I
When James Joyce spoke of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to his friend Frank Budgen during the composition of Ulysses, he insisted on the importance of the third term in the title: ‘as a young man’. By that date he had finally relegated his autobiographical hero to a lower place in his humanistic scheme of values than that which had been occupied by the remorselessly conceited young poet who is the subject of the earlier novel, and who lives on as a leading character in Ulysses. ‘Stephen has assumed a shape that cannot change’, he told Budgen, as if to say that he himself - as an author and a man - had fully outgrown his earlier alter ego by the time of writing his great novel. It is not difficult to see why. Stephen Dedalus is essentially an adolescent not only in the middle chapters of the novel but also the close where he proclaims the superiority of his own to soul and the importance of his destiny.

Reading against the grain of this bildungsroman [i.e., a novel of artistic growth] in keeping with Joyce’s hint to Budgen, it is just possible to suppose that he intended it as a satire on his own pretensions as a young man with exalted aesthetical and philosophical notions which, in the event - as his reduced condition in Ulysses, where he is called a ‘lapwing poet’, shows - he proves unable to give any greater substance than the aspirations he expresses on the final page: ‘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.’

Yet Stephen is also the vehicle of a passion for spiritual liberation and artistic honesty as well as being the spokesman for some philosophical and aesthetic ideas that energised and governed the development of the author of Ulysses. Stephen's notion of artistic impersonality, according to which the artist is said not to appear in his own work in any direct way - does not, in other words, control the narration in his own personal accent and lets the language of the book perform its own expressive tasks under a form of remote guidance only - is actually the key to the formal methods of the later novel, as well as the stylistic method of A Portrait in itself.

Several other points of comparison between the fledgling artist in A Portrait and mature author of Ulysses can easily be drawn, just as there is a world of difference between the effusions of the one and the stricter use of style to ‘bracket’ character and ethos in successive episode of Ulysses. In particular, the theory of artistic perception which masquerades as a theory of beauty in the fifth chapter of the novel (where it is associated with the term claritas and “whatness”) gives a clue to the whole procedure of epiphanies that underlies the stylistic method of Ulysses; while the bitter critique of Irish society that Stephen Dedalus articulates in A Portrait can be seen to stand behind the more informal and sardonic commentaries on Irishness in its national and religious aspects offered by Leopold Bloom in the course of his ‘interior monologues’.

Viewed from this standpoint, A Portrait can be seen as a necessary stepping-stone to a later stage of evolution when it became possible for Joyce to treat his own past self as just another character in the world of Dublin 1904; or, rr rather, not just another character but a pole in the fundamental moral diagram of Ulysses - a book in which two opposed but complementary principles stand for the necessary ingredients of a complete humanity: imagination and compassion; intellect and heart; yearning and resignation; ambition and acceptance. By the time of writing Ulysses the self-adulatory attitude of artistic Joyce’s youth had thus given way to a more generous outlook that permitted him to appreciate the virtues of the citizen as well as those of the artist. It is this change in sensibility alone that accounts for the emergence of a new centre of the Joycean universe in the unlikely person of Leopold Bloom, the ‘competent keyless citizen’ of the latter novel.

By this account, A Portrait is the pre-history of Ulysses and should not perhaps command attention; but we still read it for several good reasons. Firstly, because it offers a uniquely powerful literary vision of a definite phase of selfhood which, with impressive frequency, strikes a chord in all those whose own voyages of self-discovery have led them through similar passages of self-assertion in the face of a resisting social world. Secondly, it captures the peculiarly exalted state of thought and sensation which is inseparable from certain phases of adolescence in its relation to the social and hormonal givens of our world: in other words, the advent of sexual emotions. Thirdly, it embodies the pain and revulsion felt by sensitive souls at the brutality and abasement which make up the actual conditions of life form many in any society and any age of the world. Finally, it incorporates the desire of young minds to construct of a new reality which will to supersede the slavish and authoritarian forms of social life that they inherit from their elders. All of this makes it a moving and, in a discernible degree, a genuinely heroic work.

Stephen Dedalus’s self-absorption is at times so intense that it would be quite intolerable were it not connected with an equal and opposite concern to engage practically, through art, with a hostile objective world. That intensity is the distinguishing mark of a certain kind of ardent adolescence and his theory that, when ‘the soul of a man is born [...] there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight’ (p.207), will always meet with an answering voice in the minds of imaginatively-vital readers. Here the phrase ‘of a man’ is disconcertingly positive. Notwithstanding that, the dominant conception has less to do with gender than with soul and, in particular, the process by which a soul is born in Ireland. An emphasis on man rather than woman in this sentence is both a product of the period in which it was written and a reflection of Joyce’s strongly held conviction that women were ‘the cause of all the moral suicide in Ireland’ - as he put it in a note to Stephen Hero. Women’s culpability in this respect was due to their position as wives and mothers and hence - paradoxically enough - as agents of a patriarchal rule.

By way of plot, A Portrait traces the gradual emergence of its central character’s “soul” - a term employed not less than 95 times - as he comes to grasp the principle of spiritual autonomy and to establish a corresponding area of social freedom for himself. In so doing he identifies the opposing forces as ‘nationality, language and religion’ (p.207), a formula that essentially embraces the oppressive atmosphere of contemporary Irish Catholicism in a world obsessed with the culture of politics and the politics of culture - that is, nationalism in all its defensive and aggressive ramifications.

The argument for and against nationalism might easily degenerate into a series of sterile assertions as the the actual identity of the colonial subject. In A Portrait, however, Joyce maintains a more flexible conception by means of which the reificiations of the hyper-nationalista are challenged and overthrown. Against the background of an increasingly rigidified culture, Stephen comes to see himself less as a definite point than as a pulsation. This intuition of changing selfhood is captured in the physics classroom at Belvedere College where the young student grasps the ethereal nature of human being under the form of a spectral spectral dance of numbers:

The evolution of Stephen’s personality throughout successive chapters novel is rightly seen by commentators as taking the form of a wave-like pattern that shows him first as subject to abasement at the hands of the powers that be in the social world that he inhabits - or, more subtly still, the corresponding ideas reflected in his mind - before wrenching himself free from them by some act of mental or moral determination and hence escaping the entrapment. This pattern is established in the first chapter where the young boy is unfairly beaten for his broken glasses and seeks justice by daring to report the brutal teacher to the Director of the college - an unheard-of act which wins him the admiration of his fellow-students. In succeeding chapters, Stephen falls captive to other ‘nets’ and escapes by shrugging off their unmerited authority over him, be it the terroristic morality of the preacher and the confessional, the conventional restraints on adolescent sexuality, or the hollow literary and intellectual conceptions of his educators. In other words, he revolts against orthodox religion, frequents prostitutes and begins to read modern literature.

Such a narrative unambiguously presents the central character as a type of moral hero. Yet there is at least one moment when Joyce’s ironic circumscription of the self-proclaimed heroism of Stephen Dedalus is more or less clearly apparent. This occurs at the high-point of his enthusiasm about the destiny of his own exalted soul which he envisages in the image of a ‘hawklike man whose name he bore’, rising above the ordinary earth in answer to a quasi-divine calling in fulfillment of the ‘end that he was born to serve and had been following through the miss of childhood and boyhood’. Hence his very name - Icarus was son of Dedalus and presumably bears his patronymic - is readily seen as ‘a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable being’ (p.173).

But if Icarus can soar, he can also fall, and Joyce juxtaposes to this classical allusion and its explicit co-option by the character a series of exclamations on the part of the school-friends cavorting on the nearby rocks, who pause long enough to chivvy the Grecian-sounding Stephen with these ironically selected words:

Here a monitory note is sounded not only in the echo of the fate of Icarus but also in the choice of the expletive Cripes which derives in etymological terms from Corpus Christi: ‘body of Christ’. Redemptive heroism is not attained without cost and sacrifice and if Stephen is going to save his social peers he may have to do so at an expense that he is not yet ready to consider. For him, at this stage, the redemptive deed is all resurrection and no crucifixion, as the imagery of the passage in question clearly shows:

In this, Stephen is figured as a new Lazarus or - more precisely - a new Jesus Christ rising from the tomb. It could be said, indeed, that he seeks to arrogate to himself the prorogatives of the Christian messiah while, by just such metaphoric play, Joyce sets up Stephen as a new priesthood in competition with the old. Hence, for instance, in relation to the delectable E.C. (Emma Clery) he sees himself as a spurned counterpart of the ‘priested peasant, with a brother a policeman in Dublin and a brother a potboy in Moycullen’ who secures the attention that he desires for himself and for the ‘priesthood of the eternal imagination’ which he holds himself to represent::

In this the connection between redemption and sexuality is relatively explicit, as is Stephen’s claim to the possession of a higher form of enlightenment and a better capacity to perform an act of transubstantiation (and hence ‘save’ the mortal part of Emma) than the anointed Irish Catholic priesthood for whom he has such transparent, and distinctly snobbish, contempt. The initial plan is to overcome their influence on women’s minds in Ireland; later, however, Stephen adopts a more pro-actively eugenic attitude to the matter when he wonders:

It is, however, in the episode we have been examining - where Stephen comes to realise in the most emphatic way the element in his own nature which is specialised for art - that the psycho-physical connection between female beauty and aesthetic idealism is most fully exhibited. The events in question are set on Dollymount Strand in North Dublin, at the other side of the city from Sandymount Strand which Stephen crosses in the morning of Ulysses:

The control of symbols here is masterful, not least because the passage manages to delineate an immature reaction to the encounter with what Yeats once called ‘the first putting-on of girlish beauty’. In that twice-repeated dove-like quality of the wading girl there is a reflection of Stephen’s primary love-object, E.C., whom he has seen looking ‘out of dove’s eyes’ and ‘the young priest’ on the steps of the National Library, ‘toying’ with an Irish phrase-book - thus illustrating the priest‘s belief that ‘The ladies are [... t]he best helpers the language has’ (p.224).

But there is also a suggestion of a higher power, and one associated with annunciations in Biblical tradition, as may be inferred from Stephen’s earlier reference to the Holy Spirit - or, rather, to ‘the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind’ (p.151.) And, finally, there is a narrational allusion to Gospel episode where a dove is said to appear over Jesus as he is immersed by John the Baptist in the river Jordan, while a voice is heard to say: ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.’ (Matt. 3: 14.) Hence, in A Portrait, the corresponding phrase: ‘A voice from beyond the world was calling’ a this point in the narrative (p.172).

One clear implication is that the the religious sacrament of the eucharist has been overtaken by the secular ‘sacrament’ of the human body as the chief source of spirituality in Stephen/Joyce’s conception of the matter. It is possible to argue that this movement is perfectly consistent with the intrinsic sense of the doctrine of Incarnation according to which, in orthodox Christianity, the ‘Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us’. In this reading, Joyce carries the matter a step further in suggesting that the divine logos is inseparable from human beauty: a form of high humanism which has its origins in the sexually ambiguous climate of 1890s aesthetics of which Stephen Dedalus is a some-time disciple, as the quality of his poetry reveals:

This specimen of poetry - which Stephen calls a ‘vilanelle’ (p.223) - generally conforms to the pattern of imitation troubadour verse practised by Swinburne and other minor poets of the the illimitably minor fin de siècle era of which Walter Pater was the first term and Oscar Wilde, tragically, the last. It was Pater, for example, who told the young men of his generation to ‘burn with a hard gemlike flame’ in his banned epilogue to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) which some astute readers saw as a covert encouragement to homosexuality. Wilde, who might be said to have answered the summons in the pervasive tenor of his aesthetic and his personal existence, was imprisoned in 1895 for proven offences against the relevant Act of Parliament, thus bringing the ‘Aesthetic Movement’ to a shuddering halt.

The poem is, with some justice, critically regarded as sensually over-wrought and even dubious in inspiration - though the recurrent ‘she’ and ‘her’ of these pages makes it clear that the object of erotic interest is a young woman whom, elsewhere, Stephen describes as being ‘compact of pleasure’ (for him, that is to say). It is probably better to regard it as a form of parody, though ultimately all of Joyce’s poetry hovers between sincerity and pastiche in a way that suggests a more simplistic literary mentality than that which he applied to his best prose writing.

In this case the element of parody is clearly in the ascendent for Joyce knows very well what he is doing when he contextualises Stephen’s poem in this overly-revealing fashion: ‘Towards morning he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet.’ A certain amount of auto-erotic nuzzling of the fantasy-object goes on in the ensuing paragraphs until finally we learn that ‘[a] gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed over him, descending along his spine [...] Soon he would sleep again.’ (p.226.) From all of this, it is not hard to guess with what form of physical satisfaction is connected with the production of such verses. Literature of this kind, the text seems to say, has primarily a masturbatory value.

If those verses were all that James Joyce could produce in the way of art as answering to his manifesto in A Portrait, then it would have to be said that his mission to the gentiles (Irish or otherwise), was a literary fraud. But the reality is quite different: Stephen Dedalus is a station and an obstacle on the way to Leopold Bloom - or, rather, the literary promise of James Joyce would not attain fulfillment until he managed to place in strict parenthesis the aesthetic excesses of his former self and to embrace the healthy philistinism of an Irish commercial traveller and ad-man. And that, too, is consistent with the doctrine of Incarnation.

II
The final production that we know by the title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) actually emerged from a much longer writing entitled Stephen Hero in its draft form, a title which we know that Joyce’s brother Stanislaus suggested to him but the meaning of which - apart from the obvious semantic burden of the surname in itself - remains obscure. On the one hand it had been connected with the ballad “Turpin Hero” concerning an English highwayman which begins in the third and ends in the first person. That inference is based on a passing allusion to the ballad in an interesting context (vide A Portrait, p.219). For Hugh Kenner, it provides a sort of inverse explanation of the eccentric pattern according to which the novel begins in the third person and ends with diary entries in the first - thus representing the emergence of the artist from the chrysalis.

More likely - or, at least, more significantly - Joyce had in mind Thomas Carlyle’s notion of the “Hero as a Man of Letters” which was, for the mid-nineteenth century romantic generation, almost the leading idea about artists and their place in the social world [italics mine]. An additional reason for looking to Carlyle as the inspiration of the title is the fact that the crucial phrase ‘spiritual paralysis’ which crops up in it has its origins in that famous lecture - if not merely coincidental. (Joyce had a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution in his personal library in Trieste but not in fact the Lectures on Heroes and Heroworship.)

This is how Carlyle introduces the phrase spiritual paralysis in the first of his lectures on heroes:

This is how Joyce puts the phrase to work in speaking about Ireland in Stephen Hero:

At bottom, then, the same critique: indurated language produces a corresponding conventionality of feeling and a deadening of the capacity for original thought, true seeing and living moral response. It is always a strong line to take against of contemporary society and the fact that Joyce sets up the lip-serving Catholic Church as his target reveals much about the shift in emphasis between the two writers but also about the common rhetoric upon which reformers draw in every generation.

As a novel Stephen Hero was a deeply flawed, chiefly in its failure to establish a balanced tone in regard to the central character. Joyce wants to exalt his literary alter ego Stephen Dedalus as the sole personage in contemporary Dublin with either sense or sensibility and to turn him into a prophetic figure bringing spiritual, moral and artistic enlightenment to the inhabitants of the ‘benighted island’. At the same time he tries to hedge him round with a degree of irony that protects the author from seeming entirely credulous in the face of his own literary heroism.

The result makes for some very odd writing. In the opening chapter of the surviving manuscript (that is, Chapters XV to XVI), this description of the central character as he enters the Royal University as a first-year student is offered by the anonymous narrator:

That the narrating voice is obviously particular and consistent, so far as it goes, introduces the problem of identity: what person, what voice, what accent, speaks of the world and its occupants in these terms? Are we supposed to agree with him/her point of view? Is the world described by the novel the kind of place that is best viewed from a definite and invariable moral standpoint? If so, should it be an English, Irish, Anglo-Indian, French, Deutsche or Hottentot standpoint? All of these are problems that would be broached by literary modernism with its sophisticated sense of what may be called the epistemology of texts: that is, the manner in which they represent the structure of reality and the possibility of uttering truths about it.

Besides the unsettled element of self-portraiture to be met with here - especially the silly surmise as to the impression he might make on the hypothetical ‘girl’ admiring him - the chief thing to be noted is the conservatism of the novelistic method by which Joyce hoped to capture an image of his earlier self in those sentences. This is all the odder since, in the very earliest draft of “A Portrait of the Artist” - being an essay written in one day in January 1904 (and refused publication by the editor of Dana because he ‘would not print what he did not understand’) - Joyce had already insisted that the method of exterior description was a entirely false to the real process of human development.

Thus:

What Joyce advanced in this early writing - and what it would take him half a literary life-time to realise in any formally adequate way - was the view that human identity is intrinsically aetiological, having its ultimate reality in genetic codes wrapped up in the embryo which emerge variously but continuously as visible and otherwise perceptible forms, features and behaviours at different points in time. Although time is not the obsession with Joyce that it is with Marcel Proust or any other exponent of Bergsonian durée, it is nevertheless an intuition which finds expression in one of the most earnestly epigrammatical sentences in the novel - to which another of more jejune variety is quickly added:

There is nothing occasional or accidental about that way of describing time in its formative its relation to human being. While at University, Joyce read the ordinary manual of Scholastic philosophy supplied to all their Catholic students by his Jesuit teachers - that is, a selection of the so-called hylomorphic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval thinker whose great work Summa Theologica became and long remained the official teaching on the Church on such matters. Hence it is that Stephen speaks of his intellectual guidelines as ‘only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle's poetics and psychology and a Synopsis Philosophiae Scholasticae ad mentem divi Thomae’ (p.180). (A related source, to some extent gathered up in Aquinas as that divine’s primary intellectual source, was Aristotle’s Psychology [De Anima] which Joyce carefully examined in a Library in Paris in 1903.)

The particular sentence that Stephen borrows from St. Thomas’s Summa is a definition of beauty according to which its chief constituents correspond in number to the Holy Trinity: ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas [three things are necessary for beauty: wholeness, harmony and brightness]. This is a very medieval formulation and much easier to see in the context of, say, Gothic architecture or sculptural design - the statues of saints and kings being brightly painted and the buildings exhibiting intricate geometrical relationships of an equally structural and ornamental nature - than in the context of modern thought.

Such a stricture hardly matters since what Stephen makes of it is quite different from its original or any other literal interpretation. For Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait St. Thomas's sentence is about the 'structure of the act of apprehensiveness itself', that is to say, the modality of human perception. According to him you first perceive that something is a separate thing, then you grasp that it has a defining structure made up of rhythmic internal relations, and finally you recognised it as the thing that it is: claritas or (in the language of Stephen Hero) ‘epiphany’ [See A Portrait, Chap. V, pp.216ff.; cf. Stephen Hero, Chap. XXI, pp.190ff.]

It is not our purpose here to consider closely the meaning of Stephen's somewhat implausible theory - implausible because he argues that perception is a successive experience and not an instantaneous one (as Gestalt psychologists believe). What is important is that he grounds ‘beauty’ in perception in such a way that the seeing of any object in its true character renders it beautiful in a certain sense. This is tantamount to saying that the role of the artist is to see things ‘as they are’ - in Stephen Hero the young man correspondingly speaks of his quest for ‘the truth of the being of the visible world’ - and to convey that vision in appropriately realistic prose. That, in a very real sense, is what Joyce attempted and achieved in Dubliners.

A second implication deserve attention also: in his disquisition to the ever-attendant Cranly, Stephen talks about ‘the rhythm of beauty’ and offers a definition of the first term of that epithet: ‘Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part’. (p.210.) This is not simply a structural account of the matter for, although in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, Stephen will call it the ‘structural rhythm’, he also equates it with ‘entelechy’, a term from Aristotle - a neologistic term that means ‘the emergence or fulfilment of anything in its mature mature on the basis of the anterior plan or map contained in its germ’. (The stem-word telos means ‘a plan’.)

We have followed Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce’s philosophical thinking thus far down an obscure boreen of pseudo-scholastic thought in order to arrive at a view of his ruling conception of the nature of identity and the corresponding form of an accurate literary representation of the same. If the identity of a given being is, in fact, the expression of an inward plan or code at each stage of its emergence, it is clear that no static portrait at any moment in time will encapsulate what that person really is: only the whole temporal pattern can do that. Any just account of the true originality of A Portrait must therefore include the recognition that it represents the emerging contours of Stephen’s identity in the very form of its successive chapters where, passage after passage, the growth of mind and spirit are reflecting in a corresponding range and tone of language. In other words, the literary representation (or mimesis) is modelled on the natural entelechy of the developmental being who is its subject. Joyce himself formulated this idea in a somewhat uneven fashion as early 1904 when he insisted that it was the artist’s task to ‘liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm’ (“A Portrait of the Artist, 1904”; quoted in Cixous, op. cit. [as supra].)

Now, to be liberated may well suggest a release from the sluggish matter of actual existence at the hands of a literary portraitist, just as Stephen Dedalus promises to ‘forge’ the young girl on Dollymount Strand into ‘new soaring impalpable imperishable being’ through his art (p.171), but it also suggests a more substantial form of freedom which Joyce’s contemporaries in Ireland aimed for likewise, though by primarily political means.

It is one of the indigestible facts of James Joyce’s outlook that he had a greatly attenuated belief in Irish national cause and a sceptical attitude towards Irish political separatism beyond the dictates of a Home Rule policy: in other words, he was a creature of the Irish Parliamentary Party and not a member of Sinn Féin. Typically, in countering the latter approach - early identified with anti-colonial struggle - Joyce goes for the psycho-sexual jugular, identifying an unsophisticated Irish countrywoman in the story told by the ‘peasant student’ Davin as a flash-point for the very different kind of revolution that he himself he has in mind.

In this episode, Stephen’s college friend hesitantly tells him of an occasion when, in passing a rural cottage at night, he was invited in by a bare-breasted young woman apparently offering refreshment - an offer he refused on any terms. Davin is disturbed by the event and uncertain as to its meaning. Stephen, on the other hand, is very certain: the young woman is a symbol at one and the same time of the sexually-repressed and still unconscious condition of Irish womanhood and its blind thrusting towards the light of sexual liberation:

It is clear that whatever her own personal intentions, the young woman’s physical willingness - somehwat the opposite of ‘spiritual paralysis’ - stands in Stephen’s mind as an allegory of the Irish nation on the threshold of modernity or, at least, of real freedom as distinct from the other kind which would shortly be bestowed on it by its nationalist defenders in the form of a radically conservative Irish-Catholic statehood. (The actual model for Davin was murdered by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence.)

In that sense, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a prophecy of an Ireland that did not come to pass or, at least, not then. About it, in Irish critical reactions, there hangs the suspicion that Joyce was a disappointed revolutionary whose ideas where disregarded by the more successful Irish insurgents of the period in which he wrote it. (Published in 1916, it is almost exactly contemporaneous with the Easter Rising just as Ulysses is contemporaneous with the modern Irish nation-state..) There is a certain historical justification for this version of the matter, but also a certain moral delinquency also since Joyce courageously identified nationalism and its social fruits as no less an enemy of promise than imperialism or the generalised form of European civility and culture which stand behind (or beyond?) his call for spiritual liberation.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this local quarrel, it is certain that James Joyce’s account of spiritual birth - which entertains the possibility that for some no such thing ever happens - is one that we have to keep before our minds at the same time as we bear in mind the courage of the writer and the man who took the necessary steps in life to ensure that his own spiritual rebirth actually happened: