An Introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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An Introduction to A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man

• Based on Hugh Kenners introduction

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Narration

• The narrator is different than expected. Not
  first person- no I. So it must be third person,
  but third-person narrators are supposed to be
  reliable they give us the truth they dont tend
  to talk about moocows and hairy faces in childish
  ways they dont tend to evolve as the
  protagonist grows and develops adding literary
  sophistication each chapter. So why? Why would
  Joyce choose to do this? Who is narrating? What
  does an evolving (therefore imperfect) narrator
  suggest?

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A Good Editor

• The first draft was 913 pages and 25 chapters
  long. The entire finished product took 10 years
  to complete

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Rembrandts Painting A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man
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• Rembrandt would fix his gaze in the mirror to the
  world behind the mirror as he painted. Joyces
  use of the title may suggest the following
  chiasmic structure
• Background Painter Mirror
  Painters Image Background Image
• Dublin Joyce
  Stephen Dublin

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Chiasmus

• Biblical Poetry Structure
• ABBA or ABCCBA or ABCDDCBA A mirror image.
• Portrait is riddled with chiasmus, (Apologise,
  pull out his eyes, pull out his eyes,
  Apologise.)
• Even the structure of the novel itself is
  chiasmic. (Parts two and four both end with
  images of women parts three and five end with
  men.) I
• In the center of the middle chapter lies the
  passage The preacher took a chainless watch
  from a pocket within his soutane and, having
  considered its dial for a moment in silence,
  placed it silently before him on the table.

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Silence

• Could it be silence at the center? Time? Some
  combination of the two? What is the mirror?
  (Joyce used silence as a chiasmic center in
  Finnegans Wake)
• Are books inherently silent? How does a book
  compare to a painting? Which one is more silent?
  What other reasons might he have chosen to fixate
  on silence? Why are we asking so many questions?
  What time is it? Where are my car keys?

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Developmental Progress

• Progression of senses in chapter one
• Hearing the story
• Sight the fathers face
• Taste lemon platt
• Touch warm and cold
• Smell the oilsheet
• Why are they in this order? What is the
  significance of their development?

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Development of Gradation

• First warm then cold
• His mother had a nicer smell than his father
• Uncle Charles and Dante were older than his
  father and mother but Uncle Charles was older
  than Dante
• The Vances lived in number seven. They had a
  different father and mother. They were Eileens
  father and mother.
• When I grow up Ill be a father, when she grows
  up, shell be a mother.
• When he was grown up, he was going to marry
  Eileen
• Why does Joyce highlight this relationship-oriente
  d development?

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Male/Female Chapters

• Odd-numbered chapters appeal to a father.
  Even-numbered chapters end with women

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Women

• Chapter two ends with Stephen s loss of
  virginity to an anonymous harlot. Chapter four
  ends with Stephen looking at a girl standing in
  the water, alone and still, gazing out to sea.
  Right after he has realized that the priesthood
  is not for him.
• A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and
  still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one
  whom magic had changed into the likeness of a
  strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender
  bare legs were delicate as a cranes and pure
  save where an emerald trail of seaweed had
  fashioned itself as a sign upon her flesh. Her
  thighs, fuller and soft hued as ivory, were bared
  almost to the hips where the white fringes of her
  drawers were like featherings of soft white down.
  Her slate blue skirts were kilted boldly about
  her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom
  was as a birds soft and slight, slight and soft
  as the breast of some dark plumaged dove. But her
  long fair hair was girlish and girlish, and
  touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her
  face.

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Female Analysis

• Notice how he creates her. He doesnt just
  describe her he fashions a beautiful creature
  from the bottom up as he looks at a real-life
  girl being natural. Why create a bird-like
  creature? How might this tie to the mythology to
  which he is attached? Why did he take great pains
  to give her the body of a bird, but then use
  girlish twice before describing her hair and
  face? Also, we see here Joyces ability to mirror
  the rush of a juvenile crush- the overstatement
  and rhapsodizing of a teenager (a talented
  teenager, but still obviously young.) Is he
  romanticizing her (as Gretta Conroy in The
  Dead?) or is he seeing a woman as she truly is
  for the first time (epiphany)?

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flight
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Dedalus Name Choice

• Joyce grew up watching a Professor Fitzgeralds
  failed attempts at flight. Around that time, he
  learned about the stories of Ovids Daedalus
  (Daidalos in Greek cunningly wrought)- the
  famous inventor. There are 3 main stories
• Queen Pasiphae of Crete was under a spell, and
  desired to couple with a bull so she hired
  Daedalus to build her a wooden one she could hide
  inside. The plan worked and she gave birth to the
  Minotaur.
• Daedalus created a labrynth in which the Minotaur
  could be confined.
• Daedalus ends up locked in the labrynth himself.
  He and his son Icarus escape on wings Daedalus
  creates from wax and feathers. Icarus ignores
  Daedalus advice not to fly too close to the sun,
  and Icarus drowns before Daedalus can save him.
• What kind of man was Daedalus? What kind of man
  chooses this to be the name of his alter-ego?

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James Joyces Father
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The Male Figures

• The last line of the book is a diary entry of
  Stephens written on the eve of his departure
  from Ireland to Paris. It reads
• Old father, old artificer, stand me now and
  ever in good stead. Compare to John 175 And
  now, Father, do thou exalt me at they own side
  from the Vigil of Ascension Day where the Son
  addresses the Father.
• and compare to the section in chapter 4

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Daedalus

• Now as never before, his strange name seemed to
  him a prophecyNow, at the name of the fabulous
  artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim
  waves and to see a winged form flying above the
  waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it
  mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of
  some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a
  hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a
  prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and
  had been following through the mists of childhood
  and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew
  in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the
  earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable
  being?

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Fathers

• Has Stephen selected a substitute father? Is he
  speaking to the Greek Daedalus, or Simon Dedalus,
  his father, in the final entry? If he is speaking
  to the Greek, what is the tyrannized island from
  which he is fleeing? Who or what is the drowned
  Icarus? Why the allusion to a Biblical father and
  son? What might that suggest about the
  relationship? What about the first line of the
  book and the moocow present in it? His father
  told him about the moocowcompare to the wooden
  cow built by Daedalus- the one that started his
  woes. And what about all the other Fathers he
  will encounter Father Dolan beats him, he
  protests to Father Conmee, a nameless father
  delivers a scathing sermon that has Stephen
  confess to another nameless Father? So at the end
  of the book when he speaks to the unnamed Father-
  are we correct to assume that it is his own
  biological father?

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James Joyce at age 2
Im already smarter than you.
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Joyce at age 6
How do you like me now?
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With his Buddies at School
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Clongowes schooloriginally a castle
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Clongowes Wood College
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Joyce at Graduation
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Joyce at 22
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Getting Older
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Dead?
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The Minotaur. Jan Parker (b.1941).
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The Minotaur George Frederick Watts, 1885.
Tate Gallery, London.
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Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Stamnos by the
Kleophrades Painter, c.500-450 BCE. British
Museum, London.
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Approximately
1580. Hans Bol
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558.
Pieter Bruegel
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Daedalus watches Icarus FallSolis designed 178
woodcuts in all for this version of the
Metamorphoses.
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YOU ARE HERE
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moo