A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by James Joyce“The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron, memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.

–James Joyce--1904 essay, “A Portrait of the

Artist”

BIOGRAPHICAL

• Well off Catholic family in Dublin, Ireland

• Oldest of a dozen• They slid into poverty

• Attended Jesuit-run schools– Clongowes (boarding

school)– Belvedere (dayschool)– Royal University (aka

University College)

Bio, Cont’d

• Loved to write • Won awards with high

test scores• Ultimately rejected

Catholicism in favor of literature

• After graduation, went to Paris to study medicine

• In Paris, he squandered lots of money

• Returned to Ireland, mother diagnosed with cancer

• He began to drink heavily

Family

• Feb, 1904, began writing a long, fictionalized autobiography, Stephen Hero.

• June 1904 met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid

• They ran off to Europe together in Oct. 1904.

• Ended up in Triest and Pola, Austria (spoke Italian, very poor)

• Son, Giorgio, born in 1905

• Daughter, Lucia, born in 1907

Writing

• 1906-07 turning point• Wrote “The Dead”• Conceived Ulysses• Decided to re-write

Stephen Hero as Portrait.

• 1914-1920, fortunes gradually improved– Writing gained

attention– Found wealthy patron

Ezra Pound credited with recognizing Joyce’s talent

Controversy & Ups ’n Downs

• Lavish lifestyle in Paris in 1920s and 1930s (patroness Harriet Weaver)

• Banning of Ulysses (pub. 1922) made Joyce a household name

• Eyesight grew worse, some painful surgeries

• 1922-1939 writing Finnegans Wake

• Lucia went mad and was institutionalized

• Married Nora in 1931• Died unexpectedly in

1941

ABOUT PORTRAIT

• Mostly autobiographical

• Joyce called ‘Stephen Dedalus’

• Covers his life up to age 20

• From 1000 page Stephen Hero

• Ulysses the sequel• Chapter 3, central

chapter (harrowing sermon about Hell)

• Focuses on motifs– Five senses– Words, poems, and

performances– Rose, bird, train, and

wave

Bildungsroman• Author treats the life of a young

man through the important years of his spiritual development, usually from boyhood through adolescence.

• Shown as being formed and changed by interaction with his surroundings and the world.

• Experience, as opposed to formal education, is central to development.

• Young man must encounter life, and be formed by that encounter.

• Open-ended—prepares boy for life, but does not depict that life (made ready to confront it).

• No guarantee of success, but can hope for it.

• Character traits (normally)• Good hearted• Naïve• Innocent• Often separated from society

by birth or fortune (and thus story is about his development to become part of society).

• So, part of a Bildungsroman is the relationship of the individual to society, the values and norms of that society, and the ease or difficulty with which a good man can enter it.

Structure and Style: Bildungsroman

• Novel is held together as a work of art by our interest in the development of the main character (not by the story, as in a typical novel).

• Action is episodic rather than a tightly woven plot.

• Form is “open” rather than circular “closed”

• Concerned with internal development and uses different narrative techniques

• Inner monologue• Narrated monologue• Quoted thought• Internal analysis • Use of the first person

Central themes of Portrait:

• Art (storytelling)• Family• Politics• Religion• Love• Punishment• Apology• Loneliness/isolation• Development of senses• Independence• Intellect/aesthetics

On the Artistic Temperament

“It has often been made a subject or reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule, this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of so much importance.”

--Oscar Wilde