A PORTRAIT OF JAMES JOYCE AS A YOUNG MAN

Irish literature in the early 20th century was practically defined by James Joyce. His legacy, however, is not confined to giving voice to a nation on the verge of erupting into independence but his revolution was literary and largely religious as well. His debut novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was rooted in the classical tradition right down to the protagonist’s last name, Dedalus, a reference to the Greek hero Daedalus, while dismantling literary conventions as thoroughly as the role of the Catholic Church in Irish identity. For Joyce this crisis of faith began in 1903 on his mother’s death bed. Shortly after graduating from University College in Dublin, Joyce moved to Paris to study medicine but returned upon hearing of his mother’s imminent death. Joyce and his younger brother Stanislaus tended to their mother dutifully but it was at this moment where Joyce’s stance against the Church became established, refusing to take confession or pray. As Joyce’s biographer Herbet Sherman Gorman wrote, “Mary Jane Joyce was dying in the sanctity of the bosom of her Church ... and her eldest son could only grieve that the two wills could not meet and mix. He was incapable of bending his knee to the powerful phantom, that once acknowledged, would devour him as it had devoured so many about him and half a civilisation as well.” By this time, Joyce was already planning the precursor of the work that would become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Hero, as it was originally titled, was a veiled autobiography. In its over nine-hundred pages it explored his years at the university, his upbringing and the role of Catholicism in the shaping of Ireland. While working on the novel Joyce would meet Nora Barnacle and their relationship was cemented by their shared disdain for the Church and the direction of Ireland. The two married and subsequently moved to continental Europe. While living in Trieste, the Joyces gave birth to two boys and Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero. Joyce garnered some fame through the publication of short stories which would be collected almost a decade later into Dubliners and this inspired him to revisit the character of Stephen Dedalus. In its final form, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man signals a new era in literature, swaying seamlessly between stream of consciousness, the literal truth and visions from Stephen’s mind. Lines marking time and reality and constructed reality are blurred. Understanding the linear specifics is largely beside the point as the book is read best as a polemic than a biography. The individual pieces (vivid writings on their own) accumulate into a clear conclusion. The most scathing indictments of Joyce’s religious upbringing are in his description of the ill-treatment of the boys by the Jesuits schoolmasters in Clongowes Wood College boarding school and the lack of empathy for a religious institution. The long-detailed sermon Stephen hears years later while at Belvedere College (reminiscent of Father Maple’s pamphlet length sermon in Moby Dick) on the subject of the Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell and Heaven) would have been a challenge to read were it not for Joyce’s captivating prose, capturing how the terror instilled on him as a young man attending services. The sequence reads almost like a straight transcript, broken sporadically by glimpses into Stephen’s mind. In the end, Joyce defines epiphany by Stephen’s departure not only from the Church but its indirect consequences, notably his family’s narrow-mindedness and the obtuseness of his classmates. Like Joyce himself, Stephen abandons not Ireland but the identity holding it back. Like Stephan must leave Ireland to grow as an artist, Ireland must leave some of its chains to grow, especially as it set forth to becoming a republic. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was published serially from February 1914 to September 1915 in the British periodical The Egoist but was having a hard time finding a book publisher in Great Britain. Meanwhile, Joyce had made quite an admirer of Ezra Pound who had helped see the work serialized in print. By 1916 no British publishers were showing interest in the work and so Pound secured Joyce a publisher in the New York based B.W. Huebsch. An artist was born.