Of all the characters in the novel, Stephen Dedalus is the only one whose portrait is fully realized. His most intimate thoughts, memories and sensations are revealed to us throughout; all the other characters exist for the reader only insofar as they matter to Stephen. Joyce’s self-portrait is a complex one, inviting us to sympathize with Stephen while also causing us to regard him more critically, and even laugh at him. The little boy wrongly punished by Father Dolan for failing to copy out his Latin themes or falling ill after being shouldered into the ditch by Wells is likely to have our sympathy. Less sympathetic is the saintly youth whose absurd devotions betray a high degree of egotism and whose abstract meditations on the nature of love have no positive bearing whatsoever on his relationships with others; or the pretentious university student propounding his aesthetic theories at great length to poor Lynch, an unwilling and barely interested auditor, who makes jokes throughout, which the pedantic and humorless Stephen ignores. Stephen tends to view his life in terms of a heroic struggle to free himself from the various confinements he feels his native city imposes upon him-the “nets” of politics, religion and family. Throughout, though, Stephen’s inflated sense of himself is subtly undercut by Joyce, who provides many reminders of the flaws and inadequacies in Stephen’s character that the young man himself fails to perceive. Stephen identifies with the classical hero whose name he bears, but he is more like the son Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and came crashing down into the sea, than the father Daedalus, whose cunning enabled him to forge the wings that permitted his escape from Minos’s prison.
The term “epiphany” looms large in Joyce’s earlier work, providing a helpful point of entry into both Dubliners and Portrait. The term’s roots are Greek; it means, literally, a “showing forth.” In the Christian calendar, the feast of the Epiphany, celebrated on January 6, the “Twelfth Night” of Christmas, commemorates the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem to worship the newborn Christ-the “epiphany” is the showing forth of Christ to the three kings. Joyce adopted the term and broadened its sense to describe a series of very short prose pieces he wrote between 1900 and 1903, some of which later found their way into Portrait. In Stephen Hero (an earlier draft of Portrait, the surviving parts of which were published a few years after Joyce’s death), Stephen, who is planning a book of his epiphanies, offers this definition: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” An epiphany, in other words, is a moment of revelation, when the very truth or essence of something is suddenly glimpsed. Art, as Stephen understands it, attempts to capture and preserve such fleeting moments. The planned collection of brief epiphanies in Stephen Hero is very similar to the approximately 40 early epiphanies written by Joyce that have survived. While neither of these collections looks like Portrait, something of Joyce’s own earlier epiphanies does remain in the novel. We might see the completed novel, with its fragmented structure, as an assemblage of Stephen’s important moments of insight, which, taken together, constitute the whole “portrait.”
As a novel about a young man’s development as he tries to realize an ideal vision of himself as an artist who stands aloof from the conflicts of family, politics, and religion that divide his world, Portrait raises questions about the nature of art and artists and their relationship to the world in which they live: Is the artist an especially gifted being? What duty does an artist owe family, friends, country? Stephen imagines the artist as an indifferent god, paring his nails while his characters go about their business, but a similar indifference marks his relationships with those around him, and he often appears callous, cruel, consumed by various idealized visions of himself as the saintly penitent, for instance, or the heroic artist figure of the novel’s closing pages who grandly promises to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The novel does not clearly disavow such romantic and heroic notions of the artist, but it does at the very least suggest the cost to others of such a degree of self-absorption, however creative. The nature of art itself is also at issue in the novel. What is it? What is it for? Stephen envisions an art that transcends his world and distills his experience to a pure essence untainted by everyday life; however, we see very little of Stephen’s art in the novel, and what we do see is not remarkable. Further, the book that Joyce has written is very different from the refined aesthetic ideal celebrated by Stephen Dedalus: while Stephen all but refines his beloved E.C. out of existence in his villanelle, Joyce takes pains to remind us that Stephen walks upon the ground. Portrait is not the kind of book that Stephen Dedalus would write, at least, not the Stephen we see at this point.
1. How likable is Stephen Dedalus? What are the positive and negative aspects of his character?
1. The first chapter of the novel coincides with the downfall and death of Charles Stewart Parnell, who is throughout that chapter an important figure on the margins of the action. He is symbolized by Dante’s green brush; his death is one element in Stephen’s dream vision during his time in the infirmary; and talk of him disrupts the Joyces’ Christmas dinner. Investigate Parnell’s life, cause, and downfall and discuss his significance to Joyce’s novel.
A fairly well-received film version of Portrait was made in 1979 by Joseph Strick with Bosco Hogan playing the role of Stephen. The novel’s “sequel,” Ulysses, was also filmed by Strick in 1967 with considerably less success. There are at least two unabridged recordings of the novel, by David Case (Books On Tape, 1992) and Frederick Davidson (Blackstone Audio Books, 1995). In addition, there are a few abridged recordings, including ones by Jim Norton (Naxos Audio Books, 1995) and John Lynch (Durkin Hayes Audio, 1993).
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