A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Overview

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is two hundred and eighty pages in five chapters, serialised in 1914 and 1915 and published as a book in 1916. Joyce had already written a long, conventional autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero, over nine hundred manuscript pages, and abandoned it. What he produced instead throws out the connective tissue and keeps only the scenes that matter, so the book moves by jumps, with years disappearing between sections.

The famous technical device is that the prose grows up with its subject. The first page is in the vocabulary of a small child. Chapter one is the idiom of a frightened boy at boarding school. By chapter five Stephen is arguing aesthetics in a scholastic register he has borrowed wholesale from Aquinas. You are never told how old he is; you can hear it.

The other device is the epiphany, a word Joyce took from theology and used for a moment when an ordinary thing suddenly discloses what it is. The structure of each chapter is a build toward one: the pandying, the prostitute, the confession, the girl on the strand. Each ends in exaltation, and each exaltation is undercut at the start of the next chapter.

The name is not subtle and is not meant to be. Daedalus built the labyrinth and made wings to escape it, and his son flew too close to the sun.

What happens

Chapter 1. Fragments of infancy, then Clongowes Wood College, where Stephen is small, short-sighted and homesick. He is shouldered into a ditch of cold slimy water and falls ill. He is wrongly punished by Father Dolan, who beats his hands with a leather pandybat for not working when his glasses are broken, and in the chapter’s first epiphany he walks to the rector’s study to complain and is cheered by the other boys.

In the middle sits the Christmas dinner, one of the great scenes in Irish writing: a family destroying itself over Parnell, with Mr Casey and Simon Dedalus on one side and Dante Riordan defending the priests who brought him down, until the old man is weeping over the tablecloth and the child is watching.

Chapter 2. The family’s money runs out and they move down through a series of poorer houses to Dublin. Stephen goes to Belvedere, acts in a play, wins an essay prize. He travels to Cork with his father, who is selling the last of the property and getting sentimental in pubs, and Stephen feels nothing at all. The prize money is spent on a brief fantasy of family respectability and is gone in a fortnight. The chapter ends in a brothel with a prostitute who has to put her arms round him and kiss him because he cannot move.

Chapter 3. A three-day religious retreat, and the sermons on death, judgement, hell and heaven. Joyce gives them at length and with total seriousness: the dimensions of hell, the stench, the company, the fire that burns without consuming, and above all eternity, illustrated by the mountain of sand from which a bird removes one grain every million years. It is a sustained piece of prose that has frightened readers who believe none of it. Stephen, who has been living in mortal sin for months, is reduced to terror, and the chapter ends with a confession in a back-street chapel and a communion taken in a state of peace.

Chapter 4. Months of ferocious piety: mortifications, rosaries, a timetable of devotions. The director of the college notices and asks whether he has a vocation, and holds out the immense privileges of the priesthood. Stephen, walking home, understands that he will refuse, and that his destiny is to learn his own wisdom apart from others.

He goes to the strand at Dollymount. Some schoolfellows swimming call his name in mock Greek, and he thinks of Daedalus. Then he sees a girl standing in the water with her skirts drawn up, alone and quiet, and she looks at him, and neither speaks. It is the central epiphany of the book, and the prose goes up like a flare.

Chapter 5. University College, and a different mode entirely. Stephen is now a talker: with the dean of studies about the word tundish and the English language he can never quite own, with his friend Davin about nationalism, with Lynch about aesthetics. He sets out the theory. Art is either lyric, epic or dramatic, and dramatic is highest because the artist disappears into the work. Beauty requires wholeness, harmony and radiance. The artist stands behind his creation like God, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

His friend Cranly presses him about his mother and whether he could not simply do his Easter duty to please her, and Stephen refuses, in the speech about not serving what he no longer believes and using silence, exile and cunning. The novel ends in diary entries, the voice dropping into something rapid and private, with the last two addressed to life and to the old artificer.

How to read it

Read the first two pages twice and notice what the sentences are doing. Everything Joyce is up to is announced there.

Read chapter three straight through without skipping. The sermon is long by design; its length is the effect.

Keep some distance from Stephen in chapter five. The aesthetic theory is impressive and it is also being delivered by a twenty-year-old to a friend who keeps interrupting to complain about the cold and say something crude. Joyce is not simply endorsing him, and the comedy of the last chapter is easy to miss.

Look up the Parnell background before you start. Charles Stewart Parnell was the Irish leader brought down in 1890 over an affair, with the clergy leading the attack, and his fall poisoned Irish politics for a generation. The Christmas dinner is unintelligible without it.

Notice the pattern of ends. Every chapter closes on a peak, and every chapter opens by showing that the peak led nowhere: after the triumph over Father Dolan, the rector laughs about it with his father; after the communion, the piety curdles. That rhythm is the book’s judgement on its own hero.

The common misreading is that this is straightforward autobiography with a hero. Joyce gave Stephen his own schools, his own family’s decline and his own departure, and also gave him a vanity and a coldness he then let the reader see. The right question is how far the book is on Stephen’s side.

Questions it raises

• Is Stephen an artist, or a young man who has decided to be one? What in the book would settle it?
• The prose imitates Stephen’s mind at each stage. Where, if anywhere, can the reader stand outside it?
• The hell sermon is rendered without irony and at enormous length. Why does Joyce give it that much power?
• Stephen refuses the priesthood and adopts its vocabulary for art. Has he escaped the church or changed its object?
• Silence, exile and cunning are the weapons of a weak party. Is his refusal to serve courage or evasion?
• The artist is said to be invisible, indifferent, paring his fingernails. Does this novel meet that standard?