A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (2 page)

The episode provided him with material for one of the most vividly realized scenes in
Portrait
, and occasioned his earliest publication, a poem entitled ‘Et Tu, Healy’ in which he lionized Parnell and indicted those closest to him as traitors. In the title, he equates the Parnellite Timothy Healy’s turning on Parnell with Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar.
⁹
The precocity of the allusion (he was 9 when he wrote the poem) suggests not only imagination but a decent education. Far from being the ‘self taught working man’ Woolf imagined him,
¹⁰
Joyce was educated at the Jesuit Clongowes Wood and Belvedere Colleges. He attended university, though
not
Trinity College, Dublin. That institution had been founded by Elizabeth I in 1591 with the express purpose of furthering the Protestant reformation in Ireland—the express purpose, that is, of eradicating Catholicism, not educating its adherents. Until 1873 entrance was restricted to those who submitted to religious tests, effectively to those who were the offspring of Anglo-Irish Protestents, the landholding minority who for centuries had been Britain’s ruling class in Ireland. By Joyce’s time, Catholics could attend, though the clergy strongly urged them not to set foot in the heathen institution. He studied instead under the auspices of the Royal University (what would become University College, Dublin), an institution carrying the imprimatur of no less a Catholic than its first rector, John Henry, Cardinal Newman. Here, he made a name for himself as clever, if prone to cause a certain kind of trouble: he refused to sign a petition denouncing Yeats’s
Countess Cathleen
as defaming Ireland, refused to modify a paper delivered to the college’s Literary and Historical Society to include in it an insistence that drama have an ‘ethical’ dimension, refused to accept the non-acceptance for publication by a
college magazine of another paper in which he decried the Irish parochialism of the new Irish Literary Theatre; he published it himself instead.
¹¹
When in April 1900 the
Fortnightly Review
printed his ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, Joyce (then only 18) demonstrated his belief that Ireland ‘afford[ed] no literary model to the artist’; he would ‘look abroad’.
¹²
Within four years he had left Ireland for the Continent and would return only three times to visit (in 1909 and 1912). Even then it was to wrangle with publishers over their continued refusals to publish
Dubliners
without censoring it, but by 1912 he had already written first one, then another entirely different, version of the work that would become
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.

Running clearly through this life are the two entwined threads of the history of the domination of Ireland by Britain, of Irish Catholics by British Protestants, and of those Irish Catholics themselves by the strictures of the institutionalized Catholic Church. A third, vivid thread carries the aspiring artist’s refusal to submit to either authority especially in matters of art. In the fabric of the whole, all three are woven inseparably together. By the time he left Ireland, the young Joyce had already determined that he would reweave this history and create art out of the tale of their mutual entanglement. This is the tale that
Portrait
tells, a tale tracing the growth and development of a young Irish Catholic artist-to-be until, at last, he embraces ‘Life’ and turns to leave Ireland. Joyce, that is, determined to weave the thematic threads of his own life history into the fabric of a novel and to do so without flinching from the facts. He had formed himself in the insistence on holding out for the truth; this novel would be truthful.

Those early reviewers of
Portrait
found it so. In fact, what Joyce’s antagonists, early and late, despised was what one reviewer of
Portrait
called his ‘invincible honesty’, another his ‘intellectual integrity, his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely… . He is a realist of the first order.’
¹³
Everyone, whether praising or condemning the
novel, stood astonished at Joyce’s ability to present what J. C. Squire described as ‘sheer undecorated, unintensified truth’.
¹⁴
But these reviewers didn’t know the man James Joyce from a bar of soap. They could not possibly be judging whether the novel was a faithful, truthful account of his own life, whether, that is, it was a faithful, true autobiography, whether Stephen Dedalus was a faithful, true portrait of James Joyce. So what, then, did these critics mean by ‘truth’?

H. G. Wells gives the game away when he mentions ‘decorum’. There are things that polite, decorous people do not mention in public. Nice people don’t talk about religion or politics, nor do they ever on any account admit into discussion the emissions, excitations, vulnerabilities of the body. In the eyes of such decorous people, James Joyce was not a nice writer. Early critics felt they had to warn the unsuspecting public: ‘[O]ne distinguishing feature of the book [is] its astounding bad manners. About this one must speak frankly at the start and have done with it’, wrote one. Another found ‘the religious questions and the political questions … too roughly handled to please the incurably devout and patriotic. If they ever put up a statue of Joyce in Dublin, it will not be during his life time’ (he was right on that one at least). A third critic, fronting up to the
really
vulgar issues, pointed to what he called
Portrait
’s ‘improprieties—there is one on the very first page’.
¹⁵
On the very first page? ‘When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold’ (5). In 1916, wetting the bed was not the proper stuff of fiction. Nor was sex, nor family fights about the conflicting demands of loyalty to one’s religious leaders as against loyalty to one’s country, nor the torments of Hell vividly and sensuously evoked by a priest attempting to scare the holy bejesus out of young boys and send them trembling to the confessional, nor those boys’ irreverent banter, nor the graffiti they scrawl on toilet walls, nor the ‘smugging’ they get up to within those walls, nor even the simple closely and unflinchingly observed consequences of poverty—aspiring artists should not be shown picking lice off their necks, let alone visiting prostitutes or … wetting the bed. When publishing the novel serially, even the
Egoist
, that harbinger of artistic
freedom, had been forced by its printers to accede to the excision of a long paragraph at the opening of
Chapter III
where Stephen imagines that he will again visit ‘the squalid quarter of brothels’ as ‘the whores’ are ‘just coming out of their houses making ready for the night’ (86).
¹⁶
That kind of ‘undecorated, unintensified truth’ was just too much to print.

‘nature … expressed otherwise’

But truth-telling alone does not a great novel make.
Stephen Hero
, Joyce’s first attempt to weave the threads of his own life into fiction, shows candour. This was not enough. Intending that the finished work comprise sixty-three chapters, Joyce managed to complete only twenty-five when he cast it aside. At its best
Stephen Hero
charms as does occasionally any run-of-the-mill Edwardian novel. Despite his brother Stanislaus’s estimate at the time—‘the chapters are exceptionally well written in a style which seems to me altogether original’
¹⁷
—one cannot imagine this book causing much more than a ripple of notice. Its interest now is largely if not entirely as an early Joyce misfire. It shares with
Portrait
subject matter and genre, for though only the ‘University episode’ survives, we know it was meant to follow in detail the life of a young Irish Catholic boy from infancy to young manhood. Each is a
Bildungsroman
, a novel tracing the growth and development of an individual to the point that he or she walks out of the novel on the last page seemingly self-determined and self-determining. Each is, in fact, a
Kunstlerroman
, a novel depicting the growth and development of an artist. Both
Stephen Hero
’s Stephen Daedalus and
Portrait
’s Stephen Dedalus live lives similar in many respects to Joyce’s own. As he told Stanislaus, he meant the novel to be ‘almost autobiographical’.
¹⁸
(And in a
reversal that had life imitating art, when Joyce published the first versions of three stories that, revised, he included in
Dubliners
, he did so under the pseudonym ‘Stephen Daedalus’.
¹⁹
)
Stephen Hero
, more obviously autobiographical than
Portrait
, takes its form from the episodic, ‘one-damn-thing-after-another’ school and includes events seemingly because they happened to the young Joyce and characters seemingly because Joyce met their equivalents in real life. Stephen’s family plays a much larger part in
Stephen Hero
, and individuals other than Stephen are drawn independently and dramatically. And yet Joyce became frustrated with the book very early in his writing of it. As he wrote to Stanislaus, ‘I am afraid I cannot finish my novel for a long time. I am discontented with a great deal of it and yet how is Stephen’s nature to be expressed otherwise? Eh?’
²⁰
In answering this question, Joyce transformed a workmanlike novel into a work of art.

The steps Joyce took were principally two: most significantly, he moved the narrative centre of consciousness from a wholly independent third-person narrator to one which exists between Stephen and the third-person narrator. Joyce’s precise method represents a radical departure from previous modes of story-telling and profoundly affects the meanings of the novel (a point to which we will return). Events and characters of
Portrait
take their significance from Stephen. While there is still a third-person narrator, that narrator presents
Stephen’s
perceptions: the attitudes towards others and events are his; they are ‘seen’ by or ‘focalized’ by him. And because they are viewed by him, they reflect something about him. All go to the ends of characterizing the young artist-in-the-making.

Secondly, Joyce ruthlessly exercised a principle of selection. No longer in
Portrait
do we get everything including the kitchen sink; no longer does the narrative go plodding along in a this-happened-and-then-that-happened-and-then-that-happened kind of way. Instead of sixty-three chapters there are five and those five are carefully patterned individual entities even as they play parts in the overall pattern of the whole novel. The general movement—one dictated by the demands of chronology: Stephen grows up—remains, but each
chapter displays its own pattern and movement. Each individual episode mirrors, in effect, the general movement of the whole; each is a minidrama of rising from lowliness to triumph. Unlike
Stephen Hero
,
Portrait
shows Joyce compressing, selecting the salient detail, arranging things to suit the aesthetic pattern of the novel, not to accord with the timing of his own life history. So, critics have found it impossible to match the chronology of the novel to the events in Joyce’s own life. In writing
Portrait
, Joyce selected; he arranged; he did not transcribe.

In this new arrangement, each chapter represents a phase in the life of the young artist.
Chapter I
gives Stephen’s early childhood: Stephen at Clongowes Wood College, at home with his family in Bray for the Christmas dinner fight about Parnell, back at Clongowes where he is unjusly pandied by one schoolmaster and, having pleaded this injustice before another, emerges triumphant.
Chapter II
traces a pattern of Stephen’s burgeoning sexuality which registers in his longing to find in his own life one like the beautiful Mercedes in
The Count of Monte Cristo
, in his writing verses to E——C——, in his reeling from finding the word ‘foetus’ carved into the bench of the physics theatre when he visits Cork with his father, in his masturbatory fantasies, and finally in his visit to the prostitute with which the chapter ends. Counterpointing this narrative preoccupation are his family’s moves. When the chapter opens Stephen has already left Clongowes and the family has moved to Blackrock; during its course, they move to first one then another address in Dublin, each less salubrious than the last. At Dublin’s Belvedere College Stephen acts the part of the ‘farcical pedagogue’ in the Whitsuntide play and defends his unorthodox literary tastes against the philistinism of his schoolmates.
Chapter III
concerns itself entirely with the religious reawakening which culminates in Stephen’s repentance and confession. Stephen, still in mortal sin at the chapter’s outset, attends a retreat with the other Belvedere boys. There Father Arnall’s harrowing, vividly detailed sermon on the torments of Hell that will visit the unrepentant sinful fills him with guilt, and with ‘trembling body … with whimpering lips’ he confesses his sins to an old priest.
Chapter IV
traces the slow disintegration of Stephen’s religious commitment and its replacement with the secular call to art. Because of Stephen’s now evident piety, the director of Belvedere asks him if he might have a vocation for
the priesthood. Stephen opts instead for university. Walking on the strand, he ‘seem[s] to see’ Daedalus, the mythic artificer whose name he bears, then encounters a young woman whom he imagines a fabulous creature, ‘one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird’ (144). Both seem to him emblems of his calling as an artist. In the meantime, to avoid eviction, the family moves yet again. Over the course of
Chapter V
, Stephen sloughs off friends, family, national and religious demands in order to answer the call of art. At university he converses with the dean of studies about language and art, with his friends Davin (about Irish politics), Lynch (about his theories of art), and Cranly (about love, particularly that of a mother and son, and about his having left the Church). To Cranly, he declares, ‘I will not serve’ (201):