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

  In his 1904 essay, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, Joyce provided an early sketch of himself (‘His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural’) and of his view of his contemporaries:

  These young men saw in the death of a dull French novelist (Emile Zola) the hand of Emmanuel God with us; they admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare; and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to every day needs, in the Church diplomatic. In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (wherever there was a question of authority) a very English liberalism.

  He goes on to point up contradictions in the attitudes of his fellow students. Pledged to self-denial, they admired those who were ‘wild’; meek in themselves, they greeted rebellion when they met it in the writings and stories of Irish rebels. They preserved ‘the union of faith and fatherland’ despite its inner tensions and, above all, accepted authority.

  The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never.

  In what now reads like an anticipation of Stephen Hero, the abandoned novel out of which Portrait grew, Joyce goes on to speak of the false antinomies with which, in such a world, he was faced – on the one hand ‘sensitiveness’, on the other hand ‘dullness’. This too is an early indication of one of the ironically presented motifs in Portrait, the distinction between the sensitive artist and his dull, sports-playing, subservient friends. As in Stephen Hero, he announced his ‘Nego’, the denial (‘non serviam: I will not serve’, as it became in Portrait) that faced both ways and caused a furore. He played ‘the mocking devil in an isle twice removed from the mainland, under joint government of their Intensities and their Bullockships’ wrote his ‘Nego’ ‘amid a chorus of peddling Jews’ gibberish and Gentile clamour’ and was condemned to hell. But ‘that outburst over, it was urbanity in warfare’. That final phrase catches the quality that distinguishes Portrait from Stephen Hero. In the latter, Stephen’s war is conducted by frontal assault; in Portrait it is conducted obliquely, by deconstruction rather than by destruction, by an insider who only becomes himself when he becomes an outsider. But the negativity, the denial, is not barren. It too has its utopian moment. In the famous closing passage of this essay, Joyce, deploying the vocabulary of degeneration and infection, nevertheless writes a prelude to the great finales that give his most famous works their communal, utopian dimension – as in the short story ‘The Dead’, as in Molly’s soliloquy in Ulysses and Anna Livia Plurabelle’s meditation in Finnegans Wake:

  Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lighting of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.

  This 1904 essay owes much to Ibsen. Like Nietzsche and Freud, he exposed the pharisaic face (or faces) of bourgeois society. Joyce is engaged on a similar enterprise, but he is famously different because, more than anyone else before or since, he situates his analysis in a specific place and, because he exploits that place’s reputation for wit and eloquence, makes language itself both the instrument and the object of his analysis.

  Dublin in Joyce’s writing is not a place in the sense that London is in, say, Dickens or Gissing. Its streets, shops, pubs, churches and civic buildings are named and located in relation to one another as though, out of these particularities, a generic map of The City as such could be drawn. Indeed, the condition of becoming generic is that of being specific. The problem is that a bridge over a canal, a Findlater’s church, a Bank of Ireland, a restaurant that is known by a Dedalus family nickname (‘Underdone’s’, here) may be too miscellaneous to conform to any generic pattern, or their function in relation to such a pattern may be too recondite or obscure, or it may be that what is generic in them is precisely their random, lividly particular nature. This last possibility is the most worrying and challenging, because it raises the possibility that all generic patterns are impositions upon a reality that is always in excess of their embrace and that the very idea of order and meaning is itself a delusion from which we must escape or to which we have to give a reluctant and disillusioned consent. It may be a delusion, but it is all we have got. Equally, it may be a delusion because it is constituted by the very language that we speak and write. Language, we may come to feel, may regulate reality but is not constitutive of it. Yet we can only know this, or say it, in language. It is, therefore, important to recognize from the outset that Joyce’s Dublin is a place, a site of linguistic self-consciousness and a point on a map of the modern world that may be only a projection of our desire to give our knowledge a shape that is foreign to or other than it. Above all, it is a place that is named.

  NAMING OF PLACE

  In Chapter V, Stephen leaves his house in Fairview to go to University College in Stephen’s Green. It is, of course, a journey that he regularly undertakes, and he has patterned it for himself as though his walk were a mnemonic device for his reading:

  The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman, that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile, that as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty, and that passing a grimy marine-dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson which begins:

  I was not wearier where I lay. (here)

  It is certainly possible (see notes) to identify the places and the writers mentioned here; it is almost certainly futile to do so in the hope of gaining access to the meaning(s) of the passage by observing that there is some correlation between, say, Cavalcanti’s ‘dark humour’ and the ‘provision shops’. The passage is a display of Stephen’s habitual way of going about Dublin, making associations, imposing significances that are private and peculiar to himself. We are only expected, one would guess, to glimpse the basis of the association, if any hint is given; but we cannot be sure we have done so. More reasonably, we can assure ourselves that we can see from such a passage the kind of intellectual dandy Stephen is; the very obscurity of the associations is itself the sign of his preciousness. Furthermore, the literary associations seem exotic in relation to the locales that precipitate them. Stephen has just left a miserable home, picked his way down a waterlogged lane strewn with mounds of rubbish, heard the screeching of a mad nun from a madhouse. This programmed walk is a soothing of his spirit, a way of dealing with a life that has become physically and socially repellent to him. The reader who thinks this too bland a conclusion still has to confront an even more random event when, a little later, ‘Near the hoardings on the canal’ Stephen meets ‘the consumptive man with the doll’s face and the brimless hat’ (here) and thinks that it must be eleven o’clock – since this is obviously a regular meeting (note the force of the definite article in these phrases in affirming the habitual character of this randomness) – looks into a dairy to see a clock that tells the wrong time and then hears a public clock strike eleven. This makes him think of his acquaintance, MacCann, of whom we then get a thumbnail sketch. Between that meeting and the next point in Stephen’s journey, Trinity College and the neighbouring statue of Thomas Moore, there is an immense qualitative difference. For the college and the statue are quickly identified as important representations of the young man’s cultural heritage and each is repudiated – Trinity’s dull, Protestant centrality, Moore’s ersatz Catholic–Celtic nationalism. And so on. The journey continues up Gra
fton Street to where Stephen once witnessed the laying of a slab in memory of the Irish republican patriot Wolfe Tone. To him it was a tawdry occasion. He goes on to the University College buildings in Stephen’s Green, where Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley were reputed to have said black masses in the days of the Anglo-Irish gentry; and finally he enters to meet the dean of studies, the English convert, with whom he has a famous confrontation over language, religion and aesthetics.

  All of Stephen’s walks are like this. The walk is itself one of the novel’s most effective rhetorical devices, allowing for conversation, flashbacks, meditations, and aligning these in a variety of ways to the geography of the city. The geography implies a history. Insofar as it is public, referring to public buildings and monuments, the history that accompanies it is ‘official’, national history. Insofar as it is private – hoardings, provision shops, a dairy with a clock – it is ‘personal’, the history of Stephen, his friendships, his reading and his thoughts. The distinction between the two is not secure, since Stephen is constantly reading the history of his city’s monuments in the light of his own preoccupations, making it, so to say, ‘personal’; and the personal history is being offered to us in a text and in a context that makes it historical too. Ireland has a story and Stephen has a story, and where they intersect is history. History is, in this sense, Stephen’s interpretation of aspects of Ireland’s past and of his own present upon which is mounted the reader’s interpretation of what Stephen–Joyce writes. For ‘Stephen’ is, obviously, the name that occurs most often in the novel, and our sense of Dublin as a place is to a large degree formed by the variety of the journeys he undertakes from the ever-shifting abodes of the downward-spiralling Dedalus family, from Bray to Blackrock, to Mountjoy Square, to Fairview and Drumcondra.

  The intensive naming of place, most of it centred on Dublin but stretching also to Kildare and Cork (and to towns like Buttevant, Kilmallock and Moycullen, which make brief appearances), both confirms and disturbs the possibility of seeing the local in larger metropolitan and world-historical terms. Although it is in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that we come to realize the full implications of the notion that a reading of history also involves a history of reading, the peregrinations of Stephen in Portrait also have this chiasmic function. Reading a city, as Stephen does, involves two different kinds of experience, as we have seen. What we may call the personal brings all that is otherwise anonymous – places like bridges, corners, shops, towpaths, shorelines, tramways – into view as surrounds for all that is officially historical. Important public buildings and monuments stand in relation to these other places like italicized passages in a body of roman type. They are quotations of and from history and they are increasingly incorporated into the geography of Stephen’s world, so that, by the close, it is the places of crucial importance to Stephen’s development that become, as it were, italicized in the reader’s mind – the steps of the National Library, the chapel at Clongowes, Dollymount Strand, and, in an obvious example, Stephen’s Green (‘Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green’, here). The importance of a place depends finally on the importance of being Stephen. It is he who confers value on the city he reads. It is, after all, his city and his reading.

  QUOTATION

  Portrait begins and ends with quotation. In the interval, quotations are so numerous that they entirely take over the text, as in Chapter III with the hell-fire sermon (quoted as by Fr Arnall, who is himself quoting a seventeenth-century treatise) and the close of Chapter V, which is taken up by quotations from Stephen’s diary. It is important that the novel ends by citing the words of the young man who has been its subject; the narrated Stephen becomes the narrator Stephen. Just as he gradually took over the Dublin that cited and recited itself to him on his wanderings, he also takes over the telling of his own story, finally replacing the words of others with his own words, ultimately achieving elquoence after beginning in baby lispings and mispronunciations. The first quotation is the epigraph to the novel. The ‘he’ referred to there is Daedalus, to whom Stephen turns in the last sentence of the novel. In the first dozen pages there are quotations from a children’s story, a nursery rhyme, a tralala accompaniment to a dance, a version of a hymn, mnemonic sentences from a school text, Stephen’s own name and (cosmic) address from the flyleaf of his school-book and, opposite, Fleming’s joke verse and three different prayers. The ratio of ten quotations to a dozen pages is at least sustained and often exceeded thereafter.

  Quotation assumes a variety of forms in this novel. The villanelle by Stephen in Chapter V (here) is a quotation, but is it in the same category as the sentence we meet a couple of pages earlier?

  Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the library. (here)

  Further, a change of tense can indicate more sharply the presence of a narrator who is citing Stephen’s words:

  He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country . . . (here)

  The inflections of the narrative voice that Joyce made more supple and subtle with his ‘indirect free style’ (or stream-of-consciousness), his interior monologue and, in Portrait, with his shading of the third-person narrative towards a first-person account, can bring the whole question of ‘reported speech’ under scrutiny. Even apart from the passages in the novel that are indented and italicized to indicate that they are quotations and the other passages that are ascribed to formally acknowledged authorities – for example, Cardinal Newman, St Thomas Aquinas – or fictive sources – Fr Arnall, Simon Dedalus, etc. – there are numerous occasions when the alterations of the tense and mood of the verbs indicate the increasing proximity of the third- to the first-person narrative, when the whole narrative reads like a quotation. In the first chapter, as Stephen agonizes about whether he should or should not go to the rector to report his wrongful punishment at the hands of Fr Dolan, the tenses of the verbs shift between perfect, pluperfect and future, and their moods between indicative and conditional, as he hesitates and looks for support to what he had read in his school history texts and to the imagined comments of his schoolfellows (here). It is the exertion of such pressure on the narrative boundaries of the text that robs it of security. The story is constantly being ascribed to Stephen, and by Stephen to someone else, so that the reader is compelled to ask, but never able to answer, the question of the ‘identity’ of the narrator. Is the narrator the same as the author? Or is the narrator’s voice as borrowed, as ventriloquial, as the voices of those in the text that are indisputably quoted?

  This is not a technical issue that can be resolved by reference to the history of narrative technique in the novel from Flaubert to Dorothy Richardson, the woman who ‘invented’ the stream-of-consciousness technique. Joyce may have learned a great deal from his predecessors, but none of them had brought the question of the authority of the author to light as he did. For him, it was a question fundamental to his culture. Time and again, as the systematic exploitation of the rhetorical device of quotation makes clear, this novel returns to the question of origin and source. The Irish speak a borrowed language, having given up their own. Despite his contempt for the dean of studies, Stephen recognizes that

  His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (here)

  When he has a ‘wrangle’ with the Italian lecturer, ‘little roundhead rogue’seye Ghezzi’, about Giordano Bruno, his brief victory is tempered by the memory that Ghezzi’s

  countrymen and not mine had invented what Cranly the other night called our religion. (here)

  Stephen’s aesthetic theory is borrowed from a variety of sources, most of them theological. His idea of the soul and its relation to the body is at first a borrowed one too, culled from the teaching of his religious superiors and later confirmed by his reading of literature, especially Dante. But, worst of all, S
tephen feels the threat of his borrowed culture when it seeks to co-opt him, when it tries to recruit him into its system of institutionalized borrowing, either through the vocation of the priesthood (here) or through a commitment to Irish nationalism. He tells Davin:

  —This race and this country and this life produced me . . . I shall express myself as I am. (here)

  When Davin repeats his plea to Stephen to ‘be one of us’, Stephen replies:

  —My ancestors threw off their language and took another . . . They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? (here)

  He will not be borrowed. To be borrowed is, in a sense, to be used to pay debts others have contracted. Stephen sees no reason why he should suffer the hangover from the drinking of others. It is one thing to quote others; it is another to be a quotation in someone else’s anthology of names, whether those be the names of the members of the Jesuit order, cited several times, or of the saints, or of the heroes of Irish nationalism or of the uncertain listings of the names of great English writers, from Marryat to Newman, Tennyson and Byron (here).