A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) Read online

  A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

  The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero’s quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

  This edition, published for the novel’s centennial, is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.

  * * *

  “Magical . . . A coming-of-age story, perhaps the prime example of that genre in English literature . . . Even now, twenty-seven years after reading it for the first time, its moods come back to me.”

  —Karl Ove Knausgaard, from the Foreword

  “One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.”

  —H. G. Wells

  “[Mr. Joyce is] concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad message through the brain, he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, though it be probability or coherence or any other of the handrails to which we cling for support when we set our imaginations free.”

  —Virginia Woolf

  “[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will] remain a permanent part of English literature.”

  —Ezra Pound

  PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

  A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

  JAMES JOYCE was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family that, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. In 1902, following his graduation from University College, Dublin, he went to Paris, where he devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches, and to formulating an “aesthetic system.” Recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the fatal illness of his mother, he met a young woman from Galway, Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to go with him to the Continent, where they finally settled, in Trieste, in 1905. They had two children, a son, Giorgio, and a daughter, Lucia. Joyce’s first book, the poems of Chamber Music, was published in London in 1907, followed by Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Exiles, a play (1918). In 1920, Joyce moved to Paris, publishing Ulysses, the book that brought him international fame, in 1922. His final book, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939. After the outbreak of World War II, Joyce moved back to Zurich, where he had lived during World War I. He died there on January 13, 1941.

  KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD is the author of the New York Times bestselling six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, a global literary phenomenon that has won numerous international literary awards and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He was born in 1968 in Oslo, Norway, and now lives in Sweden.

  SEAMUS DEANE, professor of English and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the general editor of the works of James Joyce for Penguin Classics.

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  First published in the United States of America by B. W. Huebsch Inc., 1916

  The definitive text, corrected from the Dublin holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellman, first published by The Viking Press, Inc., 1964

  Published with an introduction and notes by Seamus Deane in Penguin Books (U.K.) 1992

  Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1993

  This edition with a new foreword by Karl Ove Knausgaard published 2016

  Copyright © 1964 by the Estate of James Joyce

  Introduction and notes copyright © 1992 by Seamus Deane

  Foreword copyright © 2016 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Foreword translation copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC

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  ISBN 9781101992241

  Cover by Roman Muradov

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword: The Long Way Home by KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

  Introduction by SEAMUS DEANE

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A Note on the Text

  A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

  Notes

  Foreword

  The Long Way Home

  This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Its genesis was long and tortuous—Joyce began writing his novel in 1904—and the road to its canonization as one of the seminal works of Western literature was not short either: the reviews spoke of the author’s “cloacal obsession” and “the slime of foul sewers,” comments that seem strange today, insofar as it is the subjective aspect of the book, the struggle that goes on inside the mind of its young protagonist, that perhaps stands out to us now as its most striking feature. What appeared at the time to be unprecedented about the novel seems more mundane to us today, whereas what then came across as mundane now seems unprecedented. That Joyce’s novel should remain so vital, in contrast to almost all others published in 1916, is down to the fact that the author so forcefully strived toward an idiosyncratic form of expression, a language intrinsic to the story he wanted to tell, about the young man, Stephen Dedalus, and his formative years in Dublin, in which uniqueness was the very point, and the question of what constitutes the individual was the issue posed.

  The first time I heard about James Joyce I was eighteen years old, working as a substitute teacher in a small community in northern Norway and wanting to be a writer. That ambition had prompted me to subscribe to a literary journal, and in one of the issues that came in the mail there was a series of articles on the masterpieces of modernism, one of which was Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The word modernism evoked in me a vague notion of machines, futuristic and shiny, and when I read about the tower that Stephen Dedalus—a protagonist of both novels—inhabits at the beginning of the book, I imagined some sort of medieval world of turreted castles, though with cars of the 1920s and airplanes, a place populated by young men reciting works in Latin and Greek—in other words, something very remote from the world in which I resided, with its quaysides and fishing boats, its steeply rising fells and icy ocean, its fishermen and factory workers, TV programs and pounding car audio systems. I longed to get away. What I wanted was to write, and I resolved to read this marvelous work and be illuminated by all its radiance. For me, a
t that time, literature represented somewhere else, and my conception of Ulysses was tinged by the books I had read, the boyhood excesses lived out in the French fantasies of Jules Verne, for instance, or swashbuckling classics like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, or Treasure Island—imaginary worlds in which I had lived half my life, and which for me were the very essence of literature. Literature was somewhere other than me, so I thought, and related to that was another idea I had, that everything of meaning was to be found at the center, that only there did important things happen, while all that occurred on the periphery—where I felt I was—was without significance and unworthy of being written about. History belonged to others, literature belonged to others, truth belonged to others.

  Three years later I sat in the library at the University of Bergen reading Ulysses, in English. By that time, the literary adventures of my boyhood and youth had been cast aside and my naïve notion of literature’s essence adjusted, but the idea of it belonging to others, those with talent and knowledge, who inhabited the center, lingered on. I never related Ulysses to my own world, to the young people at the desks around me—even though one of the scenes in the book takes place in a library, among students—not to mention the cobbled streets outside, the gateways and alleys, the shop windows and hoardings, the umbrellas, strollers, raincoats, and overcoats. No, Ulysses took place in the language, and the reality the novel described occurred in the land of modernism, in the depths of literature’s continent. I read it in the way an archaeologist might excavate an ancient monument, layer by layer, piece by piece, endeavoring thereby to make some meaningful totality of it all, always with my own inferiority and limitations in relation to it clear in mind. It was like an idiot stumbling over the remains of Troy and trying to make sense of what he had found.

  Since I had an assignment to write about Ulysses, I read Joyce’s other books too, among them his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And how different it was! Where Ulysses scatters, Portrait holds together. Where Ulysses describes one day in a single town, Portrait depicts twenty years in a life. And where Ulysses swells with linguistic inventiveness and gleeful experimentation, Portrait swells with . . . well, what? Mood. Even now, twenty-seven years after reading it for the first time, its moods come back to me. The rain-drenched school buildings in the dusk, the circumambient sound of children’s voices, the dull thud of a foot striking a ball, the heavy arc of the ball in the dismal air. The smell of cold night in the chapel, and the hum of prayer. The family gathered together on Christmas Day, waiting for the dinner to be served, the fire burning in the fireplace, candles lighting up the table, the bonds and conflicts that exist between the people seated around it. The father, who talks with strangers in bars and tells the same stories every time. The narrow, filthy lanes in which the prostitutes huddle, the yellow gaslights, the smell of perfume, Stephen’s trembling heart. And the birds at evening, circling above the library, dark against the blue-gray sky, their cry “shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.”

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a so-called Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, perhaps the prime example of that genre in English literature. It deals with identity, or more precisely the way in which identity arises, the events that shape us and make us who we are. These circumstances are more or less the same for everyone. We are born into a family, and by virtue of how it receives and relates to us, we become manifest to ourselves and to others. We learn a language, and though it does not belong to us alone, but is shared by all members of the community, it is by means of our language that we understand and express ourselves and that which is all around us. With the language comes a culture, of which, whether we like it or not, we become a part. Our circles widen, we start school, and the process of our socialization becomes more formal. We learn about the language, our culture and society, and to that first identity within the family a new layer of national identity is added. Within this screen the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, emerges as an Irish Catholic son of a petty bourgeois family, only to turn against all these categories in the latter half of the novel, rejecting Irish nationalism, rejecting his Catholic religion, rejecting the middle class, insistent on being nobody’s son.

  The key scene in the book occurs when Stephen is out walking with his friend Cranly and confides to him that he has quarrelled with his mother that morning about religion—because he had refused to receive the Eucharist. Cranly fails to see the problem: Surely he could do it for his mother’s sake, regardless of his absent faith? But Stephen is resolute. “I will not serve,” he says. But why not? This is the novel’s most important question, and the work itself, in its artistic entirety, is the answer. We are not merely the age in which we live, not merely our language, or the family to which we belong, our religion, our country, our culture. We are this and more, insofar as each of us is an individual encountering and relating to all of these categories. But what exactly does this individual comprise? What is its nature, and how do we go about capturing and describing it? How do we even see it, when the tools and instruments at our disposal are precisely of our age, our language, our religion, our culture? In order to reach into the essence of the individual, we must break away from that which is common to us all, and this is what Joyce does in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He ventures inside that part of our identity for which no language yet exists, probing into the space between what belongs to the individual alone and what is ours together, exploring the shifts of mind, the currents of the soul as they flow blindly this way and that, and that we know to be moods and feelings, the unarticulated, more or less salient presence of the soul, that part of our inner being that rises when we are enthused and falls when we are afraid or despairing. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is about this, a young man’s soul, and what makes Joyce’s novel so magical, and what moreover is the true essence of literature, is that the conquest of what belongs to the individual alone, what is special and characteristic, and to Joyce’s mind unique, is also what belongs, and is unique, to us. Literature is never the preserve of others, and it knows no center—which is to say that its center is any place at which it exists. Only by refusing to serve, as Stephen does, may the artist do just that: serve. Only by means of a no may a book such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man emerge into being. And only by means of a no may a book like Ulysses reach its famous conclusion: “and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

  KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

  Translated by Martin Aitken

  Introduction

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) ends with a beginning. Stephen Dedalus emerges in the last pages of the last chapter as the ‘I’ who will ‘forge . . . the uncreated conscience of my race’ (here). The switch from the neuter third-person narrator, commanding a discourse that is dominated by quotation, repetition and carefully construed rhythmical effects, to a first-person whose discourse is by comparison disjointed, careening from petty local detail to the declaration of his solemn ambition, is dislocating for the reader. Yet, for all his lonely self-assertion, Stephen recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration. Similarly, it is in relation to his community that he learns the techniques of individuation, although it is by a process of inversion that he achieves his ambition to be self-born.

  Stephen, as child, as boy and as young man, is seduced time and again by siren voices – parental, political, religious, sexual, literary – but concedes ultimately only to his own voice, or to the ventriloquial version of his own voice that he assigns to his ‘soul’. That spiritual voicing, although it is the product of a closely exercised discipline of isolation, is not the voicing of a private or personal condition only. It is the voicing of the hitherto unrealized and unexamined condition of a race, the Irish. Portrait is among the most important of Irish novels because it is the first to ex
amine the distorted relationship between the Irish community and oppression and to focus upon oppression’s ultimate resource – the cooperation of the oppressed. It is a sweet irony that the novel should have appeared in the year of the Easter Rising in Dublin. The political rebellion and even the cultural resurgence led by Yeats seemed to Joyce insufficient (although notable) attempts on the part of the Irish to break from the psychological dependency that they manifested towards the British and the Roman Catholic imperiums that had between them transformed the Irish into ‘A race of clodhoppers!’ (here).

  It is customary to say that in this, as in other works by Joyce, we witness a reaction to the squalor, paralysis and servility of Irish life. This is true, but the point loses its force unless it is refined further. It is well known that many of the most important modernist writers display a strong dislike of the ‘modern world’ of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mass civilization. A new and profound degeneracy had, it seemed, emerged. To overcome it, authority had to be renovated and reaffirmed; to explain it, the social and political system had to be analysed; to describe it, new modes of representation had to be developed. From Nietzsche to D. H. Lawrence, there is generated in European writing an obsessional, combative, threnodic discourse that is both of and against the white European world’s loss of culture and confidence, a patriarchal collapse into disorder and confusion. While it is proper to see Joyce’s work in that relation, it is ill-advised to think of him as only one more voice in the general chorus of lamentation. That role is more dramatically and successfully filled by his great compatriot and contemporary, Yeats. Joyce was unforgiving in his analysis of the Irish version of degeneration, but he came to understand that the morbidity of his community’s condition was not the consequence of a lost wholeness or of a traditional culture. Instead, it was the adherence to deforming systems of belief and modes of behaviour that kept the Irish in bondage. It was fear of freedom, fear of the body, fear of the complexity of experience that would always be in excess of the conventions which attempted to organize it into stereotyped patterns that wounded the Irish spirit. This fear was all the more pronounced because the conventional systems by which the Irish lived were borrowed, from both London and Rome; even their revival was, in his view, a fake, both because it found its ratification in a misty and suspect past rather than in the present and because it reproduced – in its valorization of manliness, sexual purity, the glory of defeat, the imaginative destiny of the Celt or Gael, the spiritual and religious character of the race – the very features of its colonial–Catholic oppression that it was trying to erase. Degeneracy, insofar as that mobile term could be taken to identify a condition, was the product of tradition not the consequence of its loss.