IndexA Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManJoyce has been hailed as a major new force in literature.You will participate with Stephen Dedalus on his journey of self-discovery. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Silence, exile and cunning." - these are the weapons that Stephen Dedalus chooses in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And these, too, were weapons that its author, James Joyce, used against a hostile world. You say no to plagiarism Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay Like his fictional hero , Stephen, the young Joyce felt stifled by narrow interests, religious pressures and political squabbles of turn-of-the-century Ireland. In 1904, when he was twenty-two, he left his family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the "dull torpor" of Dublin for the European continent to become a writer, with brief exceptions, he would remain far from 'Ireland for the rest of his life. Despite the need to free himself from the limitations of his development as a writer, he still admired the intellectual and artistic aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition who had raised him. And the city of Dublin was in his soul. (When asked later how long he had been away from Dublin, he replied: "Have I ever left it?"). But Joyce achieved his literary goal in exile. The artistic climate of continental Europe encouraged experimentation. With cunning (skill) and hard work, Joyce developed his own literary voice. He worked for ten years on Portrait of the Artist, the fictionalized account of his youth. When it appeared in book form in 1916, twelve years after Joyce's escape from Ireland, it caused a sensation. Joyce was hailed as a major new force in literature. Portrait of the Artist is usually read as an autobiography, and many of the episodes in it come from Joyce's youth. But don't assume he was exactly like his sober hero, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce's younger brother Stanislaus, to whom he was very close, called Portrait of the Artist "a lying autobiography and an angry satire". The book should be read as a work of art, not as a documentary document. Joyce transformed autobiography into fiction by selecting, sifting, and reconstructing scenes from his own life to create a portrait of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and serious boy who gradually defines himself as an artist. However, Joyce and Stephen have a lot in common. Both were indelibly marked by their upbringings in grey, proud, Catholic Dublin, a city that harbored dreams of becoming the capital of an independent nation but was in reality a backwater ruled by England. Like Stephen, Joyce was the eldest child of a family that slipped rapidly down the social and economic ladder. When Joyce was born in 1882, the family was still wealthy. But his income rapidly declined after Joyce's gregarious, witty, hard-drinking father, John Stanislaus, lost his political job - as Stephen's father, Simon - after the fall of Irish leader and independence promoter Charles Stewart Parnell . Although the loss of office was not directly related to Parnell's fall, Joyce's father worshiped "the uncrowned King of Ireland" and blamed his loss on anti-Parnell forces such as the Roman Catholic Church. (Joyce portrays the kind of strong emotions aroused by Parnell in the Christmas dinner scene in the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist.) Like Simon Dedalus, the unemployed John Stanislaus Joyce was forced to relocatehis family frequently, often leaving rent bills unpaid. however, he appears to have had a more cheerful outlook on his family problems and to have shown more patience with his irresponsible father than his fictional hero. He appears to have inherited some of his father's temperament; sometimes he could act the fool, and he laughed so he was soon called "Sunny Jim". He also inherited a tenor voice good enough to make him consider a concert career. Many believe that musical talent is responsible for Joyce's gift of language. Joyce's father was determined that his son receive the best education possible, and although the family's precarious finances forced the boy to move from school to school, he received a rigorous Jesuit education. In Portrait of the Artist Joyce relives through Stephen the intellectual and emotional struggles that resulted from his school career. Joyce's classmates admired the rebellious brilliance that questioned authority, but, like some brilliant students you may know, he remained an outsider, socially and intellectually. The religious education he received in Jesuit schools also shaped Joyce, first and foremost giving him a faith to believe in. inside and then a weight to rebel against. Like Stephen, he was for a time devoutly religious, then found that other attractions prevailed. At the age of fourteen he had begun his sexual life in secret in the brothels of Dublin, and although he was temporarily overcome with remorse after a religious retreat held at his Catholic school, he soon realized that he could not lead the life of virtuous obedience required to a priest. Instead, he exchanged religious devotion for devotion to writing. As a student at University College Dublin, Joyce studied Latin and modern languages. Although the Gaelic League and other groups hoped to gain Irish cultural independence from Britain by promoting Irish literature and the Irish language, the nonconformist Joyce rejected them. He felt closer to the less provincial trends developing in continental Europe. He memorized entire pages of Gustave Flaubert, the French pioneer of psychological realism and author of Madame Bovary, whose precision of style and observation he envied. He also admired the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who shocked the world by introducing previously forbidden topics such as venereal disease and immorality among "respectable" citizens into his works. Both of these writers drew, as Joyce would, on all aspects of life: the beautiful, the sordid, and the commonplace. But realism was not the only influence on the young Joyce. The subtle and evocative poetic imagery of French poets such as Stephane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud, who used symbols to convey shades of meaning, appealed to his love of the musicality of words and the power of words to evoke unexpected psychological associations. Their example is also followed in Portrait of the Artist. Before leaving university, Joyce had already written several essays - one of them on Ibsen - and had formulated the core of his own theory of art, a theory similar to Stephen's in Chapter Five. The famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats was impressed by the scruffy but precocious youth and tried to lure Joyce into the ranks of Irish intellectuals. But once again the arrogant newcomer rejected his homeland, choosing to remain aloof because he felt that Yeats and his group viewed Ireland's past too romantically and viewed its present with too much nationalism. Instead, at the age of twenty, Joyce did what Stephen Dedalus was about to do at the end of the novel and moved away from his family, his countryand his church. He escaped to the continent. In 1903 he returned to Ireland to visit his dying mother, but soon after her death (1904) he headed for Europe again, accompanied by the maid he had fallen in love with, Nora Barnacle. The sensual and ignorant Nora seemed an unlikely companion for Joyce, but she proved (despite Joyce's irritable suspicions of her) a loyal life partner. In Trieste (then a cosmopolitan city in Austria-Hungary), Joyce wrote incessantly and earned money. a life teaching English. He put together Dubliners, a group of stories based on short experiences he called "epiphanies." For Joyce, who believed in the "meaning of trivial things," an epiphany was a moment of spiritual revelation triggered by a seemingly insignificant detail. A random word, gesture, or particular situation could suddenly reveal a significant truth about an entire life. He also continued work on a novel he had begun in Ireland. The first, short version of what we know as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been roundly rejected in 1904, before Joyce left Ireland. “I cannot print what I cannot understand,” wrote the British publisher who refused. Undeterred, Joyce expanded the story to nearly a thousand pages. It now bore the title Stephen Hero and was a conventional Bildungsroman, a novel about the moral and psychological development of a young man. Other examples of such novels might include Sons and Lovers (1913) by D.H. Lawrence or The Way of All Flesh (1903) by Samuel Butler. (Some critics would be more specific and call Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist Kunstlerromane-novels about the development of young artists.) Then, dissatisfied, Joyce decided to reformulate his novel into a shorter, more original form. The final version of Portrait of the Artist was blocked by British censors, and only in 1914 Joyce, with the help of Yeats and the American poet Ezra Pound, managed to print it in serial form in a "small review". The selfish one. Dubliners also appeared in the same year, long delayed by the printers' boycott because of its alleged offensiveness. In 1916 Portrait of the Artist was published in book form in England and the United States, thanks only to the efforts of Harriet Weaver, editor of The Egoist and Joyce's faithful financial and moral supporter. When Portrait of the Artist appeared, critical reaction was mixed. It was called “trash” and “brilliant but bad,” among other things. Some readers objected to the graphic physical description, irreverent treatment of religious issues, the darkness of its symbolism, and its experimental style. But it was also praised by others as the most exciting English prose of the new century. Joyce, who had fled to neutral Switzerland at the outbreak of the First World War, was acclaimed as "a new writer with a new form" who had broken with the tradition of the English novel. What distinguishes Portrait of the Artist from other confessional novels about the development of a creative young man, such as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh is that the action takes place primarily in the mind of the central character. To portray that mind, Joyce began to develop a technique called interior monologue, or stream of consciousness, in which he directly quoted his hero's random, formless thoughts. Joyce used this technique sparingly in Portrait of the Artist; he exploited it more fully in his later novels. Portrait of the Artist also differs from more conventional novels because it does not show the development of Stephen Dedalus in a direct chronological progression. Nor is it seen through easily understandable flashbacks to the past. Joyce instead presents a series of episodes that at first glance can."