Background

In 1904 the magazine DANA made an important contribution to world literature by rejecting a short story by a then-unknown Irishman called James Joyce.  Joyce sought the advice of George Russell (AE), who suggested that he should rewrite it as a novel.  Joyce took his advice so seriously that he eventually produced a huge work of fiction which he titled Stephen Hero.  This book was never published during his lifetime; most of it was destroyed by its dissatisfied author who decided to try again, reworking and reducing the material into five chapters.  Twenty publishers rejected this new version before it finally appeared in 1916.  Joyce gave his first novel the same title as that of the rejected short story: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  In 1944 three years after his death, the surviving fragment of the original novel was published as Stephen Hero.

Brief Bio of James Joyce

Since A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is largely autobiographical, it is worth knowing something of the life and works of its author. James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest of eleven children.  His father, John Joyce, came from a wealthy Cork family and had inherited a small private income.  He was an ardent admirer of Charles Stewart Parnell, for whom he had worked as an election agent.  He was rewarded with the post of Tax Collector in Dublin, a lucrative position which allowed him and his growing family to live in considerable comfort and send his eldest son to Clongowes College.  However, his fecklessness, his extravagance and his fondness for drink cost him his job and reduced his family to poverty.  James was withdrawn from Clongowes and sent to Belvedere College, also run by the Jesuits.  He proved a hard-working student, winning a number of scholarships, which in a manner typical of his father he squandered on expensive family outings.

From 1898 to 1902 Joyce was a student at University College Dublin, then run by the Jesuit order.  When he graduated with a degree in languages he decided to continue studying as a medical student.  However, unhappy at UCD, he went to Paris but returned to Ireland when he received news of his mother’s imminent death.  To provide himself with a livelihood he took up a teaching post.

Then he met Nora Barnacle and his life was transformed.  He persuaded her to elope with him to Trieste where he worked as a teacher of languages.  There his children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born.  His brother, Stanislaus, joined them in 1905, giving Joyce invaluable financial and moral support.

Joyce returned to Dublin on two occasions.  On his first visit, he tried to set up the first cinema in Ireland, but the project failed.  In 1914 he came home again to publish Dubliners, but once again his trip was in vain.  Bitterly disappointed at his treatment, Joyce vowed never to set foot in his native land again.  He was true to his word.

In 1914 Joyce took his family to Zurich, remaining there for the duration of the Great War.  He then returned to Trieste but soon left for Paris, where he was to live until the Second World War forced him to move back to safety in neutral Zurich.

Meanwhile, in 1916 Dubliners was finally published, followed soon afterwards by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Then on his fortieth birthday, his masterpiece, Ulysses, appeared, and almost immediately established his reputation as the foremost writer of his time.

Joyce’s great success as an author was marred by personal tragedy.  His daughter Lucia’s mental health deteriorated to the point where Joyce could not care for her himself and had to have her committed to an institution.  In 1931 his father died.  All this time his eyesight was weakening, and though he underwent many painful operations, his sight continued to fail until he was almost blind. Having returned to Zurich on the outbreak of the Second World War he continued to write, working on his great experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake.  His health continued to decline and he eventually died on 13^th January 1941 of a perforated ulcer.

A Note on the Structure of the Novel

The novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a carefully constructed novel divided into five chapters or episodes.  Each of these sections deals with an important stage in the development of the hero, Stephen Dedalus, from early childhood to adulthood.

In Chapter One we meet Stephen as a baby-talking infant.  We learn of his first years in Clongowes College, where he is unjustly caned by Father Dolan.  An important event is the Christmas dinner, during which a bitter argument between Dante and Mr Casey reflects the troubled state of Ireland after the Parnell Split.

In Chapter Two, Stephen’s family suffers a decline in living standards due to Mr Dedalus’ feckless ways and is forced to move from Bray to Blackrock.  Young Stephen is taken out of Clongowes and sent to Belvedere College.  Important incidents are the encounter with Emma Cleary, the school play, and Stephen’s visit to Cork with his father, Simon.  This chapter ends with Stephen’s sexual awakening as seen in the episode with the prostitute.

Chapter Three is largely concerned with religion.  Filled with sexual guilt, Stephen listens to the famous sermon on Hell.  He resolves to end his sinful life and seeks grace through confession and self-mortification.  As a result, he achieves peace of mind and inner calm.

Chapter Four sees Stephen invited to become a Jesuit when his piety is noticed by his teachers.  He rejects the call, opting instead for Art.   This turning away from religion and back to the world is symbolised by the girl on the beach at the end of this section.

In Chapter Five, Stephen is now a student at University College Dublin.  Through his discussions with fellow students, we discover his rejection of nationalism and the nationalistic art that was then in vogue.  He expounds for us his theory of aesthetics.  The novel ends with his defiant refusal to serve God or country.  Instead, he will seek through exile to find the freedom he needs to create his own art.

Major Themes in the Novel

Joyce’s first novel is concerned to show the stages in the development of the artist.  We are presented with the hero Stephen Dedalus first as a child, then as a schoolboy, later as a devout Catholic, and finally as a university student.  Family, teachers, sex, religion, and country, forge fetters for the would-be artist; to create he must break free and become his own person.  This he achieves in the end with his famous declaration: “Non serviam” (I shall not serve), thereby turning his back on his family, his country, and his religion to devote himself totally to his new religion of Art.

Style and Technique in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a naturalistic novel narrated by an invisible author who remains aloof and apparently removed from his tale.  However, the viewpoint through which we see things is clearly Stephen’s.  This not only makes him the focus of our attention but it also invites us to sympathise with him throughout.  The language is also used to reflect Stephen’s central role and importance.  Thus in the opening chapter, we read the prattle of childhood as the infant Stephen tries to come to terms with his surroundings.  Later the schoolboy slang reveals his perceptions of life in a boarding school.  At all times the language is suited to whatever stage Stephen is then at.

Religious symbols and liturgical terms abound in Chapter Three.  They also help in the final chapter to elevate the tone and solemnise the young artist’s preoccupation with aesthetics at that stage.  Even though Joyce is at great pains to reject his Catholic faith he displays here a deep appreciation of Catholic rituals.  His friend Cranley points out this apparent inconsistency:

It is a curious thing, do you know, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.

This accusation, which could also be levelled at many other Irish novelists, is very relevant.  They, including James Joyce, seem determined to reject Catholicism because it seems at variance with their artistic imagination.  Yet, as Eamon Maher states ‘they cannot avoid being ‘supersaturated’ with its vestiges’.[1]

Symbols, including religious ones, are important to Joyce as a method of heightening his themes and maintaining links throughout the narrative.  For example, Stephen’s name reminds us of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and the significance of this is seen in the young man’s willingness to sacrifice all for the sake of his art.  His surname, Dedalus, evokes the labyrinth-maker, the inventor, the flier who dared to aspire too high.  Other symbols used by Joyce in this novel are water, representing death, cleansing and renewal; the Church as mother; Ireland as the ‘sow that eats her farrow’.

To create a real and convincing background for Stephen, there is a painstaking attention to detail.  Names of actual places are numerous in the text, e.g. Clongowes, Belvedere, Lower Mount Street.  Real people are also introduced, such as Parnell, and Michael Davitt, W.S. Gilbert.  The squalor of Stephen’s home life is vividly captured in Joyce’s description of the meal table.  He is not content just to appeal to our sense of sight.  We hear the sound of cricket balls hitting bats in Clongowes; we smell horse’s urine, and while we listen to the sermon on Hell in Chapter Three we feel the horrific torments of the Damned.

Walter Pater, the author of Renaissance, who had such an enormous influence on Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement, also affected Joyce in his attitude to Art.  Pater and the followers of the Aesthetic Movement believed that art should be of paramount importance.  That Joyce was especially sympathetic to this view is most apparent in the final section of the novel.  Another writer much admired by Joyce was Cardinal Newman, the founder of University College Dublin whose style he sought to emulate.

A Detailed Analysis of a Sample Passage from the Novel

“He looked northward to Howth.  The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore.  Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets.  Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tides and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the bridge were lightclad figures, waving and delving.

In a few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets, and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and picking a pointed salteaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand and as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed.  Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning.  The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the highdrifting clouds.

The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him; and the grey warm air was still: and a new wild life was singing in his veins.”

 Commentary:

This fine piece of writing, which occurs at a crucial point towards the end of Chapter Four, illustrates many of the features of Joyce’s writing style.

• Firstly, we notice his attention to detail; e.g.: ‘the pointed salteaten stick’. The word ‘salteaten’, like ‘jetsam’, ‘lightclad’, ‘seatangle’ shows the author’s fondness for coining new words.
• Secondly, we view the scene through Stephen’s eyes, and so his feelings as he observes the seascape are subtly revealed, while the narrator himself remains invisible and aloof.
• Repetition is another device to concentrate our minds and create connections in the writing. Notice how often we meet the words ‘warm’, ‘silently’, ‘clouds’ and ‘drifting’.
• Symbolism is everywhere. The clouds are the difficulties of the past, now seen drifting away; the rivulet is a new life beginning; the sky is the greatness the young artist seeks and aspires to, as well as being associated in our minds with Dedalus.
• There is also a sense throughout the piece that we are building towards a climax. The feelings of Stephen are conveyed by words like ‘warm and dry’, ‘new wild life’ and ‘singing’.  The final mood is one of joyous freedom.
• Sound is also important, as we would quickly realise were we to read the passage aloud. Its lyricism is enhanced by alliteration (‘salteaten stick’) and assonance (‘wild life’).  Stephen has arrived at a crucial moment in his life.  His decision not to become a Jesuit has just been made, and now he sees his future as an artist calling him like a vocation.  It is the turning of the tide for him.  He is exhilarated by the prospects ahead: he has now freed himself from the restraints of family, country, and religion.  That is why he feels ‘a new wild life was singing in his veins’.

CONCLUSION

Having completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce too had arrived at a new stage in his development.  He was now forever finished with conventional fiction.  Already his mind was preoccupied with the book that was to become his great masterpiece.  Ulysses was about to be born, and with its birth, the young exile from Dublin would be hailed as the greatest novelist of the century and one of the greatest innovators of all time.

However, Stephen Dedalus had survived and it is the same Stephen we meet on the first page of Ulysses.  However, he is not the hero this time; that role is reserved for Leopold Bloom, but Stephen is second only in importance to him.  Thus Joyce links together two of the finest works of fiction ever written.  The hero of the rejected short story lived on in the imagination of his creator for more than twenty years to become one of the best known and most written about characters of all time.

[1] Eamon Maher writing in The Ticket in The Irish Times, ‘The half-life and death of the Irish Catholic novel’, Saturday, December 23^rd, 2017.

You might also like to read a more detailed character sketch of Stephen here