The portrait of the artist as a young man- James Joyce

James Joyce is arguably the most influential modern writer. His influence on the

fictional technique of twentieth-century writers has been outstanding. His chief contribution to

fiction is the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. Considered to be an autobiographical novel, A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's most widely-read work.

The novel under consideration, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was completed

in three phases. Early in 1904 Joyce wrote a short autobiographical story entitled ‘A portrait of

the artist’ but his efforts to get it published came to nothing. Determined, in the following year

Joyce wrote a longer autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero. In 1908, he revised this text

and he made a fresh start which became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and it was

completed in 1914.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce describes his own development,

through the fictional personality of Stephen Dedalus, from early childhood till the time of early

manhood. It is also the story of Joyce’s own break with the Catholic Church and the discovery of

his true vocation. Hence this novel belongs to the kind of fiction known as bildungsroman or the

novel of formation, which describes a character’s struggle from childhood towards maturity.

This novel covers the childhood and adolescence of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist.

Over the course of the novel the hero grows from a little boy to a young man of eighteen who

decides to leave his country for Europe, in order to be an artist.

Both in style and content the novel was extraordinary for its time. Stream of

consciousness technique which Joyce made popular with this work is the method of narrating the

thought process of a character. Thus the novel moves forward through the path of Stephen’s

consciousness.
 Joyce’s novel is divided into five chapters. At the start of the novel, Stephen is a young

boy, probably about five-years-old. He is one of the younger students at Clongowes Wood

College for boys. It is an elementary school run by Jesuit priests. Stephen is an extremely

sensitive child, and his athletic incompetence makes him nervous and fearful. In all his

interactions with the other boys, he is practically silent. If he disagrees with their judgments, he

keeps his thoughts to himself. Also he is an easy target for bullies because of his sensitive nature,

small size, and social awkwardness. One day, he is pushed into outhouse drainage by a student

named Wells. As a result he finds himself sick when he wakes up the following day and is taken

to the infirmary.

While in the infirmary, Stephen dreams of going home for the Christmas holidays. The

next narration is about the Dedalus family at Christmas dinner, and a heated argument erupts

between Stephen’s father and Dante, Stephen’s governess, about Parnell and the Catholic

Church. The Irish political and religious scenario is a major part of the novel.

Back at school, Stephen has broken his glasses and has been excused from classwork by

his teacher, Father Arnall. The prefect of studies, Father Dolan, comes into class to discipline the

students, and singles out Stephen as a “lazy idle little loafer.” Stephen is ‘pandied’, that is, his

knuckles beaten with a bat in front of the class, and feels the injustice of his punishment deeply.

The other students urge him to speak to the rector of the college. He gets up the courage to do so,

and the rector promises to speak to Father Dolan. Stephen is congratulatedby the other students.

In short the first chapter consists of four parts. The first and shortest of these parts is

Stephen’s infancy. Suddenly skipping the years, Stephen is at school, on playground, in class
room, dormitory, and infirmary. The third part finds him back at home for the Christmas dinner.

Later he is back on playground and in refectory and he goes to the rector’s study with a

complaint against Father Dolan.Hence this initial chapter introduces to the major forces that

shape Stephen: Irish nationalism, Catholicism, and his incredible sensitivity.

In the second chapter, Stephen is a few years older. It contains the transition from

Stephen's late childhood to his teenage years.Adolescence is a conflicted time for Stephen, and

an extremely important one.He is no longer at Clongowes but at Belvedere College. He has

started to become interested in literature, and tends to romanticize his life based on what he

reads. He participates in a play at Belvedere. He tries to write a poem to the girl he loves, but

cannot.

He finds success as an actor and an essayist.Stephen takes a trip to Cork with his father,

and his father shows him the town where he was born and raised, and the school he attended

when he was Stephen’s age. During the trip, Stephen realizes that he has changed so completely

that his childhood seems like a dim memory.

The child in Chapter 1 is often frightened, ashamed of the difference between himself

and others; the adolescent Stephen in Chapter 2 is more independent. His rejection of the Church

is foreshadowed here: he defends Byron, despite the poet's heresies, and he himself writes an

essay that contains a small bit of heresy on a philosophical point.

Back in Dublin, Stephen wins a sum of money for an essay competition, and, for a brief

time, treats himself and his family to a “season of pleasure.” When the money runs out, he is

seen wandering the red light districts of Dublin, fantasizing about the prostitutes. As the chapter
ends, Stephen has his first sexual experience and that is with a prostitute.In short the second

chapter describes Stephen’s adolescence from his earliest stirrings of sexuality to his first

experience of an intercourse with a prostitute and it also describes his growing alienation from

his family, especially his father.

Chapter 3 deals with the results of Stephen's first rebellion against Catholic values.

Apparently he makes soliciting prostitutes a habit. He goes through the motions in school and at

church, and is not bothered by the deceitfulness of his life. He goes on a religious retreat with his

class and his sense of being lost makes it possible for Father Arnall's sermons to bring him back

to the Church. Thepriest’s sermon about sin and damnation affects Stephen deeply. He repents,

goes to confession at the chapel across town, and takes communion.

Stephen now dedicates his life to God. He prays constantly, and goes about crushing his

senses. He has completely renounced his sinful relations with the prostitutes, and seeing his

pious life, the director at Belvedere speaks to him about becoming a priest. The idea first seems

to appeal to Stephen, but he ultimately decides that he could not become a priest. In brief, the

third chapter is devoted to Stephen’s remorse as a result of which he also contemplates a career

of Jesuit priesthood.

The fourth chapter records the grand turning point in Stephen’s spiritual life. His father

makes plans for Stephen, who is 16, to enter the university. Walking along the seashore one

afternoon, thinking about poetry, Stephen sees a young woman bathing. They stare at each other,

but do not speak. Stephen takes this as a spiritual sign, and he excitedly decides to dedicate his

life to art.
 The fifth chapter is the lengthy chronicle of Stephen’s rebellion. In this final chapter,

Stephen is at the university. He is lazy about his classes but passionate about his developing

theory of aesthetics. He refuses to sign a political petition, thus trying to set himself apart from

the concerns of his country’s politics or religion. Talking to his close friend, Cranly, Stephen

announces that he has decided to leave Ireland for Europe to pursue his artistic vocation. The

novel closes with him making plans to leave for the continent.

Joyce calls our attention to the symbolism of Stephen's name as the novel is based upon

the myth of Dedalus. Stephen envisions himself as the winged Dedalus. Stephen's destiny is

foreshadowed: as Dedalus escaped from his island prison, Stephen will escape from the island

prison of Ireland.

As a whole what Joyce tries to emphasize is that an artist is essentially an individual

who can flourish only by becoming free of all collective entanglements and commitments in the

world around him. Joyce himself led a life of self- imposed exile as he left Ireland after he

completed his college studies in Ireland.

The opening passage of Portrait does more, however, than simply offer an instance of the
multilayered, ideologically resonant nature of Joyce’s writing style. It also exemplifies one of
Joyce’s most significant formal innovations. For Portrait announces from its first page Joyce’s
radical break with the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel. There is no omniscient
narrator here, who directs the reader’s response. Instead the narrative focuses on a particular
consciousness, and is articulated through the kind of language that such a consciousness would
use.

Joyce’s extension of the established modernist literary technique of free indirect

discourse is crucial to Portrait’s ironic mode. While Joyce avoids the explicit narrative
commentary associated with classic realist fiction, the quasi-autobiographical nature of his novel
invites us to puzzle over the nature of the author’s relationship to his creation. At one level,
Stephen is a portrait of Joyce as a young man; any glance at a biography of Joyce’s early years
will show how closely the two share their family background, education and youthful religious,
political and sexual experiences. Yet Joyce’s authorial retreat from the text destabilizes any
reading of the novel as straight autobiography, since Joyce is scrupulous in allowing ironic
distance to problematize his depiction of Stephen. The novel’s episodic rhythms underscore this
irony. Divided into five chapters, each episode apparently ends with an epiphany – a moment of
sexual, religious or artistic revelation which could be seen to deepen and enrich Stephen’s
character. Yet each concluding epiphany is abruptly followed by a moment of bathos: Stephen’s
confrontation with the rector at Clongowes at the close of Part One leads on to the foul smell of
Uncle Charles’s tobacco at the start of chapter two; sexual bliss in a prostitute’s arms gives way
to pedestrian dreams of stew for dinner; his epiphanic vision of the bird-girl bathing at the end of
chapter four is undercut by the breakfast squalor of ‘watery tea’ and rifled pawn tickets at the
beginning of the final chapter.

His contrasting styles in A Portrait present a character whose experiences regularly involve
opposing forces that seem irreconcilable, such as the violent political and religious antagonisms
that Stephen witnesses during the Christmas dinner in part i. The strongly divergent aspects of
the book’s language pertain simultaneously, though in different ways, to the writer who has
learned to work with contrasts and to the character whose life and social context are filled with
them. Various judgements about Stephen become possible in the frame of a new complexity that
arises from Joyce’s differential style for capturing the shifting qualities of conflict and memory.
The complexity arises as well from a narrative structure that emphasizes repetition rather than
continuous, chronological development and from the merging of the personal with myth and with
history. In A Portrait we see the swerving in Stephen’s life more clearly and regularly than in
Stephen Hero. At the end of each of A Portrait’s five parts, Joyce uses elevated language to
suggest that Stephen achieves a momentary insight and intensity through a transforming
experience: his communion with nature and his fellow students after complaining to the Rector at
the end of part i; his sexual initiation in the encounter with a prostitute at the end of part ii; his
post-confession, pre-communion peace at the end of part iii; his commitment to art climactically
presented as an encounter with an idealized woman at the end of part iv; and the exclamations
about hopes for the future in mythic and racial terms at the end of Stephen’s journal. At the start
of each succeeding part, Joyce counters ironically the intensity of the preceding conclusion by
switching immediately and unexpectedly to a realistic style and realistic details: the bad smell of
Uncle Charles’s tobacco in part ii; the craving of Stephen’s belly for food in part iii; the
mechanical, dehumanized character of Stephen’s religious discipline in part iv; and in part v the
dreary homelife that is the daily context and one frame of reference for Stephen’s aesthetic
ambitions. The pattern of contrasts is also repeated at various minor junctures in the narrative,
for instance, at the end of the first section and the beginning of the second section of part ii,
when Stephen’s revery about Mercedes is followed by the ‘great yellow caravans’.

Like Stephen Hero, A Portrait is episodic, with little or no transition from one situation to
another, but the later work provides an orienting sequence of rises and falls for Stephen’s
development. Joyce emphasizes the pattern by abandoning narrative continuity to make moments
that are separated in time contiguous in the narration. Even within the individual, juxtaposed
moments of elevated, climactic insight and countering, realistic perception, a pattern of contrast
and possible merger sometimes appears. When this happens, a highly complex process of
reading can ensue that may mimic Stephen’s process of recollection. Stephen’s portrait turns out
to be the name of a question about the future and its relations to the past, about our duty not to
escape from history but to rewrite it and reinvent ourselves.