Selected Student Portfolio
from LTWR 604

Effects of Religious Education on Theme and Style of

James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Although Joyce rejected Catholic beliefs, the influence of his early training and education is pervasive in his work. The parallels between Biblical text and 7he Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are abundant. As Cranly says to Stephen, "It is a curious thing, do you know, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve" (232).

The novel progresses in a way that seems Biblical in nature; thematically it compares with the creation and fall of man and/or Lucifer. In addition, the style is at times similar to Biblical text, using familiar rhythm, repetition, phrasing and imagery.

As with the Bible, Joyce begins his novel with the importance of the word. He then relates sensual impressions, as if a newly formed creature were experiencing the physical world. Then, as the center of his universe, Stephen also learns the meaning of words and the power of words. He is like Adam bringing order to things by giving them names. But Stephen's knowledge comes not only from the material world, he learns through a sudden-knowing, similar to spiritual understanding, a process Joyce calls intuitive or epiphany. His thirst for knowledge both intellectual and sensual brings him in conflict with his father (Jesuit and heavenly). He falls from grace and experiences hell (through the power of word and his very vivid imagination). Because of his terror of hell he responds at first with repentance, but after reflection, with defiance. At the end of the novel he leaves his homeland, his place of origin, and prepares to begin a new life in a new land.

In the beginning was the word. Throughout the novel the power and beauty of words is emphasized. The first memory of the artist is the voice of his father telling him a story that begins, "Once upon a time" (1). He hears his father's voice and the words conjure up images in his child's mind of a cow and a little boy walking down the road. The words have the power to create. He hears the music of language in songs. The artist takes things literally from the beginning. "Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about" (57).

Language is both symbolic and naturalistic to Joyce. Not only does language serve as symbols to communication and expression, but they have a concrete, physical presence. He hears them, feels them, sees them and reacts to them as separate entities apart from their symbolic value. The sounds of language are emphasized; the word suck sounds like water going down the hole in the basin (6); "the keys make a quick music, click, click, click, click" (16); the sound of gas burning is like a song (16). He writes, "For the words, so beautiful and sad, like music" (10).

He believes that words have power over him. When he struggles against the sensual temptation of sexual desire, words and images overpower him. "His recent monstrous reveries came thronging into his memory. They too had sprung up before him, suddenly and furiously, out of mere words" (85). The words that he must use to confess his sin are somehow more terrible than the action. "To say it in words? His soul, stifling and helpless, would cease to be" (36).

Stephen reflects on what quality or qualities words possess that affects him so deeply. "Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds" (160). He likes the rhythm, the sound, but he especially likes the "poise and balance of the period itself' (160). And then, with sharp insight (an epiphany), he realizes that while he enjoys the rich symbolism of the word, there is an additional quality of prose that touches him more deeply. It is "the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose" (160). In other words, the possibility of creating a perfect reflection or expression of his inner emotional world propels his imagination to its greatest heights.

THE FLESH

Paralleling Genesis, after the word, there is the physical world. Beginning with the first page of the novel, Joyce pulls the reader into a world of physical sensations. He hears his father's voice, sees his face, hears songs, feels the wet bed, first warm then cold. He smells his mother and hears the piano and sailor's hornpipe. He dances. Joyce establishes on the first page that the main character, Stephen Dedalus, is a character with a high sensitivity to physical sensation. Repeatedly he writes of the feel, smell, sight and sound of things. In the beginning chapters he experiences cold and shivers and then heat. On page 13, he uses the word cold eight times, the word warm six times, the word hot two times. He has an acute awareness of smell. He notices the smell of rain, soil, clothing, and bodies (14). He revels in color. "Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of' (8). Color was sensual to him. "He wondered whether ... all white things were cold and damp" (9). The "white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot" (7). The water he was pushed into is "cold and slimy" (10).

Sound is musical to him; it has form, order, and meaning. He hears rhythm and tonality in the sound of curtains being drawn, running water, pens scratching on paper, chairs scraping on Moore 4 the floor. Even the ocean sounds are "waves talking among themselves as they rose and fell" (22).

As Joyce describes the world of the flesh, words and language are a part of the sensual or physical world. The words are real and he "feels" them, like music, the rhythm, the vibrations of sound, the balance and harmony.

Joyce describes the process that brings him to conclude he is destined to be an artist. This process includes his emotional development, his formal education and something else he calls epiphany or intuition. Several times in the novel Stephen makes a decision based on a sudden intuition. He calls it a power.

An example of the power is described late in the novel when Stephen Dedalus experiences a birth of inspiration. He awakes from a dream. The description is very close to the creation scene in Genesis.

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy circumstance of what had happened or of what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow. 0! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. (209)

The imagery and language are Biblical. The description is of a vague, nebulous atmosphere where a sudden flash of light transforms unformed matter into word and then flesh. Language such as "the word was made flesh" and near biblical language such as "flashed forth" and "confused form" heighten the comparison.

Another example is the "foreknowledge" and intuition that "made him glance with mistrust at his trainer's flabby stubblecovered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, (and) dissipated any vision of the future" (59). Later, he rejects the lure of priesthood based on his "instinct." He writes, "Some instinct ... stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every near approach of that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence" (154).

When he listens to the banter of his companions he mentally disassociates and floats into a reverie and suddenly finds himself in a state: "So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city" (190). He experiences a feeling of euphoria and liberation. "His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit" (190). A spiritual completeness comes to him and it is like a death and resurrection. He uses Biblical words and syntax. "His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul..." (190).

In another instance, after searching through literature for "the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas" that left him doubting and confused, sometimes he experienced "lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed..."(170). Note, once again Biblical verbiage such as "world perished" and "fire consumed."

It is rather interesting that the one exception where epiphany and words are not intertwined is when he has the epiphany at seeing the girl on the beach. The climax of this experience seems to transcend words. He describes her like a bird and he gazes at her worshipfully, and after the experience he runs across the strand singing. Joyce writes, "Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy" (165). Here the imagery transcended the word; a word would have broken the spell.

Continuing with the Biblical parallel, the fall must follow the sins of pride and intellect.  "The flesh must fall. The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not fallen yet but he would fall silently in an instant" (156). The artist succumbs to sin. He is brought to sin not only by his natural instincts but also by the power of the word. He is tempted by the flesh and by the power of words and he succumbs and swoons under the spell of sin. Of course, woman is the temptation in the flesh.

After his sin, the artist experiences hell. In chapter three there are pages and pages of diatribe from the priests painting an excruciating picture of hell. With the artist's imagination and the power words held for him, he actually suffers hell. It is so vivid that he is sick with fright and goes to his room and vornits. I believe that Joyce's character, Stephen, experiences a sort of virtual hell. Joyce writes, "He suffered its agony. He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward toward the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes... "(106). This parallels Lucifer in hell and save for the salvation of Christ, Adam in hell.

After the terrifying experience of hell, Stephen repents and receives forgiveness. For a short time he is pure again, but his natural being is at odds with what is required of him. No matter how hard he tries, he realizes he will always fall. He understands the impossibility of what his God demands of him. He realizes that the God who created him is demanding that he be different than he was created.

Now comes the second great sin. The artist rejects God and the impossible demands put on him. He says, in effect, I will not serve such a God. Now, like Lucifer, the artist makes a decision to depart from his father/creator/God and create his own world where he (the artist) will not serve, but rule. This part of the sequence is similar to the Bible, but mostly to Milton's interpretation of Genesis in Paradise Lost.

Like the brightest of God's children, Lucifer, Stephen will not serve but will create his own world. He discusses with Cranly the aspects and components of art. He is planning how to create his perfect creation--his art. Stephen says , "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails" (207).

But still, after the bravado, after his dreams of creating his own perfect creation, Stephen admits to Cranly his fears. Even though he professes to reject the Catholic faith, Stephen says a strange thing. "I imagine that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear" (23 5). When Cranly asks him if he fears that the God of the Roman Catholics could strike him dead, Stephan replies, "I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration" (235). This is Stephen's rational explanation of his fear of God.

THE NEW BEING--THE ARTIST RESURRECTED OR RECREATED

Here is an extraordinarily intelligent young person, maybe of genius level, who is eager to learn and understand everything. He is given contradictions everywhere he searches for knowledge. In his family they are divided on many issues, but especially political, from his intellectual and spiritual teachers he received many contradictions between catechism and actions. Even the language that is used to communicate is unstable. A word means one thing one time and another thing another time. He notices that there is a belt around his jacket, "and belt was also to give a fellow a belt" (95). In addition the world is a terrifying place. Parents are bigger; teachers are bigger and above all God is bigger. And they are not predictable; they do not behave according to any rule or law that Stephen can recognize. And the punishment for making a mistake is horrible, eternal, unimaginable torture.

It is remarkable how he struggles to comprehend. Finally after all is proven untrustworthy, he discovers a quest, a quest for the ultimate in beauty and truth--art. Now he has a worthy direction. He will devote all his genius and passion to the quest for beauty and truth and recreate it in his art. Stephen understands that he will always be a leamer, a searcher. He has been exposed to so much hypocrisy which he now believes will never bring him to the truth and beauty he desires. This is a person who is "hard-wired" to be a zealot, but at the same time his intellect will not allow him to accept hypocrisy. He was capable of self-denial in pursuit of his goals. Even though self-denial was difficult for him because he was a sensitive, sensual person. Had he been less intelligent he could have accepted the Catholic teachings and devoted himself to the priesthood, probably attained sainthood.

CAST OUT INTO THE WORLD

Stephen prepares to leave his place of origin and follow his passion to create the perfect art. The thrill of his epiphany of understanding his destiny and the climax of his suffering to free himself has waned. His rebellious bravado at daring to challenge the Catholic Church and Roman Catholic God has lost a little of its fierceness. The first rush of liberty and excitement has subsided, and after he has confessed his some of his fears to Cranly, Stephen says, "I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too" (239).

The novel ends with a few journal entries by Stephen. He sounds superficial, jocular, not the introspective intense person he was before, searching for truth and beauty. He sounds now more like he has made his choice and he is banished or been banished and "So be it. Welcome, 0 life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (244). Rather like Adam going out to work by the sweat of his brow than the proud, bright son Lucifer, defying his father to go and create a world of his own.

The parallels to the Bible are not exact in detail but do correspond thematically and stylistically. The artist is the creation of God. God's best and most beloved creations were all sons: Lucifer, Adam, and Jesus. The artist is both Adam and Lucifer. He is Adam as an innocent new life, using his intellect (created in God's image) to take in his world and put his own order on it. He is eager to experience all the pleasures of the world that he is equipped to experience with his beautiful physical body (created in God's image.) He falls, like Adam, through his own nature, ignorance and disobedience. But also, the artist is like Lucifer, the brightest angel in heaven who falls because he is proud of his intellect and rebels at serving and wants to rule. It is interesting to note that Stanislaus recalls that when they were children playing characters from the Bible, a scene in which James is the devil, wriggling across the floor trailing a rolled up towel as a tail (1).

The alienated artist, like Lucifer, begins thinking how to create his own world. The long discussion with Cranly illustrates the artist's attempt to define the necessary elements of his perfect world and how to assemble those elements in the most perfect way. He theorizes how this perfect creation (his art) will be recognized. The human response should be stasis not kinesthetic. It will be perfect, so will not motivate any imperfect thoughts or actions.

Not only the content but the style of this novel is Biblical. The use of rhythm, repetition, word choice and imagery are strongly evocative of Biblical text. For example, phrases like "the word was made flesh," "strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it" (171); "All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest" (156). When he describes the girl on the beach, the rhythm, repetition and imagery are strikingly biblical.

Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them toward the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep, hither and thither, hither and thither, and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. (165)

She "suffered" his gaze. She "withdrew" her eyes, the "gently moving water." The repetition of "hither and thither" and "faint."

Stanislaus writes that he does not think his brother had a crisis of faith, but the novel clearly disputes this. Stephen, as Joyce's alter ego, suffers greatly as he wrenches himself away from the church and the Catholic God. Considering the parallels of the novel to the Biblical account of creation, fall and separation from God, I believe there was indeed an agonizing crisis of faith. It is also revealing that Joyce chose the name, Stephen, for his alter ego. Stephen was the first martyr of the church. I believe Joyce thought of himself as a martyr for his art. He was exiled (his choice) from his homeland; he did not receive any recognition for his work-, but he would not compromise his beliefs.

The description of the artist's family, country, education, is not convincing as an explanation for his being an artist. It is a portrait, a description of the artist's life, but he is an artist not because of what has happened to him, but because of his response to those events. He was not the only young Irish boy to have a self-sacrificing saintly mother and an irresponsible drunkard father. He was one of hundreds if not thousands of boys to be indoctrinated and trained by the Jesuits. What made him different was his response and that response was unique to him, and that uniqueness was born in him. So, the ultimate conclusion of the novel is that the artist is born, not made by human ways, but created by the powers of nature and/or God.

WORKS CITED

Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1958.

Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper James Joyce's Early Years. New York: The Viking Press, 1993.

Levin, Harry. James Joyce, A Critical Introduction. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1960.