A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [225]
He was glad he had left Dublin—he was glad to be away from a place where “the reformed conscience” had left its fetter and away from the fog of Anglo-Saxon civilization. His little boy went to all the operas in the Italian city they lived in, and he would not be brought up to speak English.
... I am reminded of an incident that might find a place in Dubliners or in Ulysses—an incident that seems a parody on the plans that now and again occurred to him. He came to me one day and asked me for that rare coin with student Publiners—a golden half sovereign. By a miracle I had one. A financial scheme was involved in its use.
Joyce had been given a pawnticket by a medical student. Now, to any one else a pawnticket would be a minus quantity, but to Joyce it was something realizable. The ticket was for books, and 6 shillings was the amount they were in for. They were medical books, for a certainty, and valuable. And we would take them to our friend George Webb on the Quays and sell them and make 50, or even 100, per cent.
It was an attractive proposition. We handed in 7 and 6, and the redeemed parcel came across Terence Kelly’s counter to us. Hastily we undid the wrappings! And behold! The books were Walter Scott’s, an unsellable edition of the Waverley Novels, with one volume missing!
There was a wan hope in going to Webb’s. That most knowing of all booksellers received Joyce cordially, for he had his eye on the Italian books that Joyce was then selling. We opened the parcel and exhibited the wretched, papier-mâché bound set! Very loftily, indeed, did Joyce talk to the incredulous Webb—“Webb, I have brought you some particularly good books.” He would not believe that Joyce was serious. “You have some Italian books with you, haven’t you, Mr. Joyce?” he kept on saying. When he gathered that Joyce was serious and that he had released the books on the prospect of selling them, he had them wrapped up for us. “There is only one thing to do, boys,” he said. “Take them back to Terence Kelly. Pawn them again, and he may let you have 6 shillings on them.” So we did.
-from the New York Times (June 11, 1922)
Questions
1. While thinking about the title of Joyce’s first novel, would you emphasize A Portrait of the Artist or would you emphasize as a Young Man? Do you think Joyce was justified in writing “portrait of the artist” rather than “portrait of an artist”?
2. Compare the conclusion of “Araby” with the conclusion of “The Dead.” In the first story, the young man sees himself as a “creature driven and derided by vanity” (p. 254). In “The Dead,” Gabriel “saw himself as a ludicrous figure, ... orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts” (p. 409). What have they done to deserve this self-criticism ? Is Puritanism involved? Are these male characters unmanly, too self-conscious to make it in life? Should we approve or disapprove of—or just discover—their overreaction to a disappointment that is not their fault? Or is it?
3. Joyce said he wrote Dubliners “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.” Do the stories suggest either the cause of or cure for this paralysis? Consider the conclusion of “Eveline.”
4. At the very end of Portrait, Stephen vows “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Assuming that by “race” Stephen means “countrymen,” how can writing fictions create their conscience ? Can you think of any writer of any nation whose fictions created the conscience of his or her race?
5. Padraic Colum portrays Joyce as convinced of his own genius at an early age. Is this related to the character of Stephen Dedalus? How do you think Joyce’s persona, as described by Colum, resembles the heroes and heroines of his stories and novels?
FOR FURTHER READING
Also by James Joyce
Chamber Music, 1907