A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A novel in the form of an autobiography. Or an autobiography in the form of a novel. Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin. We meet him as a boy. Five chapters later he leaves Ireland as a young man, saying, “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” (p. 253).

As Stephen Dedalus grows from child, to adolescent, to young man; from grade school to university; Joyce’s narrative style changes, too. Chapter one, the prose is childlike, matching Stephen’s childish interests and understandings. Chapter five when Stephen is reasoning with fellow university students like a budding philosopher and making jokes in Latin, the prose has become equally mature.

Chapter one gives us young Stephen at school. He works to find his place among the other boys. There’s a great scene back at home for the Christmas holiday where Stephen listens to the adults arguing over politics and religion. They’re all Irish nationalists but the question is whether they can still revere Parnell now that he’s been caught in adultery. Stephen’s father and great uncle defend Parnell. Stephen’s old nurse, Dante Riordan, sides with the church, which condemns Parnell. At school, Stephen is punished unfairly for breaking his glasses and not doing his schoolwork. Bravely, he defends himself to the rector and is hailed as a hero by the other boys.

Chapter two, the family’s finances aren’t good. The family moves from Blackrock in the south of Dublin to a cheaper apartment in town. He switches schools from Clongowes to Belvedere, a different Jesuit boys school. We observe his first attempt at writing. He tries and fails to compose a poem based on an earlier incident of riding home on a tram with a girl he likes. In relating that failed attempt he remembers an earlier failed attempt, “the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices” (p. 70) Then there’s a long scene at a school play. He travels with his father to his father’s home city, county Cork. Stephen wins a prize for an essay and spends lavishly on his family until the money runs out. The chapter ends with his sexual initiation with a prostitute.

Chapter three is an extended description of a four-day “retreat” at the Jesuit school in honor of the school’s founder, St. Francis Xavier. The retreat features a series of long, lecturey, sermons by one of the brothers on the logic of sin, God’s justice, and the punishment of Hell. Joyce produces the lectures in full. Stephen, feeling guilty because of his recent sexual activity gives himself fully to the terrors of damnation and the proffered salvation. The chapter closes with Stephen making confession and turning his life over.

So in Chapter four, Stephen follows a religious path. So wholly committed does he seem that the Director of the school asks Stephen if he might be called to the priesthood. Stephen considers it, but, more drawn by the spiritual power and mystery of the office than by sincere devotion, he decides against it. He says, “He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world” (p. 162).

Chapter five, Stephen is at university. A dean is preparing an empty lecture hall for the students by lighting a fire. He and Stephen chat and for the first time the word “artist” appears.

“You are an artist, are you not, Mr. Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question. He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty. “Can you solve that question now?” he asked.” (p. 185).

Stephen answers with a quote from Acquinas. Pulcra sunt quad visa placent. “That is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases.” He meets his friends. They joke in Latin and talk philosophy. He pulls away one friend, Lynch, and they walk together with Stephen expounding his theory of aesthetics, developed from Acquinas and Aristotle. He successfully writes a villanelle, inspired by a girl he has a crush on (p. 223). He has another talk with another friend, Cranly, this time about having given up religion and whether he should submit to his mother’s request to do his Easter “duty.” Stephen has become alienated to all that used to hold him to Irish identity, parents, religion, politics, language, education. He decides he should go. The chapter, and the book, ends with several pages of short diary entries, March 25 through April 27, at the end of which Joyce intends to leave Ireland.

I would have sworn that I read this book before but as I read it now I realized I hadn’t. Much of the first chapter was familiar to me but nothing after that, so probably I read the first chapter, or some of it, but never beyond that. It’s not a great book, or rather, it’s greatness relies on its relationship to Joyce’s other works, not in itself. The opening chapters are cliche schoolboy stuff, dealing with bullies, separating from parents, awakening sexuality. It’s well done but not new. The long third chapter with sermons on sin and Hell feels belabored and out of place. I liked it, I’m a minister and spent three years at seminary, but it unbalances the novel, like a heavy stone weighing down the middle of a sheet. After that, the philosophical discussion on aesthetics never drew me back in. Much of the novel seems more important to Joyce than he can expect it to be to his readers.

It is, after all, an exercise of ego to write an autobiographical novel. Which is not to say that a self-told life is necessarily uninteresting to others. The chief pleasure of a novel, every novel, is how closely it brings us to the mind of the author. I was thinking, having just read, The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, how that novel’s similar title switches the articles. Henry James is focused on the portrait, implying that perhaps any other number of ladies would serve equally well for subject. James Joyce is interested in the artist, the young man, himself, and perhaps feels his particular subject would be worthy of any number of portraits, this being merely one.