A century later, Joyce’s ‘Portrait’ helps us read ourselves
Ezra Pound assessed it as “the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we have now in English.” W.B. Yeats designated its author as “the most remarkable new talent in Ireland today.”
What triggered both writers’ reflections was reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel about his upbringing in Ireland. It was first published 100 years ago this week, on Dec. 29. That publication occurred here in America, because “Portrait” was turned down by London publishers, who considered it obscene.
As in “Dubliners,” the short story collection that Joyce had published two years earlier, what’s truly obscene in “Portrait” is the provincial and prejudiced Ireland that both books vividly describe and into which Joyce was born in 1882.
How, in such a toxic environment, does an impressionable and sensitive child become father of the young man who defiantly rejects his homeland to become an artist? How, in short, does Joyce himself avoid the fate awaiting the doomed characters populating “Dubliners”? Reborn in the pages of “Portrait” as Stephen Dedalus — a highly charged name combining a Christian martyr stoned to death for blasphemy and a Greek inventor who escapes his island prison by learning to fly — Joyce begins at the beginning, with two stunning pages involving a small child first becoming aware of his senses, all five of which get an immediate workout.
Joyce then continues with the first of the novel’s five long chapters, during which those senses are continually assaulted by outside influences: A charming but dissolute father. An increasingly pious and dogmatic mother. The Jesuits who educated him, while also filling him with fear of a stern and vengeful deity. The prostitutes with whom he slept. His frequently petty classmates.
In transcending these various influences, Stephen can be a snot and a prig; as a result, he can also be unintentionally funny. Here’s an illustrative example, from a period when the guilt-ridden, 16-year-old Stephen — with a comically inflated view of his dissolute life as a hardened sinner — has again found religion:
“The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality. So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary that he should continue to live.”
In highfalutin, overwrought prose, young Stephen here presumes such a special and exclusive relationship with God that the world and its people become pointless.
On the other hand, it’s that same selfimposed isolation — that same enduring sense of himself, throughout “Portrait,” as someone existing apart from all others — that later allows Stephen to escape.
Yes: Joyce frequently pokes fun at his younger, egotistical self. But he simultaneously honors and upholds Stephen’s integrity and intelligence.
Yes: Stephen repeatedly takes himself too seriously. But Joyce makes clear that it’s partly because he does so that Stephen endures.
Yes: we laugh at Stephen’s pretensions. But we’re also aware that this self-same boy became an artist named James Joyce, making good on the famous promise at novel’s end: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
When I first read “Portrait” — as a 16year-old who, like Stephen, attended a Jesuit high school — I was too young to appreciate the wry, self-deprecating humor through which Joyce pokes fun at his younger self; that would come later, upon additional readings in college and especially graduate school. But I was inspired then by the teen rebel, determined to speak truth to power.
Rereading “Portrait” this week, I’m not only dazzled all over again by writing Pound described as “hard, clear-cut, with no waste of words.” I also marvel at Joyce’s ability to respect each of the novel’s portraits of who he’d been, even as he outgrows all of them. Would that we could all paint such discerning self-portraits. This “Portrait” challenges us to try. Great books always do.