A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the second book and first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

A Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.

Background

upright|thumb|alt=A black-and-white photographic portrait of a mustachioed man with glasses in a brimmed hat.|[[James Joyce in 1915]]

Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce (1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College, Dublin, in 1902. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it up. He returned to Ireland at his family's request as his mother was dying of cancer. Despite her pleas, the impious Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to make confession or take communion, and when she passed into a coma they refused to kneel and pray for her. After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books. to the Irish literary magazine Dana on 7 January 1904. Danas editor, W. K. Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, "I can't print what I can't understand." On his 22nd birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which incorporated aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in A Portrait. He worked on the book until mid-1905 and brought the manuscript with him when he moved to Trieste that year. Though his main attention turned to the stories that made up Dubliners, Joyce continued to work on Stephen Hero. At 914 manuscript pages, Joyce considered the book about half-finished, having completed 25 of its 63 intended chapters. In September 1907, however, he abandoned it, and began a complete revision of the text and its structure, producing what became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By 1909 the work had taken shape and Joyce showed some of the draft chapters to Ettore Schmitz, one of his language students, as an exercise. Schmitz, himself a respected writer, was impressed and with his encouragement Joyce continued to work on the book.thumb

In 1911, Joyce flew into a fit of rage over the continued refusals by publishers to print Dubliners and threw the manuscript of Portrait into the fire. It was saved by a "family fire brigade" including his sister Eileen.

Stephen Hero is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but in A Portrait Joyce adopts the free indirect style, a change that reflects the moving of the narrative centre of consciousness firmly and uniquely onto Stephen. Persons and events take their significance from Stephen, and are perceived from his point of view.

The transition from Stephen Hero to A Portrait has been characterized as a radical, uncompromising act of refinement: "[T]he original elements of Joyce's first novel, particularly the characters, are subjected to a process of compression and distillation that rejects all irrelevancies, all particularities and ambiguities, and leaves only their pure essence."

Publication history

In 1913, W. B. Yeats sent the poem I Hear an Army by James Joyce to Ezra Pound, who was assembling an anthology of Imagist verse entitled Des Imagistes. Pound wrote to Joyce, and in 1914 Joyce submitted the first chapter of the unfinished Portrait to Pound, who was so taken with it that he pressed to have the work serialised in the London literary magazine The Egoist. Joyce hurried to complete the novel, and it appeared in The Egoist in twenty-five installments from 2 February 1914 to 1 September 1915.

There was difficulty finding a British publisher for the finished novel, so Pound arranged for its publication by an American publishing house, B. W. Huebsch, which issued it on 29 December 1916. The Egoist Press republished it in the United Kingdom on 12 February 1917 and Jonathan Cape took over its publication in 1924. In 1964 Viking Press issued a corrected version overseen by Chester Anderson that drew upon Joyce's manuscript, list of corrections, and marginal corrections to proof sheets. This edition is "Widely regarded as reputable and the 'standard' edition." As of 2004, the fourth printing of the Everyman's Library edition, the Bedford edition, and the Oxford World's Classics edition used this text. Garland released a "copy text" edition by Hans Walter Gabler in 1993.

Major characters

Source:

Stephen Dedalus – The main character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Growing up, Stephen goes through long phases of hedonism and deep religiosity. He eventually adopts a philosophy of aestheticism, greatly valuing beauty and art. Stephen is essentially Joyce's alter ego, and many of the events of Stephen's life mirror events from Joyce's own youth. His surname is taken from the ancient Greek mythical figure Daedalus, who also engaged in a struggle for autonomy.
Simon Dedalus – Stephen's father, an impoverished former medical student with a strong sense of Irish nationalism. Sentimental about his past, Simon Dedalus frequently reminisces about his youth. Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen's diary entries in the concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others. Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man. The style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, as the complexity of language and Stephen's ability to comprehend the world around him both gradually increase. The book's opening pages communicate Stephen's first stirrings of consciousness when he is a child. Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist and the subjective effect of the events of his life.

The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications.

The first two pages of A Portrait introduce many of the novel's key motifs, and have been shown to "enact the entire action in microcosm".

Joyce introduced the concept of "epiphany" in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Thomas Aquinas's three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object "seems to us radiant, [it] achieves its epiphany". The term is not used when Stephen Dedalus explains his aesthetic theory in A Portrait. Joyce critics, however, have used it freely when discussing the novel as well as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One critic has identified four distinct epiphany techniques in Joyce's fiction, saying of A Portrait that "in at least three instances an epiphany helps Stephen decide on the future courses of this life".

Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory identifies three forms of literary art: lyric, epic, and dramatic. The Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner saw the three forms of literary art as a progression that applies to his novels, with A Portrait being lyric, Ulysses epic, and Finnegans Wake dramatic. William York Tindall has noted that other critics have applied the three forms differently, some finding all Joyce's works dramatic, one finding all three forms in A Portrait, another finding them in Ulysses "with more justification from the text perhaps". Tindall has speculated on how they might apply to A Portrait, Stephen being "lyric in his attitude toward himself", Joyce being dramatic in his attitude toward Stephen, so that at times "he is the author of a dramatic book about a lyric hero", while at other times he is an ironist and so "seems epic... standing between audience and victim". Towards the beginning of the novel, Joyce depicts the young Stephen's growing consciousness, which is said to be a condensed version of the arc of Dedalus' entire life, as he continues to grow and form his identity. Stephen's growth as an individual character is important because through him Joyce laments Irish society's tendency to force individuals to conform to types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist character. Themes that run through Joyce's later novels find expression there.

Religion

As Stephen transitions into adulthood, he leaves behind his Catholic religious identity, which is closely tied to the national identity of Ireland. His rejection of this dual identity is also a rejection of constraint and an embrace of freedom in identity. Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus throughout the novel conjure up something demonic in Stephen renouncing his Catholic faith. When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness.

In Catholicism, "Eucharist" refers both to the act of Consecration, or transubstantiation, and its product, the body and blood of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine. It is the Church's central sacrament. Stephen uses it to dramatize his apostasy. He refuses to take communion during Easter time, every Catholic's duty, to show he is a Catholic no longer. He notes that the Eucharist is "a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration". Stephen parallels the literary artist with the Catholic priest and literary art with the Eucharist, both the act and the product. He sees himself as "The priest of eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."

Myth of Daedalus

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Ivan Canadas, the epigraph may parallel the heights and depths that end and begin each chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the interpretive freedom of the text. Stephen's surname being connected to Daedalus may also call to mind the theme of going against the status quo, as Daedalus defies the King of Crete. However, he is also heavily concerned with his country's future and understands himself as an Irishman, which then leads him to question how much of his identity is tied up in said nationalism. It's been argued that the theory also draws upon Catholicism's central doctrines in each of its two parts: the first concerned with the artist's intellect, the second with his imagination. Catholic theology distinguishes between God's activity in eternity, His begetting of the Son, the Word, and His activity in time: the Creation (soul and body), the Incarnation—the Word made flesh—and the Consecration in the Mass. Stephen uses Aquinas's application of the three criteria of beauty to the Son of God in eternity to model the artist's act of understanding—"epiphany" in Stephen Hero—and then uses the Creation to model the artist's act of (re)embodiment. In his reveries later, Stephen completes his aesthetic theory by also likening the artist to God at the Incarnation and, in the person of His priest, at the Consecration.

Critical reception

A Portrait won Joyce a reputation for his literary skills, as well as a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the business manager of The Egoist.

In 1916, in his reader's report to Duckworth & Co., Publishers, Edward Garnett wrote that, to make it publishable, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man needed to undergo extensive revision, especially at the beginning and the end. The public would call the book "as it stands at present, realistic, unprepossessing, unattractive". He said it was "ably written" and "arouse[d] interest and attention", and he approved of the rendering of the period and the characterizations. But he found the novel "too discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent". He concluded that the "author shows us he has art, strength and originality", but needed "to shape [his novel] more carefully as the product of the craftsmanship, mind and imagination of an artist".

In 1917 H. G. Wells wrote that "one believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction", while warning readers of Joyce's "cloacal obsession", his insistence on the portrayal of bodily functions that Victorian morality had banished from print.

In 1917 Ezra Pound wrote, "James Joyce produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English", and predicted that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would "remain a permanent part of English literature." He went on to further praise Joyce for writing in accord with Imagist standards: "Apart from Mr. Joyce's realism... apart from, or a piece with, all this is style, the actual writing: hard clear-cut, with no waste of words, no bungling up of useless phrases, no filling in with pages of slosh."

The following year Pound wrote, "[Joyce] has his scope beyond that of the novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly outside of their compass." He continued, "[In] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there is no omission; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation—without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality—and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with metallic exactitude."

In 1927 E. M. Forster wrote, "[Joyce] has shown (especially in the Portrait of the Artist) an imaginative grasp of evil. But he undermines the universe in too work-manlike a manner, looking round for this tool or that: in spite of all his internal looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due deliberation; it is talk, talk, never song."

In 1927 Wyndham Lewis criticized Joyce's diction in a sentence from chapter 2 of A Portrait:

Fifty years later, Hugh Kenner used Lewis's criticism to formulate what he called the Uncle Charles Principle. "Repaired" and "brushed scrupulously" are words Uncle Charles himself would use to describe what he was doing. Kenner argued, "This is apparently new in fiction, the normally neutral narrative vocabulary invaded by little clouds of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative. In Joyce's various extensions of this device we have one clue to the manifold styles of Ulysses."

Kenner, writing in 1948, was critical of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait, arguing that he "does not become an artist at all... but an aesthete" and "to take him seriously is very hard indeed". Kenner lamented, "[I]t is painful to be invited to close the book with an indigestibly Byronic hero stuck in our throats."

A later version of Kenner's 1948 essay appeared in his first book on Joyce published in 1955.

Writing in 1959, William York Tindall was also critical of Stephen Dedalus, saying "he never sees himself entirely". Tindall regretted Stephen's "failure to realize himself", adding that "this is attended to in Ulysses, which makes A Portrait seem preliminary sketch."

In 1963 S. L. Goldberg took issue with Kenner's negative appraisal of Stephen, conceding that "Mr. Kenner is certainly right in pointing to the irony with which Joyce views him in both the Portrait and Ulysses", but faulting him for concluding that in doing so Joyce is rejecting Stephen himself. For Goldberg, Joyce's "irony is a qualifying criticism, which does not imply a total rejection".

Adaptations

A film version adapted for the screen by Judith Rascoe and directed by Joseph Strick was released in 1977. It features Bosco Hogan as Stephen Dedalus and T. P. McKenna as Simon Dedalus. John Gielgud plays Father Arnall, the priest whose lengthy sermon on Hell terrifies the teenage Stephen.

The first stage version was produced by Léonie Scott-Matthews at Pentameters Theatre in 2012 using an adaptation by Tom Neill.

Hugh Leonard's stage work Stephen D is an adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero. It was first produced at the Gate Theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1962.

As of 2017 computer scientists and literature scholars at University College Dublin, Ireland are in a collaboration to create the multimedia version of this work, by charting the social networks of characters in the novel. Animations in the multimedia editions express the relation of every character in the chapter to the others.

Notes

References

Works cited

Kenner, Hugh. Dublin's Joyce. Chatto & Windus, 1955.
Scholes, Robert and Richard M. Kain eds. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Northwestern University Press, 1965. pp 56-68

External links

Digitized copy of the first edition from Internet Archive
Study guide from SparkNotes
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the British Library