Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

Description

James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a Kunstlerroman which chronicles the emotional and intellectual development of Stephen Dedalus - a character partly based on the author himself - from his early childhood and his school and university days all the way to his first forays as a young artist. Dedalus's thoughts and epiphanies reveal the tensions, insecurities and feelings of guilt that are the product of living in a country and period so deeply divided along religious and political lines. Pioneering an innovative stream-of-consciousness technique characteristic of early Modernism, and often resorting to mythical, historical and literary allusion which would find fuller expression in Ulysses, Joyce's groundbreaking work shocked the readers of its day and continues to challenge analysis and interpretation. This edition contains a wealth of material about the author's life and works, notes and a bibliographic section.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546728
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce


Annotations by Marc A. Mamigonian
and John Turner

ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics Ltd London House 243-253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey TW 9 2 LL United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first published in 1916 This edition first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2014
Introduction and Notes © Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner
Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd except ‘James Joyce’s Life’ © Sam Slote, 2012
Cover image © Roxanne Libasci, 2010
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-386-6
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
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Contents
Introduction
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I
II
III
IV
V
Notes
Bibliography
Extra Material
James Joyce’s Life
James Joyce’s Works


Introduction
The decade-long time span (1904–14) and nearly continent-spanning geography (Dublin/Trieste) announced at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man only hints at James Joyce’s personal and artistic turmoil during the writing of this book. Having begun the work as Stephen Hero in Dublin in 1904 1 in the painful period following his mother’s death (13th August 1903) and prior to his meeting Nora Barnacle (June 1904) and their departure for the Continent, more or less for good (8th October 1904), Joyce wrote some twenty-six chapters of Stephen Hero before abandoning the novel in the summer of 1905, probably around the time of the birth of his first child, Giorgio (27th July). Beset by poverty and difficulties in getting his work published (his first book of poetry, Chamber Music , appeared in 1907 after considerable delay; the struggle to publish Dubliners began in 1905 and would not conclude until 1914), a discouraged Joyce probably did not return to Stephen Hero until 1908, when he began reworking it into what would eventually become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .
In 1909, Joyce gave portions of the novel-in-progress to one of his English-language students in Trieste, Ettore Schmitz (1861–1928), whose appreciation for the work seems to have meant a great deal to Joyce and served as a rare source of encouragement. Schmitz was a gifted author who had published two commercially unsuccessful novels under his pen name Italo Svevo in the 1890s ( Una vita in 1892, Senilità in 1898), but had set aside his literary ambitions to manage his wife’s family’s business. Joyce admired Svevo’s work and must have seen the older man’s life as a warning. Joyce’s time was consumed by the ongoing travails of Dubliners , culminating in his final, futile visit to Ireland in 1912, and it was not until early 1914 and the intervention of Ezra Pound that A Portrait’s publication began to become a reality. Pound had asked W.B. Yeats whether he knew any young Irish writers in need of discovery; Yeats had mentioned Joyce. Hailing the novel as “damn fine stuff”, Pound arranged for its serialization in the periodical The Egoist in 1914–15. It was published in book form by B.W. Huebsch in New York in December 1916.
Italo Svevo wrote in 1927 that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is “a kind of preface. Fate has assigned to it the place of a preface, a very notable preface, however, which has shown that it is able to live its own independent and glorious life”. 2 Given the centrality of Ulysses in Joyce’s work – indeed, in all of modern literature – it is probably inevitable that A Portrait is viewed and will continue to be viewed as prefatory to the later, larger work. T.S. Eliot thought that A Portrait was Joyce’s only novel, and that Ulysses left the genre of the novel behind. 3 No matter where it is seen to fit within Joyce’s larger body of work, it is obvious that A Portrait lives “its own independent and glorious life” as one of the key modernist texts.
Joyce’s work on A Portrait extends back before Stephen Hero to early writings such as a brief autobiographical essay (of sorts) called ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ (1904). 4 This essay version, about two thousand words in length, sets forth some of the themes that would occupy Joyce for the next decade and beyond. Other early components of A Portrait include Joyce’s Epiphanies and his 1903–4 Paris/Pola notebook, as well as the somewhat later Trieste notebook (1907–9). 5 The Epiphanies are brief paragraphs or sketches containing some instant of revelation. A number of them made their way into Stephen Hero and A Portrait (and, later, Ulysses ). The notebooks served as draft paper for the aesthetic theory Stephen Dedalus puts forth in Part 5 of A Portrait . They also served as a place for Joyce to record remarks and details about the various people whose alter egos would populate his writings. Another item in the Portrait dossier is a late Portrait fragment 6 that corresponds, more or less, to the first chapter of Ulysses . The fragment shows the fluidity between the ending of A Portrait and the beginning of Ulysses . It also indicates that Joyce suffered from an uncertainty as to where or how to end his story. He solved the problem in A Portrait by cutting the Gordian knot. The series of diary entries gave the novel a conclusion without forcing him to “end” or resolve a plot that, after all, was based on his own life. This most self-referential, or self-reverential, of writers always wrote the book of himself. In Finnegans Wake he tells the tale of Shem the Penman, who wrote “inartistic portraits of himself” (182) using “the only foolscap available, his own body” (185).
The indefiniteness of the reader’s last glimpse of Stephen in A Portrait (and also in Ulysses ) has contributed to some puzzlement over how to take him. Although most readers are likely to take Stephen as a more or less serious self-portrait, in some quarters the view has taken hold that he must be a sort of ironized figure. We do not accept that opinion. Even at an empirical level, it is hard to see why one would think that Joyce, whose first stories were published under the pen name Stephen Daedalus, who wrote ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ in 1904 and began a novel called Stephen Hero that year, would mean us to laugh at Stephen Dedalus. But more broadly, to admire A Portrait and yet reject sympathy for its protagonist (and only substantial character) seems too strange to us. No, Stephen is not a figure of fun. But it’s true that he only goes so far – until about age twenty-one, in fact, or, given his reappearance in Ulysses , until twenty-two. This is why Joyce wished people would bear in mind that this book is a portrait of the artist as a young man . One version of the knowing, “ironic” view is that, since Daedalus’s son was Icarus, ergo Stephen must be too. As appealing as such a deduction may be, it seems contrary to Joyce’s aims in this book and its successor. Stephen Dedalus’s appeal to his “old father” at the end of A Portrait reads as a heartfelt imprecation, with none of the hubristic folly of an Icarus. If the anxiety of becoming Icarus remains, it is, nonetheless, hardly a fate . Furthermore, Joyce would have had a Christian notion of the consubstantiality of the Son and the Father in mind. It did not follow, for him, that the son of Daedalus must necessarily be a failure like Icarus. The son of Daedalus, seen this way, can be not Icarus but rather Daedalus, again, the same but different.
About This Edition
The text used for this volume is the Egoist Press 2nd edition of 1918 (though marked as 1917 by the printer), which was the first edition with English sheets and which incorporates close to 400 emendations by Joyce and by Harriet Shaw Weaver. The first Egoist edition was prepared from the sheets of the American edition of 1916 without these numerous and, in some cases, significant corrections. This, then, would have been the Portrait that many of Joyce’s contemporaries would have read. Nonetheless, this text contains a number of errors that, when significant, have been noted in the annotations. For detailed accounts of the development of the text of A Portrait , readers are directed to Chester G. Anderson, ‘The Text of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ’ ( Neuphilologische Mitteilungen lxv (Spring 1964), pp. 160–200); Hans Walter Gabler, ‘Towards a Critical Text of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ’ ( Studies in Bibliography , vol. 27 (1974), pp. 1–53), ‘The Genesis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ’, in Critical Essays on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Philip Brady and James F. Carens, eds. (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), pp. 83–112, and the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Historical Collation’ in his 1993 edition of A Portrait .
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank a number of individuals who kindly assisted with requests for information: Mr Vincent Deane; Prof. Joanne Pierce of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; Prof. James Russell of Harvard University; and Prof. Sam Slote of Trinity College, Dublin. We are grateful to Michelle Oishi for her preliminary suggestions for notes and to Christian Müller