When I first read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as a wee high school lad, I was convinced that it was a book for, and only for, Catholics who had grown up in Ireland. The whole thing seemed far too situated, far too Dublin and Jesuits and Irish slang for it to be accessible to anyone else. I've subsequently read the book a number of times, each time its become far more accessible. Still as Irish and Catholic as ever, but clearly something of an aesthetic manifesto as well as an experiment in narrative practice.
The title is absolutely straightforward: we are about to read a Kunstlerroman, a novel dedicated to the maturation of the artist, which itself is a subcategory of the Bildungsroman, novels which narrate the upbringing and socialization of the hero. This is the realm of a major realist tradition, German being perhaps the most famous, but English has many as well, Dickens being the easiest to point to (Great Expectations, etc.). The tradition has been the subject of parody since the beginning (Tristram Shandy being the most notable), so to say that Joyce is playing with the tradition is nothing new. But how he plays with it, and what is peculiarly modernist about that play, is very interesting.
In an earlier post, I made the tentative, early argument that perhaps what is peculiar to modernism is the impossiblity of assenting to any social or cultural narrative. One recognizes the need of a shared world, but there is no shared world to which one can assent. The bildungsroman is perhaps the art work par excellence in which to gauge the relation between culture, the subject, and assent--after all, that is the source of its drama. Will the hero become successfuly assimilated into the social world or not? To say that the novel is individualistic is a misunderstanding--society is as much a character as the hero, heroine. Indeed, what makes the hero "heroic" in this case is not so much a mighty deed as successful assimilation/enculturation. For this reason, critics who would argue that the novel is a source of bourgeois cultural reproduction are spot on. (A fascinating argument could be made here about mimesis. But I continue on.)
The enculturation of the hero filters down even to the level of language. In the novels where the hero him/herself is telling the tale, the language utilized already reflects successful assimilation. That is, because the narrator speaks as he does, we already know, to some extent, what is going to happen. Consider the opening lines of David Copperfield:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
Note the linguistic register. It is educated, precise, exact. Even as it calls into question the narrator's status as hero, the firm belief that a) each life is a tale, and b) each life has a hero, is never called into question. Furthermore, there is an immediate appeal to official records: dates and times matter to the bourgeoise, and they matter to Copperfield. While he carries a willing degree of doubt (thus I have been informed) in his origins, that doubt is not sufficient to warrent disbelief (he believes). In contrast, look at the famous first line in Portrait:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down allong the road met a nicens little bo named baby tuckoo. . . .
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
The narrative is not exactly stream of consciousness here, but it is, I would say, phenomenological. The narrator, not Stephen Dedalus, has access to his thoughts and emotions, and focalizes the tale in that way. There is no assumption of value here, only experience. Moreover, as the narrative progresses, we see an increased level of sophistication in the linguistic register; as Stephen's consciousness becomes more complex, so does the narrator. A few, relatively random examples: "He god up and sat on the side of his bed. He was weak. He tried to pull on his stocking. It had a horrid rough feel. The sunlight was queer and cold" (21); "He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar" (79); "The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a momen when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley" (184). Note that while the phenomenological focus is retained throughout, Stephen's responses to experience become more and more sophisticated, which in turn is reflected in a greater complexity of language. For this reason, while less noted for its narrative experiementation than Joyce's later works, a very precise narrative position is adopted which breaks from the traditions of realism.
So to what culture is Stephen assimilating? Ireland, to be sure, but from the very beginning we realize that an Irish "identity" is an impossiblity. There is no "culture" to which he can assent. At an early scene, we see a famous political debate between his aunt Dante, Mr. Dedalus, and Mr. Casey. Dante, a strictly devout Catholic, is defending the priests for abandoning Parnell, the political leader who was caught in an affair. Dedalus and Casey argue that the priests need to stay out of politics. What we find out, however, is that all three characters are strongly Irish nationalists, even Dante, who one night "hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God save the Queen" (37). In other words, the markers of Irish identity in the novel are themselves completely riven by competing ideologies. Stephen doesn't escape this fracture; toward the novel's end, in conversation with a friend over the Church, which Stephen has abandoned, he says that he neither believes or disbelieves in the Eucharist--that he cannot make a decision one way or another. For this reason, assent and assimilation is impossible.
Stephen's "conversion," then, is not to Ireland, not to the Church, not to any form of sociality, but to art. It is in his namesake, Dedalus, the famous Greek artisan who lifted beyond the world, laboring in his workshop (note the emphasis on craft), that he finds a way out. He repeatedly says that his goal is not to express nature as the Romantics had done, but to make objects out of the raw stuff of the earth, a "mode of life or of art whereby [his] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom" (246). Cut free from the bonds of nationalism, religion, culture, and mimesis, the artist discovers/creates a realm of spiritual freedom.
The book ends with Stephen leaving Ireland. As a bildungsroman, then, Stephen's is an absolute failure--he has not assimilated, indeed he cannot assimilate. Art becomes the anti-social disruption. Hence, one of the most famous aesthetic statements in the novel, when Stephen says that he will puruse his goal "using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning" (247). Like a guerrilla, the artist relies on margins. Silence: the putting to active use a passive unwillingness to speak in any socially recognizable register. Exile: contra Socrates, who chose death over exile from Athens, the modern artist can only live outside the civitas (exile being not only Joyce's fate but that of a number of modernists). Cunning: intelligence as means to spiritual/emotional/aesthetic freedom (Think Eliot: in a mad world, art must be "difficult").
Posted by pjaussen at May 3, 2007 11:14 AM | TrackBack