A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (4 page)

There is no high-falutin narrative term for this technique, though Hugh Kenner has dubbed it the ‘Uncle Charles Principle’
³⁶
after the character in
Portrait
the description of whom caused Wyndham Lewis to accuse Joyce of slipshod writing. Lewis, fed up with hearing what a brilliant writer Joyce was, took it upon himself to indicate precisely and locally an example of Joyce’s use of hackneyed and clichéd language, in the opening of
Chapter II
where ‘uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse’ (50). Lewis opined that characters ‘repair’ to ‘outhouses’ in second-rate fiction; not in serious literature.
³⁷
But, as Kenner points out, uncle Charles does not ‘repair’ to the ‘outhouse’ because Joyce could find no finer language. He ‘repairs to the outhouse’ because ‘repairing’ is what
characters
like uncle Charles do. With deft economy, Joyce provides an extra characterizing fillip: with no overt indication that it is doing so, the narrative appropriates a typically carolingian word, a word of the sort uncle Charles would himself use, a slightly clichéd, slightly supercilious, slightly but inaptly pretentious word, a word that overreaches its grasp by the smallest yet clumsiest of margins.
³⁸
This ‘Uncle Charles Principle’ writ large is the stylistic principle of
Portrait
. The lexicon, the sentence structure, the diction, follow those of the protagonist, the ‘artist’ of the title. They will change as that ‘artist’ changes, mature as he does, grow complex, florid,
overwrought in parallel with the development of his mind. As the artist grows, so grows the style.

Paradoxically, by restricting the language of the narrative to the idiolect of the central character, Joyce draws a much subtler portrait than could have been achieved by allowing that narrative lexical and dictional free range. The method itself implies a conception of character quite unlike that underpinning the narrative modes employed in earlier fictions. Character here exists at an intersection between interiority and exteriority, between the idiolect of the character (that private interior language of individualism) and the third-person narrative (that exterior frame itself significant of the ostensible objectivity of the outer world), neither wholly private, nor entirely public. The central character of this novel may think that this is his story. Indeed, never before has the language of a novel been tied so intimately to the idiosyncratic viewpoint, the mental and linguistic habits of the character therein depicted. But by retaining the third-person narrative, Joyce displaces the potentially stifling narcissistic egoism that such proximity might otherwise produce.
³⁹
A small but significant space opens up between character and narrator, not to mention character and author. And in maintaining this space Joyce avoids reinforcing those old humanist clichés of identity as wholly self-generated, of the individual existing independent of the strictures of history, culture, and ideology.

‘O, the green wothe botheth’

By deploying the ‘Uncle Charles Principle’ Joyce provides an astonishingly ‘realistic’ representation of Stephen. But neither the progression of the narrative through Stephen’s idiom nor its
focalization through him means that Stephen understands everything he sees, or everything the narrative presents. An example: on the first page of
Portrait
, a song is sung: ‘
O, the wild rose blossoms
|
On the little green place
’. Since this is Joyce, you can be guaranteed that it is a real song. And if you know the real song, you will know something that neither Joyce nor his narrator tells you directly: in the real song, the rose blossoms on a little green
grave
. That these adults have changed the word tells you something about the kind of ‘truth’ they allow their son to hear. That ‘death’ is present, if only as a repressed shadow, on the first page of the novel tells you something about the nature of this ‘life’ story. Stephen neither perceives nor understands these things. Joyce here remains scrupulously faithful to the real, but manages at once to make it do double duty.

Put slightly differently, we might characterize Joyce’s writing as duplicitous, in the strict sense of that word as ‘twofold’ or ‘double in action or conduct’. Take yet again that first page of the novel. It presents this small child’s world through a densely economical language at once both so vividly realistic that his sensory and social worlds are evoked with exceptional precision and clarity, and so symbolically resonant that virtually every theme, leitmotif, moral, political, or aesthetic concern that will arise in the succeeding novel is here proleptically figured.
⁴⁰
Notice: the world is apprehended within the space of a few paragraphs through each of the five senses: hearing (the story), sight (the hairy face of his father), taste (the lemon platt), touch (the warmth and cold of the wet bed), smell (the oilsheet). The social world unfolds: first with father (the patriarch who passes on the word, culture, history), then with mother (who tends to the body and its uncontrolled emissions); next with the extended family: first uncle Charles then ‘Dante’; finally with the neighbourhood: the Vances who have a different father and mother and who live at number seven. The comparative relation of this to that, of he to she, is delineated: mother smells nicer than father; uncle Charles and Dante are older than father and mother, but uncle Charles is older than Dante. Themes that will exfoliate over the course of the novel are sounded: Irish history and politics are
brought into the intimacy of the extended family through Dante’s keeping of two brushes, one for Michael Davitt and one for Parnell. The family’s and society’s inculcation of heterosexual norms is acknowledged: ‘when they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen’. The expectation that moral behaviour can be elicited and enforced through the threat of punishment becomes apparent: the eagles will put out Stephen’s eyes if he does not apologize (for some unnamed, even unimagined wrongdoing; guilt is induced early). The two sides of the leitmotif which will repeatedly recur—that of birds and by extension flight—are sounded first (and positively) in the epigraphic allusion to Daedalus, the ‘cunning artificer’ who fashions wings for himself and so flies free of the labyrinth in which he is trapped, and second (negatively) in the punitive eagles who will ‘come and pull out his eyes’. Perhaps most significantly, Stephen’s aesthetic predisposition shows itself. He attends carefully to, and identifies with the protagonist of, the story his father tells him: ‘He was baby tuckoo.’ He hears the song ‘
O the wild rose blossoms
|
On the little green place
’ and ‘rewrites’ it in his own idiom: ‘
O, the green wothe botheth
’, the lisping ‘botheth’ testifying to the realism of the account, while his transformation of the ‘wild rose’ into the ‘green wothe’ (or ‘geen wothe’ as Joyce actually wrote) suggests for the second time in the novel the contrary, that rather than being a faithful representation of the real world, art ‘alters nature’ (as the novel’s epigraph suggests).
⁴¹
Finally, he transforms the material of everyday life, here society’s imprecations, its threats of punishment, into a work of art:

Pull out his eyes
,

Apologise
,

Apologise
,

Pull out his eyes
.

Apologise
,

Pull out his eyes
,

Pull out his eyes
,

Apologise
.

This kind of symbolic realism or realistic symbolism typifies the double work of
Portrait
, a novel at once vividly ‘true to life’ and aesthetically finely wrought. But there is more than craftedness at issue here, and Joyce draws it quite precisely out of his realistic portrait of Stephen. Stephen aspires to be an artist, an artist whose medium will be language. Joyce makes this plausible by showing him as preoccupied with language: Stephen repeatedly ponders words, their meanings, their effects, their textures, and we are persuaded that his choice of vocation—art not the priesthood—is ‘realistic’. This linguistic preoccupation, however, leads beyond the mere characterization of Stephen. In its repeated address to the nature of language, the novel itself seems to be linguistically and aesthetically self-aware. When, for example, the novel opens ‘Once upon a time’, it self-consciously draws attention to itself
as
a story, as a narrative. The phrase itself has become utterly clichéd: it no longer means anything except ‘what is about to follow will be a story’. Because of this, that ‘once upon a time’ metatextually signifies—it comments on the novel’s status as a text, as a narrative (and not, say, as a transcription of reality). At its most innocent interpretation, the novel begins with story-telling because Stephen will leave the last page hoping to become a writer, and the narrative’s saturation in the idiom of the character elicits this tale-telling opening as a symbolic prefiguration of that future vocation. That’s its realistic function; its metatextual effect is to say ‘pay attention; this is a novel that knows it’s a novel, one wise to the ways of art’.

Over the course of the novel, Stephen’s understanding of language grows more sophisticated, but it never quite catches up with the conceptions of language and of the nature of art possessed by the Joyce who wrote the novel in which Stephen finds himself. But what does Stephen understand and how does this differ from what the novel displays?

‘God’s real name was God’

The opening pages of this novel lay a firm foundation for the plausibility of Stephen’s final decision to become ‘an artist’. His preoccupation with language begins early, matures, remains. So at Clongowes, with all the precocity of the future artist, he contemplates the meaning of ‘belt’:

[H]is hands were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the sidepockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket.
⁴²
And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow had said to Cantwell:

—I’d give you such a belt in a second.

Cantwell had answered:

—Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I’d like to see you. He’d give you a toe in the rump for yourself.

That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! (6–7)

The narrative’s description of Stephen’s being cold, of his keeping his hands in the pockets of his ‘belted’ suit, slides unremarked into Stephen’s contemplation of the name of the thing itself: ‘That was a belt’. But the second the word is applied to the thing, the meaning of the word splits in two: ‘And belt was also to give a fellow a belt.’ If the first meaning of the word sits firmly in a conception of language as nominative, denotative—language and the world coexist in a mutually confirming alliance—the second meaning pulls against this. In this arena, words have multiple meanings derived from and conveyed through the unofficial, extracurricular realm of verbal threat and schoolboy banter. Not surprisingly in this context, Stephen’s thoughts slip on to even less sanctioned words: ‘He’d give you a toe in the rump for yourself’ and ‘rump’ is ‘not a nice expression’. As so often in this first chapter, Stephen retreats from the ‘not nice’ by thinking of ‘nice mother’, who we will remember has a ‘nice smell’ and who plays the piano for him to dance. But this retreat is temporary; the fascination with language persists:

—You are McGlade’s suck.

Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing. (8–9)

If Stephen could be said to have a theory of language at this point, it would be the bow-wow or onomatopoeic theory: the word for the thing imitates its actual acoustic equivalent in reality: ‘suck’ has its name because things that ‘suck’ make ‘sucky’ sounds—like the water in the basin going down the hole: ‘suck. Only louder’. ‘Only louder’: even in this profoundly mimetic theory, words don’t quite match the real thing. And again, oddly, the contemplation of language brings Stephen into the realm of the ‘not nice’. Partly this is verisimilitude: children ponder the meanings of words they don’t quite understand; most often the words they don’t quite understand are words that are ‘not nice’, words that are ‘queer’. The entire first chapter depicts with extraordinary vividness the uneasiness (even powerlessness) that children feel when ‘others’ know something they do not (compare the incident where Stephen is asked whether or not he kisses his mother goodnight (11)).