Stephen Dedalus is both stimulated and frustrated by the confusing interplay of signified and signifiers. His cognitive development, from birth, is characterized by repetition: the stories and rhymes told to him by his family, the sentences in Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book (that ‘… were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from’), and his formal education in a catholic society; stepped in catechism and doctrinal rhetoric. It is prevalently logocentric – he strives to find fixed and stable meanings in his surroundings; yet Joyce also shows Stephen’s awareness of the openness and fluidity of language (‘But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could’). The apparent contradictions of logocentricism by his own experiences excites and fascinates his aesthetic imagination, and at the same time heightens his awareness of the impossibility inherent in his attempts to distil pure, true meaning out of his surroundings.
As a title ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ is itself a signifier, and exhibits the instability we have just been discussing. Initially it has about it an air of blandness and anonymity – reminiscent of a working title – that modestly underplays the gravity of the text, and implies that the Author is experimenting as much (if not more) with aesthetic form as with content, but in fact it changes how we receive the entire text. The word ‘portrait’ has a much closer association with a pictorial rendering of a persons image than with a written text, so we have an immediately apparent contradiction between form and medium. The artistic medium employed by Joyce attempts, by its application, to transcend the traditional boundaries of artistic form. We could even apply the analogy of the green rose quoted above, by replacing the words ‘green rose’ with ‘written portrait’ and, although it magnifies the complexity and oxymoronic quality of the phrase, the essence remains the same. The existence of a green rose, although an apparent impossibility, could be possible respective to the context in which it is perceived. We should note that; according to the title the text is A portrait, which suggests that interpretation is equivocal. Similarly; that the ‘Portrait’ is of the artist as opposed to an artist; signifying that the text is at least to some extent autobiographical (a self-portrait), but also implying a rhetorical figure – one that is in some way resistant to personal idiosyncrasies; is representative and indicative of a logocentric interpretation of ‘artist’. From this perspective Stephen Dedalus becomes an abstraction – even a caricature. Finally we need to take into account the last four words of the title, which shift the emphasis from the ‘word’ to the ‘world’ by affirming the worldly context in which our interpretation should be grounded. The portrait we engage with is a portrait not of an artist, but of a young man. Each of the elements ‘Artist’ and ‘Young Man’ effectively deconstruct the other, destabilizing their logocentric properties by the process of their attachment. Thus the figure of ‘Artist’ is subversively challenged by changing the context from the aesthetic to the actual, and our perception of our ‘Young Man’ has to be modified to take account of his artistic tendencies whilst maintaining his physical stature within the narrative. The title embodies the relational tensions and difficulties between Art and Life; between the Word and the World.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus in the time from his birth, through infancy, childhood, adolescence, to adulthood. More specifically it tells of the events and experiences that shape how he perceives and interprets the world around him. The narrative subtly takes the from of a pastiche; punctuated by repetition, rhythmic structures and devices, and Joyce’s dreamlike poetic prose. It engages all of the readers senses from the very first page to create a ‘living’ piece of art. In the beginning Stephen is a ghostly figure; removed from his immediate environment into the domain of a spectator. He reacts to his surroundings but does not obviously interact with them. The taxonomy of experience that he acquires is dominated by hierarchical structures – such as his family and household, his school, the Catholic church (including the hierarchies inherent in the doctrines of the Catholic faith) – that although they are apparently inter-woven seem at first to be clearly defined. Yet the events in which we are involved with him serve to challenge not only his logocentric conception of the world, but also the stability and validity of hierarchy itself. This is inferred in the quote:
‘For some time he had felt the slight changes in his house; and these changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world.’
In this respect we can see the ‘Artist’ as a reader – struggling to equate the logocentric structures embedded in his psyche with the actual structures he encounters in the real world. In each case the resolution is achieved in a moment of epiphany; a reordering, redefining, and relocating of the rhetorical entities that are present in the challenge.
The ‘changes in what he had deemed unchangeable’ directly refers to the changes in circumstances due to the failing prosperity of the Dedalus family, but also less directly refers to the structure of language, and the impact on it by the linguistic challenges Stephen encounters (‘That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt.’). Joyce describes how Stephen acquires his understanding of language:
‘Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him.’
Repetition is a key feature of Stephen’s epistemological progression. The phrases in his spelling book: ‘Canker is a disease of plants, / Cancer one of animals.’ are primarily aimed at spelling instruction but also impart factual information. Stephen may not have any other reference for what Canker is but he knows that it is a disease, and that it affects plants. They also elucidate the symbolic significance of language at a micro level; with implied significance at higher levels (if the impact of changing one letter in a word – in this case a ‘k’ to a ‘c’ – can change its essence, then it should follow that the impact of the new word potentially affects the sentence, the sentence: the paragraph, and so on. Yet if – as we saw in the second paragraph – meaning is not immediately present in a (sign) word but is dispersed among the sea of others, then context can be seen as a modifying factor behind meaning; with each repeated word or phrase being referred not only by the other signs, but also by the preceding incidence(s) of itself. Its meaning then is vulnerable to changes of context and emphasis as well as the causality of the act of repetition. In the case of ‘Canker’ one might imagine Stephen encountering other instances of hearing the word repeated in different contexts, and from these collective insights be able to gain a better comprehension of what is signified by it.
Repetition is also a key feature of Joyce’s narrative, endowing the text with character and structure. The repeated use of figures such as white, cold, wet, and others provide a means of charting Steven becoming increasingly engaged with language; as his taxonomy of all the interrelated parts of the whole emerge and its structure becomes accordingly both clearer and more flexible. Throughout the time span covered by the text the nature of the forces acting on Stephen (family, society, religion, love, and sexuality) remain substantially unchanged however the context and circumstances which they reside in and are subjected to are fluid and changeable. One of his major epiphanies occurs in the process of him composing poetic verses for the mystical anonymous figure of his affections, for whom he had written verses for ten years previously. The narrative at this point reminisces back ten years; extensively paraphrasing and repeating sentences and phrases from the narrative of the time of the previous incident . We as readers are do not get to see the original verses, but with the coming of this epiphany we are able watch as the poetry unfolds out of the emotional turbulence of Stephen’s experiences. At this point he is not only engaging with language but he has control over it.
It is by observing the effects of the ‘shocks’ of change that Stephen undergoes that we can build up our own mental image of the young man and artist. He evolves from a passive observer of the world into an active participant by way of his deepening awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of language. It is through the process of repetition and iteration that he gains this awareness and it is through it is through a similar process of repetition and iteration, utilized by the author, that the reader can engage with the figure of the Artist (the ‘word’) with that of him as a Young Man (the ‘world’).
Word count: 2047
Bibliography:
Bennett, A. Readers and Reading. 1995. Longman Group Limited. New York.
Connolly, T. Joyce’s Portrait Criticisms and Critiques. 1962. Peter Owen Limited. New York.
Eagleton, T. Literary Theory an Introduction. Second Edition. 1996. Blackwell.
Joyce, J. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Penguin Classics. 1992. Penguin Books Ltd. London.
Holy Bible New International Version. 19
McQuillan, M. Paul De Man. 2001. Routledge. New York.
Morris, W. and Nault, C, Jnr. Portraits of an Artist. 1962. The Odyssey Press Inc. New York.
Nalbantian, S. Aesthetic Autobiography. 1994. The Macmillan Press Ltd. New York
Parrinder, P. James Joyce. 1984. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Startiliot, C. Citation and Modernity. 1993. University of Okalahoma Press. USA.
Holy Bible New International Version. 1983. p1063
Collins English Dictionary. 1990. p1003
