A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [222]
Literature
The artistic work most directly linked with Portrait is Joyce’s own autobiographical Stephen Hero. Joyce began writing what was to become Stephen Hero in his teens and abandoned the project halfway through. Portrait represents his second effort at autobiography, a rewriting. Stephen Hero, the book finally published in 1944 after Joyce’s death, is what survives of the early manuscript. Considerably longer than Portrait, Hero takes the reader through only the latter third of Stephen’s development as presented in Portrait.
Though artistically inferior, Stephen Hero allows readers to chart Joyce’s magnificent progress as a writer. Even at a very early age, Joyce had clear ideas about his writing style, approaches that would define his entire career. The following passage taken from Stephen Hero sheds light on Joyce’s use of the “epiphany”:
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
Another work by Joyce connected with both Portrait and Dubliners is his 1922 masterpiece Ulysses, widely described as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Joyce originally thought of his Odyssean cycle as a short story to be included in Dubliners, but he recognized its true scope once he began committing it to paper. The finished, lengthy novel comprises a single day, June 16, 1904, and imbues daily modern life with epic as well as ironic implications. Ulysses centers on Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, who is Joyce’s Odysseus, but also makes use of several familiar faces from the pages of Dubliners and gives particular attention to the further development of Portrait’s Stephen Dedalus. Stephen, now a full-fledged writer and teacher, corresponds to the Telemachus figure from the Odyssey, in that he is a spiritual son to Bloom. A rich tapestry that gains in complexity and meaning with each reading (followers of the prose stylist call repeated readings “re-Joycing”), Ulysses stands as a major hallmark of modern literature.
Stream of Consciousness
Among novels in English, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pioneered the use of the stream of consciousness writing technique, which eliminates the mediation of the narrator, providing a direct, unadulterated view of a character and the actual process of his or her thought formation. For example, the opening chapter of Portrait is not solely the account of a third-person narrator who describes or interprets the inner thoughts of young Stephen Dedalus; instead, this outside perspective alternates with an interior one, emerging from Stephen’s mind and revealing the thoughts themselves in all their fragmented, incoherent variety.
The phrase “stream of consciousness” was coined by psychologist and philosopher William James, elder brother of writer Henry James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890). Joyce cited a French novel as his inspiration for employing the idea as a writing technique; he first read Édouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupes (1888; published in English as We’ll to the Woods No More) when he was in self-imposed exile in Paris in 1902. Joyce expanded his use of stream of consciousness in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939).
British writer Virginia Woolf was well known for her ability to enter the minds of her characters with stream of consciousness writing, notably in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Woolf said in a letter to painter Jacques Raverat that it was “precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the ‘formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream.’” Among