A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (62 page)

³³
Jane Austen,
Emma
(1816), ch. 30; ed. James Kinsley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 235.

³⁴
Portrait
is often described as a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novel. The term is borrowed from philosophy, specifically from William James, philosopher brother of the novelist Henry, who used it to describe the workings of consciousness as experienced by the individual. When applied to literature, it remains descriptive only of fictions which share a preoccupation with representing character through pre-verbal or unspoken ‘thoughts’. It is thus a generic grouping, not a technique. The term tells us nothing about how the aim of ‘representing thoughts’ is accomplished. See William James,
Principles of Psychology
(New York: Henry Holt, 1890), i. 239; Robert Hurley,
Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1954); and for ‘free indirect discourse’, see Mieke Bal,
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative
(1980), trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 140–2; or Seymour Chatman,
Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

³⁵
As early as 1903, in a review of a not very good but—for Joyce’s later project of writing his own novel about a rebellious ‘young man’—relevant French novel (Marcelle Tinayre’s
The House of Sin
), Joyce (over)praised a writer because he adapted the novel’s prose style to the exigencies of the subject matter: ‘The last chapters of the book … show an admirable adjustment of style and narrative, the prose pausing more and more frequently with every lessening of vitality, and finally expiring’ (
Critical Writings
, 122, and Barry (ed.) 85–6).

³⁶
Hugh Kenner, ‘The Uncle Charles Principle’,
Joyce’s Voices
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 15–38.

³⁷
Wyndham Lewis, quoted ibid. 17.

³⁸
Similarly, Lily the caretaker’s daughter in the opening sentence of Joyce’s
Dubliners
short story ‘The Dead’: ‘Lily the caretaker’s daughter was literally run off her feet.’ That ‘literally’ is the giveaway. The one thing sure is that Lily is not
literally
but rather
metaphorically
run off her feet. The sentence has committed the common sin of attempting to strengthen metaphorical statements by reporting them as literal occurrences: ‘I am literally dead with exhaustion.’ No … The opening sentence of ‘The Dead’ adopts the language of the character being written about—‘literally’ is Lily’s kind of word (James Joyce,
Dubliners
(1914), ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138; Kenner,
Joyce’s Voices
, 15).

³⁹
Not that everyone has noticed this fact. One of the oldest debates in
Portrait
criticism centres on the question of irony, which might itself be thought of as a matter of distance—between, for example, what is said (denotatively) and what is meant (connotatively). Wayne C. Booth, for example, maintained that the narrative of the novel was so irremediably tied to the attitudes of the central character that there was no space for irony to operate; it was impossible to distinguish the attitudes of the character from those of (the narrator or) the author; and the attitudes of Stephen were insufferable (‘The Problem of Distance in
Portrait
’, in
The Rhetoric of Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 323–36). Hugh Kenner, on the other hand, found the portrait of Stephen ironic throughout (first in his ‘The
Portrait
in Perspective’, in
James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism
, ed. Seon Givens (New York: Vanguard, 1948), 132–74, and later in the revision of this as a chapter in
Dublin’s Joyce
(1955; repr. with new introd. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 109–33).

⁴⁰
Hugh Kenner, again, first notices this:
Dublin’s Joyce
, 114–15. With ‘prolepsis’, the rhetorical figure of anticipation (which means ‘to take before’), a form or symbol or word anticipates something that will happen later.

⁴¹
In the manuscript of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, the line reads ‘O the geen wothe botheth’ (
The James Joyce Archive
, ed. Michael Groden, 63 vols. (New York: Garland, 1977–80), 9: 5). The novel’s epigraph—
Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes
—comes from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and means ‘So then to unimagined arts he set his mind’; in the original poem, the line continues ‘and altered nature’s laws’.

⁴²
The manuscript has ‘jacket’ for ‘pocket’. Groden (ed.),
James Joyce Archive
, 9: 13.

⁴³
This rhythmic aspect of language Julia Kristeva describes as analogous to the
semiotic chora
, the persistence of which within symbolic language disrupts and undermines denotation and coherent meaning (
Revolution in Poetic Language
, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25–30, 58).

⁴⁴
‘Tara’ was the ancient seat of Irish kings; Holyhead, the port in north Wales where ships heading east from Dublin landed (see notes).

⁴⁵
‘Epiphany’: a word which Joyce appropriates from the lexicon of the sacred to that of the profane. The Feast of the Epiphany in the Christian calendar celebrates the arrival of the Magi at the scene of Christ’s birth (the point at which God incarnate (or the Word made flesh) is shown forth to the wise men of the world). Joyce turns it to his own ends. In
Stephen Hero
, Stephen Daedalus explains to Cranly: ‘By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.’ It represents a moment in which the radiant whatness and full significance of a thing suddenly become apparent. It has now entered the general critical vocabulary. Joyce himself wrote a series of what are called by Joyce critics ‘Epiphanies’ and these have now been published. It is perhaps significant that the word itself does not appear in
Portrait
.
Stephen Hero
, 188; ‘Epiphanies’,
Poems and Shorter Writings
, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 161–200.

⁴⁶
See n. 15, above.

⁴⁷
Compare Roland Barthes’s analysis of the ‘hermeneutic code’ in literature, that through which the merely formal arrangement of a text produces the sense that ‘truth’ has been revealed (
S
/
Z
(1970), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19, 209–10).

⁴⁸
Though the poem (the ‘villanelle’) he does write is one Joyce himself wrote many years before
Portrait
had even been conceived in its final form (see Robert Scholes, ‘Stephen Dedalus: Poet or Esthete?’,
PMLA
79 (Sept. 1964), 484–9).

⁴⁹
Kenner,
Dublin’s Joyce
, 129: ‘Each chapter closes with a synthesis of triumph which the next destroys.’

⁵⁰
And if we cheat and go outside the bounds of this novel, we can argue that fall he does, for by the opening of
Ulysses
he has flown to the Continent only to return to Dublin and to show no signs of being able once again to attempt flight. But by that time, Joyce was to say of Stephen that he had a shape that couldn’t be changed (to Frank Budgen, quoted in Budgen,
James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’
, 105).

⁵¹
Aristotle,
Poetics
, VIII.1451
^a
38–1451
^b
4;
Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation
, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), ii. 2322–3.

¹
The holograph survives; it is written in Joyce’s hand, bears the date ‘7/1/1904’, and shows signs of having been pillaged for other writings; a photoreproduction can be found in
The James Joyce Archive
, ed. Michael Groden, 63 vols. (New York: Garland, 1977–80), 7: 70-85; it has been published in
Poems and Shorter Writings
, 211–18. For an alternative account of the origins of
Portrait
, see Hans Walter Gabler, ‘Introduction’,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York and London: Garland, 1993), 1–2.

²
CDD
11–12, entry for 2 February 1904 (James Joyce’s 22nd birthday).

³
It has been published: James Joyce,
Stephen Hero
, ed. Theodore Spencer, rev. edn. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (1963; repr. St Albans: Triad, 1977).

⁴
Though as edited it comprises 12 episodes, marked XV to XXVI; as Gabler has shown, the chapter entitled in the edition ‘XIX’ is actually a continuation of ‘XVIII’; this makes the chapter marked ‘XX’ really ‘XIX’, and so on (Gabler, ‘The Seven Lost Years of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’
, in Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds),
Approaches to Joyce’s
‘
Portrait
’
: Ten Essays
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 55.

⁵
Quoted in full in
E
273–4.

⁶
Stories as to exactly which manuscript it was diverge, and in the absence of any manuscript remains showing signs of having been at least scorched, textual criticism has had to read carefully between the lines of Joyce’s letters to try and decipher what he means by ‘the “original” original’ (
LI
136). Gabler argues strongly that it was
Portrait
and not, as legend would have it,
Stephen Hero
(Gabler, ‘Introduction’, 4).

⁷
Gabler, ‘The Seven Lost Years’.

⁸
James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, corrected by Chester G. Anderson, ed. by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1964); this text was reprinted by Jonathan Cape in London, 1968. The same year the text was also reprinted in the Viking Critical Library: James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism and Notes
, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking, 1968).

⁹
Chester G. Anderson, ‘About this Text’, in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, ed. R. B. Kershner (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), pp. ix–x, ix.

¹⁰
In the edition cited in n. 9.

¹¹
And photoreproduced in
The James Joyce Archive
, vols. 9 and 10.

¹²
James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York and London: Garland, 1993).

¹
Joyce to Weaver, quoted in John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon,
A Bibliography of James Joyce [1882–1941]
(1953; repr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971), 136.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

Composition and Publication History

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I

II

III

IV

V

Appendix: List of Selected Variants

Explanatory Notes

Footnotes