Portrait of the Artist on a first pass

For the first installation of the “Joyce on a first pass” series, see “Dubliners on a first pass” here.

Suppose you want to continue your journey toward getting a sense of what Joyce is up to. You want to read some Joyce, sure, but you also want to know what makes Joyce different from other authors, why he’s such a big deal. You read a couple of stories from Dubliners. Great. Now you’re going to read a selection from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Text

First get yourself a text. You can read any old text you like. As as with Dubliners, if you want notes, I recommend either the Oxford World’s Classics edition or the Penguin edition. Of these I recommend the Oxford World’s Classics edition for the same reason I did for Dubliners: Notes are tucked quietly in at the end, so there’s no distraction in the text proper.

Background

I’m not really going to add anything in the way of ‘preparation’ that I didn’t already say with regard to Dubliners. Instead I want to motivate the shift from Dubliners to Potrait. Recall the distinctive gesture of Dubliners: the moment of paralysis. Characters become incapable of (or uninterested in) realizing their intentions, and stories end abruptly or pedal in mid-air as the relation between the protagonist and their world breaks down.

Now consider the voice of Dubliners. In particular, recall the climactic moment of “Eveline,” when Eveline just stands there, doing nothing. Imagine yourself describing this moment to someone else. You’d be screaming! It would be virtually impossible not to embellish it with commentary, not to adorn it with one or another choice epithets for the protagonist. She’s deluded! Her mind is adrift! Frank calls to her: “Come!” Now Joyce’s narrator:

All of the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

Frank says “Come!” again. The narrator continues:

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish!

No comment, no unpacking of metaphors; nothing but straight telling what’s in her mind. The narrator works within the confines of Eveline’s own imagination. The narrator of Dubliners not only describes nothing but what’s going on in Eveline’s head, but does so under Eveline’s own imaginative constraints.

At least two things distinguish Portrait from Dubliners. The first is that the narrator isn’t just confined to the protagonist’s mind, as a closed system, as it were, but tracks its development from childhood to late adolescence. Unlike Dubliners, whose prose remains statically in the detached world of its characters, the narrator of Portrait ‘grows up’ alongside Stephen Dedalus, its protagonist; diction, style, and rhythm shift to accommodate Dedalus’ development and maturation.

The second thing is Dedalus. In short, Dedalus doesn’t accept the terms of Dubliners. By the end of Portrait, appropriately, he’s planning to leave Dublin. The story of Portrait, in short, is that of Dedalus outgrowing the world of Dubliners: straining to expand the frontiers of his mind and imagination; and meanwhile continually forcing the narrator to modulate their stance and perspective, too. Gradually over the course of Portrait the narrator becomes a different sort of narrator, moves closer to the “stream of consciousness” that is one of the hallmarks of Ulysses.

Plan

Here’s your reading plan. You’re going to read two parts of Portrait:

• Part I, and
• Part V.

That is, you’re going to read the beginning and the end. That will get you a sense of the two points just mentioned. A couple of notes to consider before or during each part.

Part I

Notice right away, with the first sentence, what Joyce is doing: mimicking the interior of Dedalus’ young mind. Not only do things and people have silly names (“moocows”; an aunt [‘Auntie’] is “Dante”) but sentences are short and have simple constructions (“He sang that song. That was his song.”) or make trivial observations (“[Uncle Charles and Dante] were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante”).

After the first three-asterisk break, we are treated to an image that is, in a way, the central image of Portrait: Dedalus, now in boarding school, refusing to play the game he finds himself in the middle of. He’s sitting on the wing of a rugby game trying as hard as he can not to get involved. He’s lost in his thoughts—although, tellingly, he’s for the most part lost in his memories rather than in his imagination. Significantly, however, he is at the same time constantly asking himself questions that probe the meanings of conventions. Consider, for example:

Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

(Note the shifting personal pronouns: “your,” “his,” and so on. Throughout Portrait the relation between protagonist and narrator is uncertain, constantly being renegotiated.)

When Dedalus is home for the holidays, I recommend you not get lost in the chatter of his family. Don’t worry if you aren’t following every last thread about Irish national politics; it’s not going to ‘pay out’ later in the novel or anything. Really you just need to note what a bunch of non-stop talking they do, how small they are in their obsessions and squabbles, and how irresistible it is for them to pick small fights. This is an important anticlimax, too, as Dedalus while at school has been fantasizing about being home again; the payoff is nil; he must find some other source of meaning than his family.

Perhaps the central event of Part I is Dedalus deciding to protest his treatment by the prefect. The prefect refuses Dedalus’ story about why he isn’t doing his exercises, and he beats Dedalus as a result. Dedalus swells with indignation and then reports him to the rector. Alongside his intellectual maturity, Dedalus thus makes the first steps toward growing into a certain moral uprightness also. By the end of Part I, he is a boy well on his way to becoming a young man.

Part V

Half a book later, Dedalus is a student at University College in Dublin. You don’t have to worry too much about what’s happened between parts I and V in the meanwhile.

I also want to suggest you don’t have to worry too much about all of the historical and literary references, and if I mention this in particular, it’s because it’s the sort of (inadvertent) intimidation that can make approaching Joyce difficult. There are two things to keep in mind about this. The first is that Dedalus is about twenty years old, and intellectually curious, sure, but about as intelligent as an intellectually curious twenty-year-old, and the narrator is, let’s say, faithful to that. The references are artificial, superficial, forced, bordering on pretentious (“The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann”—I, personally, wouldn’t take this seriously).

The second thing to keep in mind is that Dedalus lives in a world quite unlike ours, and is taking a very specific course of study whose material he is more or less regurgitating. Aquinas’ theory of beauty, for example, is part of the scholastic core of his studies; it would not be for anyone studying the equivalent philosophy-and-literature-type track today. Inversely, it’s unclear whether Dedalus has actually read any Aristotle, which would be more (although not universally) common for a similar student today. To take a few references from Dedalus’ walk to school: Hauptmann, nearly forgotten today, was treated as canonical at the time; Cavalcanti, standard fare for the time, is less well-known today; and Newman—Cardinal Newman—is a foundational figure for University College, but not common currency among today’s Dedaluses. In short, if you wanted to study philosophy and literature today (even the history of philosophy and literature), no professor would recommend Dedalus’ course of study.

What does matter is appreciating how, and how intensely, Dedalus seems to be engaged with his studies. The fact that trees remind him of women in Hauptmann is mostly interesting because it tells us that Dedalus sees the question of beauty as one tied intimately to his immediate world. Indeed, Dedalus himself treats the figures of his education as only useful partners in his quest to understand the nature of beauty, saying of Aristotle and Aquinas, for example, that “I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light.”

In a sense, the question of all of Part V is: What is beauty? and Dedalus chiefly employs Aquinas as a tool for probing the question. Dedalus is simultaneously however pulled in two directions: one is that of his Jesuit training; the other is, as it were, the university of life, the world not only dressed in the ideas of Aquinas and Aristotle, but the world in its own ugly, weird clothes. While sitting through a physics lecture, for example, Dedalus’ classmate whispers a dirty joke in his ear (something on par with “deez nuts”). Then:

His fellowstudent’s rude humour ran like a gust through the cloister of Stephen’s mind, shaking into gay life limp priestly vestments that hung upon the walls, seeing them to sway and caper in a sabbath of misrule.

A dirty joke isn’t a distraction from Dedalus’ persistent philosophical musings but a way of giving them life and substance.

At the same time, Dedalus distinguishes himself by not being entirely absorbed in or by the world around him. At one point in Portrait V he’s in conversation with a friend, Lynch, about the nature of beauty, when a truck passes making a terrible lot of noise. Lynch covers his ears and shouts at it. When it’s gone, Lynch is still shouting at it, and Stephen has to wait a few moments before continuing, and he picks up immediately where he left off, articulating a second reply to an objection to a thesis concerning the third constituent of his Thomistic theory of beauty.

Now, what’s more interesting here, the truck or the theory of beauty? I’m sure the theory of beauty has its adherents, but I’m for the truck, and I’ll tell you why: It does a phenomenal job at showing how Dedalus, to put it one way, has already left Dublin. Lynch is so absorbed in his immediately perceptible world, he not only can’t hear what Dedalus is saying while the truck passes; he suffers its presence residually, even after it’s gone. That’s what absorption looks like. To Dedalus’ mind—and in fact, if it matters, this is more or less what he’s about to argue with respect to the theory of beauty—the particulars of sense are just so much noise; what really matters are the forms perceived, as it were, through them.

The end of Portrait

Something happens at the end of Portrait that anticipates the unhinged formal experimentation of Ulysses: The narrative suddenly shifts from the third-personal, free indirect discourse of the rest of the book to a short sequence of Dedalus’ journal entries. Let’s say the obvious intent is to demonstrate Dedalus’ coming into his own, taking over the narrative thread of his own life. The ultimate point of arrival in the process of maturation that is Portrait’s relationship between narrator and Dedalus is the narrator’s absence. Dedalus is on his own.

But, under the hood, it reveals in a simple way a rich frontier for the novel, one that will be expansively cultivated in Ulysses. From the beginning of Portrait the narrator has been tracking Dedalus’ development with style and diction, but more or less the same basic formal idea has remained unchanged: sympathetic narrator tells story of boy. With the journal entries, the novel becomes not only polyphonous (many-voiced) but formally diverse. Suppose for simplicity’s sake Portrait were composed half in the third-person and half in journal entries. What is it? It’s an assemblage, a collage. It doesn’t have a single narrative thread that makes it one thing. It’s not even a collection of one sort of thing. To call it a novel is to invoke a completely different understanding of what a novel can be.