action followed by a fall, and so on. The reader’s expectation ought, therefore, to be that Stephen’s final cry will go unheard, that he will fall, not soar, that when next seen he will have again been humbled and that, far from having become Daedalus, he will have plunged instead like Icarus.
⁵⁰

However sophisticated Stephen’s aesthetic may be by the end of the novel, that aesthetic will not account for these kinds of multiple meanings, for the symbolic realism of the novel, for its duplicitous language. He has not even yet come to a recognition of the extent of his own implication in the structures—linguistic, cultural, historical, familial, religious, even mythic—he wishes to flee. Just prior to his Daedalean invocation, Stephen provides his ultimate statement of his artistic intentions: ‘Welcome, O life! 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’ (213). Stephen shows no signs of recognizing that ‘forge’ means two things at once: ‘to beat into shape, to frame or fashion’
and
‘to make something in fraudulent imitation of something else, to counterfeit’. The narrative knows this; Joyce knows this. Joyce has forged a vivid, evocative, plausible, sincere, even at times ironic portrait of Stephen, a portrait which in teasing out the duplicities of language exploits the potential meanings latent in the actual history of his own life. In this Joyce
becomes an artist or a poet in Aristotle’s terms, not a historian: the poet presents ‘a kind of thing that
might
be’, the historian ‘the thing that has been’.
⁵¹
Joyce, the artist, creates in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
a genuine forgery.

COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION HISTORY

J
AMES
J
OYCE
had several tries at writing
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
before it finally emerged serially in the
Egoist
in 1914. Ten years earlier (7 January 1904), he had written an ‘autobiographical essay’ in the third person, titled it ‘A Portrait of the Artist’,
¹
and submitted it to Fred Ryan and W. K. Magee, then editors of
Dana, a magazine of independent thought
. But
Dana
was insufficiently ‘independent’ in its ‘thought’ to publish Joyce’s piece, which Stanislaus Joyce claims, was ‘because of the sexual experiences narrated in it’. The refusal, according to Stanislaus, spurred the young artist into action:

Jim … has decided to turn his paper into a novel, and having come to that decision is just as glad, he says, that it was rejected … Jim is beginning his novel, as he usually begins things, half in anger, to show that in writing about himself he has a subject of more interest than their aimless discussion.
²

That novel, to be called
Stephen Hero
³
after, seemingly, the English ballad
Turpin Hero
, had as its central character a young man named Stephen Daedalus who, in the way of the protagonists of many first novels, resembled his creator in many respects. It was written in the third person, in a style not particularly remarkable (though Stanislaus, never blindly uncritical of his brother’s work, thought it ‘exceptionally well written in a style which seems to me altogether original’ (
CDD
20)), and was planned to have sixty-three chapters
(
LII
83). All that survives are eleven chapters
⁴
comprising what Joyce referred to as the ‘University episode’. He had begun writing at speed (Ellmann claims that the first chapter was written in eight days:
E
148); by March he had completed eleven chapters (
CDD
19–20). However, by the time he left Ireland on 8 October, he had made it only part way through Chapter XII (which he completed in Zurich later that month:
LII
67). The work thereafter continued steadily (his progress can be traced through his letters to Stanislaus) until by July 1905 he had sent to his brother the text up to at least Chapter XXIV (
LII
91). Joyce set it to one side to work on
Dubliners
and never returned to complete it.

When he began again in 1907, it was with an entirely new conception: a novel covering the whole of the span of
Stephen Hero
, but in five chapters instead of sixty-three. Between 8 September 1907 and 7 April 1908, three chapters were completed (
E
264). Again Joyce stopped. He started again under the encouragement of Ettore Schmitz (an Italian novelist who published under the name Italo Svevo), who wrote on 8 February 1909 in response to reading the first three chapters.
⁵
Sometime in 1911 Joyce threw one of these manuscripts—either that of
Stephen Hero
or that of
Portrait
as completed to this stage—into the fire; it had to be ‘rescued by a family fire brigade’, as Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver (
LI
136).
⁶
Whether
Stephen Hero
or
Portrait
, Joyce’s frustration seems clear: ‘the “original” original I tore up and threw into the stove about eight years ago in a fit of rage on account of the trouble over
Dubliners
’ (6 January 1920:
LI
136). The trouble? Getting anyone to publish the stories on which he had been working without excising so much that they were left in shreds. But persist he did (Gabler gives a detailed account of the full progress of this process)
⁷
until he was ready to
consign the novel entire for publication serially in the
Egoist
, beginning with the 2 February 1914 issue. The date marked his thirty-second birthday.