Download - Intro to a Portrait of the Artist
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An Introduction toA Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
Based on Hugh Kenners introduction
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Narration
The narrator is different than expected. Not first
person- no I. So it must be third person, but third-
person narrators are supposed to be reliable; they
give us the truth; they dont tend to talk about
moocows and hairy faces in childish ways; they donttend to evolve as the protagonist grows and develops
adding literary sophistication each chapter. So why?
Why would Joyce choose to do this? Who is
narrating? What does an evolving (thereforeimperfect) narrator suggest?
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A Good Editor
The first draft was 913
pages and 25 chapters
long. The entire finished
product took 10 years tocomplete
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Rembrandts Painting A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man
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Rembrandt would fix his gaze in the mirror to the
world behind the mirror as he painted. Joyces use
of the title may suggest the following chiasmic
structure:
Background Painter Mirror Painters Image Background Image
Dublin Joyce Stephen Dublin
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Chiasmus
Biblical Poetry Structure
ABBA or ABCCBA or ABCDDCBA A mirrorimage.
Portrait is riddled with chiasmus, (Apologise, pull
out his eyes, pull out his eyes, Apologise.) Even the structure of the novel itself is chiasmic.
(Parts two and four both end with images ofwomen; parts three and five end with men.) I
In the center of the middle chapter lies the
passage: The preacher took a chainless watchfrom a pocket within his soutane and, havingconsidered its dial for a moment in silence, placedit silently before him on the table.
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Silence
Could it be silence at the center? Time?
Some combination of the two? What is the
mirror? (Joyce used silence as a chiasmic
center in Finnegans Wake)Are books inherently silent? How does a book
compare to a painting? Which one is more
silent? What other reasons might he have
chosen to fixate on silence? Why are weasking so many questions? What time is it?
Where are my car keys?
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Developmental Progress
Progression of senses in chapter one:
Hearing: the story
Sight: the fathers face
Taste: lemon platt Touch: warm and cold
Smell: the oilsheet
Why are they in this order? What is thesignificance of their development?
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Development of Gradation:
First warm then cold
His mother had a nicer smell than his father
Uncle Charles and Dante were older than his fatherand mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante
The Vances lived in number seven. They had adifferent father and mother. They were Eileens fatherand mother.
When I grow up Ill be a father, when she grows up,shell be a mother.
When he was grown up, he was going to marryEileen
Why does Joyce highlight this relationship-orienteddevelopment?
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Male/Female Chapters:
Odd-numbered chapters appeal to afather. Even-numbered chapters end withwomen
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Women
Chapter two ends with Stephen s loss of virginity to ananonymous harlot. Chapter four ends with Stephen looking ata girl standing in the water, alone and still, gazing out to sea.Right after he has realized that the priesthood is not for him.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still,
gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic hadchanged into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a cranes andpure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioneditself as a sign upon her flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft huedas ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white
fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft whitedown. Her slate blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waistand dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a birds softand slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish,and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
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Female Analysis
Notice how he creates her. He doesnt just describeher; he fashions a beautiful creature from the bottomup as he looks at a real-life girl being natural. Whycreate a bird-like creature? How might this tie to themythology to which he is attached? Why did he take
great pains to give her the body of a bird, but thenuse girlish twice before describing her hair andface? Also, we see here Joyces ability to mirror therush of a juvenile crush- the overstatement andrhapsodizing of a teenager (a talented teenager, but
still obviously young.) Is he romanticizing her (asGretta Conroy in The Dead?) or is he seeing awoman as she truly is for the first time (epiphany)?
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flight
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James Joyces Father
Get toknow me!
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The Male Figures
The last line of the book is a diary entry of Stephens
written on the eve of his departure from Ireland to
Paris. It reads:
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever
in good stead. Compare to John 17:5 And now,
Father, do thou exalt me at they own side from the
Vigil of Ascension Day where the Son addresses the
Father.
and compare to the section in chapter 4
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Now as never before, his strange name seemed to him aprophecyNow, at the name of the fabulous artificer, heseemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see awinged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing
the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening apage of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, ahawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy ofthe end he had been born to serve and had been followingthrough the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of
the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggishmatter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishablebeing?
Daedalus
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Has Stephen selected a substitute father? Is he speaking to theGreek Daedalus, or Simon Dedalus, his father, in the finalentry? If he is speaking to the Greek, what is the tyrannizedisland from which he is fleeing? Who or what is the drownedIcarus? Why the allusion to a Biblical father and son? What
might that suggest about the relationship? What about the firstline of the book and the moocow present in it? His father toldhim about the moocowcompare to the wooden cow built byDaedalus- the one that started his woes. And what about allthe other Fathers he will encounter: Father Dolan beats him, he
protests to Father Conmee, a nameless father delivers ascathing sermon that has Stephen confess to anothernameless Father? So at the end of the book when he speaks tothe unnamed Father- are we correct to assume that it is hisown biological father?
Fathers
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James Joyce at age 2
Im alreadysmarterthan you.
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Joyce at age 6
How do youlike me now?
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With his Buddies at School
http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/JJ_class.html -
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Clongowes schooloriginally a castle
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Clongowes Wood College
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Joyce at
Graduation
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Joyce at 22
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Dead?
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The Mino taur. Jan Parker (b.1941).
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The Minotaur
George
FrederickWatts , 1885.
Tate Gallery,
London.
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Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Stamnos by the Kleophrades Painter, c.500-450 BCE. British Museum, London.
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,Approximately 1580. Hans Bol
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558. Pieter Bruegel
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Daedalus watch es Icarus Fall
Solis designed 178 woodcuts in all for this version of the Metamorphoses.
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