It’s so interesting when a piece of art completely embodies its purpose, when all of the elements work together in unison to create not only a physical and intellectual argument but an emotional experience. Mulholland Dr. does this; The Glass Menagerie does this; and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does this. James Joyce’s work doesn’t merely describe an experience or tell a story, it recreates the experience of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and allows the audience to partake in the experience with him. Portrait is largely a rumination on what art can, or should, be, and in making it argument, completely embodies its ideal.
The novel begins as many other bildungsroman do, with the protagonist as a young boy, perhaps, with his first memory: his father singing him a song. The novel begins in dialect with the familiar “Once upon a time.” There are, however, as throughout the book, no quotation marks or any indication that it is a character speaking, rather than the narrator. The book just, well, opens: no introduction, no prompting. The reader is given the lines and left to decode them on his own. In the opening pages, the novel completely inhabits and reflects the mind of the child, with short, choppy sentences and its direct relationship between names and things, from which the child and the reader come to know the world of the novel. The first characters introduced are Rody Kickham and Nasty Roche, two schoolmates who pick on Stephen. What more fitting name could there be for two bullies? Furthermore, the metaphors are very rudimentary, “it was like something in a book,” and the association between the hotel faucets: “He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks” (22,23). appearances and names reflect reality, and the child has no concept of deception or disingenuousness, and the reader is given the thoughts and the world of a child unmediated. It is immediate, and, thus, draws the reader into the mind of the child. We not only see and understand the child, we become the child.
As the novel progresses, the stability and the reliability of its world becomes increasingly complex and abstract. The first two chapters are mostly dominated by the education and interaction of the child with others. Stephen’s school keeps him in line, and religious observation dominates most of his life. At the end of chapter two, however, this order breaks down as Stephen has his first run in with carnal sin and lust. He describes trying “to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up…the powerful recurrence of the tides within him,” and as breaking into a “dark orgiastic riot” like “some baffled prowling beast” (106, 107, 108). The restrained, conservative language of sexual innuendo and implicit association becomes explicit and vivid, and the reader, like Stephen, must confront and come to terms with this language. The reader experiences the sexual awakening that Stephen undergoes, which is what makes the following chapter so immensely powerful and disturbing.
The third chapter relates a detailed, vivid, and intense vision of hell. For the most part, the chapter consists of direct quotations. Like the opening, however, these quotations are not “divided” out of the text by punctuation or by introduction. They are just presented. Unmediated. I know when I read this chapter, I had to stop more than a few times to let the intense and gripping words settle down in my mind. It’s a tough chapter to get through. It’s gory, its intense. The reason it’s so intense and gripping is precisely because Joyce presents it as an experience we undergo with Stephen. We hear the words of the priest the same way he does, and, because it is not an easy time for Stephen, who grapples with the sin and the nature of his own soul and the prospect of the afterlife, it cannot be an easy time for the reader. We experience everything Stephen does.
In the final scene of the novel, the theme of names and realties comes full circle. The novel becomes increasingly more abstract, it shifts from the narrative of the details of a schoolboy’s life to a philosophical rumination on the nature of art and religion, and the novel increasingly subverts the world it earlier, as a child, had taken for granted. The final conversation between Cranly and Stephen becomes the epitome of this conversion. In the opening, as discussed earlier, names and labels define their object: the faucet that is labelled “hot” spews how water, and the faucet labelled “cold” spews cold water. In chapter five, Cranly and Stephen ostensibly discuss religion, specifically, the nature of Jesus as a human being and the evaluation of his actions, especially towards his mother. He tells Stephen he will be completely alone, and Stephen stares him down, “Of whom are you speaking? Stephen asked at length. Cranly did not answer” (249). Names are completely subverted, and Cranly no longer speaks about himself, the surface reality does not reflect his inner motives but shadows them.
The novel is amazing. It creates a complete experience, the “vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills each person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life” and the world of the novel takes on a life of its own (217). In the final chapter, the language of religion and God that weaves through the first four chapters is appropriated to art, and the artist becomes an “artificer” and his work “like the creation of a God” (179, 189). Like Stephen, in order to present a complete, full experience, Joyce tries “to fly by these nets” of “nationality, language, religion” which has bound others and, to this point, bound himself. Joyce, unlike the writers of the 18th and 19th century novels, presents the world of the novel unmediated by a narrator. The narrator gives no impression or protection for the reader, and the reader must work through and decode the work on his own. It is not easy task; it requires work and, often, the novel is not easy to read. It is, however, always harder to put down.
Admit.
Admit.
Admit.
Admit.