Sunteți pe pagina 1din 7

Significance of the Title

The title of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” has been the subject of as much
speculation as the novel itself, and like all modernist writing, this title has been able to
maintain its open-ended nature. Indeed, this open-endedness has posed problems for
many critics. The theme of this novel concerns the development of the artist from that
point in his life when he becomes conscious of the world around him, to the time
when he reaches manhood, and sets off in pursuit of the goal which he has identified
for himself in the course of the book. The problem is that we are not given a portrait
of AN artist, but of THE artist. The choice of the general article “a” before the word
“portrait” suggests the open-ended nature of the text – that it is only one of many
portraits that can be painted, and that the author is only attempting to show one side of
the picture, from one point of view. The reader may interpret as he wishes. The
definite article “the” before “artist”, however, cannot be understood so easily. It may
refer to the autobiographical element in the novel, or it may refer to the type of the
artist, the form of art which he chooses to make his own.

STEPHEN’S THEORY OF AESTHETICS

Two chief principles (from Thomas Aquinas):


Those things are beautiful the perception of which pleases.

The good is that toward which the appetite tends
o
The creative artist is concerned only with the creation of the beautiful
o
The productive artist is concerned with the productions of the good

Other major principals:


Art must produce a
stasis in the observer that is! it see"s no end by the satisfaction of an aesthetic sense

Art should not be kinetic that is! it should not product an emotion such as desire or
loathing. #f it does it assumes the function of a useful art! such as rhetoric.

Three things are necessary for the perception of the beautiful:
o
wholeness or integrity
o
harmony or proportion
o
clarity or radiance$sing the e%ample of a bas"et! &tephen elaborates on the three
things necessary for the perception of the beautiful.
 First! one sees the basket as one thing (wholeness)
• Then one perceives it as a thing with parts (harmony)

The Aesthetics of Stephen Dedalus


Stephen's Classical and Scholastic Roots

Stephen Dedalus, the aspiring poet, amateur philosopher, and protagonist of


James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while speaking to his
dean about philosophy, tells him, “For my purpose I can work on at present
by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas . . . I need them
only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by
their light” (164). Here, Joyce is invoking an attitude, common to modernist
literature, of blending traditional and classical perspectives to create new
ideas. Although Joyce's work is renowned for its deviations from narrative
convention, he was also learned in ancient and scholastic thought. Joyce's
notebooks have shown scholars that the author was familiar with the writing
of Aquinas and that he studied Aristotle's Poetics. (Eco 332) One cannot
break from the past, after all, without knowing well what it is one's breaking
from. The skeletal structure of Portrait is itself taken from a classical myth,
that of Daedalus and Icarus. Stephen's growth as a artistic inventor is
paralleled by the industriousness of his eponym, the legendary artificer
Daedalus.
The epitaph that opens the book is a quote from the Daedalus section of
Ovid's The Metamorphoses , which translated means, "He turned his mind
toward unknown arts." Like Daedalus, who used his cunning to create
unprecedented devices, such as a set of wax wings used to escape from the
prison of King Minos, Stephen uses his cunning to create art and a new
identity deracinated from his Irish heritage. If the classical model for
Stephen's identity is Daedalus, however, then his philosophical thoughts, as
he admits to the dean, come from Aristotle and Aquinas. Later in the same
chapter, Stephen muses with his friend Lynch on pity, tragedy, and the
beautiful: the basic tenets of aesthetic studies. The precocious Stephen
occupies himself outside the classroom by criticizing and formulating an
aesthetic theory based on his classical and medieval readings. Another
classmate, Donovan, lets it slip that Stephen is even writing an essay on the
topic, though Stephen seems to deny it ( “I hear you are writing some essay
about esthetics. Stephen made a vague gesture of denial" [186]). From the
conversation with Lynch, we can discern that aesthetics is a subject that
greatly engrosses Stephen, the burgeoning artist, and one in which he far
surpasses his peer.

From his expatiation in this chapter, it is possible to construct, in general


terms, Stephen’s beliefs on the nature of art. Such conjecture, however, can
be perilous. First, there are only a few pages of conversation we can use to
extrapolate the entire system of thought of an individual. The conversation
on art holds a relatively small claim on the chapter, lasting about seven pages,
let alone on the entire book. Rather than a formal, elaborate discourse, it is a
picture of an ambitious student sharing his philosophic realizations with a
sympathetic friend. Second, the fact that these are spoken words, not a
formal, written argument Stephen would intend for publication, should make
us skeptical of how invested he is in what he is saying. If we do assume that
Stephen is telling us what he actually believes, we must still keep in mind
that Stephen himself is a work-in-progress. As Umberto Eco puts it, ". . .
Joyce's works might be understood as a continuous discussion of their own
artistic procedures. A Portrait is the story of a young artist who wants to
write A Portrait" (329). Joyce's novel is a Künstlerroman, a novel about the
development of an artist. Stephen’s immaturity is the whole point. He is an
artist creating an artist. It is also important to note that the Portrait is
semi-autobiographical. That does not mean, however, that we can freely
ascribe Stephen’s aesthetic beliefs to Joyce. As observed by David Jones,
there is much debate among Joycean scholars concerning degree of influence
and by Aristotle and Aquinas in the section (291). This article, therefore, will
not try to interpret the fidelity of Stephen's polemic to ancient and Medieval
philosophy; rather, it will evaluate the relevance of Stephen’s thoughts to the
novel and determine the dramatic function of Stephen’s philosophizing.

The Aesthetic Context of Portrait

While Stephen informs us that he draws his aesthetic theory from his own
ruminations and readings in ancient and medieval philosophy, his creative
personality is in harmony with the artistic ethos of Joyce's own time. Stephen
defines art as, “the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an
esthetic end" (182). The implications of this statement will be fully examined
in the next section, but, for now, the latter part of this definition is especially
significant: the esthetic end. For a pagan such as Aristotle, art mimetically
reproduced nature and divinity. If executed properly, it could praise the gods
by accurately and deferentially telling, and thereby venerating, their stories.
It could also, however, slip into blasphemy if the gods were inappropriately
depicted. For a medieval theologian such as Aquinas, art was a vehicle for
celebrating God (perhaps through liturgical music). Art based on the Bible
could teach the illiterate lay Christian parables through stories or poems. As
with the ancients, art served a definite spiritual purpose.

But for the artists of the Fin de Siècle, art existed only for its own existence:
l’art pour l’art; “art for art’s sake.” While the Aesthetic Movement can be
said to have originated in France with the Symbolist poets in the late 1800s,
two of its most luminous proponents, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, were
Dubliners, like Joyce. Pater, an influential art critic and essayist, was well
regarded in literary circles for his writings that helped fuel the Aesthetic
Movement. In the conclusion of his most famous work, Studies in the
History of the Renaissance(1873), Pater writes of the richness of a life
steeped in artistic appreciation and the usefulness of philosophic thought in
the understanding of art. "The service of philosophy, of speculative culture,"
he writes, "towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and
eager observation" (299 Pater). If the full life is full of aesthetic experience,
philosophy is a tool to articulate and understand the beauty one's experiences.
He concludes the chapter saying, "Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the
desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you
professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments' sake" (301). Pater transforms the
artistic appreciation into the quasi-religious experience that gives meaning to
the otherwise inane moments of life. Like Pater, Wilde enumerated his own
aesthetic doctrine in the preface to his novel //The Picture of Dorian
Gray// (whose title bears a resemblance to Joyce's novel). Wilde defines the
artist as "the creator of beautiful things." Art's purpose is not to instruct or
worship, in contrast to Aristotle and Aquinas, but to be enjoyed for being
beautiful. Didactic or mimetic qualities may contribute to beauty, but they
shouldn't be ends in their own right. He goes on to write, "Those who find
beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is
hope." This is Pater but with intellectual snobbery. Those who are capable of
appreciating beauty are somehow better off, according to Wilde. What we
read here is quintessentially Stephen. He shares Pater's reverence for the
exquisite moments in life that come from total submersion in the artistic
world and Wilde's cultivated elitism. From Portrait's lengthy title, we read
that Stephen is still a puerile artist, but he is certainly following Pater's
instruction in reaching the most exalted state of consciousness through
rigorous contemplation of art.
Beauty and Genre

Stephen makes many points on the purpose of art, but two in particular, his definitions
of beauty and genre, are interesting because they are in conversation with the form
of Portrait. Stephen defines art as a disposition, that is to say, a natural tendency,
recognizing the human propensity for creation. This impetus for creation is two-fold:
first, it is an act of physical creation akin to childbirth, as the artist puts labor, effort,
and love into a subject of her own creation; second, part of this human disposition is
for the viewing of that which is beautiful. Stephen quotes Aquinas, saying, “that is
beautiful the apprehension of which pleases” (181). Artistic production is as
fundamental as any other human drive. Perhaps the most important distinction about
art that Stephen makes is of its “sensible” and “intelligible” aspects. In one
interpretation, sensible could dictate the dual effect art has on the viewer. Art is both
sensible, since we use our five senses to observe it, and intelligible, because we can
ponder, criticize, argue and engage in other cerebral contemplation directed towards
art. Shortly after in the conversation, Stephen says, “Though we may not like a statue,
we can recognize that there’s something in it to admire. Our senses discern something
from it.” (181). The conscious mind, Stephen realizes, may not care for a statue, but
senses can still be stirred by it. The sensible and intelligible may be the routes through
which the esthetic end travels into us, first through the senses and next to the brain.
The senses are a mode of apprehension used by our higher faculties to absorb and
understand beauty. It is his acute understanding of art and beauty that makes Stephen
the budding artist. It is because of his ability to absorb the sensible and intelligible
aspects of beauty that, as Wilde says, "there is hope."

Once beauty is defined, Stephen categorizes it into three forms: “the lyrical form, the
form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical
form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to
others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate
relation to others” (188). These three forms are really three traditional forms of
narrative in literature. The lyrical represents the subjective, such as a poet’s mind
poured out directly onto paper in a sonnet. The dramatic represents the objective
portrayal of the works action, such as in a play where the audiences sees rather than is
told what is happening. Finally, epical refers to a mix of subjective and object, in
which the narrator describes to a reader what is happening, such as a novel. This
passage is appropriately included in the text because Portrait is a novel that
experiments with narrative form. It is more than epical but less than purely lyrical.
The reason for this is Joyce's use of the Modernist convention of
stream-of-consciousness. The novel eschews a traditional first or third-person narrator
and instead often leads us from one of Stephen's thoughts to the next: "Eleven! Then
he was late for that lecture too. What day of the week was it? He stopped at a
newsagent's to read the headline of a placard. Thursday. Ten to eleven; English:
eleven to twelve; French: twelve to one; physics" (155). An everyday mental
conversation ("Eleven!" and "What day of the week was it?") is inserted into typical
third-person narration (such as, "He stopped at a newsagent's to read the headline of a
placard"). Although Stephen discriminates narrative form into categories, one of
Joyce's most famous achievements is writing outside this three-pronged mold.

The Aesthetic Speech and Stephen's Development

Philosophy aside, the inclusion of Stephen’s aesthetic theory is indicative of both his
artistic acumen and social alienation. We know from the opening of the book that
Stephen stands aloof from his fellow Irishmen. His last name itself, Dedalus, is
obtrusively non-Irish. As Hugh Kenner puts it: "Why, a name like a huge smudged
fingerprint: the most implausible name that could conceivably be devised for an
inhabitant of lower-class Catholic Dublin: a name that no accident of immigration, no
freak of etymology, no canon of naturalism however stretched, can justify: the name
of Stephen Dedalus." (Kenner 351) Stephen is horribly chided by his classmates in
Clongowes Woods and fails to assimilate into his pre-adolescent social environment.
Upon hearing Stephen’s last name, a school bully virulently inquires, “What kind of a
name is that?” (6). His name--the word that gives him identity--and his shyness make
his first years in Clongowes a nightmare. Later in chapter five, preceding his
conversation with Lynch, there is an encounter between Stephen and the dean of his
school, in which the two dabble in aesthetic theory. This heady tête-à- tête displays
how distant Stephen feels from the dean and contrasts his energized later conversation
with this tepid one. The interactions between the Stephen and the dean are somewhat
perfunctory. Each character responds briefly to each other and merely make a few
general comments about aesthetics. It begins with some avuncular questioning on the
definition of beauty, but the dean soon loses interest and Stephen even catches him
not paying attention: “The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope
I am not detaining you. –Not in the least, said the dean politely. –No, no, said Stephen
smiling, I mean…” (164-165) The dean, an adult figure who should have the utmost
interest in stimulating Stephen’s intellect, is seen only as passing the time with him.
We know, however, from the conversation with Lynch, that Stephen is capable of
elaborate philosophic discourse. The conversation would more accurately be called
pontification, as Lynch does little more than humor Stephen by listening to his
theories. Lynch even professes that he has no interest in the subject and is probably
only there to take cigarettes from Stephen. What we see is a lone aesthete, completely
devoted mentally and spiritually to his craft but alienated from his peers and teachers
by his own abilities. Earlier, Stephen dolefully muses:
but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of
the world’s culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to
forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in that the
subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry. (157)

Stephen despairs that not only at the interminable store of human knowledge but that
his own contributions to the “feast of the world’s culture” will be thought esoteric or
irrelevant by his community. The realization that his passion is but a specialized
curiosity, such as heraldry and falconry, to the world is undoubtedly a painful one.

Portrait as a Künstlerroman

Stephen is a character in development. The trajectory of the novel takes him from his
early fascination with sounds as a youth to an adolescent aesthete. His artistic theories
are a phase in his development and thus they should be approached with incredulity,
knowing his growth is not yet complete. Cordell Yee observes that there is a lack of
sophistication to Stephen's aesthetics: “Stephen’s lack of this understanding shows
that by the end of A Portrait he is not an artist in a fundamental way. He is immature:
the would-be artist is also a would be theorist.” (68) Joyce, he argues, deliberately
misapplies Aquinas's teachings when he places them in Stephen's mouth. (69) This
suggests that this section of chapter five, rather than a coherent philosophic treatise, is
indicative of character building by Joyce. Aesthetic theorizing is a milestone in
Stephen's artistic growth. His conversation and thoughts, reminiscent of
Pater's Renaissance, are inevitable parts of artistic life he is leading so there should be
no surprise in that Stephen, the young aesthete, will grow up into someone who thinks
seriously about the nature of art. Yee further notes the early evidence of Stephen’s
interest in the beautiful: "As a child, Stephen has a questioning mind: he wonders
about the world and shows a philosophic bent. He does not take things for granted and
seems to recognize a distinction between nature and convention. He often thinks
about language, asking why certain words are used, why they mean what they mean."
(77) A young Stephen is hypnotized by the “pick, pock, puck” (52) of the balls
striking cricket bats in the school yard. His childhood fears manifest themselves in his
consciousness as verse as he hides under a table: “Pull out his eyes,/Apologise,/
Apologise,/ Pull out his eyes” (6). Indeed, his whole life seems to resonate with
artistic and intellectual preoccupation. Joyce, here, has traced the path of an artist
from his rawest form to the more (but not completely) refined. The novel begins with
a story read to infant Stephen by his father and ends with a diary entry, "Old father,
old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead" (224). Significantly, the novel
ends with the invocation of Daedalus, Stephen's assumed artistic father and, implicitly,
the casting off of Stephen's old parentage and his entrance into his own self-fashioned
heritage. The classical world provides both Stephen's new identity and the roots of his
understanding of aesthetics.

S-ar putea să vă placă și