In brief
A Portrait follows Stephen Dedalus from a nursery story to the eve of his departure from Ireland, through Jesuit schools, a family’s slide into poverty, teenage sex, religious terror, religious ecstasy and finally the decision to be an artist. It has very little plot. What it has instead is a language that grows up with its hero, starting in baby talk and ending in a young man’s private diary, so that you hear a mind forming rather than being told about it. Stephen is Joyce’s younger self, closely observed and not altogether forgiven.
This is the easy door to Joyce’s difficult later work, and it is a real novel in its own right. The technical ideas of Ulysses are here at a human scale, in a story anyone who was once a clever, unhappy adolescent will recognise, sometimes uncomfortably.
The argument
The book seems to argue that an artist has to free himself from whatever made him: family, country, Church. On that reading the last pages are a triumph, and many young readers have closed the book in that spirit. “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” (ch. 5).
But the title has a qualifying phrase, as a Young Man, and the book keeps it in view. The millionth time, from someone barely out of college? The whole of chapter 4’s rapture is written in a prose so swooning that it is hard to tell whether Joyce is sharing it or smiling. His villanelle, the one poem we read whole, is decadent and thin. His great speech on freedom goes to a friend who laughs “almost slily” and takes his arm, and his mother is left to put his secondhand clothes in order. Joyce, writing about himself from a distance of a decade, gives Stephen every gift and also a priggishness he knows very well.
So the argument is a double one, and I think the best way of reading the book is to refuse to choose. Stephen is right that the nets are real and that he has to get out. He is also a very young man who has borrowed the Church’s language for his escape, and who treats his art as a new priesthood, “a priest of the eternal imagination” in the phrase he uses of himself, with the same pride that Father Arnall’s sermon assigned to Lucifer. The freedom is real and it is unproven, and the book stops exactly before the proof.
The shape of the book
Joyce cut an enormous manuscript down to five chapters, and the pattern is one of the most careful things in the novel. Each chapter climbs to a height, and the next begins by dropping him.
Chapter 1 moves from the moocow to Clongowes Wood, where a small boy is pushed into a ditch, frightened by a violent Christmas dinner, unjustly beaten by Father Dolan, and at last walks down the corridor to complain to the rector: he ends carried shoulder high by his schoolmates. Chapter 2 opens with his great-uncle in an outhouse, and follows the family’s money running out, a humiliating trip to Cork with his father, prize money blown in a few weeks and, at the climax, a prostitute’s kiss. Chapter 3 opens with him greedy for food and sin, and then comes the retreat, with its long sermons on hell, his terror, confession and communion. Chapter 4 opens with a timetable of piety, moves through the offer of a vocation which he refuses, and ends on the strand with a girl wading in the water, the book’s ecstatic peak. Chapter 5 opens on watery tea and a pawn ticket.
So the structure is itself an ironist. The reader is given each ecstasy in full and then shown the morning after, and the pattern quietly warns against trusting the last height, the one the book does not live long enough to undercut. Ulysses supplies the fall: Stephen is back in Dublin, his wings unused, teaching in a school and mourning his mother.
Ovid’s line on the title page, Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, names the frame: Daedalus turning his mind to unknown arts, and building the wings that will carry him out of the labyrinth. Stephen hears his own name as a prophecy on the strand, “a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea” (ch. 4). He does not dwell on what happened to the son in that story, though readers do.
The voice
The opening is among the most surprising in English fiction: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road”. The narration is in the third person, but it knows only what the child knows, in the words that the child has. By the time he is at Clongowes it thinks in schoolboy slang and a child’s fascinations (“Suck was a queer word”). Each chapter’s language is that of the mind it describes, so the style is in effect the plot.
The critic Hugh Kenner gave the principle its name. Wyndham Lewis had mocked the sentence in chapter 2 where “uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse” as bad writing. Kenner replied that “repaired” is the old man’s own word, and called this the Uncle Charles Principle: the narrator’s language is coloured by whoever is nearby. It is free indirect style at a new pitch, and Ulysses is built on it.
Two passages show the range. Father Arnall’s sermons in chapter 3 are a sustained impersonation of Jesuit rhetoric, drawn largely from a seventeenth-century Italian devotional book, Pinamonti’s Hell Opened to Christians. They are horribly effective: “Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high”. Then, at the other extreme, chapter 4 has Stephen alone by the water with a phrase, “A day of dappled seaborne clouds”, wondering whether he loves words for their colours or their rhythm. That is the book’s real conversion, and it comes without God.
Dialogue is marked by dashes, as Joyce preferred, and the ending breaks into the first person when the last pages become Stephen’s diary. The third-person narrator has been absorbed. For the first time he has the book to himself, and it is a little less impressive than he thinks, which is one of its best jokes.
The three nets
Stephen’s most famous statement of purpose is made to his nationalist friend Davin: “You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (ch. 5). The whole book can be organised around them.
Nationality. The Christmas dinner in chapter 1 is the first time the boy sees grown men weep, over Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish leader destroyed by a divorce scandal and by the bishops’ condemnation of him. “Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!” is Mr Casey’s cry after Dante has stormed out. So when Davin later urges him towards the cause, he has his answer ready: “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
Language. The quietest scene is the best. The English-born dean of studies, a convert, is puzzled by the word “tundish”, for a funnel, and Stephen realises with a stab what language he has been speaking: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.” Then the diary pays off in one of the funniest late turns: he looks the word up and finds it good old English. The dean should have known it. The colonised boy owns the language better than its supposed owners do, and that is Joyce’s whole career in miniature.
Religion. The hardest net is the one that nearly holds. After the sermons Stephen’s piety is total, and the Jesuit director’s offer of the priesthood gives him a real vision of power: “The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J.” He turns it down because of something like pride, and takes up the Church’s words for his new purpose. His refusal to make his Easter duty at his mother’s request, explained in the long walk with Cranly, is the book’s real break: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe”. It repeats Lucifer’s non serviam, as Father Arnall has told us earlier. Joyce himself refused his dying mother in just this way, and the book does not hide what it cost.
The people
Stephen Dedalus
Stephen is cold, brave, snobbish, frightened of dogs and thunderstorms, and capable of astonishing attention. H. G. Wells, reviewing the book, wrote that one believes in him as in few characters in fiction. The novel does not require him to be likeable.
Simon Dedalus
Stephen’s father is the great comic-tragic figure of the book and is based on Joyce’s own: charming, drunken, sliding down the social ladder and telling stories as he goes. Stephen’s summary to Cranly is a one-sentence biography, listing “a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician” and ending with “at present a praiser of his own past”. The trip to Cork in chapter 2, where he hunts for his youth in the old haunts while his son finds the word “Fœtus” cut into an anatomy-theatre desk, is the novel’s most painful father-and-son scene.
Mrs Dedalus and Dante
Stephen’s mother has only a few scenes, and their weight comes from what we know: she will die, and he will refuse her. Dante Riordan, the fierce governess of the opening pages, defends the bishops against Parnell at the dinner table, and shows the boy how religion can look from inside.
Emma
Emma Clery is scarcely a character, and that is the point. She appears as initials in a schoolboy poem, a figure on a tram step, and a girl seen at a distance, whom Stephen imagines into temptress or saint without ever really talking to her. The other women, the prostitute and the girl in the stream, get the same treatment. The novel knows this about him, more or less; the diary shows him beginning to catch on.
Davin, Lynch and Cranly
The three friends of chapter 5 are three kinds of pressure: Davin, the country nationalist and gentle Gaelic Leaguer; Lynch, who hears out the aesthetic theory with coarse jokes; and Cranly, who hears Stephen’s confession and is the secular priest of the last chapter, and with whom a last, half-understood jealousy is left hanging.
How it was made
The book began as an essay. In January 1904 Joyce sent a short philosophical narrative called “A Portrait of the Artist” to the Dublin magazine Dana, whose editor rejected it with “I can’t print what I can’t understand”. That same winter he began a vast realistic autobiography, Stephen Hero, and took it to Trieste. He had completed 25 of 63 planned chapters, some 914 pages, when in September 1907 he gave it up and began again: five chapters, everything seen from inside, everything unnecessary thrown out. In 1911, in a rage over the fate of Dubliners, he threw the manuscript on the fire, and his family rescued it.
What saved the book was a stranger. In 1913 W. B. Yeats drew Joyce to the attention of Ezra Pound, who read the first chapter and got it into the London magazine The Egoist. It ran in twenty-five instalments from 2 February 1914, Joyce’s birthday, to 1 September 1915, while he was still finishing it. British publishers would not take the book. Edward Garnett’s reader’s report for Duckworth called it “too discursive, formless, unrestrained”. B. W. Huebsch published it in New York on 29 December 1916, and the Egoist Press followed in London in 1917 under the backing of Harriet Shaw Weaver, who became Joyce’s lifelong patron. The novel closes with its dates: “Dublin, 1904. Trieste, 1914.”
Readers and critics
H. G. Wells praised the book and warned readers of Joyce’s “cloacal obsession”. Ezra Pound called it the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose then in English.
The real quarrel, which has never ended, is about Stephen. Hugh Kenner in 1948 argued that he does not become an artist at all but an aesthete, and that Joyce means us to see through him. S. L. Goldberg in the early 1960s replied that irony is criticism, not rejection. Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), took the case as his example of a new problem: when a narrator will not tell us how far he stands from his hero, no one can be sure. You will read the last chapter differently depending on where you stand.
Afterlives
Stephen’s first afterlife is the opening of Ulysses, a little older and a good deal less sure, and the phrases “silence, exile and cunning” and “the uncreated conscience of my race” have since gone off to live independent lives. The surviving part of Stephen Hero was published in 1944, and shows by contrast how much the cutting achieved. Hugh Leonard’s play Stephen D (1962) adapted both books, and Joseph Strick’s 1977 film, with Bosco Hogan as Stephen, gave the sermon to John Gielgud as Father Arnall. Every later novel in which a clever child writes its way out of a provincial place has this one behind it.
How to read it
- Don’t get stuck on chapter 1. The first pages are confusing on purpose. You are meant to be a small child who does not know what is going on.
- Look at where each chapter ends and the next begins. The drop between them is Joyce’s commentary on the height.
- Do not skip the sermons. They are long, and you are supposed to feel them as he does.
- Read chapter 4’s rapture twice, once with Stephen and once from a little way off. Decide what you think of the prose.
- Take the aesthetic theory lightly. The talk with Lynch is a show, with a young man’s pride in it. Listen for the joke about “paring his fingernails”.
- Use a good edition if you are going further. Chester Anderson’s corrected text (Viking, 1964) is the standard, and Jeri Johnson’s Oxford World’s Classics edition has good notes. The free Project Gutenberg text is complete and fine for a first reading.
Read next
- James Joyce, Dubliners (1914). What Stephen is running from, in the same streets, without his excuses.
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). Stephen’s return, and his meeting with the far kinder man who was the point all along.
- James Joyce, Stephen Hero (1944). The cut draft, for anyone curious how much a writer can gain by removal.
- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869). The model of an ironic portrait of a young man, and the French prose that Joyce was learning from.
- Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013). The Irish girlhood the Portrait leaves out, in a language that also begins before grammar.