A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel by Irish writer James Joyce. A
Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young
Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate
craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish
conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The
work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake
(1939).

A Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in
a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking
its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and
making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's
developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the
English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B.
W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners
(1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.

In 1998, the Modern Library named the novel third on its list of the 100 best English-language
novels of the 20th century.

SUMMARY - POVESTIRE

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.

— Ovid, Epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man[3]

James Joyce in 1915

At the request of its editors, Joyce submitted a work of philosophical fiction entitled "A Portrait
of the Artist" to the Irish literary magazine Dana on 7 January 1904.[4] Dana's editor, W. K.
Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, "I can't print what I can't understand."[5] On his 22nd birthday, 2
February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which incorporated
aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in A Portrait.[6] He worked on the book until mid-
1905 and brought the manuscript with him when he moved to Trieste that year. Though his main
attention turned to the stories that made up Dubliners, Joyce continued work on Stephen Hero.
At 914 manuscript pages, Joyce considered the book about half-finished, having completed 25 of
its 63 intended chapters.[7] In September 1907, however, he abandoned this work, and began a
complete revision of the text and its structure, producing what became A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man.[8] By 1909 the work had taken shape and Joyce showed some of the draft chapters
to Ettore Schmitz, one of his language students, as an exercise. Schmitz, himself a respected
writer, was impressed and with his encouragement Joyce continued work on the book.
In 1911 Joyce flew into a fit of rage over the continued refusals by publishers to print Dubliners
and threw the manuscript of Portrait into the fire. It was saved by a "family fire brigade"
including his sister Eileen.[7][8][a] Chamber Music, a book of Joyce's poems, was published in
1907.[9]

Joyce showed, in his own words, "a scrupulous meanness" in his use of materials for the novel.[10]
He recycled the two earlier attempts at explaining his aesthetics and youth, A Portrait of the
Artist and Stephen Hero, as well as his notebooks from Trieste concerning the philosophy of
Thomas Aquinas; they all came together in five carefully paced chapters.[11]

Stephen Hero is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but in
Portrait Joyce adopts the free indirect style, a change that reflects the moving of the narrative
centre of consciousness firmly and uniquely onto Stephen. Persons and events take their
significance from Stephen, and are perceived from his point of view.[12] Characters and places are
no longer mentioned simply because the young Joyce had known them. Salient details are
carefully chosen and fitted into the aesthetic pattern of the novel.[12]

Characters
Stephen Dedalus – The main character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Growing up,
Stephen goes through long phases of hedonism and deep religiosity. He eventually adopts a
philosophy of aestheticism, greatly valuing beauty and art. Stephen is essentially Joyce's alter
ego, and many of the events of Stephen's life mirror events from Joyce's own youth.[15] His
surname is taken from the ancient Greek mythical figure Daedalus, who also engaged in a
struggle for autonomy.

Simon Dedalus – Stephen's father, an impoverished former medical student with a strong sense
of Irish nationalism. Sentimental about his past, Simon Dedalus frequently reminisces about his
youth.[15] Loosely based on Joyce's own father and their relationship.

Mary Dedalus – Stephen's mother who is very religious and often argues with Stephen about
attending services.[15]

Emma Clery – Stephen's beloved, the young girl to whom he is fiercely attracted over the course
of many years. Stephen constructs Emma as an ideal of femininity, even though (or because) he
does not know her well.[15]

Charles Stewart Parnell – An Irish political leader who is not an actual character in the novel, but
whose death influences many of its characters. Parnell had powerfully led the Irish Parliamentary
Party until he was driven out of public life after his affair with a married woman was exposed.
Cranly – Stephen's best friend at university, in whom he confides some of his thoughts and
feelings. In this sense Cranly represents a secular confessor for Stephen. Eventually Cranly
begins to encourage Stephen to conform to the wishes of his family and to try harder to fit in
with his peers, advice that Stephen fiercely resents. Towards the conclusion of the novel he bears
witness to Stephen's exposition of his aesthetic philosophy. It is partly due to Cranly that Stephen
decides to leave, after witnessing Cranly's budding (and reciprocated) romantic interest in
Emma.[15]

Dante (Mrs. Riordan) – The governess of the Dedalus children. She is very intense and a
dedicated Catholic.[15]

Lynch – Stephen's friend from university who has a rather dry personality.[15]

STYLE
The novel mixes third-person narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both
identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The
omniscient narrator of the earlier Stephen Hero informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write
"some pages of sorry verse," while Portrait gives only Stephen's attempts, leaving the evaluation
to the reader.[28]

The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue until the final
chapter. This chapter includes dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davin
and Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits his complex Thomist
aesthetic theory in an extended dialogue. Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen's diary
entries in the concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his
own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others.[29] Joyce fully employs the free
indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's intellectual development from his childhood, through his
education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man. The
style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, as the complexity of language and
Stephen's ability to comprehend the world around him both gradually increase.[30] The book's
opening pages communicate Stephen's first stirrings of consciousness when he is a child.
Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist
and the subjective effect of the events of his life.[31]

The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue
by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian
publications.
ANALYSIS
According to the literary scholar Hugh Kenner, "every theme in the entire life-work of James
Joyce is stated on the first two pages of the Portrait".[32] The highly condensed recounting of
young Stephen's growing consciousness "enact[s] the entire action [of the novel] in microcosm.
An Aristotelian catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities is counterpointed against the
unfolding of the infant conscience",[33] and themes that run through Joyce's later novels find
expression there.[34]

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his
surname.

The epigraph quotes from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the inventor Daedalus, who has built a
labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur, and his son Icarus who are forbidden to leave the Island of
Crete by its King, Minos. Daedalus, "turning his mind to unknown arts", fashions wings of birds'
feathers and wax with which he and his son flee their island prison. Icarus flies so close to the
sun that the wax on his pair melts and he plummets into the sea. To A. Nicholas Fargnoli and
Michael Patrick Gillespie the epigraph parallels the heights and depths that end and begin each
chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the interpretive freedom of the text.[3]

A Portrait belongs to the genre of Künstlerroman, a story of artistic development, of which A

Autobiography[edit]

Stephen Hero is a directly autobiographical novel, including people and events because Joyce
had personally experienced them. In contrast, in A Portrait Joyce refines his approach by
selectively drawing on life events and reflecting them through the consciousness of Stephen
Dedalus, a fictional character.[3

QUOTES –
1. “His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her
eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in
life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”
2. “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I
no longer believe, whether it calls 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 defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile,
and cunning.”
3. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience
and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
4. “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was
alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and
brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
5. “And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life
simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at
sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”
6. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down
along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens
little boy named baby tuckoo”