He decides not to join the priesthood. He wishes to maintain his independence and does not feel that he can be a part of any organization. His power, he realizes, will come not from his initiation into the priesthood but from devoting himself to his solitary art, even at the cost of losing his family, friends, nation, and God. Sin—particularly Stephen's sense of sin, as defined by the Catholic Church—is a major aspect of his awareness of God and religion. Deeply disturbed by the consciousness of his own sin including masturbation and encounters with prostitutes , Stephen goes to confession.
Afterward, absolved of his sins, he is "conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs…. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.
For all his efforts, however, Stephen is unable to maintain this kind of life, and he lapses once again. Like many of the novels that precede it, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is written in the third person point of view. However, this novel is anything but a traditional third-person narrative. Joyce's narrative voice is utterly unlike the omniscient all-knowing narrative voice found in traditional nineteenth-century novels. Earlier novelists such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot concentrated on exterior detail and attempted to give a broad overview both of the action that they were depicting and the society in which it took place.
Joyce had no interest in writing this sort of novel. His narrative is narrow and tightly focused; he does not tell what is happening but rather tries to show what is happening without explaining the events that he is showing. There is no plot as such in the novel; the narrative is not continuous but fragmented, with gaps in the chronology.
The focus is exclusively on the central character, Stephen Dedalus, who is present on virtually every page. Every narrative detail is filtered through Stephen's consciousness. Joyce uses the experimental techniques stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue to let the reader see, hear, and feel what Stephen is experiencing as the action unfolds.
One result of this focus on Stephen is that most of the other characters are seen only in relation to him. In the earlier sections of the novel, Stephen is very young and is not fully aware of the significance of the situations in which he finds himself. Here the narrative mirrors the level of Stephen's intellectual development. For example, at the very beginning of the book, Stephen is a baby or, at the most, a toddler. Thus, Joyce begins the book using a simple vocabulary and imitates the style of a children's story: The dialogue of the argument, between Mr. Casey a friend of Stephen's father and Stephen's Aunt Dante, is reported without comment.
Stephen is not aware of what the argument is about, but he knows that it is disturbing and that it disrupts the harmony of the Christmas dinner. However, Joyce the author knows that readers of his day certainly would have recognized the significance of the argument, which concerns the late Irish nationalist leader Charles Stuart Parnell. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is full of this sort of narrative duality: Joyce the author knows what is happening, the reader might know what is happening, but the central character through whom the action unfolds is not always aware of its full significance.
The narrative becomes increasingly sophisticated as Stephen matures. Much of the chapter is taken up with philosophical discussions of art and aesthetics. In several conversations, Stephen explains his ideas, which are based on the ideas of Aristotle and of Thomas Aquinas. Critics have remarked that Stephen's dialogue in this section reads more like a nonfiction philosophy work than like fiction.
The action of the book takes place in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century, a span of about twenty years. Although Joyce gives specific settings for the incidents in the book, he does not give dates for the events that he is reporting. However, critics know that the events of Stephen Dedalus's life mirror events in Joyce's own childhood and young adulthood. Specific settings include various Dedalus homes the first outside Dublin and later ones in the city , the schools that Stephen attends Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare and Belvedere School in Dublin , the chapel where Father Arnall delivers his fiery sermon, and, later in the book, University College, Dublin.
Stephen also visits the city of Cork in southwest Ireland with his father. Both indoor and outdoor settings are used. Regardless of the specific setting of any scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Joyce gives a minimum of external description. He is more concerned with the state of mind of his main character, Stephen Dedalus, than with the external circumstances of Stephen's situation.
Yet without giving lengthy descriptions of a classroom, for example, Joyce is able to create the atmosphere of a school. Joyce himself was a Dubliner by birth and upbringing. He does not evoke the city of Dublin in as much detail here as in his earlier short story collection Dubliners or in his later novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Nonetheless, in A Portrait , Dublin is prominent both as a physical city and as a symbol of the center of Irish consciousness. In any case, whether he is writing about Stephen's life at school, at home, or at large in Dublin or in particular neighborhoods elsewhere in Ireland, Joyce's larger subject is always Ireland—a subject that he renders in an ambivalent stance.
A Portrait of the Artist is divided into five chapters. Each chapter deals with a different period in the first twenty years of the central character, Stephen Dedalus. Each also addresses a specific theme related to Stephen's development as an artist. Chapter One takes Stephen from his infancy into his first years at school. In this chapter, Stephen becomes aware of the five senses and of language itself, and he takes the first steps to assert his independence.
Chapter Two includes his awareness of his family's declining fortunes and his move from Clongowes Wood School to Belvedere School in Dublin. It ends with his sexual initiation in the arms of a prostitute. In the third chapter, Stephen is preoccupied with his sin and the possible consequences of his sin. The fourth chapter takes place at Belvedere School.
Stephen attempts to understand the precepts of his religion and to lead a life in accordance with those precepts. However, he recognizes that his independent nature will not allow him to serve as a priest of the Church. Instead, he will become an artist, a "priest of eternal imagination. He also makes a final declaration of independence from his friends, his family, his religion, and his country.
Within each chapter there are several distinct, self-contained scenes or episodes. These episodes are, in effect, "portraits. The epiphany often occurs during an otherwise trivial incident, and is the central organizing feature in Joyce's work. However, these epiphanies are undercut by "anti-epiphanies"—moments of disillusion or disappointment that bring Stephen back to earth.
Each shift between epiphany and anti-epiphany is accompanied by a shift in the tone of Joyce's language. The epiphany scenes are generally written in a poetic and lofty language. By contrast, the language in the anti-epiphany scenes emphasizes less noble aspects of life. Taken together, Joyce uses the give-and-take shift between epiphany and anti-epiphany to show the paradoxes of life. The author's punctuation is not normally an issue in a discussion of a work of fiction.
Up until Joyce, most English-language novelists used standard punctuation. As part of his effort to create an entirely new type of novel, however, Joyce employed unusual punctuation. Immediately noticeable in Portrait is the fact that there are no quotation marks. Instead, Joyce uses a long dash at the beginning of a paragraph where he wishes to indicate speech by a character. One effect of this technique is that the reader is not immediately able to tell what portions of a paragraph might be part of the narrative apparatus rather than the speaking voice of a particular character.
Joyce is also sparing in his use of commas. Many of his longer sentences appear to be "run-on" sentences. He does this deliberately to show the "run-on" nature of a character's thoughts—a technique known as the " stream of consciousness. Critics have remarked on Joyce's unique combination of realism and naturalism on the one hand and symbolism on the other. Joyce's realistic and naturalistic approaches are evident in his pretense that he is presenting things as they are. At the same time, he uses symbolism extensively to suggest what things mean.
The five senses—sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—are recurrent symbols throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen's reliance on the five senses is signaled in the book's first few pages. Here we are made aware of the way his father looks to Stephen sight , the songs that are sung to him and the clapping of Uncle Charles and Dante sound , the feeling when he wets the bed touch , and the reward of a "cachou" cashew—taste from Dante.
Joyce considered the five senses to be indispensible tools for the literary artist. Of these, the sense of sight is most prominent. The importance of sight—and its fragility—is a recurring motif throughout the novel. This reliance on, and fear for, sight is embodied in the phrase "the eagles will come and pull out his eyes," which Dante says to Stephen after his mother tells him to apologize for something. At various points in the novel, Stephen refuses to apologize for his actions and decisions, even at the risk of perhaps losing his vision, metaphorically.
For example, in Chapter One he listens to Mr. Casey's anecdote about spitting in a woman's eye. At Clongowes school, Father Dolan punishes Stephen for having broken his glasses. In Chapter Four, Stephen attempts a mortification of the senses to repent for his earlier sins. There are numerous references to various elements and rites of Roman Catholicism: Bird symbolism is prominent too. In addition to the eagles mentioned above, there is Stephen's school friend and rival Heron, who is associated with the "birds of prey.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is set in Ireland in the late nineteenth century and at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Joyce does not give precise dates in the narrative, but there is a reference to at least one historical event the fall of Parnell that helps to date the action. Moreover, critics agree that the incidents in the life of Stephen Dedalus, the "young man" of the title, closely parallel incidents in the life of Joyce himself.
In , Joyce wrote an autobiographical essay titled "A Portrait of the Artist. These years approximately form the parameters of the novel. Joyce grew up in an Ireland that constitutionally was a part of a nation formally known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Located just to the west of the island of Great Britain , Ireland had its own distinctive customs and culture. Most significantly, while Protestantism was the predominant religion in Great Britain, most native Irish people were Roman Catholics.
However, both politically and economically, Ireland had long been dominated by Britain. This dominant British presence in Ireland went back to the middle ages, when Norman knights from England first arrived in Ireland at the invitation of local Irish chieftains. The British presence in Ireland grew over the next few hundred years, for a variety of reasons.
During the reign in England of Queen Elizabeth I — , British settlers mainly from Scotland went to Ireland and suppressed local Irish resistance. In the mids, British rule of Ireland was further consolidated by the English Parliamentary leader Oliver Cromwell , whose army scoured the Irish countryside. Cromwell drove many thousands of native Irish from their land and persecuted Irish Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church was outlawed in , but Catholic priests continued to practice underground.
Periodically, Irish factions rebelled against British rule, but these rebellions notably one in were easily put down. Ironically, many of the leaders of these Irish nationalist movements were Irish Protestants who were descended from earlier British settlers. In the Irish parliament in Dublin was dissolved, and the two countries were joined under a single government headquartered in London. Nonetheless, despite British persecution of the native Irish, a distinctive Irish identity remained strong.
By the late nineteenth century many Irish people aspired to a form of limited Irish independence known as Home Rule. The Great Famine of the s saw the deaths or emigration of some several million Irish men, women, and children—more than half the total population of Ireland at the time. However, this period proved a turning point in the Irish struggle for self-determination. The action of A Portrait occurs some time after the activities of Davitt and the downfall of Parnell.
However, in the novel the memory of Parnell is still strong. Joyce, an individualist, was disturbed both by Ireland's nationalist politics and the strict doctrine of the Catholic Church. He regarded himself as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of Europe if not of the world. This is made very clear in the final chapter of A Portrait , in which Stephen Dedalus declares his intention to fly past the nets of "nationality, religion, language. Ironically, the Irish nationalist uprising that eventually led to Irish independence occurred in , the very year in which A Portrait was published in England.
By this time, Joyce was living in Zurich. By the time Joyce made his mark as a writer, Ireland already had a long and distinguished literary history. During the so-called Dark Ages , Irish monks helped preserve classical learning, copying classical texts in beautiful manuscripts. Poets were greatly esteemed and held high positions in the courts of Irish kings. During the long period of British domination, some of the finest writers in the English language were Anglo-Irish that is, Irish of British descent. Among these were the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift — , who served as dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin; the poet and prose writer Oliver Goldsmith ?
By the mids, however, sentimental stories and ballads of no great literary merit were the norm. The late s and early s—the time frame during which A Portrait is set—saw a movement known as the Irish Literary Revival. Unquestionably the central figure in this group was the poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats — Almost single-handedly Yeats created a new Irish literature.
By the time Joyce was an undergraduate student at University College, Dublin, Yeats was the most famous living Irish writer. However, the work of Yeats and his associates made much use of Irish themes and subjects drawn from Irish folklore and mythology. Joyce, on the other hand, had discovered the work of French writers and of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Stephen Dedalus's statements in Chapter Five of A Portrait suggest that Joyce had already decided to reject the celebration of Irish nationalism as a literary theme. When the young Joyce was introduced to Yeats, he told Yeats that the poet was already too old to help him.
Rather than write about ancient heroes and legends, Joyce wanted to chronicle the lives of ordinary people in his early fiction. There is another notable difference between Joyce and his best-known predecessors. At a time when Protestants dominated the cultural institutions of Ireland, Joyce was the first major Irish Catholic writer.
Even though he himself rejected Roman Catholicism—a process that is detailed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man —he made his religious background an integral aspect of this novel. And although he wrote brilliantly in the English language , Joyce was keenly aware that he wrote in the language of Ireland's conquerors. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man attracted much attention when it was published, and also caused controversy.
The book was widely reviewed in Europe and the United States. The most enthusiastic reactions came from other leading novelists and intellectuals of the period, who acclaimed it as a work of genius. However, not all early critics agreed on the book's merits. Rather than praising its originality, some critics denounced the work as formless or as blasphemous and obscene.
The English novelist H.
Wells reviewed the book in , the year after its publication. Writing in the New Republic , Wells called it "by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing. It is a mosaic of jagged fragments that … [renders] with extreme completeness the growth of a rather secretive, imaginative boy in Dublin.
Like many critics of the time, Wells felt that these subjects were best left out of a serious work of literature. Joyce, he said, "would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation.
Other critics were more blunt and more scathing in their attacks on the novel. An anonymous reviewer in Everyman called the book "garbage" and said that "we feel that Mr. Joyce would be at his best in a treatise on drains. A reviewer for the Irish Book Lover warned that "no clean-minded person could possibly allow it to remain within reach of his wife, his sons or daughters.
The distinguished British novelist Ford Madox Ford admired the book for its stylistic excellence. He called it "a book of such beauty of writing, such clarity of perception, such a serene love of and interest in life, and such charity…. The book's impact continued to be felt in Ireland long after Joyce's death. Although the Catholic Church disapproved, important Irish writers saw it as the first great Irish novel of the twentieth century. In , the short-story writer Sean O'Faolain remarked that "this autobiographical-imaginative record [is] so mesmeric, so hypnotic a book that I can never speak of it to young readers without murmuring, Enter these enchanted woods ye who dare ….
In the decades since its publication, A Portrait of a Artist as a Young Man has continued to receive the attention of many scholars and critics. It has perhaps suffered in comparison with Ulysses , which critics generally regard as a much richer, more ambitious, and more complex novel. For example, Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann devoted an entire book Ulysses on the Liffey to Ulysses but had noticeably less to say about A Portrait.
The Oxford don J. Stewart better known as the author of detective novels under the pseudonym Michael Innes appreciated Joyce's command of language and imaginative brilliance in A Portrait , but felt that the result was uneven. According to Stewart, "Stephen Dedalus is presented to us with a hitherto unexampled intimacy and immediacy.
Hugh Kenner has pointed out that the opening pages of the novel attempt to do something that has never been done before. The author does not guide the reader in understanding the narrative, but leaves the reader to work things out for himself or herself. Kenner sums up the book's impact on literary history, saying that after this novel, "Fiction in English would never be the same. Hochman, who teaches at Portland Community College, analyzes whether Joyce's hero should be viewed as either serious or absurd, and he discusses references to Greek mythology in the book.
James Joyce's first published novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , recounts Stephen Dedalus's struggle to understand and then break free of family, church, and country. The journey of this representative young artist is a growing apart or wrenching away from increasingly imprisoning influences, in Stephen's case, from an economically impoverished home, a theologically impoverished Catholic Church, and the politically impoverished nationalism of Irish independence.
Crucial here is that familial, religious, and national "railings" that first fascinate and guide the child increasingly become "bars" that imprison the adult. The task of the artist, then, is to break free of these constraints and from their bars forge new and better formations. The artist will create not only the guide-posts and protective railings of the future, but in the process will likely have to sacrifice his well-being and perhaps a bit of his sanity as well. For Joyce, the image of the artist apart conjures up ambivalence, specifically, excitement alternating with dread.
At the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist , Stephen is not only a very young child, an "object" protected and guided, but an object in a story, a character baby tuckoo "written" in by his father's narration. Stephen is the near-opposite of a man apart—he is the very young child whose story is being created by another. Stephen is at once both a child shaped by his parents and a character embedded in a story he didn't create, a combination producing an object who is anything but apart. Later, at home and in Catholic school, Stephen is either speechless at Christmas dinner or victimized knocked down by schoolmates and beaten on the palms by a prefect.
Stephen's only independence revolves around his sensitivities to words "belt," "iss," "suck" and stimuli, especially temperature, moisture, and smell. By the end of Chapter One, however, Stephen commits his first real act of independence: At the end of Chapter Two, the increasing apartness Stephen feels as the result of his family's sudden poverty and his sen-sibilities—which separate him from his father and his surroundings—culminates in his "French kiss" with a prostitute, the prelude to a period of whoring that would seem to break his ties to Catholicism.
The social apartness created by Stephen's whoring is less a creative, artistic separation than a destructive, uncreative separation, a mere rebellion. Therefore, in Chapter Three, Stephen gradually regrets his falling away from the Church until, at the end, he not only confesses but readies himself for the Host. In this chapter, Joyce creates, after a gradual slope toward the heights of separation, a fall: Joyce keeps reader conflict alive as Stephen decides to mortify his flesh and devote himself to prayer. But Stephen's movement toward separate-ness cannot, of course, be stopped: Later, Stephen wanders alone on the beach meditating on his apartness from immature peers and staring at multiple figurings of his solitude: Chapter Five cuts once and for all Stephen's ties to family, religion, and nation.
Leaving the house, Stephen figuratively leaves behind the economic and spiritual poverty that make him feel apart. Then he asserts his interior solitude. Arriving at the Catholic university, he scorns a dean for his cloistered lifelessness, attends a boring physics class with cobwebbed windows and a droning professor, and denounces a political gathering for its unthinking worship of hero and nation.
In conversations with friends, and in a poem he writes to the shawled girl, E. Finally, Stephen asserts his independence from nation when he tells Cranly he will leave Ireland. Here then, is a heroic odyssey into apartness, one ending far from its beginning: Stephen traverses the distance from a character inextricably interconnected to a creator apart.
A recurring debate in Joyce criticism concerns this issue of Stephen's heroism. The question is whether Stephen's journey from character in a story to the creator of stories is heroic. Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, regarded the title he invented, Stephen Hero , as deliberately ridiculous. Wayne Booth states and asks, "The young man takes himself and his flight with deadly solemnity. Parvin Sharpless answers, "Joyce's classicism sees all aspects of human life as meaningful and absurd at the same time.
This is true even of things which he might be expected to value most: First, Is Stephen an exciting victor or a tragic loser? Second, Is Stephen a serious or absurd figure? A renowned sculptor and engineer, he apprenticed his nephew, Talos, but pushed him off a cliff when Talos proved a greater genius than Daedulus and when it was discovered Talos was having incestuous relations with his own mother, Daedulus's sister. Daedulus also built several ambivalent devices. First, a hollow wooden cow so King Minos's wife Pasiphae could have sex with a magnificent white bull.
Finally, Daedulus created the famous wax wings that melted and caused Icarus's fall. In summary, Daedulus, the mythic character on which Joyce builds his novel's character, is not just skillful but deceitful or cunning. Further his devices are ambivalent, both good and bad. The depiction of Daedulus, and other artificers in mythology, points to the idea that human creation and creations have their price, their down side, just as valued knowledge of good and evil produced its price: The reader should also recall the Latin epigraph opening quotation from Portrait of the Artist that Joyce borrowed from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Here is a translation: The figure of the great artist and grand artificer are myths still having purchase on the present, on the role of the artist, but especially for our own times, on the ambivalent state of technology: The artist, then, is both hero and, like Daedulus, Icarus and Talos, victims who when approaching too close to the gods or the "laws" of nature, must either be punished or sacrificed.
This is key to understanding Stephen's friends calling him "Bous Stephanomenos" and "Bous Stephanoforos. Foros is the bull as powerful victor and menos is the bull as sacrificed animal. Stephen, as artist, is this bull, an ambivalent symbol of powerful victor and tragic victim. While the bull symbol still has application to the pagan bullfight, it has largely been replaced by the Christian symbol of a meek sacrificial lamb. The lamb may have less magical ambivalence because it is not both strong and weak, but it does have greater application to the more common defeat of the weaker by the stronger.
Armed with all of this classical mythology, it should be clearer why Stephen has been represented as a bull rather than a lamb: Now to the question of whether Stephen is absurd or serious, which may, in turn, be broken down into multiple specific questions. Here are just three of many that could have been asked. Is the recently self-excommunicated Stephen absurdly selfish or uncompromisingly principled when he refuses to do his "easter duty" for his mother?
Is Stephen's villanelle to be taken by readers as an adolescent poem or a serious work of art? Is Stephen's own association with Daedulus, including the line, "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," to be looked on as the product of foolish youth, or as an inspiring declaration.
There is little doubt that Stephen views his principles, artistic output, and philosophy as serious. But, echoing Booth, should we? This is a far more difficult question than whether Stephen is a winner or loser for this answer depends far more on taste. While Joyce, as I hope I have shown, furnishes ample and hard hints that Stephen is both winner and loser, Joyce does not tell the reader what his—Joyce's—tastes are.
Some might sympathize with Stephen's principled rejection of his "easter duty" feeling that his mother will get over it. And some of us might like Stephen's anti-love poem which combines images of mother, Virgin, and Emma Clery; womb and mind; gestation and artistic creation; the child, the poem, the art object; religious devotion, sexual attraction, and self-sacrifice.
But others might view the poem and its creation as elementary. But there is still the question of whether we readers should regard Stephen's most famous declaration above as absurd or serious. In other words, should we understand this line as an example of childish megalomania, hubris, and youthful pride bound for an adult fall? Or is this serious stuff, the artist as smith of a new conscience, new ethics, a new way of seeing and understanding the world?
Perhaps this question can have no answer, since we cannot know what Joyce meant here unless it is stated somewhere clearly in his letters. Without evidence we must decide for ourselves. Perhaps it is just as well. Even if we interpret Stephen as a selfish and foolish youth, it is less the rightness or wrongness of his struggle that is at issue than depicting the struggle itself. And, after all, if Stephen is selfish and foolish, this is, after all, a portrait of a young man, not a mature one.
Had Stephen's principles, poems, and aesthetic philosophy been mature and fully formed, these would not have belonged to the realist portrait of a young man. Whether or not one likes the way Stephen handles his struggle, it does show the effects of the battle fought by anyone refusing to act on certain received ideas or act out particular received practices: In many ways, Joyce knew these problems as his own.
Should readers fault either Joyce or Stephen—or both—if they deem Stephen's principles selfish, his poem adolescent, and his declaration overblown? Or should they credit Joyce for a realistic portrait of youth? As answering involves knowing the thoughts of Joyce, perhaps it is better to shift focus from mere evaluation of talent toward his work's effect on the world. Perhaps we might say the following: If Stephen and Joyce can be faulted for anything, it is far less for what they said and did than what they didn't say or do.
That is, in Portrait of the Artist both concentrated almost exclusively on how the artist, him or herself, must suffer and be sacrificed for freedom. On the other hand, precious little in Portrait of the Artist indicated how the artist's "alteration or improvement of nature," as Ovid put it in Joyce's epigraph, impacts upon the world.
In the excerpt below, O'Neill illustrates how Joyce's understanding, appreciation, and use of myth in forming one's identity is revealed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Literary Revival of turn-of-the-century Dublin was much concerned with expressing Irish aspirations through heroes. Finn and Cuchullain supplied imaginatively what Ireland had not been able to achieve in reality: Joyce's contempt for this form of self-consolation is well documented. What is perhaps less well known is that Joyce's initial contempt gave way to a profound understanding of the psychology of the Revival and of the uses of myth in the creation of identity….
The English, having been their own masters for centuries, have created many models of the successful life; the Irish, being colonials, have been unable to do so. As with American blacks and Indians, subjection to a foreign culture has destroyed all authority figures in the society. This latter point is, I think, the theme of the first episode of A Portrait.
The novel begins with the beginning of a children's story, a moocow coming down along the road and meeting a nicens little boy, Stephen. The little boy, who will grow up to become the "bullock befriending bard," learns as he grows older to associate cows with mothers and with mother Ireland. And what comes down along the road and meets Stephen in the early part of the novel is his nationality.
He goes off to Clongowes to find that his father is not as important as the other fathers. He learns the Story of Hamilton Rowan, who used the only strategy available to him, silence, exile, and cunning, to escape English captivity. Irish heroes are not conquerors, but people who cope cleverly with being conquered.
He gets shouldered into the square ditch. For now, at least, he is defined by his place. His mind will be formed by the experience of this place. And the process of formation is what we are reading: That was the way a rat felt, slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of. Sleek slimy coats, little little feet tucked up to jump, black shiny eyes to look out of. They could understand how to jump. But the minds of rats could not understand trigonometry. When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things. Unlike the internal voice of Maria in the story "Clay," which helps her exclude anything which might endanger her rather fragile idea of who she is, Stephen's voice, like Leopold Bloom's, actively explores his world and comes to conclusions about world and self that are scrupulously tentative.
It is this scientific approach which will eventually enable him to see his personal myths and those of his culture for what they are: Stephen's education in the effects of colonial status is also the theme of the Christmas dinner episode which follows.
The real tragedy of the fight between Dante and the two men, Mr. Casey and Simon Dedalus, is not that the family does not get along, but that their ideas of themselves have been formed entirely by the institutions that govern them. Their powerless rage succeeds only in spoiling the dinner, and is capped by Mr. Casey's tale of spitting in a woman's eye, and Dante's boast of the church's role in killing Parnell.
Injustice of the conqueror begets the meaner injustice of the conquered. This Christmas dinner is Stephen's first with the adults; the children eat in a separate room. It is his initiation into the adult world, and what he learns is that, in Ireland at least, there is no adult world. Stephen writes his complete address as citizen of the universe, but Simon, Mr. Casey, Dante show him that Ireland will be his farthest boundary if he stays there.
Stephen encounters his nationality just as David Copperfield encounters Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse or as Pip gets temporarily lost in the feckless Finches of the Grove men's club, but his is the greater hurdle. The nationality dilemma is particularly insidious because one's identity is derived from the very thing that is the impediment to one's development.
Young Stephen comes to awareness of his situation only gradually, by intuiting from small signs. There is something about the adult males around him that affects his feeling about himself. For example, he thinks how pleasurable it would be to deliver milk for a living. But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at his trainer's flabby stubblecovered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future.
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 to Clongowes. The father's descent has apparently been precipitated, as John Joyce's was, by the demise of Parnell and the victory of anti-Parnell forces within the Irish Party. Stephen's fantasies of himself as the Count of Monte Cristo indicate that something of this has come through to his youthful consciousness. The Monte Cristo fantasy is formed on the same pattern as the Celtic Revival fantasy.
It is, of course, the usual fantasy of the powerless. Later Stephen will figure himself as artist spurned by a materialist woman, and, in Ulysses , as Hamlet: The mythic formula of his life has been determined by the story of Parnell and its aftermath in his own family. The Celtic Revivalists had resurrected Parnell as Cuchullain, but Stephen, as he did under the table, chiasmically changes the form of the story.
In progressing from the Count to Hamlet, one essential change has taken place: This habit of savoring one's position as victim of injustice is a species of mental sin discussed by Aquinas under the name "morose delectation. This helps to explain why Stephen is not interested in joining societies for the improvement of things in general:. As an alternative to his private myths the Celtic Revival is emotionally unsatisfactory: He has also chosen a literary form: Bakhtin has pointed out, epic heroes do not develop and they have no secrets:.
The individual in the high distanced genres is an individual of the absolute past and of the distanced image as such, he is a fully finished and completed being. This has been accomplished on a lofty heroic level, but what is complete is also something hopelessly ready-made…. He is, furthermore, completely externalized. There is not the slightest gap between his authentic essence and his external manifestation.
All his potential, all his possibilities are realized utterly in his external social position…. Everything in him is exposed and loudly expressed. Clearly, Stephen Dedalus, he who hides under the table and composes the chiasmic word-charm, he who will understand trigonometry and politics, cannot be a never-changing Cuchullain. Similarly, the world that he inhabits cannot be the easily interpreted good-or-bad world of the epic and of the Celtic Revival; it must be the difficult to interpret world of the novel.
Cuchullain always knows who his enemies are. Even if they are his son or his foster brother, there is no doubt about their enmity, and his course of action is clear. The peasant theme in A Portrait offers an example of the shifting and tentative, the novelistic nature of Stephen's personal mythopoeia. Stephen's thoughts on the subject begin with a struggle between the romantic view of peasants as picturesque and the view that associates them with darkness and bats, and, unlike the peasant theme in Stephen Hero , undergoes a progression.
Stephen, going to sleep at Clongowes, thinks,. It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy. But, O, the road there between the trees was dark! You would be lost in the dark. It made him afraid to think of how it was.
Romantic notions based on the repetition of the word fire give way as the word dark repeats in his mind. Living with peasants would destroy his boundary line, the embryonic identity he has been constructing; the "you" he has created, a person who, in contrast with rats, will someday understand trigonometry and politics, would disappear in the darkness. But his attitude is not one of simple revulsion. He likes the way peasants smell, and from the beginning he has associated the sense of smell with his mother, who put the queer-smelling oilsheet on his bed.
Mothers are frightening too because they embody the dark womb that precedes the "once upon a time" of consciousness. He sees the peasant seductress of Davin's story as "a type of her race and his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed.
The political joining of Ireland with England which took place in was called the Act of Union. Out of this union is born the "disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul. Later the girl he is in love with flirts with a priest who is of the Celtic Revival persuasion. The priest, Father Moran, has a brother who is a potboy in Moycullen, so Stephen imagines her as giving herself to the peasantry and associates her with Davin's seductress.
Stephen contrasts himself to this peasant priest: The peasant theme of the novel concludes with the diary entry—a condensation of a section of Stephen Hero —about John Alphonsus Mulrennan, a Celtic Revival folklorist who has just returned with a new hoard of material he got from an old man with red eyes; material about terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world. Stephen, as he did at Clongowes, expresses fear:.
I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. Top page edges gilt, remainder untrimmed. The Modern Library, Binding tight and text unmarked. Baltimore, MD, United States: The biggest stumbling block facing any prospective reader of "Finnegans Wake" is the book itself, with its thousands of words of Joyce's inventions, derived from nearly every foreign language imaginable and from a host of other sources. Now extensively revised, expanded, and corrected, Roland McHugh's "Annotations" is a unique one-volume guidebook designed to be read side by side with the "Wake" itself.
Harvard University Press, Condition is FINE ; like new on all points. The Odyssey Press,, Original white cloth, titles to upper board and spine in red. With the original cellophane dust jacket, wraparound band, and card slipcase. Spine and endpapers slightly toned. An excellent copy in the rare cellophane dust jacket, wraparound band, and card slipcase. First Odyssey edition single volume issue, the first printing of Ulysses issued in cloth. Stuart Gilbert edited the text of this edition with help from Joyce, and it remains one of the key lifetime printings.
A really beautiful copy, scarce in this condition with the cellophane jacket and wraparound band. Special Limited Edition, first issue in this format. Text body is clean, and free from previous owner annotation, underlining and highlighting. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. Deckled edges rough cut. Top edge gilt - bright, rich condition. This is copy number of a limited edition of copies numbered and signed by the artist Rockwell Kent. Blue cloth over boards with a blind stamped illustration on front covers, beveled edges, no dust jacket as issued, gilt lettered vellum spine labels, Notes, Glossary, Index to the Characters, Index of First Lines.
One corner of spine label on the Volume I is slightly chipped, both volumes have a few light scratches on covers from sliding in and out of the slipcase. Slipcase is intact; however, it is very worn. Illustrated label on one side is in very good condition. This a heavy set and will require extra shipping charges. Oxford University Press, The facsimile is printed on fine paper by the Inkpen Press. Large thick 8vo [ x mm], beautifully hand-bound in full crushed blue morocco, the spine handsomely lettered in gilt, housed in a blue moire cloth slipcase.
A mint, pristine and superb copy. The true first edition of this book is now beyond the range of all but a very small handful of collectors, this facsimile provides the opportunity to own this important and handsome work in a format, and with the feel, of the first edition. Burgess as well pronounced it the greatest single work in the English literature of the last century, and he is not alone in that opinion. According to James Spoerri, "This fortunate combination of printer and publisher resulted in the appearance of ULYSSES as a book whose physical aspect is particularly suited to its content.
It is a fat and inviting volume, the blue and white of its covers subtly evocative of the Greece whose epic it so closely parallels" quoted in the catalogue for the Garden Sale, Sotheby's While this facsimile is of course not the true first edition, the physical attributes are the same. Airmont Publishing Company, Inc. Paperback, reprint, gms, pages. There are a few small tears to the front cover, otherwise no other pre-loved markings.. I feel that I have spent half my career with one or another Pelican Shakes peare in my back pocket. Convenience, however, is the least important aspec t of the new Pelican Shakespeare series.
Here is an elegant and clear text for either the study or the rehearsal room, notes where you need them and t he distinguished scholarship of the general editors, Stephen Orgel and A. Braunmuller who understand that these are plays for performance as well a s great texts for contemplation. Fine in Fine DJ. Wordsworth Edition Limited, Paperback, reprint, 66gms, 87 pages. Book is in good condition with minor general wear and tear and moderate page discolouration throughout, otherwise no other pre-loved markings..
Hardcover Edition With Dustjacket. The Golden Cockerel Press, A very good copy of this beautiful limited edition produced by The Golden Cockerel Press with distinctive wood-engraved designs and illustrations by Eric Ravilious. The Golden Cockerel Press, founded in , was famed for quality - with hand-set print, use of hand-made paper or vellum; and fine illustrations - mostly wood-engraved.
In the original Sangorski and Sutcliffe half leather binding with Ravilious illustrations to the front and back boards. The binding has some wear to the leather on the front board towards the base of the spine - where original? The cloth is clean with a small scuff on the front board and more pronounced scuffing to the rear board. Cloth is slightly darkened towards the leather. The contents are in fine condition. There is a loose flyer 'Golden Cockerel Books for the Spring' enclosed. Please enquire if you would like more images to assess condition.
Despite its age this is still a useful background to the context of Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature. The New Pelican Guide to English literature volume 2.