A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [10]
In the course of this scene, and others beside (compare, for instance, the prose describing the “bird girl” in chapter 5 with the jejune villanelle he makes out of the same episode), Joyce seems to be suggesting that if poetry had been the leading edge of literary innovation in the nineteenth century, it would be prose that would lead the way in the twentieth. (On the far side of the twentieth century now, we can’t help but be impressed by Joyce’s prescience.) As long as Stephen fetishizes writers like George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, the authentic literary voice of the twentieth century, the modern world, will remain gagged. As a young writer Joyce first thought of himself as a poet, though had his reputation depended on his poems, his name would now be forgotten: A perusal of Joyce’s own first volume of poems, Chamber Music, quickly confirms that his prose was as avant-garde as his poetry was derriere-garde. Thus the move from poet to prose writer was one that Joyce knew something about, for it was a move he himself had already made by the time he wrote Portrait. As the example of Stephen’s first poem makes clear, Portrait supports a very complicated narrative structure: It is an autobiographical novel about a former self—a self about whom the author now has some misgivings, even feels some embarrassment. But in strict accordance with what critic Maud Ellmann has called modernism’s “poetics of impersonality” (her book bears this title), Joyce forbids himself anything like explicit, third-person commentary on Stephen’s beliefs, positions, and actions: The novel contains only dramatic “showing,” no authorial “telling,” and the aesthetically calculated juxtaposition (the prose and poetic versions of Stephen’s tram ride, for instance) is the most explicit commentary Joyce will allow himself. This stealthy mode of criticizing his protagonist, providing a kind of ironic counterpoint, differentiates Portrait from the abortive draft Stephen Hero, in which Joyce did indulge, in small doses at least, in commentary on the callowness of his protagonist. In Stephen Hero, when Stephen flies a bit too high, for instance, the narrative calls him a “fantastic idealist”; in Portrait, this kind of criticism must remain always unspoken, merely implied, so that, for example, Stephen believes the most sublime and transcendent moment of The Count of Monte Cristo to be Dantes’s utterance of his “sadly proud gesture of refusal”: “—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.”
Hence the overarching structural irony of Portrait, which has made the tone of the book so very hard for so very many readers over the years to discern: It’s a novel about a devotee of an anachronistic literary cult, written by a writer who has himself outgrown his infatuation with that same cult but who writes with a conviction that the only legitimate form of critique is precisely the patient and detached description found in Stephen’s epiphanies. Joyce’s reluctance to “weigh in” has made for an interesting reception history; as in Dubliners, in Portrait Joyce seeks to hold up his finely polished looking-glass to us for our inspection. But since we readers tend to identify with, rather than criticize, the aspirations and idealism of Stephen Dedalus—because his foibles are so nearly our own—we have tended not to see Joyce’s understated criticism. This, finally, is what makes Joyce’s writing in Dubliners and Portrait so powerful for so many readers: We’re never allowed simply to sit in judgment of their characters, but must instead recognize that their follies are our own. We are drawn, propulsively, into an imaginative identification with these characters and their plights. The reader whose heart doesn’t respond to Stephen Dedalus’s high-flown aspirations (“I go to encounter for the millionth