A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

When the Modern Library released its controversial list of the Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, James Joyce was honored with the first and third entries on the list, for Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, respectively. This was quite the accomplishment, considering that no other author had two entries even in the top twenty-five. While a great deal of criticism was poured upon the list, and anyone can quibble with the particular ranking of books (or the nature of the project itself), there was little effort to deny the importance of Joyce's work. Even the Radcliffe list, published in response to the dearth of female authors on the original list, put both books in the top fifteen.

The earlier book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is largely autobiographical, with many of Stephen Dadelus' experiences seemingly culled straight from the author's life: the alcoholic, financially destitute father, the education at the Jesuit Clongowes and Belvedere schools, the breach with Catholicism in favor of an artistic life. But the substance of this bildungsroman is not what set it apart so much as its style. Joyce is lauded today for his innovative literary techniques, presented most famously in Ulysses and most extremely in Finnegans Wake, and his resulting influence on the course of 20th-century literature. Many of those techniques are on display in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though the more straight-forward nature of the underlying narrative renders the book substantially more accessible than Joyce's later works.

The books opens with Stephen as a small child, recalling a song his father sang, his childish understanding of the members of his family, and his early school experiences. Though presented in a third-person narrative, the narration is consistent with the capacity of Stephen's age, and presents his experience of the story rather than a simple recitation of that story:

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep.

As Stephen grows older and gains a better grasp of the world around him, the narration becomes somewhat more sophisticated. Yet Stephen is still an impressionable young man, without any clear guidance in the world beyond the poor example of his father's failures, the blustering machismo of his schoolmates, and the rigid guidance of his church. Thus when his father's financial situation necessitates a family move to the city of Dublin, Stephen is ill-prepared to chart a middle path for himself. First he veers toward the abyss, wandering into a seedy part of town and having his first sexual experience with a local prostitute, setting off waves of paralyzing guilt:

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded; and no part of body or soul had been maimed but a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardor extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.

Now enrolled in another Jesuit school, Stephen's moral suffering continues and is exacerbated by an extraordinary dozen-page series of lectures on sin, judgment, and hell that utterly convince him that he must seek immediate salvation. Stumbling onto a neighborhood chapel, Stephen confesses his sins and uses this absolution as an opportunity to enter a new phase of his life, pivoting 180 degrees and focusing his efforts on pious devotion:

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and with an early mass. The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety; and often as he knelt among the few worshippers at the sidealtar, following with his interleaved prayerbook the murmur of the priest, he glanced up for an instant towards the vested figure standing in the gloom between the two candles which were the old and the new testaments and imagined that he was kneeling at mass in the catacombs.

Stephen makes such accomplished strides in his newfound piety that the director of his school calls him to a meeting to discuss the possibility of entering the priesthood. Though Stephen toys with the idea, the prospect of merging the remainder of his life into the church actually has the opposite effect, shaking him from his unquestioned devotion. He decides to pursue a university life, and while awaiting news of his application, a walk on the beach results in an epiphanous encounter with a beautiful young woman:

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his sould had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasty the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

Thus Joyce's protagonist progressed from the limited perceptions of childhood to the uncontrollable urges of puberty to the reactionary application of rigid self-restraint to a mature grappling with the beauties of the world in all its mystery and ambiguity. Stephen decides to pursue an artistic life, and to do so he feels he must break free of the ties that bind him to his homeland, pursuing foreign exile like Joyce himself.

The irony of Joyce's massive influence over the past century of literature is that his work, so raw and shocking at the time, cannot possibly seem so original or innovative to the 21st-century reader. The absence of quotation marks around dialogue, for example, is practically de riguer in modernist prose. Likewise the focus on the protagonist's subjective psychological experience of the world vice an objective narrator's portrayal of such. It is surely unfair to hold against Joyce the fact that his innovations have been splendidly re-rendered and slavishly copied by subsequent generations, but there it is.