A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN BY J. JOYCE

James Joyce

Today, The Grandma has received a present. Claire Fontaine has offered her one of the oldest editions of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was issued on a day like today in 1916.  

The Grandma is a big fan of Irish literature in general and James Joyce in particular. Joyce lived in a convulsed age for Ireland and his novels are a clear reflex of those years.

A writer is not only a person who creates new realities, but also a person who can explain the current history using the tools that literature offers. Before Claire arrived, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 57).

More information: Adjectives

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of 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.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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.

Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce (1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College, Dublin, in 1902. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it up.

He returned to Ireland at his family's request as his mother was dying of cancer. Despite her pleas, the impious Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to make confession or take communion, and when she passed into a coma they refused to kneel and pray for her. After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books.

Joyce made his first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero, in early 1904. That June he saw Nora Barnacle for the first time walking along Nassau Street. Their first date was on June 16, the same date that his novel Ulysses takes place. Almost immediately, Joyce and Nora were infatuated with each other and they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ireland and the Church.

More information: James Joyce. From Dubliners to Ulysses

Nora and Joyce went to continental Europe, first staying in Zürich before settling for ten years in Trieste, then in Austria-Hungary, where he taught English.

In March 1905, Joyce was transferred to the Berlitz School In Trieste, presumably because of threats of spies in Austria. There Nora gave birth to their children, George in 1905 and Lucia in 1907, and Joyce wrote fiction, signing some of his early essays and stories Stephen Daedalus. The short stories he wrote made up the collection Dubliners (1914), which took about eight years to be published due to its controversial nature.

James Joyce & Nora Barnacle

While waiting on Dubliners to be published, Joyce reworked the core themes of the novel Stephen Hero he had begun in Ireland in 1904 and abandoned in 1907 into A Portrait, published in 1916, a year after he had moved back to Zürich in the midst of the First World War.

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. Dana's editor, W. K. Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, I can't print what I can't understand.

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. 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.

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. 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.

More information: Joyce Museo Trieste

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. Chamber Music, a book of Joyce's poems, was published in 1907.

Joyce showed, in his own words, a scrupulous meanness in his use of materials for the novel. 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.

James Joyce

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. 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.

In 1913 the Irish poet W. B. Yeats recommended Joyce's work to the avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound, who was assembling an anthology of verse. Pound wrote to Joyce, and in 1914 Joyce submitted the first chapter of the unfinished Portrait to Pound, who was so taken with it that he pressed to have the work serialised in the London literary magazine The Egoist. Joyce hurried to complete the novel, and it appeared in The Egoist in twenty-five installments from 2 February 1914 to 1 September 1915.

There was difficulty finding a British publisher for the finished novel, so Pound arranged for its publication by an American publishing house, B. W. Huebsch, which issued it on 29 December 1916. The Egoist Press republished it in the United Kingdom on 12 February 1917 and Jonathan Cape took over its publication in 1924. In 1964 Viking Press issued a corrected version overseen by Chester Anderson. Garland released a copy text edition by Hans Walter Gabler in 1993.

More information: The James Joyce Centre

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.

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.

James Joyce

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. 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.

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.

Towards the beginning of the novel, Joyce depicts the young Stephen's growing consciousness, which is said to be a condensed version of the arc of Dedalus' entire life, as he continues to grow and form his identity. Stephen's growth as an individual character is important because through him Joyce laments Irish society's tendency to force individuals to conform to types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist character. Themes that run through Joyce's later novels find expression there.

More information: The British Library

As Stephen transitions into adulthood, he leaves behind his Catholic religious identity, which is closely tied to the national identity of Ireland. His rejection of this dual identity is also a rejection of constraint and an embrace of freedom in identity. Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus throughout the novel conjure up something demonic in Stephen renouncing his Catholic faith. When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness.

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Stephen's surname being connected to Daedalus may also call to mind the theme of going against the status quo, as Daedalus defies the King of Crete.

Stephen’s struggle to find identity in the novel parallels the Irish struggle for independence during the early twentieth century. He rejects any outright nationalism, and is often prejudiced toward those that use Hiberno-English, which was the marked speech patterns of the Irish rural and lower-class. However, he is also heavily concerned with his country’s future and understands himself as an Irishman, which then leads him to question how much of his identity is tied up in said nationalism.

Download A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture 

ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. 

The English reading public explains the reason why. 

James Joyce