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

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has something to say about beauty and attraction. The final quarter of the book is much concerned with a debate among Stephen and his peers about classic definitions of what is beautiful. The boys define and reduce things rather coldly—and the dialogue here makes a curious contrast to the chapters that precede it about Stephen battling lust. The intellectualization of beauty, looking at everything with the “the dullness of a thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of god” (175) is, perhaps, the real sin. The boys misguidedly attempt to distill what is primal and beyond language. What rings truer than these scholarly debates is Stephen’s battle with sexual desire as it is played against a terror of the afterlife and the threat of pain and misery therein. “What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction?” (95). There’s a rich complexity to the psychological conflict here (Stephen becomes terrified at the thought of pleasure) and Stephen’s battle is reminiscent of something every young person brought up to fear hell must at times consider.

At one point in the novel, Stephen’s friend Davin interrupts the richly poetic and deeply intellectual tone of the whole book to declare, “Too deep for me, Stevie…But a man’s country comes first. Ireland’s first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after” (190). Interesting words in light of the book’s title. Does Joyce consider himself an artist first? Or first an Irishman? The book concludes with a dialogue in which Stephen makes it clear that he (much like his creator) is a religious unbeliever, although still sympathetic of a system “which is logical and coherent,” (Catholicism, that is, compared with the alternative, Protestantism). Even so, Stephen declares that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself freely in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can…” (232). I suspect that this is the novel’s primary message—to be defined as an individual first (an “artist” first), as a member of a community only secondarily.