A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Lectures

A quick run-through of some crucial points

Part 1: The first page

• His father has the first lines of the story; Stephen is a baby.

• (Place: Ireland. Time: circa 1895.)

• Narrative is in modern style: puts reader immediately into Stephen’s experience, makes reader experience things as Stephen does. We are shown not told.

Part 1: The first page

It has been noticed that:• For this story of a person who will

become an artist, Joyce has included an appeal to all 5 senses (imagery) within the first page!

• Sight (little green place), sound (song, piano, voice), smell (mother’s nicer than father’s), touch (velvet backs of brushes), taste (lemon)

Part 1: Clongowes Wood College

• “Stream of consciousness” - note how the narrative just shifts without warning or guidance (like thoughts do) from Stephen at home to Stephen at school.

• Page 23 - “warm and cold motif (sensual experience of the world) picked up from first page, also attention to words (“suck”)

Part 1: Clongowes Wood College

The artist in embryo:• Attention to colour, creative associations (page 24 -

roses, pages 26-27 (earth colours linked to the brushes)

• Sensitivity and imagination: vivid memory of being pushed into the ditch (26), castle nightmares (30-31)

• Imagines own death. Reacts to beauty of elegiac poem when sick in the school’s infirmary (35-36)

Parnell

• Fantasies of his own death bring on feverish vision of Parnell’s body being brought back to Ireland - page 38

• Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891): Irish nationalist political leader, founder of the Irish Parliamentary Party that sought Irish Home Rule.

Christmas Dinner Disaster Back home for Christmas, where Stephen (and the

reader) get a dose of some forces that govern adult Irish life:

Religion and Politics!

Here, its Religion (Dante Riordan who is anti-Parnell) vs. Politics (Simon Dedalus and Mr. Casey who are pro-Parnell)

• Stephen, “terrorstricken”, sees his father cry.

The Pandybat

• Stephen’s flogging at the hands of the Jesuit master (p. 60-61) is sadistic, damaging and unfair. The book will revisit Jesuits relishing cruelty and power to scare or hurt.

Part 1: Last Page

• Stephen a hero all of a sudden for telling the rector he was pandied unfairly.

• He was happy and free (p.68)• The air was soft and grey and mild, with the

smell of evening in it. Sounds of cricket-playing like drops of water from fountain.

• Section ends as it began, in that we have imagery: Stephen’s sense experience.

Part 2: Family, Friends and “Romance”

• Fast-forward in time. Stephen is a teenager now. He’s got the confused feelings that go with adolescence:

• Desire to connect to family but increasing embarrassment or disappointment with them (especially father)

• First desires for love and sex, but awkwardness around that…

• Pals around with friends, but is often aloof, conscious of his difference.

Part 2: Family

• Decline has set in. Family has to move to poorer area (Blackrock). Stephen no longer able to attend Clongowes: “in a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back…” (74). Men arrive to take some furniture away to be sold off (75)

Part 2: Family

• Father tells story around dinner table of how he and Rector Dolan had a good laugh about Stephen’s complaint of unfair pandying.

• This embarrasses the older Stephen and undercuts his memory of triumph

Part 2: Family• He rushes away after the school play he performs in,

not waiting for his father and preferring his own company (95)

• In Cork, he is bored and irritated with his father’s proverbial advice and nostalgic, self-justifying reminiscences (bottom of 99)

• He realizes his moon-like remoteness from his father in the pub, while his dad insults him in public company (bottom of 103-104)

Part 2: Family

• He tries to help his family with money won from an essay competition, buying them expensive gifts. Later feels this was futile and wasteful.

• “How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide…Useless. (106)

Part 2: Family

• His father’s old friend, Mike Flynn, his trainer for a while, receives Stephen’s contempt (see page 71)

• Nor can Stephen share in Uncle Charles’ piety (71-72) and we see that his thoughts about his uncle are critical and ironic.

• Conclusion: Stephen no longer looks up to family. He will not be the apple of his father’s (or uncle’s, or father’s friends’) eye.

Sex and Romance (?)

• He’s better at fantasies (influenced by his reading of literature) than real contact with girls.

• Note: his imagined encounter with the beautiful Mercedes is a prideful fantasy of rejection of love, not admission of it. (72-73)

• Writes poem to E.C_ in the style of Byron, his favourite poet at this time.

Romance?

“Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes”

Sex and Romance (?)

• He does nothing but write poems addressed to E.C.

• The night of the children’s party, waiting for the tram, he felt he could “hold her and kiss her. He did neither.” (79)

• The excitement in his blood is frustrated when,after the rush of performing in the play, he doesn’t see her among those waiting for him.

Sex and Romance (?)

• Even the prostitute he sleeps with at the end of this part must kiss him, as “his lips would not bend to kiss her” (109).

Aloof

• Bottom of page 74: He is different from others• After the tram ride, after the Whitsuntide play, he

ends up alone.• He’s chosen to play the teacher because he seems

so much older and pedantic.• “He saw clearly too his own futile isolation” (106)• We see him needing to break away from others for a

solitary vision or experience before returning: “my heart is quite calm now. I will go back.” (95)

Part 3: The Conversion

• Sin vs. (Official) Sanctity developed in this part.

• Stephen, who is visiting prostitutes regularly (at 16 yrs old) at the start of this section, repents and embraces the “life of grace” at the end.

Part 3: The Conversion

• Contrast the heavy, greasy start (“his belly crave for food...he longed for stew...the flourfattened sauce...stuff it into you, his belly counselled him” – p.110)

• with the light-filled end (“simple and beautiful..breakfast...candles...flowers....the host on his tongue” p.152)

Stephen – still the sensualist and fantasist

• He takes sensual pleasure in sinning and then repenting to the pure figure of Mary and saying prayers.

• Into the sermon, despite his real-life experiences, his is still conjuring up unrealistic images of “harlots with gleaming jewel eyes”. He tries to obliterate the memory of his fantasies with yet another fantasy – a vision of himself and Emma in front of the Blessed Virgin.

• He’s still going from one extreme to another in formative part of his life

Part 3: The Hammer of God

• The sermon delivered by Father Arnell (old priest at Clongowes) is overwhelmingly long and intense (p.115-142)!!

• It signifies the power of the Catholic church at this time and its inevitable influence on an Irish boy’s life.

• Again the cruel, relishing emphasis on guilt, threat, judgement and the sins of the mind and flesh that will be paid for with pain

Repent, ye sinners

Confession – with a little pride

• Deeply affected by the priest’s words, Stephen decides to confess his sins and be absolved.

• However, he cannot face revealing his sins in the company of fellow students, even though the confession booth is private. He goes to a priest not connected to the school.

• Page 148: he finds it hard to be humble and abase himself.

The Language of Others

• It has been noted that after the sermon (for a while), the narration (which is limited to Stephen) begins to sound like Father Arnell. See page 148

• Stephen is trying on the words of others. Before too long he finds they do not fit...

Part 4: Epiphany

• 153-159: For a time Stephen is a most zealous and devout Catholic, until at 163 an offer is extended for Stephen to “join the order”.

• Interestingly during this period he tries to mortify the senses (156-157), a kind of symbolic death of (imagery and) the artist.

• It has been noted that there is still pride in Stephen-the-devout: whatever he does (even if its humble servitude), he must be different.

Part 4: Epiphany

• But Stephen’s fire of devotion begins to die…

• Page 158-159: the return of sexual desires, and of questions about his life.

• Page 160: the director’s silly comments about robes like skirts both irritate him and (at the word “jupes”) excite his imagination.

Part 4: Epiphany

• Motif: “The little flame on his cheek” (page 161 and again on 162) has been seen before in the context of rebellion and defiance (of religion): refer back to the Christmas dinner disaster at page 49.

• Something in Stephen won’t let him say yes to the priest’s offer: bottom of 162

Religion or Art?

• Street music helps to dissolve his nearly resolved contract with the church (bottom of 165).

• The priest’s face is a “mirthless mask” (166), his imagined face as a Jesuit is “eyeless, sourflavoured and devout” (167)…

• Stephen is “ready to fall”, and crosses the bridge (167) - he will not be a priest.

In Stephen’s experience, Religion does not embrace life

Epiphany

• We know this part. Let’s look to our sheets for specifics…

• All in all, a scene where he embraces his true vocation, to recreate life out of life as an artist, to invent, to fly (away) and so live up to his last name.

Part 5: University and Departure

• Stephen, now university age, is skipping some classes.

• When not at school he likes to walk across the city, where he is “glad to find himself in the midst of common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth of the city.”

Distant from friends

• He has university pals but they are generally not very much like him, and he is considered antisocial.

• Example: Davin comes from an uneducated peasant background, and is a fervent supporter of the native Celtic culture (a movement Joyce considered silly) and the Catholic church. He’s a “dullwitted serf”.

• Cranly is closer to Stephen , but also a believer.

Distant from adults too

• Has contempt for the Dean of Studies, who doesn’t understand Stephen’s theories, although Stephen’s “soul” does “fret in the shadow of his language” – the Dean’s native English.

• His mother, a good Catholic, is distraught at Stephen’s agnosticism and refusal to take Communion.

“I will not serve”

• In fact, Stephen in one section wants to talk over (with Cranly) a quarrel he had with his mother about not taking Easter Communion.

• Cranly tries to convince proud Stephen to bend to his mother’s wishes, but Stephen replies “I will not serve”.

• Stephen here is daringly quoting Lucifer, the devil, the rebel angel.

“I will not serve”

“I shall try to fly by those nets”

• Davin urges Stephen to “be one of us. In your heart you are an Irishman”. He also makes a reference to Emma.

• Stephen replies with a fierce attack on his countrymen for their treachery toward those who tried to help them reclaim their national identity “from the days of Tone to those of Parnell...When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight...I shall try to fly by those nets...Ireland is an old sow” who eats her young”.

Aesthetic theory: what is beauty?

• Stephen is using ideas form St Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, but, significantly, is modifying the ideas of others into his own philosophy of art and beauty.

• The supreme work of art is “the dramatic form” reached when “the personality of the artist...refines itself out of existence...The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”

Preparing for flight• Near the end, Stephen

stands on the steps of the library watching the swallows. The swallows are augury, an omen that he will leave Ireland. They are “birds ever leaving the homes they had built to wander”.

Emma

• Finally establishes a more distant and objective view of Emma and his relationship with her. Actually sees her in a friendly way, now that he’s not obsessive or idealistic towards her.

• “I like her and it seems a new feeling to me.”• In his mind the white arms of roads and...and

the black arms of tall ships have replaced the embraces he hoped for from Emma.

I will not serve

• Stephen decides he must ruthlessly cut himself loose from all the old ties if he is to fulfill himself as an artist.

• “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call 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.”

True Father

• In contrast to the start of the novel that began with his father Simon speaking to him, the end offers Stephen’s words (in diary form) invoking Dedalus, he of his last name and the “old artificer” whom Stephen now claims as his true father.

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