Growth and Expression

Straight Outta Ireland: Stephen's Self-Understanding will soon enable him to follow NWA's command

I have been more critical of Stephen throughout our reading of Portrait than Joyce probably intended any reader to be. A lot of this comes from how my own sensibility clashes with Stephen’s, but, at last, in the end of part IV, Stephen grows significantly in his self-concept, and I am thus at peace.

Stephen has been artistically and aesthetically inclined for as long as we have known him. This is simply something we expect and accept. Sentences like “A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!” are something we just deal with as part of Stephen’s character (165). I complained about these before because I perceived his artistic inclination and expression (i.e. florid language and imagery) to be borne out something he himself misunderstood or something he erroneously idealized (the obvious example here is the Catholic Church). In these last pages of part IV, however, a perceptibly matured self-awareness emerges from Stephen. He has gone from thinking artistically about the Church or girls to knowing that expressing himself artistically is itself crucial to his existence. He considers his own name and its relation to the Daedalus myth in an enormously important question: “What did it mean?…a prophecy of the end he had been borne to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?” (162). It seems clear towards the end of this section that Stephen too relishes this new sense of meaning and self, when he “felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies: and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast” (166). If this doesn’t scream a sense of cosmic belonging, I don’t what does. Forgive the colloquial tone, but I’m gonna let Stephen do Stephen, as long as he doesn’t get carried away (the implications of the Icarus story loom large).