Theory and Practice of Genre in Portrait

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Stephen's Esthetic and Joyce's Art: Theory and Practice of Genre in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" Author(s): Jerry Allen Dibble Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 29-40 Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225573 . Accessed: 21/04/2013 13:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Journal of Narrative Theory and Department of English Language and Literature, Eastern Michigan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Narrative Technique. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:28:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Theory and Practice of Genre in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Transcript of Theory and Practice of Genre in Portrait

  • Stephen's Esthetic and Joyce's Art: Theory and Practice of Genre in "A Portrait of the Artistas a Young Man"Author(s): Jerry Allen DibbleSource: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 29-40Published by: Journal of Narrative TheoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225573 .Accessed: 21/04/2013 13:28

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

    .

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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  • Stephen's Esthetic and Joyce's Art: Theory and Practice of

    Genre in A Portrait of the Artist

    as a Young Man Jerry Allen Dibble

    We have been told that Ulysses is epic because it is based on the Odyssey; that all of Joyce's work, including Ulysses, is dramatic, except for Chamber Music, of course, which is lyrical; and that Stephen Hero and Portrait are lyrical, Ulysses epic, and Finnegan's Wake dramatic- and these are only a few of the various, contradictory attempts that have been made to apply Stephen's genre theory as it appears in A Portrait to the body of Joyce's own work.' Clearly, there is something wrong, so much so that Wayne Booth, for one, has been led to suggest that the text itself is at fault, that it is hopelessly ambiguous and incapable of commu- nicating a single, clear meaning.2

    It would be fairer to say, however, that our approach to Stephen's genre theory, unlike our approach to the more prominent esthetic of apprehension which precedes it, has been unusually haphazard. To date, for example, no one has asked in any systematic way what the relation- ship is between the genre theory and the rest of Stephen's esthetic; nor have those who have dealt with the genre theory as a separate entity attempted to apply it to Joyce's work in terms consistent with those Stephen uses. Instead, seizing on several phrases of special appeal, we have gone to the text in search of "fingernail parings," "detachment," or "god-like indifference," with only the sketchiest notions of the actual narrative forms that may have been intended by Joyce's definitions.3 And this, we may note, in the case of an author who never thought "abstractly," whose most generalized ideas were always arrived at and illustrated by reference to the most concrete examples. Let us look

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  • 30 The Journal of Narrative Technique

    again, then, at the things Stephen says about the three genres and, as a case in point, at the actual narrative style of A Portrait of the Artist.

    To begin with, it is not true that A Portrait is "authorless," as some critics have maintained.4 If we mean by "author" only that kind of narrator who makes his presence felt through intrusive authorial judg- ments-as Fielding does in Tom Jones or as Joyce does in Stephen Hero when he describes Stephen as a "heaven-ascending essayist"-then there is, of course, no sense in speaking of an authorial presence in A Portrait. Unlike more traditional novels, A Portrait does not often force the reader into an awareness of a narrator who stands apart from the action he is describing, who exists in a world separate from the char- acters he portrays, and who remains unaffected by the events that change their lives.

    There are, however, other narrative elements besides explicit com- mentary which are likely to contribute to the reader's sense of an autho- rial presence and thus of a distinction between the author's sphere and the world the characters inhabit. A statement, for example, which breaks into the chronological order of events in order to anticipate a future occurrence, even when there is no moral judgment involved, re- minds the reader of a narrator who exists apart from the world of action. And, even when the events of the novel are narrated without anachro- nous interruption, as they are in A Portrait, a passage like the following suggests the separate existence of an authorial personality simply by virtue of the point of view implicit in a statement of continuing action:

    When the order list had been booked the two would go on to the park where an old friend of Stephen's Father, Mike Flynn, would be found seated on a bench. Then would begin Stephen's run round the park. Mike Flynn would stand at the gate near the railway station, watch in hand, while Stephen ran round the track in the style Mike Flynn favoured, his head high lifted, his knees well lifted and his hands held straight down at his sides. (p. 61)

    A similar passage appears near the end of the same chapter, where again the events described are seen from the point of view of a narrator not limited in his knowledge to the events which transpire at any given point in time, and thus empowered to mould together for us a series of actions repeated over a long period of time.

    For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through Stephen's fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for the family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre to see Ingomar or The Lady of Lyons. In his coat pockets he carried squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers' pockets bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought

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  • Genre: Theory and Practice 31

    presents for everyone, overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists, drew up a form of commonwealth for the house- hold by which every member of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he could do no more he drove up and down the city in trams.5

    It will be useful for the moment to think of passages like these as one extreme in a polar relationship between Joyce, the narrator of A Por- trait, and Stephen Dedalus, the central character. The crucial problem here, as Wayne Booth suggests, is one of distance, and if passages which seem to dissect Stephen's actions represent one extreme of the distance felt between Joyce and Stephen, the passages which are usually referred to as "lyrical," in which we seem to partake directly of Stephen's thoughts and emotions without outside interference, are surely the other:

    The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next. He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box.

    At last it had come. He knelt in the silent gloom and raised his eyes to the white crucifix suspended above him. God could see that he was sorry. He would tell all his sins. His confession would be long, long. Everybody in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Let them know. It was true. But God had promised to forgive him if he was sorry. He was sorry. He clasped his hands and raised them towards the white form, praying with his darkened eyes, praying with all his trembling body, swaying his head to and fro like a lost creature, praying with whimpering lips. (p. 143)

    Dorrit Cohn has analyzed this passage so well that, in the main, it is necessary here only to recall the major points of her argument.6 The passage is, she notes, a prime example of the use of erlebte Rede or "narrated monologue"-a narrative style in which a character's thoughts can be rendered in his own idiom, without relinquishing the third person form of narration or the authorial use of the past tense. As a result, the passage "can weave in and out of Stephen's mind, can glide from narrator to character and back again without perceptible transi- tions."' The use of narrated monologue thus enables Joyce to plunge the reader into the immediate here and now of Stephen's consciousness, eliminating the explicit distance between himself and his character. The result is a passage shot through with moments of lyric intensity-in Stephen's sense of the word as well as our own. Immersed so entirely in Stephen's own moment of emotion, the narrative seems temporarily isolated from all other moments in space and time, tied down as it were to the limited psychic state which occupies Stephen at the moment he

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  • 32 The Journal of Narrative Technique

    walks "blindly" into the confessional. In many places, moreover, the passage renders thoughts and feelings which are perhaps not fully formed in Stephen's mind, which are experienced by him below the level of self-consciousness and reflection, and which therefore show him to us as a character "more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion" (p. 214).

    Yet Professor Cohn is surely only partly correct when she talks about the "lyric oneness" in Joyce's presentation of Stephen's monologue; for, as she points out elsewhere, the narrated monologue can be accu- rately defined "only by insisting on the presence of the unobtrusive narrator."8 That presence remains with us here not only in the form of the past tense and the use of the third person, which remind us, however indirectly, that Stephen's thoughts are the subject of refining and objecti- fying narration, but also in the irony of the passage which reveals the unconscious pride in Stephen's repentance at the same time it reveals his most private thoughts:

    He would tell all his sins. His confession would be long, long. Everybody in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Let them know. It was true. (p. 143)

    In short, at neither extreme of distance between narrator and char- acter can we speak of a totally unmixed experience. On the one hand, there is a sense in the earlier passages of looking down from a world separate in time and space from Stephen's own-a world from the greater perspective of which recurring actions can be summarized and drawn together, even judged in a way which implies a sensibility differ- ent from Stephen's own. And yet, there is no sense here of a Fielding- esque narrator with a separate, fully developed narrative personality and a location at a fixed temporal distance from the characters and events he is describing. Unlike the narrator in Tom Jones, the narrator of A Por- trait floats above the action, enshrouded even at his greatest distance from the characters in an indeterminacy of time, place and stylistic identity.

    On the other hand, the passages usually described as "lyrical," in which we as readers seem to be totally immersed in Stephen's "stream" of consciousness, are likewise marked by an infused element of epic narration, even at those points where the explicit narrative distance seems to have disappeared altogether. If, at such points, it hardly seems possible to speak of a separate narrator at all, a narrator is nevertheless there. In fact, it is precisely because Joyce's implied presence makes itself felt in one way or another at every point in the work that there is never a sense of abrupt transition as the work moves from the narrator's broader, external perspective, toward the involuted here and now of Stephen's consciousness and back again. Thus, in A Portrait it is virtu-

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  • Genre: Theory and Practice 33

    ally impossible to talk about an established narrative distance between Joyce and Stephen: at one point it may be possible to speak confidently of Joyce's narrative report, at another, of Stephen's thoughts and feel- ings; but for the greater part of the work, Joyce's narrative is a thing of sublime slipperiness, in which it is often impossible to say exactly how much of a given statement is Joyce's narrative and how much is Stephen's thought.

    The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the box. The near slide was drawn. A penitent entered where the other penitent had come out. A soft whispering noise floated in vapor- ous cloudlets out of the box. It was the woman: soft whispering cloud- lets, soft whispering vapour, whispering and vanishing. (p. 142).

    The first sentence is clearly Joyce's narration, although the viewpoint is limited to Stephen's field of perception and the content to those things which occupy his attention. The last sentence is equally clearly a portion of narrated monologue, but where the interior view of things starts and the authorial narration stops is a question impossible of definite answer.

    We can, however, describe with some certainty the overall narrative situation of the work and its relationship to Stephen's theory of genres. As we have seen, A Portrait is lyrical only in a sense which immediately disqualifies it as a lyrical novel: for just at that moment when we seem to hear Stephen' voice most directly, when he as character seems lyrically "more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion," we actually hear least the voice of Joyce, the artist who presents us with Stephen's image. To the extent that Stephen's thoughts and feelings take on the qualities of an interior monologue, they point to a lyrical relationship between Stephen and his object; but they are then Stephen's "statements" about his object, not Joyce's. Joyce as narrator remains within or behind or beyond Stephen's voice, making no state- ments of his own. In this way, Joyce manages to make use of the lyric mode by incorporating Stephen's lyricism into the larger framework of the novel as a whole. But the fact that he does so hardly justifies our calling A Portrait a lyrical novel.

    What then can be said of the epical qualities of A Portrait? First, of course, there is the subject matter itself, as indicated by the book's title. Obviously a great deal of the significance we attach to the title depends on the sense in which we understand the phrase "the Artist"; that is, whether we take it to mean the artist in general or the particular artist who has here presented us with his own image "as a young man." But even assuming that the title is a reference to the quasi-autobiographical content of the work, the problem of form or genre in A Portrait has hardly been solved.

    If A Portrait is an example of the artist "prolong[ing] and brood[ing]

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  • 34 The Journal of Narrative Technique

    upon himself as the centre of an epical event" (p. 214), it is hardly for that reason an example of the simplest epical form. Here there is no explicit relationship between narrator and character of the sort that we find, for example, in first-person narratives like Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. Nor, as we have seen, is there an epical narrative "person- ality" of the sort that one finds in Tom Jones, separate from the char- acters and consistently identifiable through its own mannerisms of style, syntax and value. Instead, A Portrait offers the reader a traditional epic polarity between narrator and fictional world, but one in which the per- sonality or identity of the narrator is not only veiled but constantly in the process of breaking down as it flows toward the main character in the story, taking on his "personality," vocabulary, syntax, and even his values as the narrative distance lessens. This principle is unmistakeably in effect in the opening chapters of A Portrait, where, as has often been pointed out, the style and syntax reflect the developing consciousness of the central character. As we have seen, however, the practice of using Stephen's own words and emotions to describe the progress of events continues well into the closing chapters of the book.

    Is A Portrait, then, epical in form at all? Or is it, perhaps, not an epical work that has somehow absorbed into itself the lyrical mode, but a dramatic work that has absorbed both the epical and the lyrical modes? Obviously, this is a difficult question to answer, and not less so in light of the way Stephen describes the transition between epical and dramatic:

    The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills each person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personal- ity of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, imper- sonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (p. 215)

    The similarities here between Joyce's idea of the dramatic and Eliot's have often been mentioned, but have never been followed to their logical conclusion. For Eliot, "the voice of the poet addressing other people is the dominant voice of the epic"; the voice of the dramatic mode, on the other hand, is the voice we hear "when [the poet] is saying, not what he would say in his own person [to an audience], but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character."'9 The dramatic mode is thus marked by "a variation of the style of the poetry according to the character to whom it is given," and in

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  • Genre: Theory and Practice 35

    it the characters speak for themselves, not for the author, and in their own voices and words, not his. The personality of the artist thus dissolves into the impersonation of an independent character who is thereby brought to esthetic life. "The world of a great poetic dramatist," Eliot concludes, "is a world in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden."~'to

    When applying Eliot's definition to the novel, one must resist the temptation to interpret it too literally, to see in his qualifying phrase, "where the characters may be said to live,"1' only a demand for con- vincing dialogue. As some reflection will show, the formal element in A Portrait that is most important in establishing its claim to a dramatic character is not the dialogue, as convincing as that may be, but the use of narrated monologue. For here, perhaps even more so than in the dialogue itself, one finds the sympathy, the ability to speak in a voice and in words other than one's own, that Joyce and Eliot both empha- size. In fact, if the breakdown of the epical form begins "when the [authorial] vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills each person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper intan- gible esthetic life," then it is easy to see in the quasi-lyrical quality of narrated monologue one of the means by which the dramatic artist es- capes his own personality in order to endow others with theirs. Narrated monologue thus becomes, as a representative dramatic element, an "im- personalization" of the narrative in a new sense. It is not merely a de-personalization of the artist, but an impersonation of the character's voice by the artist. It is, in short, a means of presenting the esthetic image at once lyrically and at an epic distance from the blind absorption in the instant of emotion which it communicates.

    The same statement may be made with equal justice about the "imper- sonal" narrative style of the work as a whole. If the dramatic form enables us to see the esthetic image as "that thing which it is and no other thing," it does so because it removes the image itself from the realm of the "mediated" or historically created and places it instead in direct or immediate relation to others. Consequently, it is the fixed personality of the artist, the evidence of his own subjectivity and the mark of his own historial attitudes, not his presence, that is refined out of existence as the dramatic form is reached. Like the "narrator" in A Portrait, the dramatic artist loses his fixed identity, his established dis- tance from the characters, and his individual mannerisms of style, syn- tax and vocabulary; but he becomes, in the process, a non-identity, not a non-entity.

    The distinction may be made more concretely by reference to Stephen's own experiments with the naively dramatic. The three vig- nettes in Chapter II, which begin "He was sitting," portray Stephen's attempt to "chronicle with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret" (p. 67). Significantly, this

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  • 36 The Journal of Narrative Technique

    attempt at machine-like indifference and detachment breaks down even before the third vignette is over, and, as a general attitude toward life, culminates in the "flood tide" of emotion which overcomes Stephen at the end of the chapter. As if to reinforce the meaning of the passage, we are given immediately thereafter the description of Stephen's poem, "To E- C- ", in which neither he nor she "appeared vividly," and the corresponding memory of his attempted poem on Parnell, which yielded nothing more than the names and addresses of his classmates. In both cases, the message is abundantly clear: the pose of dramatic realism, in which the artist attempts to remain completely removed from his char- acters, is as futile for the artist as for the man himself:

    How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial rela- tions, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumpled mole.

    He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that divided him from mother and brother and sister. (p. 98)

    The true image of the dramatic relationship between the artist and material is the one embodied in the sea-girl at the end of Chapter IV, where Stephen's definition of the dramatic form is anticipated even in the language used to describe his mood as he goes to encounter the reality of his vocation as artist: "So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him" (p. 168). In such circumstances, the artist and his object are both im- mersed, literally and figuratively, in the tides of life, giving and receiving without domination. The artist on his side shapes and gives to the mate- rial its conscious epic meaning, the object on the other side influences the artist, subjecting him to its lyrical truth without overcoming his center of balance and stability. In many ways, of course, Stephen's reaction to the sea-girl is less than ideally constituted, but the point Joyce is making here comes to us through the implied comparison of the sea-girl to the prostitute of Chapter II and the Church of Chapter III, both of which act as extreme forces on Stephen, pushing him toward a relationship to life which is either too close or too distant.'2

    S. L. Goldberg makes a similar point when he says that the stasis of true art is a balance of moral attitudes, not their absence.'3 Yet the question remains: how is one to conceiveformally of an artist who is at once detached, involved, and refined out of existence? Clearly, A Por- trait, as we have described it here, is a work in which the author is

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  • Genre: Theory and Practice 37

    constantly dissolving into the work itself by altering his voice or mood or language to fit the character or emotion described, and to that extent it is dramatic. But we must be careful of taking the word "dramatic," and our notion of the form that accompanies it, in too absolute a sense. It is perhaps some indication of the way we tend to think about Joyce that we assume "dramatic" was an accomplished reality from the begin- ning of his career as an author rather than a projected ideal realized in various ways throughout his career. Thus the narrator of the stories in Dubliners can be seen as indifferent, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails, and the work, accordingly, as dramatic in character. But if one wishes to speak of the dramatic form in terms of vitality, esthetic life, and the "true" view of characters' lives, then it seems clear that the effect of effacement alone as a dramatic technique has its own limita- tions. A Portrait may thus be seen as going a step beyond the dramatic technique of Dubliners by recognizing implicitly the impossibility of bringing a character to life without giving up an enforced detachment which is, after all, as much an intrusion of the author's personality on the lives of his characters as explicit, intrusive commentary would be.

    Nevertheless, A Portrait also has its limitations so far as Stephen's definition of the dramatic novel is concerned. Dissolve as the narrator's personality may, the fundamental structure of the work remains that of the traditional epic, with a single narrator limited in his moods and style to the conventional devices associated with the novel. Whatever may happen in A Portrait, the narrator must remain, to some extent, the narrator of epic fiction, and his role vis-a-vis the fictional world of Stephen's adventure remains as fixed for us as Fielding's or Homer's.

    The fixity of narrative structure in A Portrait is, of course, just the thing that Joyce abandons in Ulysses, and it may not be out of the way to see in the pyrotechnics of that work yet another redefinition of the dramatic form. We are all familiar by now with the multiplicity of narrative modes in the work-all of which are designed to be in some way appropriate to the subject matter of the chapter in which they appear. Less often men- tioned is the intentional inconsistency of narrative structure within indi- vidual chapters, the overall result of which is a general disruption of the conventional relationship between the author and the represented world of the novel. In the following passage, for example, it is no longer possible to speak of a polarity between author and character of the sort one finds in A Portrait. Instead, the effect is that of a mixture of narrative modes in which narration and narrated monologue are broken into without warning by interior monologue, and exterior views in the third person and past tense unexpectedly absorb first person, present tense thought fragments from Bloom's early morning consciousness:

    Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the

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    hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. -Mkgnao! -O, there you are, Mr. Bloom said, turning from the fire. The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writing table. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.14

    Taken together, the alterations in narrative method within individual chapters and from one chapter to another in Ulysses point to nothing less than a fundamental alteration in Joyce's own conception of the dramatic personality of the artist, indeed of the idea of objectivity itself. Here, dramatic narration is realized not as detachment alone, not as mere impersonalization, but as a series of impersonalizations which ex- tend even to the narrator and the narration. Such practice suggests, among other things, that the form of epic narration, like the pseudo-de- tachment of the effaced author, signifies a certain kind of "personal" view toward the subject matter, and that the only truly dramatic narrator is one who "disappears" by appearing in the multifarious shapes im- posed by the material he deals with. Thus, in Ulysses we can truly say that the author is everywhere present and yet everywhere hidden. Clearly, this is a notion of "objectivity" and detachment which goes far beyond the naivete of scientific observation, and it is both interesting and corroborative to find that, as we move from Dubliners to Ulysses, "realism" becomes less and less the distinguishing characteristic of Joyce's work. That is not to say, of course, that the "naturalistic" elements in Ulysses are negligible and that they play no part in the overall effect of the work. Rather, they are here more than ever subser- vient to a higher notion of realism, just as the epic form itself, still noticeably present in A Portrait, is here taken up into a higher concep- tion of narrative form in which it becomes simply another element in a truly god-like perspective on humanity.

    State University of New York Stony Brook, New York

    NOTES

    1. The three interpretations cited are to be found in Robert Ryf, A New Approach to Joyce (Berkeley, 1964), p. 35; Ellsworth Mason, "Joyce's Categories," Sewanee Review, 61 (Summer, 1953), 430; and Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce (London, 1955). In the discussion that follows, page citations to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young

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  • Genre: Theory and Practice 39

    Man are given in parentheses; the source is the Compass edition, Viking Press, New York, 1964.

    2. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 330-331. 3. The one notable exception is Homer Obed Brown's James Joyce's

    Early Fiction (Cleveland and London, 1972), an interesting and valu- able study. Although Brown's approach to the material is rather different from mine, I find myself in substantial agreement with his conclusions.

    4. See in particular Wayne Booth's discussion of A Portrait in The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 323-336.

    5. Admittedly, passages like these are in a distinct minority in the book, but it is worth noting that they are in evidence and that in them one characteristically finds a kind of irony which is as close to authorial commentary as one can get without actual authorial intru- sion.

    Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his station in life, circled about its own centre of spiritual energy. His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity; every thought, word and deed, every instance of consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in heaven: and at times his sense of such immediate repercussion was so lively that he seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven, not as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender flower (p. 148).

    Only the most desperate devil's advocate will argue here that we are not aware of Joyce looking down upon Stephen from a sphere of authorial superiority or that Stephen is aware, in the same way we are, of the silliness of his actions as here described.

    6. Dorrit Cohn, "Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style," Comparative Literature, 13 (Spring, 1966), 97-112.

    7. Cohn, p. 99.

    8. Cohn, p. 102.

    9. T.S. Eliot, "The Three Voices of Poetry," in On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), p. 96.

    10. Eliot, p. 112. The original source for this statement, as for Stephen's similar description in A Portrait, is almost certainly Flaubert's fa- mous pronouncement that "an artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be everywhere felt,

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  • 40 The Journal of Narrative Technique

    but nowhere seen." (The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller [New York, 1953], p. 195.)

    11. Eliot, p. 100.

    12. The passage cited earlier, which immediately precedes Stephen's "fall" into the arms of the prostitute, should be compared in this connection with the following, which appears as part of the assess- ment of Stephen's religious phase: "To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer, and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples" (pp. 151-152).

    13. The Classical Temper, p. 229.

    14. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 55.

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    Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 1-75Front MatterEsther Summerson: The Betrayal of the Imagination [pp. 1-13]Point of View in "Villette" [pp. 14-28]Stephen's Esthetic and Joyce's Art: Theory and Practice of Genre in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" [pp. 29-40]Light Imagery in "The Sound and the Fury": April 7, 1928 [pp. 41-50]The Dissolving Self: The Narrators of Mark Twain's "Mysterious Stranger" Fragments [pp. 51-65]Notes and CommentThe End of the Game: New Directions in Doris Lessing's Fiction [pp. 66-75]

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