My re-read of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man continues, and I’m enjoying it greatly. This post contains some of my reflections.

First, something kind of frivolous: during Chapter IV, when Stephen attempts to amend his life (I’ve been calling this the “Holy Roller Chapter”), he describes how he mortifies his senses. The senses are important to Portrait, right from the first page and its confusing flux of sensations in Stephen as an infant (not to mention the Freudian rhyme he creates about eagles pulling out his eyes). Check out how he brings his eyes under “rigorous discipline” in Chapter IV:

His eyes shunned every encounter with the eyes of women. From time to time also he balked them by a sudden effort of the will, as by lifting them suddenly in the middle of an unfinished sentence and closing the book.

I wrote “FW” in the margin because this reminds me of the way the Wake famously ends in the middle of a sentence. There’s something Freudian going on here, since the eyes are associated by Freud with phallic power (and blinding with castration), but I find most fascinating the connection Stephen draws here between ogling women and reading complete sentences. Doubtless some kind of link could be made to the Wake: is the older Joyce, in ending Finnegans Wake in the middle of an unfinished sentence, attempting to master his senses in a different way, no longer for the sake of mortification but for full control and enjoyment of both his literary powers and lusts (which are, arguably, sublimated into literature)? Perhaps I will attempt to elaborate that idea when I write a fuller post about the senses in these works.

Another aspect of Portrait I found interesting is a minor point: the depiction of Simon Dedalus (John Joyce) as someone whose impressions of others almost manifest these other people in his face and voice:

He inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely, began to speak with the voice of the hotel keeper.

—And he has such a soft mouth when he’s speaking to you, don’t you know. He’s very moist and watery about the dewlaps, God bless him.

Mr Casey was still struggling through his fit of coughing and laughter. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotel keeper through his father’s face and voice, laughed.

Like HCE in Finnegans Wake, who manifests as many different characters — or, alternately, who allows many other characters to pour through his face and voice — Simon Dedalus is a bit of a comic everybody. [Consider II.2: “Rolf the Ganger, Rough the Gangster, not a feature alike and the face the same” — each manifestation of HCE, each person in the world, is the same face with different features, the same anew. Different features appear through the same face of HCE, as do the impressions made by Stephen’s father]

Just another way in which John Joyce, who looms large in Ulysses, also influences Finnegans Wake significantly.

Yet another aspect of the text I found interesting is Stephen’s first youthful attempt at poetry, writing about his experience with his crush Emma Clery. First, here is the actual moment that he will eventually write the poem about:

It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.

They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or reverie, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him.

—She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That’s why she came with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.

But he did neither: and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted tram, he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the corrugated footboard.

First of all, I can’t think about Stephen tearing his tram ticket to shreds and not also think of the end of I.7, where ALP has “tramtokens in her hair.”

But second, I was taken by his attempt to write a poem about this experience:

The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. From force of habit he had written at the top of the first page the initial letters of the jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to write: To E—— C——. He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath he fell into a daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices.

Out of force of habit, he writes AMDG at the top of the poem, as he would have done on all of his schoolwork (the abbreviation of a Latin phrase meaning “For the greater glory of God”). The phrase marks his poem as both schoolboy practice and something sacred. Like Byron, in his opinion the greatest poet (as we learn in Chapter II), he censors the name of a real person in his poem. He recalls how his early attempt at poetry, occasioned by the disastrous Christmas argument recounted in Chapter I, was also connected to his father’s debts (an association between art, debt, and the fallen world that Joyce would pursue through Finnegans Wake).

And then the poem itself:

During this process [of daydreaming and thinking] 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. After this the letters L. D. S. were written at the foot of the page, and, having hidden the book, he went into his mother’s bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressingtable.

It’s fascinating that this glimpse into Stephen’s artistic technique is one in which the specifics and accidents fall away, leaving only an essence. In many ways, this reminds me of the Wake, where the story (to the extent that there is a story) is more a series of archetypes that manifest in all the particular stories of the world with all of their common and insignificant elements.

Staring into his mother’s mirror seems significant to me, perhaps a Freudian and/or Jungian reference to the importance of the mother figure: either his specific mother as a pattern for his romantic relationships (Freud) and/or the archetypal image of the mother (the anima, the female portion of the self) inspiring art (Jung). Under the latter interpretation, Stephen’s mother is a major part of his anima, which will receive her ultimate expression as ALP in the Wake.

My next post will look at Stephen’s technique and compare it to Shem’s in Finnegans Wake.