A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Review

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began as a much longer autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero that Joyce eventually abandoned and cannibalized. What he built from the wreckage is something far more controlled and far more strange: a novel in which the formal properties of the prose are themselves the subject, in which how the book is written is inseparable from what it is about.

The novel follows Stephen Dedalus from early childhood through his years at Clongowes Wood College, his adolescence in Dublin, his religious crisis and near-vocation, and finally his emergence as a young man who has decided to become an artist and leave Ireland. This trajectory is familiar — the coming-of-age novel had existed for a century before Joyce — but the treatment is entirely new. The prose of the opening pages is written in baby-talk, in the rhythms and vocabulary of a very small child. By the close of the first chapter, at school, the syntax has grown more complex. By the end of the novel, Stephen is writing in diary form, with the elliptical, confident compression of a young intellectual who has found his voice. Joyce is tracking not just Stephen’s experiences but the development of his consciousness — his language.

The central section of the novel, in which Stephen hears a retreat sermon on hell and is overwhelmed by guilt and religious terror, is one of the great set pieces in modern fiction. Father Arnall’s sermon — long, detailed, physically specific about the torments of the damned — is both an accurate reproduction of a certain tradition of Catholic preaching and a perfect portrait of how that tradition worked on susceptible minds. Stephen’s subsequent confession and conversion are rendered with the same precision, and Joyce makes no editorial comment: we understand, as Stephen eventually does, that the whole episode is a form of spiritual fever rather than genuine conversion.

The novel’s close is famous: Stephen’s diary entries, his conversations with his friend Cranly, and finally his declaration — “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” — which is both a genuine artistic manifesto and a sentence whose grandiosity Joyce leaves us free to smile at. Stephen will go to Paris, and he will fail, and he will come back — we know this because Ulysses begins where this novel ends. But the Portrait is not diminished by what follows. It is the founding document of a certain kind of modern ambition, and it remains one of the finest accounts of the formation of an artistic self in all of literature.

Style as Autobiography

The formal achievement that sets A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) apart is that its prose grows up alongside its protagonist. The opening pages are written in the vocabulary and rhythms of a very small child — “once upon a time and a very good time it was” — and as Stephen Dedalus ages, the syntax thickens, the diction sharpens, and the consciousness rendering the world becomes correspondingly more complex. By the closing diary entries, the prose has the elliptical, confident compression of a young intellectual who has found his own voice. Joyce is not merely narrating a life; he is enacting the development of a mind through the texture of the language itself. This is what he salvaged from the abandoned earlier draft, Stephen Hero: not the conventional autobiographical novel that book had been, but the radical idea that how a book is written could be inseparable from what it is about.

The Hell Sermon

The novel’s central set piece — the retreat sermon on hell that overwhelms the adolescent Stephen with guilt and terror — is among the great passages of religious writing in modern fiction. Father Arnall’s sermon is long, physically specific, and relentless, an accurate reproduction of a particular tradition of Catholic preaching and, simultaneously, a perfect demonstration of how that tradition operated on a susceptible mind. Joyce renders Stephen’s subsequent confession and brief, fervent conversion with the same unflinching precision and without editorial comment. We are left to understand, as Stephen himself eventually does, that the whole episode was a kind of spiritual fever rather than a genuine vocation — that the terror had passed through him without becoming belief.

The Nets

Stephen famously names the forces he must escape — “nationality, language, religion” — and resolves to fly past them by the only means available to the artist: “silence, exile, and cunning.” The Daedalus myth that gives him his name frames the whole ambition: the craftsman who builds wings to escape his confinement, the father whose son flies too high. Joyce is careful, though, not to let Stephen’s self-mythologising go unexamined. The boy is deliberately priggish, self-regarding, and humourless about his own importance, and readers who cannot tolerate him will struggle with the book. But the priggishness is the point: Joyce is portraying the formation of an artistic self, ego and all, with an honesty that includes its least attractive features.

The Ending and Its Irony

The novel closes on Stephen’s exalted declaration that he will “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” — a genuine artistic manifesto and, at the same time, a sentence whose grandiosity Joyce leaves us entirely free to smile at. We know what Stephen does not: that he will go to Paris and fail and return, because Ulysses begins where this novel ends, with a chastened Stephen back in Dublin. The double vision is essential. Joyce neither endorses Stephen’s grandeur nor mocks it; he holds both the aspiration and its likely deflation in view at once. That refusal to resolve the irony is what keeps the book from being either a hymn to youthful genius or a satire of it. A Portrait remains the founding document of the modern literary coming-of-age novel precisely because it takes the formation of an artist seriously while declining to take the artist entirely at his own valuation.