A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a synopsis
In his youth James Joyce wrote a lecture entitled “A
Portrait of the Artist,” in which he begins to outline his own theory of
aesthetics before Dublin’s artistic community. As he matured, he began to
present the search for and development of this “new science of aesthetic” in
terms of a semi-autobiographical novel to be called Stephen Hero.
That novel’s hero, Stephen Daedalus—a closer approximation of
the mythological Greek inventor’s name than we find in the final form—works on
just such a paper that he will present to the Dublin Literary and Historical
Society. While this version never made it to print in Joyce’s day, it has since
appeared, and in its pages we can see Joyce working on and maturing the
aesthetic theory he will have Stephen Dedalus declare in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“The
narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes
into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action
like a vital sea….The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has
flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force
that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality
of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and
lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes
itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified
in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like
that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined
out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
[James
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson, Viking
Press, New York, 1968, p. 202.]
Through the other novels we will see what Joyce’s Stephen
means by the “personality of the artist”; and, how one refines it out of
existence. And, we will see why Joyce compares the artist to the God of
Creation—but, his version “indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
First, though, in this novel—considered Joyce’s most
intelligible work—Joyce will describe in a naturalistic voice the birth of the literary
hero in five stages:
- Chapter I, Pandy Bat Hero: “Justice” vs. “Authority”; Stephen
challenges Father Dolan’s error.
- Chapter II, Insubstantial Father: “Wolf pack” or
“Steppenwolf”; from running like a pack animal to disguising his father’s
tremors, Stephen comes of age; but, “he’s not his father’s son” (p. 85).
- Chapter III, Serving Heaven or among the heavens: “Percival in
sight of the Grail”; Stephen witnesses the ciborium come to him (p. 136), aping sermons of Italian Jesuit
Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti; but, the chapter ends with a “prostitute’s
lingual kiss.”[1]
- Chapter IV, Bous
Stephaneforos (Greek, ευφορος,
“fertile”): “Son of Daedalus”; and his “soul had arisen from the grave of
boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly
out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose
name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable,
imperishable” (p. 159). Stephen, the sacrificial bull, exclaims “Where is
boyhood now?” At this “Beatrice” moment,[2]
beauty arrests his aesthetic spirit (p. 160).
- Chapter V, Moses, the Pisgah Scion: “First flight of the
Phoenix”; the longest chapter opens with a weary Stephen calling on women
to bring water (Moses, the frustrated scion who almost got into the Promised Land). His own father calls him a
bitch, Simon playing Pharaoh. Stephen will struggle for his artistic voice,
and, in the struggle will meet a yellow-swearing Lynch (Vincent Cosgrave,
Nora’s “rival”[3])
on Page 189, and then a fig-chewing Cranly on Page 213 reading a text
called Diseases of the Ox…a name
that will impale Stephen as the “failed protagonist” when we next meet him….
…in Ulysses
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