On the symbolic level, Stephen, the central character in the Portrait of the
Artist, is of course Daedalus, the great artificer who must escape the
labyrinth that is Dublin, while in other readings he is a type of proto-martyr,
a messianic figure who must suffer at the hands of those who misunderstand him
but who will eventually prevail. Alternatively he may be viewed as the victim of
what Greville Fulke once described as; "this wearisome condition of humanity,
begotten under one law to another bound" though ostensibly and at the most
basic level he is the artist who strives for freedom of expression. Stephen is
however also portrayed as the victim of his own sensitivity, or more
particularly his youth; a bondage which only time can release him
from.
The first section of the Portrait adumbrates the winding passages
of the labyrinth from which Daedalus must escape. His first contact with
religion is associated with fear as Dante's inferno awaits those who do not
'apologise' or as he will later learn; "confess confess!". Later on, political
argument over the death of Parnell and the subsequent split among Irish
nationalists spoils the long awaited Christmas dinner while back in Clongowes he
is embarrassed when Wells has asked him does he kiss his mother before going to
bed. As Stephen grows older his awareness of the constraints of religion,
nationality and the family increase as the walls of the labyrinth become more
resolved, focused, smothering and concretised. His situation is that of the
constrained Romantic or as Emile Rousseau observed; "L'homme est nee libre,
et partout il est dans les fens" (Man is born free and everywhere he is
bound in chains). When the symbolic Daedalus finally achieves liberation on the
strand at Dollymount it is preceded by the vision; "of a hawk like man flying
sunward above the sea".
We first become aware of the possibility of a
parallel on the life of Christ in the scene where Stephen suffers at the hands
of Heron, Nash and Boland. Here, he is bound to be "scourged", or rather, lashed
with a cabbage stump as his tormentors try to procure a confession and make him
relinquish his faith - in Byron. Like all martyrs, Stephen it seems, must suffer
at the hands of others. Throughout the Portrait Stephen has a prophetic
sense of destiny; "in secret he began to make ready for the great part which
he felt awaited him, the nature of which he only dimly apprehended" (58). He
also seems to have a prophetic awareness of the moment this will happen,
believing it will be a religious experience; "In that moment of supreme
tenderness he would be transfigured" (60).
On Dollymount Strand we can
liken his sensuous muse Mercedes to John the Baptist standing in the waters of
Jordan as when during Stephen's transfiguration the bathers cry out until his
own ancient name which will be shed is called for;
-
Stephaneforos!
From this moment he is transformed and no longer
unsure of the nature of his calling. There was a lust of wandering in his feet
that burned to set out for "the ends of the earth". In the next chapter
we find Stephen doggedly preaching his doctrine. There are in fact twelve
students mentioned in the University section neatly paralleling the count of the
Apostles. In the opening of the chapter the language echoes that of the gospels;
"fill out the place for me to wash", he commands. He then
"allowed" his mother, now in the role of Mary Magdalen, "to scrub his
neck and root into the folds of his ears". while his talk with Cranly before
he emigrates to Paris parallels that of Christ with Paul during the Last Supper.
Cranly, the most faithful and attentive of his friends he alone will listen to
Stephen before he embarks on a new life and finally, to honour his calling, he
must, like Christ, reject his mother, whose "mutterings" offended and
threatened him.
There is another less figurative struggle for freedom
which in cultural terms arises from the fundamental cleavage between the natural
and social aspects of the personality. One could again quote Rousseau but E.M.
Forster's damning indictment of Leonard Bast in Howard's End is equally
illuminating; "He gave up the glory of the animal for a top hat and tails and
a set of ideas". For Stephen, the nets which he speaks of - nationality,
language and religion - must be flown past, not only for his integrity as an
artist but as a human being. He must escape those moulding influences which seek
to blandise, conform, dehumanise and ultimately cripple his spirit. During the
retreat Stephen felt his "soul was fattening and congealing into a gross
grease". Wracked with guilt, he believes himself bound for an eternity of
suffering for masturbating and being with prostitutes; in short, responding to
natural biological urges.
Again, the scene in Dollymount brings to an end
his guilt as Mercedes; "lifted her skirt without shame or wantonness". To
him, the promise of this spectacle is the epitome of the free life. In the
following chapter Davin relates how he could have slept with a peasant woman but
he rejected her entreaties. Stephen instead viewed her; "as a type of her
race and his own, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in
darkness and secrecy and loneliness". Just like Stephen's muse on the
strand, she represents a time in the not too distant future where people can
express themselves openly and freely without shame or guilt.
However, the
novel's main focus is on the growth of the artist's mind. Most of the first
twenty pages focus on the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic consciousness of
the young Stephen. The first page alone draws attention to all the senses. "He
had a hairy face" (sight), "It is warm than it gets cold" (touch), "The oilsheet
had a queer smell" (smell), "Uncle Charles and Dante clapped" (sound) and "Dante
gave him a cachou" (taste). We also have a growing awareness of individuality -
the Vances we are told "had a different father and mother". Rhythm and the
poetic use of language are then invoked;
"O the wild rose blossoms, on
the little green place"
But something is amiss. He is "a nicens
little boy named Baby Tuckoo". So, in the very first sentence we are introduced
to a displacement, a sense of not belonging; in short, the lot of the sensitive
and creative mind. The following chapters describe Stephen as a quasi-audio
visual recorder absorbing sense impressions and ordering the world around him.
Later, after the student's religious retreat, Stephen puts himself through
"an ever-increasing circle of works of super-erogation". He attempts to
deny his body of any pleasure and rejects the senses which he has spent his life
honing. To the artist this is folly and Stephen soon realises it; "what had
become of the pride of the spirit which had always made him conceive of himself
as a being apart in every order" (161). This brings us back to the baby
cuckoo and introduces us to the notion of the artist as bohemian, free spirit
and outsider. He is the perennial observer, not participator of the life around
him and it is this calling, stronger than any other, which eventually makes him
reject the priesthood. But Stephen is not the existentialist anti-hero of
modernist literature offered to us by Camus and Sartre, he is the Romantic hero
who believes primarily in the existence of beauty and truth. In "Stephen
Hero", Joyce's preliminary draft of the Portrait, Stephen gives forth
his theory of epiphanies;
"by an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual
manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable
phase of the mind itself" (188)
Later on, in conversation with
Cranly, he further describes the moment of epiphany as part of his definition of
beauty;
"when its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its
appearance the object achieves its epiphany" (191)
In Stephen's
theory of aesthetics in the Portrait this whatness, the third quality of
beauty, is referred to as the object's essence but it is worthwhile to note that
Joyce didn't use the word epiphany in his revised theory of aesthetics. This
would have been too close to Joyce the artist. Stephen's transfiguration on
Dollymount Strand then is an exemplary instance of a Joycean epiphany. All the
composite parts are connected to complete the whole; the mythological Daedalus
has flown the labyrinth; the messianic figure of Stephen has been baptised; the
artist has realised his vocation and the human being within achieves the freedom
of a life without shame or wantonness. Joyce achieves what Aquinas said are the
three requisites for beauty; integrity, wholeness and
radiance, which brings us the moment of epiphany.
However, in the
final chapter there is a marked increase in the use of irony. Joyce remarked
much later that; "I didn't go easy on him did I". We are reminded of the
title "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". In popular and many
scholarly references it is often referred to simply as "The Portrait" but
Joyce wanted us to remember it was also of a young man with all the attendant
foibles, vanities and affectations that accompany youth. As the novel progresses
and Stephen's confidence grows, he develops certain distasteful tendencies which
only a close reading of the narrative reveals. In Belvedere he answers his
schoolmates 'urbanely' and in a 'suave' manner. By the time he is in college he
can extend a wilful unkindness to MacAlister for asking the professor whether
they are likely to be tested on applied science where in particular, he is
offended by MacAlister's pronouncing of science as a monosyllable (176) -
Joyce himself would have been too sophisticated a thinker to entertain such
petty prejudices.
Also revealing is the beginning of the final chapter
where we are told; "the lore which he was believed to pass his day brooding
upon so that it had kept him from the companionship of his youth, was only a
garner of slender sentences from Aristotle's "Poetics" and a pamphlet from
Aquinas". His grand theory of aesthetics then, is culled from only two
writers and these ironically the two men most responsible for the intellectual
credibility (from a theological perspective) of the institution he intends to
free himself from. This cannot but be a deliberate ploy by Joyce and shows
Stephen to be perhaps more pilloried than praised for his famed theory of
aesthetics. He is ultimately his own victim. His Achilles heel being, as McCann
pointed, his absence of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.
Having attained his heroic emancipation in four interconnecting and overlapping
forms Stephen cannot surpass the greatest rite of passage of them all; the
demanding criteria of Joyce himself.
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