I

In the spring of 1907 James Joyce, tutor, writer , and (sometime) bank clerk delivered a series of three public lectures at the Università Popolare in Trieste. In those lectures, the first two of which survive, the young Joyce expressed strong reservations about the misplaced zeal of twentieth-century Irish nationalism. Anglo-Irish attempts to promote a national recovery of Celtic culture had served, in Joyce’s estimation, only to limit the advancement of Irish art and thought. “The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in [the Irishman’s] own country do not permit the development of individuality,” he lamented in Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages. “No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove” (CW, p. 171).¹ With a catalogue of Ireland’s past contributions to world culture, Joyce warned that the Irish had betrayed their legacy as vital players in the European cultural theater by embracing artificial national identities.

Joyce’s description of the Irish situation in these early lectures reflects the differences that separated him from most of his older contemporaries. Yeats’s revival sought in the Celtic legacy of Ireland an artistic and political alternative to the shackling dominance of Catholicism. Resistant to the conception that, in F. S. L. Lyons’s words, any Irish work “that claimed to be ‘national’ would be judged according to whether or not it conformed to the stereotype which ascribed to Catholic Ireland the virtues of purity, innocence, and sanctity,” the Yeatsian artist allied himself with a history that neither England nor Rome could claim as its own.² For Joyce, though, the wholesale rejection of Catholicism merely exchanged one problem for another. In an effort to challenge Catholicism’s influence over the lives of the Irish population, the Celtic renaissance had constructed a national fiction equally ill-equipped to represent Ireland’s complex modern culture. Revival of the Irish language, retrieval of Celtic mythology, and the infusion of old mysticisms into contemporary literature were measures that Joyce believed to be as limiting to the development of a free Irish consciousness as any Catholic nationalism. To turn from the “coherent absurdity” of Catholicism to a cultural identity that was “dead just as ancient Egypt is dead” (CW, pp. 168, 173) could result only in another impotent aesthetic and political agenda. Lashing themselves to the mast of uncritical nationalism in a desire for collective strength, Irish artists were in Joyce’s mind submitting to a ruining power that would limit the nation’s options for self-determination and wreck Ireland’s journey to renewed cultural prominence.

Scholars have long recognized Joyce’s ambivalence regarding the attempts of the Irish literati to Celticize Ireland’s culture. Much recent work, though, has taken up the question of how Joyce’s texts treat nativist and specifically Catholic nationalisms. Yet this discussion has focused almost entirely on the later writings. Postcolonialists concerned with evaluating the politics of Joyce’s modernism have chosen Ulysses and to a lesser extent Finnegans Wake as their preferred texts. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, at least from this perspective, has been largely ignored. In the novel that Joyce was composing at the time of the Trieste lectures, he produces a crucial text for assessing his development of a uniquely Irish modernism. A Portrait publicly rejects Catholic nationalism’s claims to speak for all Ireland, even as it resists the solution of transnationalism by manifesting a sustained engagement with the Irish-Catholic discourses of Joyce’s youth.³ That the illusion of literary independence offered by the Anglo-Irish Celtic revival held little charm for the young Joyce is well established; that the security of nativist Catholicism was to his mind equally inadequate appears to need further assertion at this point in Joyce studies. Stephen Dedalus’s growth toward a lyric self-narration, which culminates in the final defiant artistic stance of A Portrait, relies on Catholic modes of expression to the exclusion of all others and marks the surrounding text’s multiple narrative techniques as a more authentic Irish literary form. The limitations of Stephen’s confessional lyricism thus represent to Joyce’s readers the inadequacy of essentialist notions of Irish identity, and the need for critical engagement with the nation’s complex cultural legacies.

The debate over Joyce’s nationalism has developed out of a consideration, expressed most consistently in the work of David Lloyd, of the ways that postcolonial texts simultaneously represent and critique the marginalized conditions of their production.⁴ Focusing on the subversiveness of an Irish “minor” literature, Lloyd, like other postcolonial scholars, politicizes the development of Irish literary form. He describes an increasingly successful mediation of the modes of production inherited from colonial tradition and those offered by nativist nationalisms. Not surprisingly, the idea of a transnational modernist Joyce, or a Joyce who at the very least eschews Irish Catholicism’s totalizing cultural narrative, stands at the forefront of such a concern. In a 1993 essay, “Adulteration and the Nation,” Lloyd renders an exemplary reading ofUlysses along these lines: because Joyce’s work “dismantles voice and verisimilitude in the same moment,” it “insists . . . on a deliberate stylization of dependence and inauthenticity, a stylization of the hybrid status of the colonized subject as of the colonized culture.”⁵ What Enda Duffy has similarly called the “relentless interrogativity” of Joyce’s texts has come to be understood as the triumph of modern Irish writing: the production of literary form that successfully negotiates, through its conspicuous hybridity, the colonial and native essentialisms that would otherwise threaten its efficacy as a representative text of fractured postcolonial culture.⁶

These critical formulations have met recently with significant resistance. In her provocative 1995 study James Joyce and Nationalism, Emer Nolan argues that, because of its zeal for a pluralism that can be deployed as a solution to the ongoing Irish question, postcolonial Irish criticism has obscured Joyce’s real nationalist commitments. By positing that “explorations of language, personal identity and history are simply incompatible with the reverence displayed for tradition and community in nationalist ideology,” Joyce scholars “do not acknowledge that nationalisms vary, and are internally divided and disputatious.” For Nolan, Joyce’s “rejection of Revivalism is a characteristic gesture of the world of native Catholic nationalism—the world within which he was brought up.”⁷ Hence, explanations of his antagonism toward the Celtic revival as both a desire for the greater psychic space of European “transnational modernity” and as a rejection of nationalism in all its forms must be judged as oversimplified and inadequate. Joyce’s texts, while undeniably modern, “record or lament the progressive abolition of local difference in the modern world.” In this way, Nolan argues, “Joycean modernism and Irish nationalism can be understood as significantly analogous discourses, and the common perception of them as unrelated and antagonistic begins to break down.”⁸

But the Ireland Joyce envisioned in the 1907 lectures was a nation of agents free from the over-determined identity of subjection to the English monarchy, to the Celtic revival, and to the Catholic Church. No longer “island of saints and sages,” the new Ireland would include the very peoples the old nation had alienated, for “to exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible, and to deny the name of patriot to all those who are not of Irish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the modern movement” (CW, pp. 161-62). In the final lines of his first lecture, Joyce employed the image of language itself to describe both Ireland’s cultural servitude and the process by which it could be thrown off. “It is well past time for Ireland to have done once and for all with failure,” he urged, for “though the Irish are eloquent, a revolution is not made of human breath and compromises. Ireland has already had enough equivocations and misunderstandings” (CW, p. 174). What was needed instead was for the Irish to reconceive their own nation, creating an environment in which the multitude of cultural discourses present in Ireland could freely inform the practices of the nation’s political and aesthetic life. Only when the “convenient fiction” of Celtic and Catholic nationalisms had been recast into a “nationality [that] must find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word” (CW, p. 166) would Ireland “put on the play we have waited for so long” (CW, p. 174). What Joyce wanted in 1907 was, in a very practical sense, a common recognition of Ireland’s complex and diverse cultural situation, and the realization of a truer (if less convenient) national fiction to represent that situation. “[T]his time,” he wrote, “let it be whole, and complete, and definitive.”

In the second Trieste lecture, Joyce described the revolutionary role literature would need to take if Ireland were to enact her whole and complete play on the world stage. Qualifying a more enthusiastic position he had expressed five years before on his chosen subject, Joyce offered James Clarence Mangan as an example of the typically limited Irish artist, one whose identity was beholden to an uncritical and “hysterical nationalism” (CW, p. 186). The positive aspects that David Lloyd can now find in Mangan’s fractured communication of native Irish culture, Joyce saw in 1907 only as weakness. Although he was “the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world” (CW, p. 179), Mangan had no critical perspective on his own culture because “the history of his country encloses him so straitly that even in his hours of extreme individual passion he can barely reduce its walls to ruins” (CW, p. 185). When his perspective on Ireland did break through, it was only as a fiery representative of a solely Celtic racial consciousness. Embodying an Irish aesthetic that Joyce found inadequate, Mangan was in the end a slave to his limited idea of Irishness, and the singular perspective of his lyric poetry revealed the shortcoming.

Taken together, the two surviving Trieste lectures powerfully represent the young Joyce’s ambivalence toward contemporary Irish identity politics in both its Celtic and Catholic versions, and his desire to construct a culturally critical aesthetic that was yet uniquely Irish as part of an alternative to those politics. For Joyce, the revolutionary “play” of national identity would arise out of a literary and indeed novelistic portrayal of the true composition of Irish culture, a portrayal incorporating all aspects of the culture as they existed in Irish daily life. Joseph Valente has remarked that the collision of so many varying cultural discourses (English, Catholic, Celtic) made Joyce’s Ireland “acutely sensitive to the relativity of language.”⁹ In my reading of the lectures, the problem as Joyce saw it in 1907 was precisely that most Irish chose not to admit any relativity in their cultural situation, and instead embraced the security of simplistic notions of what it meant to be Irish. What Anglicized Celticism was for the Irish intelligentsia, Catholicism was for the mass of unschooled Irishmen: an essentialized collective identity, complete with its own way of perceiving, and speaking about, and living in the world.

For Joyce, as for Mikhail Bakhtin, the novel is the genre that explodes the illusion of linguistic homogeneity in any community. When individuals encounter different formal manifestations of language in their everyday interactions, they gain the ability “to regard one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the eyes of another language (that is, the language of everyday life and the everyday world with the language of prayer or song, or vice versa).” The consequence of such a “critical interanimation of languages” is a developed notion of personal identity as a process, in which “the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages [comes] to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them beg[ins].”¹⁰ The novel can formalize this cognitive process by portraying the influence of various languages on an individual consciousness; and the novel’s textual portrait in turn becomes a locus of subjective transformation for readers. With its depiction of Ireland’s grand linguistic interplay, Joyce’s true Irish literature would in just this way imagine for its readers a nationality rooted not in any single inherited blood or language, but in the multiplicity of bloods and languages that were present in Ireland working upon the consciousness of the Irish people.

Joyce advocated in the Trieste lectures a political consciousness-raising accomplished through literature, in which reading audiences would be invited to consider the arbitrary relation commonly imagined between their social practices and any abstract or essentialist concept of Irishness. As Cheryl Herr has written, “much of Joyce’s effort is . . . to erode the concept of nature and to indicate the fabricated quality of all social experience.”¹¹ The Joycean poet, in revolt against the collective torpor that accepted Ireland’s role as the “island of saints and sages,” could not be merely a passionate Manganian spokesperson for “the succession of the ages, the spirit of the age, the mission of the race,” regardless of whether the race was conceived as exclusively Celtic, or Catholic, or anything else (CW, p. 185). Rather “the poet’s central effort is to free himself from the unfortunate influence of these idols that corrupt him from without and within”: to become not the servant, but the critic of the cultural perspective his language expresses. Joyce’s portrayal of Stephen Dedalus dramatizes for readers how the young artist’s insufficiently sophisticated reliance on an inherited mode of subjectivity prevents his achieving precisely this kind of critical aesthetic consciousness. Only when the Irish writer’s words revealed themselves as a nexus of cultural interplay would Ireland begin to emerge from its self-imposed cultural tutelage. By fashioning his text to reveal the irreducible complexity of Irish social and cultural life, Joyce exposes the fallacy that any singular discourse can wholly and completely embody Irish culture. The stylistic and narrative shifts that characterize A Portrait synecdochically represent to the novel’s audience a fuller understanding of Ireland’s uniqueness than had previously been attempted in Irish literature, and seek nothing less than a revolution of the national mind.¹²

II

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s novelization of a new Irish aesthetic centers around Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s portrait is at the same time the portrait, as Joyce conceived it, of the Irish artist’s attempt to navigate out of cultural subjection into a position of economic and intellectual freedom. Language, not surprisingly, plays a vital role in that attempt. The linguistic practices to which Stephen is exposed as a young man represent to him (and to readers of the text) various methods to perceive and communicate, that is, to figure, reality.¹³ Throughout the novel, Stephen struggles to find his own voice amidst the others he encounters. The degree to which Stephen constructs a voice that does not merely reproduce the linguistic norms with which he was raised is the degree to which he resembles the kind of critical artist Joyce seeks. The language of the Portrait journal entries seemingly shows Stephen as finally the author of his own reality. Going forth to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (P, p. 253), Stephen is presumably free from the political and religious strictures of “nationality, language, religion” that have tormented his younger years (P, p. 203). He has throughout the book’s final sections moved steadily away from any practical enactment of Catholic morality: “Cannot repent. Told her so . . .” he remembers of his mother (P, p. 249). And in dismissing Yeats’s symbolic Michael Robartes and the “forgotten beauty . . . which has long faded from the world” in favor of “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world,” Stephen summarily rejects the cultural archeology of the Irish national literary revival (P, p. 251). In Dominic Manganiello’s words, “Stephen recognizes no anterior logos, no authoritative word other than his own.”¹⁴ On the threshold of fully engaging a unique artistic identity, Stephen seems free at last from the “nets” of his Irish boyhood. In his vision only Paris and the guiding aesthetic genius of his namesake stand before him.

But Stephen’s strident declaration at the novel’s end demonstrates that his struggle for independent artistic identity remains as yet unfulfilled.¹⁵ His expressive stance is a lyric one that has so deep an investment in the linguistic formulations of a Catholic confessional identity as to be inseparable from them. While Stephen’s effort to gain a personal voice strategically resists the dominant cultural influences of his boyhood, the lyric language of that resistance, when contrasted to the surrounding narrative’s formal representation of multiple Irish discourses, cannot finally be accepted as a complete and definitive Irish perspective.¹⁶ It is, quite simply, too much an exercise in personal identity formation. John Paul Riquelme has argued that Stephen’s increasing command as a teller of his own experience, when juxtaposed to the shifting narrative perspective of the text as a whole, creates an ambiguity that makes authorship the central problematic of A Portrait. For Riquelme, the ambiguity is resolved (though not erased) as we see the growth of Stephen’s poetic powers. Constructing the villanelle, creating the journal, Stephen begins to claim A Portrait as his own book. As Stephen’s language breaks through to form an independent voice, “we discover that the fulfillment of the process of becoming an author occurs in the act of writing.”¹⁷ In its denial of any social and political reality beyond the personal, though, the same lyric voice that frees Stephen from cultural bondage finally leads him into a static, and literally pronounced, artistic solipsism. Concerned with individual identity more than anything else, Stephen denies himself the interactions with others that would enable him to create an authentic aesthetic representation of Ireland’s culture. Isolated by his self-authorship, Stephen renders himself incapable of speaking for all Ireland.

The Stephen Dedalus so rudely summoned by Buck Mulligan’s command of “Come Up, Kinch!” at the beginning of Ulysses corroborates the false promise of the Portrait journal entries (U, 1.8). Back in Dublin, this Stephen is a character shockingly diminished from the one whose commanding voice comprises the final section of A Portrait. Mulligan’s initial hail to Stephen in “Telemachus,” to which Stephen immediately complies, suggests what the last (unsaid) word of the section will confirm: Stephen’s ability to control the narration that secures his identity has been usurped. The “lancet of [his] art” (U, 1.152) is now used to fend off psychic impositions only in a most cursory way, with a wit that goes unnoticed. The insulting call of “Kinch . . . you fearful Jesuit!” is doubly cutting in that it identifies Stephen with the vocation he explicitly dismisses in A Portrait and robs him of the hard-won ability of self-narration that enabled the dismissal (U, 1.8). Stephen is in Ulysses once again a servant, not only to the “two masters” of “the imperial British State . . . and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (U, 1.638-44), but to a host of cultural discourses he can no longer falsely reduce into a personal lyric voice. Because his posture as self-sustaining logos has collapsed, the strong poet reverts to ephebe status. A flight Stephen had begun so exultantly, a flight given lift by the accomplishment of the journal, comes to a rather sad, Icarian end.

Considering the less than successful outcome of Stephen’s journey abroad, the development of narrative control in A Portrait, which has at times in its critical history been seen as an all-encompassing political and artistic emancipation, appears rather to be the shaping of a particular subjective position that limits Stephen even as it empowers him. Throughout A Portrait, and particularly at novel’s end, the text details Stephen as the inhabitant of what Michel Foucault has famously called “disciplinary space.”¹⁸ This is to say that Stephen develops a conception of reality, a consciousness, that is informed and indeed created by the continual regimented experience of his Irish Catholic family, school, and church environment. Seizing control of A Portrait’s narrative, Stephen merely repositions himself in a system of social relations which, in Foucault’s words, “produces reality” by “produc[ing] . . . rituals of truth.”¹⁹

The presiding ritual that locks Stephen into his limited Irish subjectivity is that of confession. Both the explicit Catholic (and specifically Ignatian) practice of imaginative self-examination, as Joyce conceives it, and the development of Stephen’s limiting lyric stance continually enact a subjectivity in which the speaker reveals his examined inner self to an imagined audience. Stephen’s poetic lyricism is a performative self-positioning, a ritual that takes its cue from the method of Catholic sacramental confession where the penitent must engage in “the nearly infinite task of telling—telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts.”²⁰ The rituals of truth prescribed by Irish Catholicism make it impossible for Stephen to produce literary texts embodying a critical Irish aesthetic. Although Stephen theorizes a mature aesthetic perspective in the latter stages of A Portrait that is essentially identical to Joyce’s discussion in the Trieste lectures, his confessional self-conception prevents him from ever speaking about experience, or speaking with a voice, other than his own. Just as the aesthetic theory to which Stephen turns as a method of emancipation from Catholicism “depends to a very large extent on the religious vocabulary in terms of which it is formulated,”²¹ so the artistic identity informing his lyric stance is rooted in the methodology of Catholic self-examination. The repeated ritual practice of the confessional refines the strategies of self-narration Stephen learns in his earliest days, shaping his notions of identity to the degree that, when Stephen leaves the actual practice of sacramental confession behind, his identity as a confessor remains.²² His writing becomes so charged with the force of confessional method that he cannot create, as he desires, an art critical of the Irish Catholic culture he proposes to redeem. Stephen cannot go beyond the practice of lyric confession, because he will in the same act dismantle the only self he has ever known.

III

Stephen’s will to lyricism, that is, his compulsion to continue narrating his own subjective position to the exclusion of others, originates in the way he situates himself psychically in response to his earliest sensations by constructing a personal narrative. Consider the short, story-like sequence that opens A 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 along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo” (P, p. 7). Young Stephen appropriates the narrative context imparted by these words as a structure after which he models his own narrative. The boy fashions a story in the image of his father’s, reordering the elements in relation to the central social position he imagines for himself. In his own story, Stephen, the narrator, is the most important character. Even the teller of the original tale is refigured as an element revolving around Stephen: “His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass . . . He was baby tuckoo” (P, p. 7, emphasis added). Later in A Portrait, when Stephen encounters competing symbolic systems, the egotism of his first little tale gives way to a recognition that he is not the center of those systems or their narratives: his self-narrative is one of many on a vast cultural landscape. The almost binary cognitive operation of countering his father’s story with his own develops accordingly into a complex practice of self-orientation attentive to the social and political implications of encountered narrative methods. Like Bakhtin’s developing individuals, Stephen is continually “choosing [his] orientation among” those methods by appropriating various aspects of their figurations of reality as his own.²³ The task of self-narration remains quite the same throughout his growth, but the nature of his personal narrative, insofar as it reproduces or does not reproduce elements of the discourses Stephen encounters, tells who Stephen is and how he changes.²⁴

Throughout A Portrait Stephen is surrounded by the discourses of family, school, and church. The Dedalus family’s dinner conversation, the ribald debates of his classmates, and the severe homily of the Jesuit spiritual director represent to Stephen the changing social function of language. Amidst the din of these discourses he tries to create an independent self. In the beginning his voice is, as he himself recognizes, small and weak; he cannot master and appropriate the narrative strategies he encounters. The dominant narrative structure early in the text is consequently the interaction of his family’s voices. Stephen is only a listener:

The dialogue is, of course, charged with the political and religious vocabulary of Irish Catholicism. Stephen’s growing narrative power, as Joyce portrays it, is not simply a struggle for existential determination, an attempt to gain a voice that, once possessed, will empower him to be a self-sustaining logos. Rather, Stephen’s self-telling is an ongoing process of social positioning within the world of cultural narratives the text comprises.

Even Stephen’s earliest private musings (that is, his earliest attempts to move beyond the position of listener) are shaped by a concern for enacting the “right” social role through a proper public expression of the self. Tormented by his classmates’ questions of whether or not he kisses his mother at night, Stephen wonders “What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in the third of grammar” (P, p. 14). As Augustine Martin has noted, Stephen’s “crisis of conscience is Irish and Catholic in its terror, its ardour and its intensity,” even in its minutest aspects.²⁵ The self Stephen conceives and tells is primarily concerned with its own social function within those communities, and it is told through their language. That the apparently simple self-examination just described gives way to a complex religious and political meditation in which Stephen tries to determine his relation to the larger cultural norms of Irish Catholicism is thus not surprising. He seeks to understand his imagined self as a relation to God (“God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen”) and to Irish politics (“He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon”) (P, p. 16). In this attempt, Stephen fails: “He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry” (P, p. 17).

As Stephen grows, he more consciously appropriates and discards aspects of the voices he perceives. To the degree that he appropriates the language of any encountered discourse, represented to him (and to the novel’s readers) by the voices of other characters, he gains for himself a vocabulary and a grammar with which he can express his identity. When his self-conception is in harmony with the narrative methods he encounters, the dominant voice of A Portrait becomes Stephen’s. The most striking example of this is his specific appropriation of Catholic confessional language. Because the Jesuit rector’s direct and powerful rhetorical method models for Stephen a use of language radically different from the dialogues he has encountered at home and school, it offers a radically different conception of how language creates identity. The interplay of voices at the family dinner table, a linguistic setting that allows for the mutual enactment of social identity by its participants, disappears, replaced by an arena where the self is methodically scripted by the formulaic, unyielding, singular voice of ecclesiastical Irish Catholicism: “The soul tends towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my dear little boys, our souls long to be with God. We come from God, we live by God, we belong to God: we are His, inalienably His” (P, p. 128). There is little opportunity here amidst sermons and rote responses for an individual to join in a dialogue, little room for identity-as-process.

The Ignatian spirituality the rector exemplifies is defined by interdependent rituals of self-examination and imaginative meditation that enable the sinner to renew himself and his relation to God. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius require both a “daily particular examination of conscience” in which the exercitant “should demand an account of himself with regard to the particular point he has resolved to watch in order to correct himself and improve,” and a “general examination of conscience” in which the exercitant is to “demand an account of [his] soul from the time of rising up to the present examination” by fully considering sins of “thoughts,” “words,” and “deeds.”²⁶ Yet in the Ignatian context confession is not simply the creation and expression of a moral inventory. Rather, it is one component of an ongoing ritual in which the “mental representation” of scenes from the life of Christ enable the exercitant to “see in imagination” the fullness of his human condition and his relation to the eternal other of God.²⁷ The applied intellect becomes a means of transforming the sinner’s entire ontological orientation. And confession becomes the central practice through which the newly imagined—and newly imaginative—being must manifest itself in language.

The rector’s sermon, with its highly detailed imagery of hell and its exhortations to self-examination and repentance, is the product of this Ignatian spiritual model. Whether or not Stephen finally accepts the doctrines communicated by the rector’s voice, he learns from that voice a self-conception that comes to define his every imaginative act.²⁸ The impulse toward imaginary self-examination by which Stephen situates himself with regard to the discourses of family and school gains new rigor when, appropriating the formal language of Irish Catholicism, he learns to confess (and therefore enact) new and greater social transgressions and to conceive of himself as a particular kind of self-examining social, and, in the face of God, essential being:

The sacramental recital of the Act of Contrition, repeated verbatim after the priest, occasions a crisis of identity that can only be resolved by an extra-sacramental telling of the imagined Catholic self. Stephen longs “[t]o be alone with his soul, to examine his conscience, to meet his sins face to face, to recall their times and manners and circumstances, to weep over them” (P, p. 136). The diction here is strikingly evocative of the rector’s ritualistic language, and its vocabulary is tellingly Ignatian. Throughout the book’s central sections, Stephen is constantly in this state of self-examination and narration; he catalogues his every action as good or evil and defines his identity solely within the parameters of Catholicism’s master discourse. Confession reestablishes his social role within the Catholic milieu by distancing his imagined self from actions that represent any experience outside dogmatic Catholicism’s figured reality: “He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy” (P, p. 145).

In section four of A Portrait, the experiences Stephen once marked as deviant aspects of his confessional Catholic identity become the basis for recasting that identity in terms of a supposedly asocial alliance with transcendent beauty. Called into the rector’s office after having “amended [his] life” (P, p. 153), Stephen is faced with the impending consequence of his continued acceptance of Catholic self-scripting: “the Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.” (P, p. 161). He leaves the office and enters into yet another ruminative self-examination. This one, though, leads him to reject his life in Catholic Ireland, and gives rise to a visionary state in which he refigures his identity with language free from the limiting formulas of Catholic doctrine:

The identity reformation this language represents is an attempt to throw off all the social orientations Stephen had previously chosen. Brooding over himself in an unending examination, he rejects utterly his social position as an Irish Catholic by becoming the confessor-prophet of an alternative discourse, that of beauty. Yet Stephen’s visionary language, while not doctrinally beholden to his former Catholic identity, unselfconsciously demonstrates Catholic confessional method as it seizes control of A Portrait’s narrative: “Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny . . . Or where was he? . . . He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wildhearted” (P, pp. 170-71). All of Stephen’s experiences continue to be transformed into language that has as its ultimate referent only Stephen Dedalus. Even the sublime encounter with the bird-girl, which would seem to stand outside of language, is figurally contained by Stephen’s lyrical-confessional egotism:

The bird-girl, in Stephen’s mind, exists only for him, becoming, as do all his experiences, an impetus for his continuing self-absorption.

An artist sworn in fealty to beauty, Stephen now seeks to awaken in others a similar knowledge of transcendence. “Beauty expressed by the artist,” he asserts, “awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved in what I call the rhythm of beauty” (P, p. 206). That rhythm is a sort of aesthetic apotheosis, a movement out of the realm of the social to a state where “the mind” perceives in an object only the Thomistic virtues “integritas, consonantia, claritas,” and enters into “the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure” (P, pp. 212, 213). In the final stages of A Portrait, Stephen theorizes just how the artist accomplishes his task. He proposes an aesthetic hierarchy, the measure of which is the artist’s ability to transcend his personal social identity and remain “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent” (P, p. 215). The lowest rung on this hierarchy is the “lyrical form,” which “is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion” (P, p. 214). Because the lyrical artist is unaware of the symbolic or social significance of his experience, he “is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.” As the artist realizes that the central role he fashions for himself in the lyrical mode is in fact a solipsistic fallacy, the artistic text becomes less a straightforward expression of personal identity and more a critical portrayal of the conditions that produce that identity. In the “epical form,” which “is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event . . . the narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself” (P, pp. 214-15). Finally, as the artist entirely removes his own experience as the centerpiece of the aesthetic form, his personality “refines itself out of existence” in favor of a depiction of the vital interplay of others’ experiences: “The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life” (P, p. 215).³⁰ What Stephen describes here is the growth of an artistic consciousness able to formalize experiences other than those of its own imagined social centrality, to enact the very poetic method Joyce finds lacking in an artist like James Clarence Mangan or, ironically enough, in Stephen Dedalus himself.

Stephen is, finally, so acculturated to conceive of himself as a confessional being that he cannot forsake lyric expressions of his experience for an aesthetic form manifesting an interplay of conflicting social realities. He remains at book’s end unable to move into the dramatic stage of artistry he has theorized. The narrative relating his production of the villanelle is scrupulously infused with Catholic vocabulary, including “O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh” (P, p. 217), and later “The earth was like a swinging smoking swaying censer, a ball of incense, an ellipsoidal ball” (P, p. 218), and still later “The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving” (P, p. 221). But the images work their way into the poem only as figurations of Stephen’s personal desire. “[T]he fallen seraphim . . . the smoke of praise . . . one eucharistic hymn . . . [t]he chalice flowing to the brim”: these are in the villanelle simply devices rendering a confession of sensual love (P, p. 223). Stephen’s singular perspective, his alliance to a perfect formal beauty, limits his ability to render as independently valid the discourses he has now disdained. In the villanelle, as in the visionary narratives that are its substance, we hear only Stephen’s voice.³¹

The final journal most clearly crystallizes into textual form the confessional artistic self Stephen has adopted. There, he figures all discourses of Irish social reality that are incompatible with his perspective as “dead” (P, p. 248). What results is an identity that denies the ongoing process of social orientation so vital to the formation of the Joycean artistic perspective. The lyric posture that once uncritically shaped Stephen’s understanding of the discourses of “nationality, language, religion” now just as uncritically shapes his antagonism (“non serviam”) towards them. Because Stephen’s narrative method subordinates all other voices to his own, those who represent alternative voices of Ireland become figures that he uses only to punctuate his development. On 20 March Cranly is the “child of exhausted loins,” and on 21 March “he is the precursor,” to be overcome (P, p. 248). On 24 March Stephen’s religious discussion with his mother, “Subject: B.V.M.” leads to his refusal of repentance. On 6 April comes the dismissal of Michael Robartes, and on 13 April the disdain for all things English: “Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!” (P, p. 251). Most tellingly, on 14 April Stephen expresses anxiety about Mulrennan’s old man of the West, who speaks from a rural Irish perspective about which Stephen knows nothing:

Here is language that could most certainly disrupt the power of the artist’s lyrical impulse, and Stephen knows it: “I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him that I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till . . . Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean him no harm” (P, p. 252, Joyce’s ellipses). What cannot be conquered must be dismissed, in the hope that it will ignore the lyric artist, as he ignores it.³² What Stephen is left with, then, when all else is stripped away, is himself alone. The “uncreated conscience” he will examine and confess is his, and only his. He is a race of one.

In shirking the Irish artist’s duty to wrestle continually with Ireland’s multiple cultural legacies, Stephen chooses instead to ally himself with an asocial Daedelian aesthetic, to rejoice in “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world” (P, p. 251). But the journal confirms Stephen’s subjection to the lyricism he earlier rejected as aesthetically incomplete. Stephen Dedalus, disciple in the sodality of beauty, committed intellectually to an art that valorizes the dissolution of the egotistical artist, is in the end as entrapped as ever he was in a psychic cloister fashioned by Catholic self-representation. Contrasted to the form of A Portrait, in which narrative alters in structure and style to represent Ireland’s multifaceted culture (a form that will come to fruition with Ulysses), the lyrical stance of Stephen’s journal destines him for artistic failure. While Joyce himself remains critically engaged with the Catholicism of his youth, Stephen embraces a position as limited as the one Joyce criticized in Mangan: he is a lone Irish troubadour rebelling against cultural oppression with an uncritical alliance to a falsely essentialized identity. Like the Irish artists that preceded him, Stephen’s language owes its grammar to the governing rituals with which he was raised. The Telemachian subservience Stephen endures in Ulysses, where he is in command neither physically nor narratively, is the inescapable outcome of the earlier flight into transnational exile on the wings of confessional lyricism. The Stephen of “Telemachus” is the man to whom the journal-child is father.

Stephen may ultimately become the revolutionary poet Joyce envisions in the Trieste lectures. We can see him in Ulysses beginning to realize, with his Dubliners-like story, the dramatic aesthetic program he so lucidly expresses in A Portrait’s section five. His paralysis in “Telemachus” in fact suggests that by admitting the relativity of his social position, he has come to know the political and aesthetic limitations of his lyric stance. As the young artist of A Portrait, though, Stephen’s self-expression stands as a conspicuous measure against which, if we rely on the young Joyce’s aesthetic standards, the encompassing narrative style of A Portrait should be favorably compared. The political implications of this are clear. Rather than rejecting Irish nationality, language, and religion by creating a voice of solipsistic lyricism as Stephen does, Joyce accepted those discourses and refigured them in A Portrait into a novelistic text that brings out the potential for dynamic cultural interplay in modern Ireland. As witnesses of that interplay, and as witnesses of Stephen’s failure to recognize its vitality, A Portrait’s audience inherits the urgent task of reconceiving themselves, and their nation, as free.

Source

From Studies in the Novel 33.2 (Summer 2001), pp. 193-199. Copyright © 2001 by University of North Texas. Reprinted with permission of University of North Texas.