A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce, 1916 ★★★½

A Portrait of Many Parts

There were times reading A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man where I was convinced that this was not only a great novel, but the greatest ever written in the whole history of mankind.

Other times, I felt it wasn’t even very good.

Still, consider this not only an appreciation of a literary cornerstone, but a recommendation. A Portrait Of The Artist is well worth your time. Just be aware that it goes on some wide tangents and gets a bit preachy.

The novel tracks the progress of Ireland’s Stephen Dedalus from toddler to college student. Over time, conformity is exchanged by a will to strike out on his own in search of artistic and personal liberty.

He explains this resolve to one of his few friends by novel’s end:

“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.”

While this forms the climax of the novel, delivered by Joyce as a matter of epical import, it is also one of the less interesting things in Portrait Of The Artist, which explores many facets of Stephen’s evolving consciousness in the form of real-time glimpses of a life in motion. Not quite a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but close. Joyce was a master sketch artist, as his prior short-story collection Dubliners reveals. Here he delivers a series of sketches which, however episodic individually, link up to tell the story of Stephen’s life.

James Joyce as a young man. While he looks fit enough in this portrait, the character of Stephen Dedalus is notably thin and weak in Portrait, bedridden at boarding school after getting pushed into a sewage ditch by one of his schoolmates. Image from https://thewire.in/books/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce.

The book begins and ends with a journey. In the beginning, we hear a father tell a son the storybook tale of a “moocow” going down a road to meet a boy, one Stephen Dedalus. Even then, little Stephen is processing the world much like an artist, deeply impressionable and questioning:

Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

By novel’s end, Stephen is the moocow readying his journey from the cradle of Ireland to parts unknown.

In between, you get snapshots of Dedalus at various key points of his emotional, spiritual, and mental development. Characters slip in and out of the narrative without the author making much of their fate. Chapter Two begins with Stephen in the company of an indulgent grand-uncle; many pages and a few transitions later, but within the same chapter, we learn the grand-uncle has been dead some time.

An Irish Jesuit (wearing biretta) with some of his young charges. Portrait explores Joyce's love-hate relationship with the Catholic order: "His masters, even when they had not attracted him, had seemed to him always intelligent and serious priests, athletic and highspirited prefects. He thought of them as men who washed their bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold linen." Image from https://www.offalyarchives.com/index.php/irish-jesuit-archives. 

Ideas are critical in Portrait; emotions fleeting:

Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones’s Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that suddenwoven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel.

That’s part of the boldness of Portrait, the way it moves. Transitions are abrupt yet a long time coming, too. Joyce’s vivid descriptions and careful character development makes Portrait a book that seems to actually hold the life and soul of a man within its pages.

“He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld,” Joyce writes at one early point, while Stephen is fantasizing about women but actually undertaking the wider challenge of adulthood. “He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.”

What weakens Portrait for me is the indulgent manner Joyce has of depicting his protagonist once he reaches adolescence. Dedalus comes off as self-precious, discoursing at great length about this and that in a pedantic way. Even at the height of eloquence, he gets carried away.

He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one long-drawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again!

A little later on:

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and the power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

A scene from the 1977 film adaptation of Portrait Of The Artist. Here, young Stephen (Luke Johnston) is seen doing what he often does in the early part of the novel: Watching from the sidelines. Image from http://rarefilm.net/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-1977-joseph-strick-bosco-hogan-t-p-mckenna-john-gielgud-drama/.

Debate has raged for some time among Joyce scholars whether Dedalus is a thinly fictionalized Joyce himself, or a send-up of that very idea. Some note that such self-celebration had been the stuff of debut novels for decades before Joyce’s arrival. Surely Joyce knew this, too.

In a Viking Critical Library edition of the novel published in 1966, editor Chester G. Anderson calls out the tendency of some to dislike Dedalus for being what they call a “prig.” In our parlance, the term might be “Mary Sue;” a protagonist too perfect for his or her own good.

Yet Joyce’s powers as a craftsman mostly overcome suspicions of artistic pretension. The particular nature of Stephen’s sensations has a ballast and depth about it, minutely detailed and keenly felt. You feel the draft when he walks into a cold college hall. You hear the birds chirp from the window as he lies in bed, composing a poem.

Or take just this glimpse of Dublin after rainfall:

The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation was breathed forth by the blackened earth.

Bull Bridge in Dublin. This is the setting of Stephen's great epiphany of finding joy in life after rejecting his Jesuit education at the end of Chapter Four. "He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast." Image from https://www.dangerousroads.org/europe/ireland/5996-bull-bridge.html.

I keep coming back to Joyce’s descriptive powers when explaining why Portrait Of The Artist deserves its reputation. In what are often a handful of well-chosen words, he captures a scene or a mood in a way that even great authors grasp for in vain. I think it would take Charles Dickens a chapter to get across the same ideas Joyce covers in a paragraph.

There are whole sections of Portrait I could do without. Many point to the middle chapter in this five-chapter work, Chapter Three, where Stephen goes on a spiritual retreat at his Jesuit-run high school and endures a long lecture about the perils of damnation.

Behold this sample from Father Arnall: To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever?

"Break time's over, back on your heads!" Father Arnell's depiction of Hell is even bleaker than this 15th-century painting by Fra Angelico: "Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that God should mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment in the fires of hell for a single grievous sin. They reason thus because, blinded by the gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable to comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell.

Joyce spends pages on this, and it amounts to a dead end. He starts the retreat a faithless Catholic, shakes off a brief conversion, then resumes his nonbelief to the novel’s end. Perhaps the vivid descriptions of Hell given by Father Arnall give this chapter a reason to exist; you feel in it Dedalus’s reverence for the power of the word, if not the Word.

That said, I do feel the novel takes a significant if not at all fatal dip after the first two chapters. Joyce is brilliant at capturing Dedalus as a young innocent, his takes full of wonder and lively humor. Why is one cleric at his school merely a “brother” and not a “father”? Was he not holy enough or why could he not catch up on the others?

He processes arguments about Irish politics at the family dinner table in a way that makes Joyce’s own sympathies clear but leaves room for some delicious cringe humor at the expense of Dante, a former nun of bombastic religiosity. Dante, a great name in itself for its infernal suggestiveness, is actually an Irish corruption of the term “Auntie,” one of many particularities of this book Joyce doesn’t pause to explain.

Published in the same year as Ireland’s Easter Rebellion, Portrait is a story of independence, too. Not national independence, no, but rather personal independence. Joyce’s take on Ireland is rather ambivalent. He’s proud of his heritage, but much like Gabriel Conroy in his earlier short story “The Dead,” rather leery of Fenian ideals. Late in the book someone calls Stephen “a born sneerer,” which applies to Joyce as well.

A contemporary illustration of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish leader whose career was derailed by scandal. His death in 1891 is referenced at the climax of Portrait's Chapter One and Parnell's legacy as abandoned liberator haunts Stephen through the rest of the book. Image from https://pixels.com/profiles/maryevans-picturelibrary.

Talking to an English priest, Stephen contemplates the paradox of addressing life and country in a foreign tongue:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Borrowed robes or no, Joyce wears them well in this first novel, one which set a high bar in literature and remains a brilliant journey despite its many pit stops. Read it with an open mind, and you will come away with greater appreciation for the art of a novel.