A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"O, I say: here's a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed. The other fellows stopped their game and turned around laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said: --- I do not. Wells said: --- O, I say: here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to bed. They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question?" (Joyce 14). The question of "what was the right answer?" follows Stephen for the rest of the book. The reader sees such a process as an example of how one progresses through life and learns that the words that are spoken, seemingly innocent words, are not innocent at all but carry dangerous undertones and meanings.

The above event is what Jacobs would refer to as one of Stephen's "epiphany fragments" (20). "In these passages Joyce's language echoes Stephen's initial encounter with an epiphanic scene in order to focus the tensions between Stephen's attempts at rigid self-definition and Joyce's more ambiguous constructions of selfhood" (Jacobs 20). Only a few pages later, Joyce explains how Stephen felt: "It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?" (Joyce 17). In his childish way, he thought he understood language only to find that the language he knew was not what the other boys spoke.

As he grows older, a key aspect of the novel is his determination to define his own language, while learning the foreign language of the others. He understands himself to be different from the rest and seems to ultimately decide it is because of the different "languages" in which they speak, think, and act. Yet, the world around him continues to communicate in ways that have nothing to do with the language he seeks. One example is highlighted by Kearney in his discussion of Joyce's use of familiar plot twists of irony. The one that best suits how painful "their" language is compared to the language of Stephen is shown in the fifth chapter as Stephen's lecture on aesthetics is drowned out by the wagon filled with old iron (Kearney 34). As Kearney explains that the noise and disruption of the iron-filled dray "mocks Stephen's pretensions to be the superior artist" (34). He goes on to add that it also symbolizes the "... material reality the serious writer needs to work with. Stephen, if he is to make good as a writer, cannot just fly above the ordinary world; he has to live in and work with it" (Kearney 34). In other words, Stephen must at least understand the other language in order to assure that the language he uses can be heard and somehow understood.

It's generally agreed that much of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is autobiographical as, it can also be argued, all of Joyce's work is. This seems particularly appropriate when one considers how difficult the Joyce's language is for the reader struggling to understand it. It is made evident in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that Stephen's discovery of language is a journey that not only has to be taken in order to make a successful attempt at not only becoming an artist but also at becoming an intellectual and cultured man.

Works Cited

Jacobs, Joshua. "Joyce's Epiphanic Mode: Material Language and the Representation of

Sexuality in Stephen, Hero and Portrait." Twentieth Century Literature, April 2000, v46.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Books,

1964.

Kearney, Anthony. "Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'". The Explicator,

Fall 1997, v56.