Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Symbolism in Portrait of the Artist

If we were to concern ourselves strictly with plot, we might well say of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that there is no there. Not a great deal actually happens in this essentially autobiographical tale of Stephen Dedalus, and the narrative follows no clear single trajectory of cause and effect. Rather, in one of the first important uses of stream of consciousness, Joyce tells us in this short novel about Stephen's growing self-awareness as a person and as an artist, a growing self-awareness that will cause him by the end of the book to cast off the nationalism, the Catholicism and the sense of clannishness that defines other members of his father and to set off to Paris to become a writer. Joyce's use of symbolism is far more important in conveying what he has to say about these themes than what actually happens in the plot.

Because so little seems to happen in the book, we might expect that it would seem essentially static. (And indeed those reviewers who do not like it tend to point to the pointlessness of a book in which there is essentially no action.) But in fact it can also be argued that as much happens in this novel as happens in any novel, for what drives the narrative of a longer work of fiction is always conflict and the resolution of that conflict.

While we might (or might not, of course) prefer the kind of overt conflict that occurs in a work by Ernest Hemingway, to pick a good anti-Joycean counterpart, we can easily see Stephen's development into a young artist as a clearly defined conflict with a clear resolution. All throughout the book we must ask ourselves if Stephen is going to succeed in his quest to find himself. In the end, we believe that he has, as he begins the next stage of that quest in going to France. This sense of a perilous quest (for after all, what quest can be greater than the attempt to find one's own soul) is what drives the book, giving it a sense of purpose and dynamics that might - in a purely abstract sense - seem to be missing from a book in which nearly all of the action is interior to Stephen's thoughts.

The metaphor of birds and of flight is integral to the novel - beginning with Stephen's name, for of course Daedalus is a bird-man, a creature of the earth who takes on wings and successfully uses them to buy freedom for himself. (It is interesting that we remember his story as being the fall of Icarus for hubris rather than the successful challenging of the heavens by Daedalus.)

One of the important dynamics in the novel as Weldon Thornton argues in his "The Bird Motif" is the way in which Stephen claims the imagery of flight for himself.

Another point of interested in the bird image is Stephen's attempt self-consciously to reconstitute the meaning of the image for humsefl at a crucial point in his life - the climatic scene on the beach in chapter IV. The motif also permits us to see how subtly various conscious and subconscious dimensions of the image ramify in Stephen's psyche.

While it might be tempting to view the image of the bird in Stephen's life (and in the novel) as a relatively straightforward one of liberation and of the release of the authentic self from social bounds, in fact (as Thornton argues) it is a complex and to some extent contradictory one that contains at least three different elements. These are first the threat of punishment (regardless of specific guilt on Stephen's, although given the way in which the novel is embedded in Catholicism, certainly not regardless of the general sin of all humanity in the echoes of the fall of the species from grace); secondly, the metaphor and reality of sight; and thirdly the bird itself, the real birds that appear in Stephen's life and the mythical one that appears in his name (after Thornton).

These different levels of the bird image would stay separate from each other and not blend together in the way that they do (and their miscibility is in fact a key element of the novel) is the way in which Joyce conveys the details of these symbols to us through passages of stream-of-consciousness description.

As William York Tindell argues in his essay "Joyce's Interconnecting Images," one of the keys to understanding the ways in which Joyce's descriptions of Stephen's interior life compel us is to understand how convincingly they draw us into the world of the narrator. The book is replete with small details, but each of these inconsequential details comes to matter as much to us as they do to Stephen precisely because they do matter to Stephen - and very quickly on in the book we come to see the world through his eyes.

We are attracted too to such passages precisely because of their stream-of-consciousness. The same writing conventions that prevent much from happening in the work also allow Joyce to explore the way it is that the human mind actually functions. We take pleasure in watching Stephen think because this is how our own minds function. Human thought is (when we observe its workings in the quiet of our own minds) rarely linear. And the conventions of the Realist novel that require lots of things to happen in a particular order in the external world prevent us from getting to read about how it is that humans think. And precisely because each one of us does value the ways in which people think, we miss this sense of realistic internal discourse. Nothing happens at all in the end of the passage cited above, and yet it is marvelous to read:

White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could (http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/62/frameset.html).