The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Many critics have considered Portrait as the precursor of modernism and the beginning of Joyce’s new realism, which will be further developed in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Modernism, however, cannot be defined so easily. As Butler (2004) argues, there are many kinds of modernism, but what can be said about modernist artist is that they entered unprecedented freedom and confidence in stylistic experiment. According to Childs (2007), modernism in prose is associated with attempts to render human subjectivity, perception, emotion and meaning; it is to break up with the formal realism which is incapable of depicting reality. As Virginia Woolf says: what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?; this is an important question the modernist artists and it is strictly related to the new realism that Joyce was defending.

The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is considered to be a Künstlerroman, narrating the development of an artist. It exposes the wakening of Stephen Dedalus as he begins to rebel against the values and beliefs of his society. The novel starts[1] in the mind of a child; differently from what we see in formal realism with a direct discourse, here we start as if we were in a child perspective, and as Stephen grew up and developed, the world started being organized with new words and points of view.Filled up with epiphanies and streams of consciousness, the Portrait is an example of the new realism and the modernist purpose of a transvaluation of all values. In Portrait, there is an articulation of an Irish-Catholic experience, while a mythical dimension is also emphasized. In the final pages of Portrait, Stephen as a young man, finds his voice and the narrative has a dramatic shift, from the third-person narrator to Stephen himself, in a first person narrative. The consideration[2] of Stephen is an example of the new perspective of realism, in which past, present and future are not strictly separated, different from the Cartesian perspective of formal realism.The new realism in Portrait is also the element which builds up the rhetorical masks that deny authority and nationalism, not only the denial of nationalism and religious discourses, but it also makes up an ambiguity of Stephen Dedalus in the novel.

ReferencesATTRIDGE, Derek (ed.). The Cambridge companion to James Joyce.  Cambridge University Press, 2004.BULSON, Eric. The Cambridge introduction to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.CHILDS, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2007.

[1] ‘‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens  little boy named baby tuckoo ’’[2] “The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future”