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By Root 1416 0

of the Artist as a Young Man, of course, a would-be artist is at the absolute center of the novel’s action and narration: a presence so central that, in ways that were being fleshed out in physics and astrophysics at the very time Joyce was writing Portrait, all other objects are more or less deformed in his field. In the novel, the competing claims of religion and art are laid out, and in chapters 3 and 4, especially, we see them at war: One thing not often remarked upon in the criticism of Portrait, however, is that within the novel’s pages, it is far from clear that art comes out on top. In the sermons of chapter 3, a poetic and rhetorical inventiveness is brought to bear that dwarfs anything our young artist himself musters; the mystic, scholar, and writer Thomas Merton, for instance, converted to Catholicism as a result of reading them. By comparison, the writing that Stephen himself produces during the course of the novel is pale and bloodless; we read about a poem rehearsing romantic platitudes on “the maiden lustre of the moon,” for instance, and his artistic production for the period covered in the novel culminates in his “Villanelle of the Temptress,” which represents an advance only in that Stephen is parroting fin-de-siècle rather than earlier-century clichés.

The scene describing the writing of Stephen’s first poem, in the second “scene” of chapter 2, is instructive. In a passage recalling the discussion of epiphany in Stephen Hero, Joyce describes Stephen Dedalus’s habits of attention: “He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret” (p. 58).” What follows, though not labeled as such in the text, are precisely three epiphanies: Two of them, in fact, are based on incidents recorded in Joyce’s own epiphany notebook. Like the Dubliners stories, these vignettes are spare, closely observed, and slightly mysterious; and the third, describing the tram ride back from Harold’s Cross in which Stephen’s intials-only love interest E—C—seems eminently embrace-able but remains unembraced, is the provocation for the poem Stephen then attempts to write. These three brief prose sketches—based on what we see in Dubliners, for instance, as well as the mature prose sections of Portrait—represent something like what Joyce thought twentieth-century literature ought to be accomplishing, that “style of scrupulous meanness” he saw as a kind of moral ideal.

In explicit contrast, Stephen’s poem is ... well, strictly speaking, it’s just not there at all. We watch Stephen write; but we’re shown no writing. Just when it seems that his attempts to write the poem will fail, even by Stephen’s standards, he pushes forward by “brooding” on the tram incident, and in the process of writing the poem,

all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both (p. 6).

Whereas Joyce’s own practice insists on focusing on the actual details of a scene until they come starkly into view-chronicling with patience what one sees—his artist “as a young man” instead “broods” (never a good sign, in Joyce) until everything real falls away, and all that’s left is a sodden lump of romantic clichés. A sharply observant prose like that of the Dubliners stories is written about Stephen’s experience, but he himself can write only a vaporous and derivative poetry. (Joyce emphasizes the schoolboy quality of the poem by having Stephen write it in a school exercise book, with the motto Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam [“to the greater glory of God”] at the head and Laus Deo Semper [“praise to God always”] at its close, the obligatory topoi of his classroom writing exercises