University of Tulsa
Reflections on "A Portrait of the Artist"
Author(s): Marvin Magalaner
Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer, 1967), pp. 343-346
Published by: University of Tulsa
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Reflections on
A Portrait of the Artist
by Marvin Magalaner
After a half-century of critical commentary on Joyce's novel
of adolescence, almost nothing can be said about the Portrait which
is not trite. The symbol and source hunting, the patterning and
structuring go on, but the book wiggles free of attempts to impose
cosmic overviews. Not what it means?here triteness intrudes?but
what it is as a reading experience for generation after generation of
young readers becomes the main question.
With doubt, A Portrait is one of the most popular modern
"classics" in the universities of this country, now almost universally
assigned to students in sophomore survey courses in literature and
certainly to every student of the English novel. This may, of course,
be merely a reflection of the wishes of instructors, men brought up in
a different generation and endowed with a different brand of literary
taste, who seek to impose upon the students of the sixties what they
themselves found nourishing in the forties and earlier. My own
experience in teaching this novel forces me to reject the view of
A Portrait as a latterday Silas Marner. Nor do I attribute the
vogue of the story to its place as prelude to Ulysses, for the great
majority of readers of the shorter novel will never read Joyce's
sequel. Indeed, one of the reasons that A Portrait is not over
shadowed by its successor?as some of Mann's earlier fiction is
dwarfed in the public mind by his Magic Mountain?is that the
actual readership of Ulysses is so restricted.
What claim, then, does A Portrait have on the attention of the
contemporary student generation? Both Yeats and Ezra Pound
fifty years ago were drawn chiefly to the style of the book. Yeats
insisted that the prose established Joyce for him as the young writer
of greatest potential genius. For Pound, it was uniquely the only
writing in English that an intelligent man could read and reread with
pleasure. Joyce's ability to approximate in language the evolving and
maturing consciousness of his protagonist seems less original to us
than to his early readers because Joyce taught all the writers who
followed him in fiction how to make the unique commonplace?
and thereby succeeded in blunting the shock of reaction to his
originality.
Readers of the forties and fifties relegated language to a sub
ordinate position in their confrontation of the book. What mattered
343
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344 JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY
was richness of allusion and the fruit of explication. Why did Cranly
and Heron have bird-names? Who was Betty Byrne? What did Joyce
know about Parnell? In what sense was Cranly the Precursor?and
what did such identification matter with respect to Stephen's role in
the book? Spurred on by discoveries of hidden meanings in Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, critical readers looked back at the earlier works
and applied to them the same minute probing that was proving suc
cessful in interpreting the long novels. And, if there was any time left
over, readers played with the problem of point of view: where does
the portrait of Stephen Dedalus leave off and that of Joyce begin?
Is the presentation ironic and detached, or "straight" and intensely
personal?
Some years ago, this interest in tone and point of view was re
flected in remarks made by Lionel Trilling in a discussion of "The
World of Joyce and the World of Lawrence." He was always em
barrassed, Professor Trilling said, to teach Lawrence's Sons and
Lovers to his young undergraduates, for the appeal to the emotions
in that novel is so direct. The reader identifies with the most intimate
problems of the protagonist to a degree that makes dispassionate
discussion of the story impossible. The reader becomes a member of
the family, as it were, and not merely a reader. On the other hand,
Professor Trilling as reader and teacher made no such intimate con
tact with Stephen Dedalus either in A Portrait or in Ulysses. The
former becomes a brilliant exercise in the artistic use of words, and
the role of the reader is to be a cold and unaffected solver of intel
lectual problems. There is a barrier between Stephen and the read
er quite as formidable as the barrier that keeps Stephen from con
tact with his fellow Dubliners. Though, as I recall, Mr. Trilling
made no explicit judgment as to which of the two relationships?
that with Morel or with Dedalus?was aesthetically preferable, his
audience sensed that his embarrassment with Lawrence's story some
how represented a sign of that novel's superiority.
Today's student-reader refuses, in the main, to have it that way.
He may never have heard of Maud Bodkin and archetypal patterns,
but he tends to ascribe to Stephen the outlines of Every-boy and
then to identify, as Mr. Trilling does not, with the timeless and place
less figure he half creates and half perceives. Fear of triteness al
most precludes enumeration of the analogies that emerge for to
day's college student: Stephen is "on the road" quite as literally
as his successors in the "beat" generation; James Clarence Mangan,
one of Stephen's heroes, has his counterpart in several Berkeley-San
Francisco poets; the devouring of fathers by children is just as in
evitable now as it was then; and the ugly duckling is today equally
shunned by his more attractive contemporaries.
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MARVIN MAGALANER 345
What I am suggesting is that, as much as the novel is A Portrait
of the Artist, it is even more for today's youth a portrait of a young
man, a real man, who has come to sum up many of the attributes of
the present college generation?the generation concerned with re
bellion; with moral values sharply at odds with those of parents,
state, and church; with a modern attempt to forge the uncreated con
science of their race. Though Stephen regards himself, and is con
sidered by others, as a party of one, utterly different from all
those about him, the paradox is that in our time Dedalus-types are
legion on most campuses, and the lonely crowd is more than the
title of a sociological work. Perhaps it is too much to say that
Joyce's novel has helped to create a milieu in which this multitude
of Stephens can exist. It is not, I think, too much to say that these
chips off the Dedalian block have contributed to a new sympathy
for and acceptance of the prototype.
In this regard, it is interesting to recall the remarks of Professor
George Steiner at a celebration in Paris of a Joycean anniversary.
He was struck, he said, by the uncanny lightness of Joyce's in
stinct or judgment in selecting Leopold Bloom as his unlikely Every
man for the twentieth century?not after the second World War
but at the time of the first one. That Joyce should have picked a
Jew, a middle-European alien in Dublin, a victim of racial and re
ligious prejudice, and that he should have endowed his creation with
symbolic greatness even as he demonstrated Bloom's tragic ineffec
tually in the face of everyday events was to write the history of our
time a generation before it was enacted on a panoramic scale.
With Stephen?the other half of the Blephen-Stoom combination
?Joyce seems similarly to have detected in the first decade of this
century the way that things would go for "all the sad young men."
Other contemporaneous views of young men/artists seem dated by
comparison. Tonio Kroger is little more than Mann's mouthpiece.
Ernest Pontifex no longer seriously touches today's readers. The
young men of Wells, Maugham, and Conrad appear artistic throw
backs to the past. But the proliferation of Stephens in our world is
a phenomenon that Joyce seems to have anticipated, with the re
sult that his protagonist assumes symbolic importance to this gen
eration quite as meaningful as that afforded to Leopold Bloom.
If this hypothesis is correct, it may help to account for the
lessening interest classes today normally show in mythic parallels
and literary or historical analogies. It is not as necessary as it used to
be to demonstrate in what ways Stephen is like Christ and in what
ways like the Devil.
Much more meaningful to students now is what Stephen stands
for as Stephen. Joyce called his early fiction the "first step in the
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346 JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY
spiritual liberation of my country." To protagonists like Bloom and
Stephen is assigned the role of self-liberation, and this is the kind of
task that students today understand. Their adherence to it is chang
ing the way we see Joyce's Portrait.
City University of New York
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