JAMES JOYCE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
"Silence, exile, and cunning."--these are weapons 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.
Like his fictional hero, Stephen, the young Joyce felt stifled by the
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 was to remain away from Ireland for the rest of his
life.
It was a bold move for several reasons. In spite of his need to
break away from constrictions on his development as a writer, Joyce
had always been close to his family. He still admired the
intellectual and artistic aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition
that had nurtured him. And the city of Dublin was in his soul.
(Asked later how long he had been away from Dublin, he answered:
"Have I ever left it?")
But Joyce did achieve his literary goal in exile. The artistic
climate of continental Europe encouraged experiment. With cunning
(skillfulness) and hard work, Joyce developed his own literary voice.
He labored 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 flight from Ireland, it created a sensation.
Joyce was hailed as an important new force in literature.
Portrait of the Artist is usually read as an autobiography, and many
of the incidents in it come from Joyce's youth. But don't assume
that he was exactly like his sober hero, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce's
younger brother Stanislaus, with whom he was very close, called
Portrait of the Artist "a lying autobiography and a raking satire."
The book should be read as a work of art, not a documentary record.
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 young boy who gradually
defines himself as an artist.
Still, Joyce and Stephen have much in common. Both were indelibly
marked by their upbringing in drab, proud, Catholic Dublin, a city
that harbored dreams of being the capital of an independent nation
but which in reality was a backwater ruled by England. Like Stephen,
Joyce was the eldest son of a family that slid rapidly down the
social and economic ladder. When Joyce was born in 1882, the family
was still comfortably off. But its income dwindled fast after
Joyce's sociable, witty, hard-drinking father, John Stanislaus, lost
