SOURCE: Riquelme, John Paul. “Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy.” In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, pp. 103-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Riquelme traces the development of Stephen Daedalus as an artist in Joyce's novels.]

TOWARDS A STYLISTIC HISTORY: FROM STEPHEN HERO TO ULYSSES

Near the end of what has survived of Joyce's unfinished draft of an autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero [SH] (written in 1904-5), the central character, Stephen Daedalus, claims that one function of writing is ‘to record … epiphanies with extreme care’, since ‘they … are the most delicate and evanescent of moments’ (SH 211). In the same passage he defines an epiphany as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’. Stephen's statement makes clear that his interest in writing evocative prose vignettes, the sort Joyce himself wrote, is wholly aesthetic.¹ Like the real author, the artist character in Stephen Hero and in A Portrait (written 1907-14) has been strongly influenced by the writings of older contemporaries, especially Walter Pater, whose famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (1873) emphasizes the special status of art as providing the most direct access to experiences of the highest intensity.²

The Paterian influence is one that Joyce clearly moved beyond, in part by producing in the realistic style of Dubliners (written 1904-7) an antithesis to Pater's lush, late-Romantic writing. But it is less clear exactly how far beyond Pater's influence Stephen moves in either Stephen Hero or A Portrait. [P] Toward the end of part iv of A Portrait, for instance, he thinks admiringly of ‘a lucid supple periodic prose’ (P 167) of the sort Pater wrote, and in the climactic scene on the beach that follows, the narrator renders Stephen's thinking in a vividly Paterian style full of ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trembling’ (P 172). Based on some of their experiences, thoughts, and actions, it is possible, despite the Paterian allegiance, to see Stephen Daedalus and, especially, his counterpart in A Portrait and Ulysses, whose last name is spelled Dedalus, moving tentatively toward the production of original writing comparable in quality to Joyce's and different in kind from Pater's. But numerous readers have come away from their encounter with Stephen with quite a different impression.³

The evidence concerning Stephen's potential as an artist is mixed, and the problem of judging him is a difficult one for several reasons. We may, in fact, be dealing with two distinct characters about whom different judgements can be made, since the narrative of Stephen Hero differs in important ways from the narrative of A Portrait. The difference goes deeper than the spelling of the character's surname. And yet, these characters have a great deal in common. A further complication arises in Ulysses, for Stephen's experiences and views from A Portrait do not carry over with any great force, though they are sometimes in evidence. Given these factors but also the common first name among the three characters, it seems reasonable to identify them only provisionally, as I do in the discussion to follow, and to keep in mind that some sharp distinctions need at times to be made. Another difficulty arises because Joyce assigned so many details from his own life to Stephen. In addition, there is the odd fact from the early publishing history of the Dubliners stories that Joyce sometimes used the pseudonym ‘Stephen Daedalus’ (JJ [James Joyce, by Richard Ellman] 164). Joyce's frequent intimate renderings of his characters' thinking, as in the Paterian passages of A Portrait, also make it hard to distinguish the narrator's perspective from the character's thoughts even though the narration occurs in the third person. Since Joyce is writing fiction and not pure autobiography, it is important not to identify the real author in any absolute way with the young artist character; nevertheless, the texts frequently encourage us to consider the alignment.

In presenting Stephen's development prior to Ulysses, Joyce employs the two epiphanic modes of stark realism—‘the vulgarity of speech or of gesture’—and visionary fantasy—‘a memorable phase of the mind itself’—as delimiting extremes in his character. In both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, Stephen alternates between allegiances to the visionary and to the material, between internal fantasy and external reality. In Dubliners, by contrast, the visionary has been largely displaced by the grim limitations of living and dying. Stephen, however, continues to be attracted by visionary possibilities until very nearly the end of A Portrait, and is clearly influenced by them when he writes both his villanelle and his journal.

The evocations of Stephen's alternative allegiances differ substantially in the two narratives that focus primarily on him. In Stephen Hero Joyce portrays Stephen as both ruthlessly analytical and visionary. At a crucial moment in his development, his encounter with the disturbing reality of death intensifies both his critical bent and his visionary yearnings. In A Portrait, by contrast, Joyce presents the two perspectives of realism and fantasy not primarily as aspects of character but fundamentally as aspects of style. Having now emerged as mutually modifying and mutually challenging attitudes, these styles of Stephen's thinking and of Joyce's writing vie with one another for predominance as they merge and diverge. The realistic and the visionary components become much more complexly intertwined than in Stephen Hero, for they begin to become elements in a style that emphasizes memory. The double temporal orientation of this later style indicates the direction Joyce will take after A Portrait in the more allusive initial style of Ulysses.

We can begin sketching Joyce's stylistic progress, and some of the changes his artist character experiences, by considering Stephen's remembrance in Ulysses of his former commitment to an art that captures spiritual manifestations. Since the recollection concerns Paterian attitudes, it bears on Stephen's potential for becoming an artist and on his possible similarity to Joyce. During the recollection, which occurs in the third episode of Ulysses, Stephen is again on the beach and may be remembering his former allegiance to a spiritual, Paterian notion of art because the surroundings remind him of the earlier beach scene in A Portrait. An important event has occurred, however, between these two scenes, since Stephen's mother has died during the unnarrated period following the end of the journal in A Portrait and preceding the beginning of Ulysses. During the day of Ulysses, the fact of her death almost exactly one year earlier is the often unstated background for all Stephen's thinking, including this memory. In the presentation of Stephen at the beginning of Ulysses, [U] Joyce returns to an encounter with death, like the one involving Stephen's sister in Stephen Hero, as he composes an alternative for both realism and fantasy. Those earlier styles evoked in Stephen Hero in relation to the epiphanies are being complicated and displaced by a style of play that involves a recognition of death. The alternative to those styles emerges as Stephen engages in a kind of mental play that eventually affects his more public performances as well as his thoughts. The newly developed playfulness involves an altered attitude toward audience.

Stephen's remembrance focuses on his epiphanies:

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once. …

(U 3.136-46)

This brief, mocking remembrance indicates that as an aspiring artist Stephen has taken his epiphanies wholly seriously, as Joyce likely did himself at one time. But the importance he attached to these snatches of sometimes lyrical prose is clearly in the past. The passage gives us part of the context for Stephen's production of epiphanies, and it mixes in new ways elements from earlier presentations of him. It also provides stylistically one of the positions Joyce reaches soon after A Portrait, a position markedly different from his preceding styles. There is nothing quite like this allusive, parodic, internal dialogue in either Stephen Hero or Dubliners. The style of A Portrait comes much closer to it, prepares the way for it, but does not fully reach it.

In this extended moment of self-mockery, Stephen retrospectively places the writing of epiphanies among his grandiose, youthful literary projects, projects he now sees as no more than adolescent fantasies. In all Stephen's references to the mystical traditions, he turns them to ironic purposes. The famous library at Alexandria exists, for instance, only in imagination, since it was destroyed in the first century bc, but it once apparently formed part of Stephen's imagined audience for his writings. Because of its permanent place in a timeless, visionary realm, that audience ostensibly solves the problem of mortality for the immature artist by providing an eternal repository for his writings at his death. As the memory makes clear, the only real audience for Stephen's narcissistic performances was himself. The implied isolation is also evident in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait when Stephen searches, largely unsuccessfully, for a responsive audience for his activities.

Stephen is passing a negative judgement on himself, especially with the reference to Hamlet's whale-like cloud. The final sentence of the passage, however, evokes stylistically another kind of negative judgement, one that shows the double effect the aesthetic tradition of the 1890s has had on Stephen. The sentence parodies quite openly Pater's use of the impersonal pronoun ‘one’ in his essays, as for instance in this sentence from ‘Pico della Mirandola’: ‘He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of one's self, to turn again to the pages of his forgotten books …’ (Pater, 67). And it mocks Pater's notion that the writing and reading of texts provides a virtually unmediated access to the past. Pater claims in his essay on Pico, for example, that ‘to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres … with the old disused ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them’ (Pater, 62). Stephen has clearly read this essay and others in The Renaissance, a collection that had an immense influence on his older contemporaries in Dublin, especially W. B. Yeats and his circle. He has sufficiently mastered Pater's style through careful, and presumably enthusiastic, study to be able now to transform it into an expression of his distance from it. The earlier styles of Stephen Hero and A Portrait, on the contrary, present Stephen's enthusiasm for Pater and for aesthetic, mystical writings and experience with much less (if any) irony. In Stephen Hero, Yeats's prose of the 1890s has a powerful effect on Stephen, as Pater's presumably has in A Portrait, and he shows no self-irony or restraint about the enthusiasms. The difference is reflected in the way Stephen thinks and what he thinks about in each text.

The passage from Ulysses concerning the epiphanies exemplifies a pattern evident in the earlier texts. This is not the first time Stephen has given himself to an enthusiasm and to impulses, only to turn away from them. The turning away is always only partial because the effect of the influence, which was powerful, remains. The most obvious example of the pattern is Stephen's commitment to the Catholic Church. As many critics have pointed out, his childhood and early adolescent religious experiences, including especially his education by the Jesuits, continue to inform the way he thinks, including the way he tries to reject the object of his former commitment. The traces of that commitment linger.

The mixture of intimate knowledge and scepticism in the Ulyssean Stephen's thoughts, his former attraction but present aversion to the intensely serious, even mystical, aesthetic reverence that was the impetus for the epiphanies, points to one of Joyce's major stylistic achievements. We find Joyce developing this double temporal perspective, the perspective of memory, in the works written before Ulysses, especially in A Portrait but to some extent in Dubliners as well, particularly in ‘The Dead’. By means of this double perspective we can experience simultaneously both scepticism and the deeply-felt impact of thoughts and events in the central character's changing sensibility. The inherently double, or multiple, interiorized style is the vehicle Joyce invents to render the deep ambivalence and dissonance of Stephen's mental life, especially in the interplay of critical self-scrutiny and vivid recollection. As Joyce complexly presents them, ambivalence, dissonance, and interplay inform the mental process of creativity.

We can see some of Joyce's strategies and perspectives emerging in the early fiction by noting differences between the episodic fragments of Stephen Hero, the starkly realistic stories of Dubliners, and the discontinuous narrative and flamboyant narration of A Portrait. The new style that Joyce produces in Ulysses as one outcome of his earlier endeavours requires new strategies for reading, which we acquire as we encounter the stylistic changes from book to book and even within each book. The shift is from either fantasies or seemingly objective, realistic presentations to recollections or other moments of mental activity, structured like memories, that are neither fantastic nor objective. Stephen's memory of his epiphanies, for instance, is not itself a fantasy; and rather than being neutral, through its tone it expresses a judgement about the earlier activities. The mediation announces itself stylistically, often through obscure allusions and personal references that hinder as well as enhance our understanding; this style is opaque rather than transparent.

By contrast, both fantasy and objective description present themselves as transparent language that carries its own interpretation with it.⁴ The heightened language of fantasy announces its immediate access to an extraordinary spiritual realm whose status we perceive because of its difference from the limitations of ordinary reality. Its meaning is the denial of conventional meaning, and once we recognize that ordinary experience is being transcended, no further questions are necessary or perhaps even possible. The quite different, referential language of objective realism promises apparently direct, uncomplicated access to that limited, ordinary reality. The mediated, allusive style of the passage from Ulysses, on the other hand, invites and enables readers to respond to its complications by doing more, often playfully, than they are encouraged to do by a comparatively transparent style. We are asked to clamber over, under, around, and through the obstructions to understanding that it places in our path and to enjoy our energetic motions. Because of the differences from the earlier narratives, including stylistic ones, the passage from Ulysses gives us a version of Stephen's development through and away from mystical aestheticism against which we can gauge the other versions. The trajectory for that development is toward allusive mental play and self-mockery.

The fragments of Stephen Hero, for instance, present Stephen's interest in the occult quite differently and indirectly, through his reverence for some of Yeats's mystical short stories.⁵ In chapter xxii, during Stephen's second year at the university, he studies even less than before and spends more time on his literary enthusiasms, which include Yeats's stories from The Secret Rose (1897) concerning the mystical, wandering monks, Owen Ahern and Michael Robartes. Stephen's reading of these stories, with their emphasis on a mode of life wildly at variance with societal conventions, dovetails with his whimsical research into Renaissance Italian writings at a little-used Dublin library. His recollection in Ulysses of reading ‘the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas’ ‘in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library’ (U 3.107-8), which occurs just before the memory of the epiphanies, refers explicitly to this period in his life. Stephen's attraction to Ahern and Robartes is made clear in Stephen Hero in ways that it is not in the later works. In A Portrait they are barely mentioned, and in Ulysses Stephen openly distances himself from other artists who show interest in them. In Stephen Hero, however, he is easily able ‘to believe in the reality of their existence’ since he found himself ‘in such a season of damp and unrest’ (SH 178). Because they are ‘outlaws’ (SH 178) who possess secret wisdom, Stephen can take a stand against the restrictive conventions of Irish culture by identifying with them. He takes the same stand when he begins writing epiphanies.

STEPHEN HERO: FROM RESTRAINT TO EXTRAVAGANT DEFIANCE

In the narrative of Stephen Hero, the encounter with Yeats's writing signals an important turning point for Stephen that is rendered almost entirely in terms of his character rather than being evoked primarily through style. The difference in emphasis in the rendering marks a major contrast between Stephen Hero and A Portrait and between our impressions of their central characters. With the reading of Yeats's stories, Stephen becomes more extravagant in his determined protest against the restricting conventions of Irish culture. He is learning here to follow a Blakean revolutionary precept, that ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’, or, in Oscar Wilde's irreverent version, that ‘nothing succeeds like excess’. As had many English and Irish artists of the 1890s, Stephen chooses the road of excess to protest middle-class conventions. We see that excess as extravagance in various scenes in Stephen Hero, but first in Stephen's desire to recite publicly from memory Yeats's story, ‘The Tables of the Law’. Even though he feels ‘acutely the insidious dangers’ in his behaviour, presumably the dangers of losing control and becoming insane, ‘a dull discharge of duties’ would be even more dangerous and frustrating (SH 179). Stephen chooses fantasy and the impulsive behaviour that accompanies it over the dull grind of conventional reality. From this point onward in the narrative, ‘A certain extravagance began to tinge his life’ (SH 179).

Starting in this chapter, not only does Stephen's extravagance become more frequent, it begins to take exaggerated forms. His uninhibited behaviour reaches a memorable climax at the end of the next chapter when he interrupts his Italian tutorial and runs after Emma Clery to propose a night of lovemaking. In his discussion of the incident with his friend Lynch (SH 200), Stephen's evident lack of humour or self-irony about it seems typical. Even though the narrator does not provide an explicit judgement, Stephen's self-serious attitude can be seen as a fault. In both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, Stephen's regular tendencies to think abstractly and with concentration, to practice discipline (though at times selectively), and to turn a serious face to the world do often seem unattractive. But the implications and results of his behaviour are mixed in both narratives. His reasons for responding with dead seriousness are not limited to emotional frigidity, and he responds at times in a different way.

‘The Tables of the Law’ and the spiritual aestheticism it represents are not the cause for Stephen's change in behaviour but rather the first artistic focus he finds for his intense anger toward Irish culture. That anger emerges in the aftermath of his sister's illness and death, for which there are no equivalents in A Portrait. Despite his unconventional views, his eccentricities, his frustration, his isolation, and his arrogance, Stephen's public conduct before her death remains largely within the bounds of convention, and he behaves neither erratically nor with absolute seriousness. In the half dozen chapters leading up to Isabel's death, there are many examples of Stephen's independence in thought and action but also of his sensible, circumspect conduct. Even though he baits Father Butt with a question about unseemly passages in Twelfth Night (SH 28), Stephen's tolerance for the contradictions he experiences in his culture remains for a time fairly high. He can react to them with amusement (SH 29). Later, when the paper he delivers at the Debating Society is attacked, he can still respond in a restrained way, then decide gradually to withdraw without clamour from the groups and activities he earlier frequented. A mixture of prudence and tolerance serves Stephen well until he realizes that the issues are too important for him to continue restraining his responses.

Stephen comes to this realization through the experiences in and around chapter xxii. Immediately after Stephen's presentation to the Debating Society, his younger sister, Isabel, returns home due to a serious illness. The situation with Isabel is mentioned for several chapters until she dies in Stephen's presence at the beginning of chapter xxii. Though the references to her illness are brief, the descriptions suggest unambiguously the deep effect on the entire family, but on Stephen in particular: ‘The lingering nature of her illness had spread a hopeless apathy about the household and, though she herself was little more than a child, she must have been aware of this’ (SH 161). Her condition is so severe that she whimpers when left alone or when she has to eat. Her few moments of animation come in response to the playing of the piano downstairs. We hear only of Stephen playing that piano. She has become his audience, albeit temporarily. It is important that she has, since Stephen has had difficulty finding appropriate audiences. Except for his brother, Maurice, Isabel is the only auditor with whom Stephen is able to establish good communication. By this point in the narrative, he has largely given up not only on the Debating Society but on the group of young people who gather regularly at the Daniels' household, a group for whom he would sometimes sing and play. The moribund Isabel provides a particularly striking contrast to the robust Emma, to whom Stephen's singing at those gatherings had been largely directed. During Stephen's final visit to the Daniels' house shortly before Isabel's death, in an unambiguous, though still mild, gesture of protest, he refuses to perform when asked (SH 158).

Stephen's playing for Isabel is obviously motivated by neither desire, which he feels for Emma, nor rebellious, intellectual comradeship, which he shares with Maurice. There is desperation and determination, as well as pathos, in Stephen's pretence that Isabel is not near death. As part of that pretence he ‘preserved his usual manner of selfish cheerfulness and strove to stir a fire out of her embers of life’: ‘He even exaggerated and his mother reproved him for being so noisy. He could not go to his sister and say to her “Live! live!” but he tried to touch her soul in the shrillness of a whistle or the vibration of a note’ (SH 161). Stephen cannot save her, but they achieve a special kind of understanding when ‘once or twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from the bed had guessed his meaning’ (SH 161). In these scenes we witness Stephen putting on his mask of seriousness for a more humane purpose than self-protection. It enables him to undertake a work of kindness and establish communication with an audience that matters to him. Like Isabel, the success is short-lived, and Stephen's moods of selfish indulgence keep recurring, at times in a style that is the precursor for the Paterian ending of part iv of A Portrait: ‘… in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane’ (SH 162).

The breaking point for Stephen occurs with Isabel's death. At the end of chapter xxi, in a passage that draws on one of Joyce's realistic epiphanies, Stephen's mother interrupts his self-communion at the piano with the disturbing news that ‘There's some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel's … stomach’ (SH 163). Not only do Stephen's reveries not disappear after her death, his commitment to the kind of spiritualized art he finds in Yeats emerges in part because of it. But the situation has changed. In a way that is exceptional in Stephen Hero, Joyce renders the change briefly through style by describing the funeral in chapter xxii realistically: ‘Standing beside the closed piano on the morning of the funeral Stephen heard the coffin bumping down the crooked staircase’ (SH 166-7). Given the piano's regular appearance and its importance in the previous chapter, the closed instrument reiterates the shift indicated stylistically by the grim details. After the funeral, Stephen finally breaks significantly with decorum by choosing to drink a pint with the carriage drivers rather than having a more genteel drink with the middle-class mourners. The gesture does not go unnoticed by Stephen's father, who gives him a hard look at the time (SH 168) and upbraids him much later for his conduct (SH 228). This is a new kind of public performance for Stephen, marking an irrevocable shift in his conduct, his relationships within the family, and his attitude toward the family's Irish social context.

By means of brief uses in Stephen Hero of a Paterian style and, in tandem with it, a realistic style, Joyce is able to suggest Stephen's difficult, contradictory situation and the opposing extremes of his attitudes in a way that is the forerunner for his extended use of those styles for similar purposes in A Portrait. But neither style is suitable for capturing the energy with which Stephen sometimes thinks and reacts in Stephen Hero and in the later books. That energy emerges as clowning and laughter in numerous scenes both preceding and following Isabel's death. In response to a self-deprecating story Maurice tells him, for example, he ‘exploded in laughter’ (SH 59). He has to resist the impulse to express his antic disposition to the President when they discuss the censoring of his paper (SH 94-7). During a Good Friday sermon, he indulges ‘his gambling instinct’ by trying to outpace the priest's various translations of Consummatum est, running quickly through a list of possibilities, wagering ‘with himself as to what word the preacher would select’ (SH 120). Much later, well after Isabel's death, Stephen and Lynch have a funny conversation about love and sex (SH 191-2), and he parodies the mechanical catechism of his Italian lessons by composing his own humorous alternative (SH 192-3).

Joyce moves in such passages toward presenting Stephen not only as serious but as energetically engaged in the way he sometimes is in parts iv and v of A Portrait and in Ulysses. When Stephen deceptively wears a mask of seriousness to cover a mocking interior response, he has already begun pursuing his scheme of surviving by ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ announced in A Portrait (P 247). But Joyce has yet to find an adequate style for presenting at length Stephen's ‘scornful mind scampering’ (SH 97) in active dialogue with itself and its surroundings. By contrast with the condensed, allusive internal dialogue we have already seen in the early part of Ulysses, Stephen's thoughts in Stephen Hero have a ponderous, awkward quality that does not capture the energy he sometimes humorously expresses.

His self-reflections regularly take the form of self-doubts in which Stephen recognizes that he, like his culture, is full of inconsistencies. He thinks about or experiences vacillations at various times, including a moment near the end of chapter xxi, just before the scene in which his mother informs him of the disturbing new development in Isabel's degeneration. There, as elsewhere, the contradictions emerge in Stephen's doubts about himself: ‘Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger upon every falsehood it contained’ (SH 162). Such misgivings are presented more extensively shortly after the culminating episode with Emma in a segment (SH 204-6) that is stylistically unusual in Stephen Hero because it seems to present at length, though awkwardly, an internal colloquy. ‘An embassy of nimble pleaders’ from the Church state their positions (SH 204), but these ‘ambassadors’ must be internal ones, since Stephen is involved in ‘reflections’. The implications of the passage for Stephen's character are clear. He is engaged in self-criticism and self-testing, motivated by residual fear and insecurity in the face of continuing temptations to conform and succeed. In short, he has yet to move entirely beyond the crisis of his break with the Church.

Joyce attempts in this passage to capture Stephen's predicament, but he lacks the stylistic techniques for presenting it vividly and directly as the shifting to-and-fro of thinking. The report of Stephen's thoughts mixes third and second person, but not first person, in a logical discourse composed of propositions, questions, and direct address. Many of the sentences would not be out of place in an actual dialogue: ‘However sure you may be now of the reasonableness of your convictions you cannot be sure that you will always think them reasonable’. By contrast with Stephen's thinking in Ulysses, the passage lacks the signals Joyce developed later to indicate interior language: frequent colons, exclamation marks, multiple allusions, and condensed or grammatically fragmented statements.

Stephen's tendency toward self-doubt points to ambivalences that are different in kind from those he perceives and despises in his culture, in part because he is willing to consider that he himself may be self-deceived. By recognizing the self-deception around him, he has become sensitive to the potential for it within himself. After Isabel's death, Stephen's encounters with the cultural contradictions elicit some new responses. He recognizes, for instance, that the members of the Debating Society ‘revered’ the ‘memory of Terence MacManus’, a revolutionary patriot, ‘not less … than the memory of Cardinal Cullen’, an ultra-conservative clergyman who spoke out against the nationalists (SH 173). Earlier Stephen might have responded with restrained amusement, but his response takes considerably stronger forms instead: total withdrawal and sarcasm.

Stephen's sensitivity to contradictions leads him to undertake literary projects, including his love verses and his epiphanies, that allow him to position himself against his society by admitting and working with opposing elements set in combination. We first hear about Stephen's love poetry, on which he labours instead of pursuing his academic studies, between the death of Isabel and his infatuation with Yeats's stories. Inspired by Dante's Vita nuova, ‘in his expressions of love he found himself compelled to use what he called the feudal terminology’, but also ‘to express his love a little ironically’: ‘This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal fealty because we recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy’ (SH 174). In his typically ambivalent fashion, Stephen sees both loss and gain in transforming the idealizing literary language of love. What it loses in ‘fierceness’ it gains in ‘amiableness’. Stephen strives to humanize his love poetry by tempering overstatement with a sense of human limitations.

It is important that Stephen articulates such a goal for his poetry at this point in the narrative, just before he discovers Yeats's mystical stories in The Secret Rose. His doing so indicates in advance an attitude that should protect him from following the path of eternal, visionary fantasies for too long. The later history of Stephen's verses suggests that he has developed a sufficient sensitivity to his own excesses and the alternatives not to rest permanently content with the attitudes he strikes. In chapter xxiv he continues ‘making his book of verses in spite of’ distractions (SH 208) at a time when his differences with his friend Cranly and his parents appear no longer to be reconcilable. But in the next chapter, he tells Maurice he has ‘burned them’ because ‘they were romantic’ (SH 226). Though the tone and style of the statement are different, this is the kind of judgement about his earlier efforts we see Stephen making about his epiphanies in Ulysses.

The concept of the epiphanies, introduced late in Stephen Hero, provides another way for Stephen to proceed by means of contradiction in his literary work. In writing them, he can employ both stark realism and visionary experience in a mode that, like his love poetry, has the potential for being internally differential. In the representing of a vacuous reality, the artist recognizes and rejects its superficialities; in the evocation of visionary realities, the artist displaces debased, ordinary reality with a spiritual alternative. There is no evidence in Stephen Hero, however, that Stephen can transform his dual epiphanic procedure into something more than a double gesture of defiance. An exaggerated swerving between extremes could even become the vertiginous hyperbole of madness, about which Stephen himself expresses concern. The passage from Ulysses ridiculing the epiphanies suggests that they were indeed excessive and narcissistic, a form of writing to be left behind. But the epiphanies hold out distantly the possibility for juxtaposing and perhaps even merging opposites stylistically in a mutually modifying way that might serve to present the to-and-fro of the mind in process. That possibility is one that Joyce is able to actualize only after abandoning Stephen Hero.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: OSCILLATIONS IN STYLE AND NARRATIVE

Despite the self-indulgent and potentially self-destructive qualities of the epiphanies, Stephen's working by contraries is a step toward achieving the interplay, or oscillation, of perspectives that we encounter in aspects of his thinking and his life in later works. His putting into practice of Blake's precept that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ has only just begun in Stephen Hero. The results of that practice emerge much later, when the alternation tending toward a process of extremes merging and mutually modifying one another becomes an important structural principle in Joyce's subsequent writing. By using styles that often work by means of oppositions in order to present a character whose thoughts and experiences regularly involve opposing forces, Joyce enables readers to recognize a variety of possible resemblances and differences between the writer and the character. The same language pertains simultaneously, though in different ways, to the writer who has learned to work successfully with contrasts and to the character whose life is filled with them. Various judgements about Stephen become possible. The reader attempting to make them based on A Portrait and Ulysses encounters a much richer, more complex stylistic and structural texture than is the case with Stephen Hero. Part of the new complexity arises from Joyce's developing a differential style for capturing the shifting quality of memory; part of it arises from a narrative structure that emphasizes repetition rather than continuous, chronological development.

In A Portrait we see the swerving in Stephen's life more clearly and more regularly than in Stephen Hero.⁶ That swerving resembles the abrupt shift in Stephen Hero at the end of chapter xxi and the start of chapter xxii from Stephen's high-flown meditations and self-doubts to the material details of Isabel's death and funeral. In A Portrait Joyce takes maximum advantage of the strong contrast such a shift can evoke when he uses it not just once, as in Stephen Hero, but repeatedly at the narrative's major junctures. At the end of each of A Portrait's five parts, Joyce uses elevated language to suggest that Stephen achieves a momentary insight and intensity through a transforming experience: his communion with nature and his fellow students after complaining to the Rector at the end of part i; his sexual initiation in the encounter with a prostitute at the end of part ii; his post-confession, precommunion peace at the end of part iii; his commitment to art climactically presented as an encounter with an idealized woman at the end of part iv; and the exclamations about hopes for the future in the book's final sentences at the end of Stephen's journal. At the start of each succeeding part, Joyce counters and ironizes the intensity of the preceding conclusion by switching immediately and unexpectedly to a realistic style and realistic details: the bad smell of Uncle Charles's tobacco in part ii; the craving of Stephen's belly for food in part iii; the mechanical, dehumanized character of Stephen's religious discipline in part iv; and in part v the dreary homelife that is the daily context and one frame of reference for Stephen's aesthetic ambitions. The pattern of contrasts is also repeated at various minor junctures in the narrative, for instance, at the end of the first section and the beginning of the second section of part ii, when Stephen's revery about Mercedes is followed by the ‘great yellow caravans’ (P 65) arriving to remove the family's belongings. By alternating and starkly juxtaposing extremes, Joyce arranges the events of Stephen's life without relying primarily on continuity of action. Like Stephen Hero, A Portrait is episodic, and often there is little or no transition from one situation to another, but the later work provides an orienting pattern for Stephen's development. Emphatic presentation of that pattern actually depends on abandoning narrative continuity in order to make moments that are separated in time contiguous in the narration.

Even within the individual, juxtaposed moments of elevated, climactic insight and countering, realistic perception, a pattern of contrast and possible merger sometimes appears. When this happens, a highly complex process of reading can ensue that may be understood to mimic Stephen's process of recollection. The possibilities for this kind of reading emerge most emphatically late in the narrative, once the reader has come to know Stephen's thinking, especially the language of his thinking, well. It would seem that Stephen remembers at some level his earlier experiences, which have become connected with one another and tend at times to merge. The situation is complicated because he apparently remembers and connects elevated moments of insight not just as a group but in some relation to the moments of realistic perception that always follow them. And he remembers and combines other experiences as well. Joyce does not present Stephen explicitly remembering and linking the opposing moments. He depends instead on the reader's remembering, connecting, and anticipating. And he presents Stephen's thoughts in language that, by repeating aspects of earlier scenes, suggests that a remembering and crossing-over may be taking place.

A kind of feedback is created whereby Stephen's later experiences, which are in some ways repetitions of earlier ones, are not in fact exact repetitions, in part because they occur against the background of what has gone before. The reader has access to this feedback through the increasingly mixed language that leads back to earlier scenes of different kinds. Because the language is complexly layered, the reader comes to every scene with frames of reference derived from earlier elements of the narrative, but each scene in turn results in new retrospective framings of what has gone before and new prospective framings of what is to come, and so on until the various frames overlap or nest within one another. The highly unusual effect, which is difficult to describe in an expository way, mimics the process of Stephen's remembering his complicated, differential past as he encounters each new experience, but it depends on the reader's active recollection of earlier passages.

An example may help clarify the complex possibilities the style offers. In the closing pages of part iv, Stephen has an intense experience on the beach, reported in vivid Paterian language, after which he naps in a nest-like, sandy nook. Having decided to lie down, he feels the heavens above him ‘and the earth beneath him’ (P 172). When he wakes, ‘recalling the rapture of his sleep’ (P 173), Stephen holds these oppositions together briefly. He imagines a merging of two realms in his image of the moon embedded in the earth: ‘He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of the sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools’ (P 173). Visionary and material, heaven and earth, sea and land, process and stasis merge and interact in a promise of harmonious union not nearly so evident in Joyce's earlier narratives. Not only do heaven and earth merge as silver blends with gray, but the tide, though flowing fast, has been humanized: her waves whisper.

The conjunction of opposites extends and fulfils the intense experience Stephen has had on the beach. As with the earlier moments of intensity, this one is quickly followed by its stylistic and experiential opposite at the beginning of part v. There Stephen drinks ‘watery tea’, chews ‘the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him’, stares ‘into the dark pool of the jar’ of tea, remembers ‘the dark turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes’, and rifles idly with ‘greasy fingers’ through a box of pawntickets, whose lid is ‘speckled with lousemarks’ (P 174). As at the beginning of the three preceding parts, a debunking takes place through style. But the situation is more complicated now, because the language at the end of part iv already anticipates some details from the realistic passage that follows it. There are pools of liquid in that earlier passage as well, but also some past participles (‘fallen’, ‘embedded’) that anticipate the numerous past participles in the first paragraph of part v (‘fried’, ‘scattered’, ‘scooped’, ‘rifled’, ‘scrawled and sanded and creased’). The pool of tea is in part an ironic recollection of the pools of water on the beach, but the additional recollection of Clongowes makes clear that these later pools are all embedded in a past and in memories that make any simple contrast of two isolated moments impossible.

The overlap between the two scenes creates a stylistic double helix, in which the experience of visionary intensity with its elevated language and the experience of a grimy reality with its material details mutually frame one another. They have become styles of memory, and part of what they recollect, or help us recollect, is one another. We begin to see each through the lens of the other, and that is an important development because it suggests that Stephen may have begun seeing them in that odd fashion as well.

Joyce provides abundant material for the reader to recognize and work with the complexities by including a kitchen scene (P 163), shortly before the scene on the beach, that contains elements common to both the Paterian and the realistic scenes that follow. The description of the light and the singing there anticipates the light and Stephen's singing on the beach (P 172). But this earlier scene in a littered kitchen that involves Stephen's family, specifically his siblings, is obviously echoed in the later kitchen scene. The ‘knife with a broken ivory handle … stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover’ (P 163) that Stephen sees there anticipates the later scattered breadcrusts, but it also anticipates the moon embedded in the sand. And that latter anticipation does not necessarily have an ironic implication. Stephen on the beach may himself be recalling the earlier image as he half-perceives and half-creates the later one. In so doing, he can be understood to reaffirm what has taken place in the kitchen on his return home after having decided not to become a priest, when, perhaps to his own surprise, he joined his ragamuffin brothers and sisters in their singing. It seems, oddly, that at the time he rejects a religious vocation and chooses art, Stephen is aligning himself, if not exactly committing himself, to the grim realities represented by the family situation and not just to visionary experience.

To the extent that Stephen's perception of the moon carries a memory of the broken knife and the family along with it, the family situation nests within and contributes to the visionary scene rather than simply debunking it. The two kitchen scenes frame and implicitly comment on the beach scene that comes between them, but since the framed and framing scenes overlap, the implications are multiple and not altogether determinate. Joyce's language invites the reader to pursue those implications.

The thorough imbricating of these various passages gives us access to the complicated network of intertwined elements making up Stephen's life. It does so in a way that enables us to recognize and explore multiple, simultaneous perspectives for understanding and combining those elements as we respond to the narration's twists and turns. If we have recognized some of the repetitions connecting these passages, when we encounter a scene later in which Stephen awakens in ecstasy after a dream and composes a villanelle (P 217-24), the resemblances to the beach scene create a further framing, in this case for the second kitchen scene, which falls between them. A soup-plate from the previous night's supper remains on the table as a link to the description of the kitchen (P 218). Stephen, however, intends his writing to involve ‘transmuting the daily bread of experience’ (P 221). He is intent on ‘shrinking from’ the ordinary world of ‘common noises, hoarse voices, sleepy prayers’ (P 221), though his memories during the writing of the poem keep thrusting that world into his thoughts.⁷

In this section, even more fully than earlier, the two apparently antagonistic styles of visionary intensity and grim realism merge, though they continue to alternate as well. Both have become characteristic of Stephen's consciousness in Joyce's unusual attempt to represent the mental act of aesthetic creation. In creativity, as Joyce here presents it, fantasy, perception, and memory all mingle and merge as imaginative production. Rather than serving a common purpose of protesting convention, as in the epiphanies, or of mutually debunking one another, fantasy and realism converge in a form of play that is the attempt to produce something new. The convergence occurs in part under the auspices of memory, whose work is presented throughout the section either explicitly or inscribed in the repetition of phrases from earlier sections. With this convergence, the style of Stephen's thinking not only in A Portrait but also in Ulysses becomes possible. The style of visionary intensity has its antecedents in Yeats's ‘The Tables of the Law’ and in the writings of Walter Pater, whose style Stephen's thoughts mimic at the end of part iv and parody in Ulysses. In the ‘Conclusion’ of The Renaissance, Pater characterizes art as the most important of experiences and defines ‘success in life’ as maintaining ecstasy and burning ‘always with this hard, gemlike flame’ (Pater, 222). The flame Stephen attempts to keep burning as he writes his poem is at once the visionary intensity of his dream and the emotion he feels for a real woman. His flame-tending proceeds next to a table on which, in the midst of composing, he notices a real, burnt-out candle, ‘its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame’; he must write out his poem as best he can on the back of a torn cigarette packet (P 218). The two styles have been conjoined.

As those styles interact in A Portrait, they carry forward from Stephen Hero and begin actualizing the suggestion of a potential in Stephen for self-recognition and self-correction that may enable him eventually to break successfully from the conventions he inherits and the enthusiasms that for a time occupy him. We see such a break starting to occur at the end of A Portrait when Stephen's oscillations and reversals culminate in self-criticism, as well as intense commitment, in his journal. He explicitly distances himself there, for instance, from his earlier enthusiasm for Yeats's visionary heroes: ‘Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world’ (P 251). It is not at all clear, however, how exactly that loveliness differs from Michael Robartes's ‘forgotten beauty’.

The criticism in the journal is at times not only self-directed but also humorous. Although we encounter regularly in A Portrait the energy of Stephen's thinking, we do not see his humour as often as in Stephen Hero. Its emergence at the end of the later work is something of a relief, perhaps for Stephen as well as the reader. He even makes fun of his own ambivalent tendency to re-evaluate his experiences when he writes: ‘Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before now, in fact … O, give it up, old chap! Sleep it off!’ (P 252). This kind of comment comes as a relief because of Stephen's evident tendency toward emotional frigidity. We see this tendency more clearly in A Portrait than in Stephen Hero, though Stephen's serious demeanour and disciplined responses in both texts create the impression of coldness. In part iv of A Portrait, at the end of Stephen's period of religious fervor, the emotional absence is evident even to him: ‘He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit, had found them set forth solemnly in books, and had wondered why his soul was unable to harbour them for any time or to force his lips to utter their names with conviction’ (P 149). It is, in fact, a positive sign that he recognizes the problem, for that recognition influences his decision not to follow a religious vocation that would likely reinforce his emotional deadness. Although Stephen's coldness diminishes in the remainder of the book, especially in the journal, even there, the penultimate entry emphasizes what he has yet to learn, at least according to his mother: ‘She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it’ (P 252). Stephen's emotional potential, like his artistic talent, remains to be actualized when he writes the last, hopeful entries in his journal.

DUBLINERS AND BEYOND: FROM REALISM TO MEMORY AND PLAY

In creating the impression of Stephen's coldness in A Portrait, Joyce excised material that holds an important place in Stephen Hero, especially the intimacy between Stephen and his siblings, Maurice and Isabel, who do not appear in the later work. The absence of Isabel's death, with its strong impact on Stephen, is arguably the most significant of many alterations Joyce made. He also chose not to include the death of Stephen's mother, which occurs after the writing of the journal. Even in Ulysses that death, like Molly Bloom's adultery, is not directly presented as part of the realistic narrative. Only in the fantastic scenes of the episode in Nighttown are we given the act of adulterous copulation and the body of May Dedalus, ravaged by cancer. Such moments of death, ecstasy, and betrayal are so powerful in themselves and in their effects that they defy adequate representation in language. They signal certain limits that even Joyce, with his great skills as a stylist, did not attempt to cross in a realistic style.

In Joyce's hands, however, the limits of realistic writing are very wide indeed, so wide that the realistic style becomes a complex means for presenting memory that leads eventually to the allusive style of Ulysses. There is no trace in Dubliners of the Paterian style that Joyce later uses in A Portrait to suggest Stephen's values and attitudes. By avoiding that style entirely and focusing on the limitations of life in Dublin, Joyce responds critically to the mystical writing, such as Yeats's stories, that Stephen fervently admires. With his remark concerning Michael Robartes in his journal, Stephen begins to shift away from an art emphasizing vision and fantasy, as he continues to do in Ulysses. In the seventh episode of Ulysses, centred on the newspaper office, he even narrates a realistic vignette that counters stylistically the highly rhetorical, elevated styles that some of the other characters have used. Joyce went much further in this critical direction even before the writing of A Portrait by focusing resolutely in Dubliners on the grimy surface of ordinary life. He includes, as well, however, some indications of a potentially richer interior life.

Of the two epiphanic modes, the fantastic and the realistic, it is the latter with its ‘vulgarity of speech or of gesture’ that leads to Dubliners, whose stories are all narrated in a realistic manner. The stories and their style share with the epiphanies the goal of criticizing and unmasking a culture that Joyce despised because he considered it paralytic (Letters I 55). The opening story, ‘The Sisters’, involves paralysis literally, and some of the later stories include it at significant moments as a mental condition. At the end of ‘Eveline’, for instance, the central character is so torn between her desire to escape her dreary life in Dublin and her fear of doing so that she cannot move. And at the end of ‘A Painful Case’, James Duffy's mental life reaches a moment of emptiness and stasis, the paralyzing result of his earlier behaviour. Despite the absence of overt commentary by the narrator, an absence that is characteristic of Joyce's fiction, the characters and their culture are generally presented in a harsh light. Many details of the eleven stories from ‘Eveline’ through ‘Grace’ provide material for a severely negative judgement of the events, characters, and society presented in them.

The same is not entirely true of the opening and closing stories of the volume, though they project no strong optimism about Irish culture. The first three stories, ‘The Sisters’, ‘An Encounter’, and ‘Araby’, and the concluding story, ‘The Dead’, differ in some important respects from the stories they frame. Because of the difference, which is in part stylistic, the collection as a whole creates effects that no one of the stories can when read separately. The central figures in the beginning and ending stories differ from most of the other central characters because they are more aware, at least in retrospect, of their situations and possible alternatives. It is the retrospective orientation in these stories that sets them largely apart from the others and that makes them early precursors for Joyce's later, more elaborate style of memory.

Among the other stories, only ‘A Painful Case’ also presents a central figure who clearly develops a retrospective self-understanding, but for James Duffy the time has passed for self-knowledge to result in a beneficial change in his life. Like Stephen Dedalus and like Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’, Duffy affects a mask of seriousness and has difficulty feeling, recognizing, and expressing emotion. He comes to recognize his own limitations, as does Conroy, through an experience that brings him into contact with death. But by the end of his story, Duffy's case is closed, whereas the outcome for Conroy and the young boy of the first stories is still unclear when their narratives end. As in many of the other stories, the implicit irony of the perspective offered to the reader in ‘A Painful Case’ carries a finality that precludes hope for something better in the future.

By contrast with all the stories that follow them in Dubliners, [D] the first three are narrated in the first person and may all concern the same young boy. As with Stephen in the three narratives in which he appears, the continuity of the central figure in the separate narratives can only be tentatively maintained, especially since he is never named in any of them. But there are also no details indicating unambiguously that the boy is different in any of the stories. The question of continuity aside, all three stories are retrospective narrations, told by an ‘I’ who provides little in the way of overt commentary and explicit judgment but whose narrating skills and vocabulary clearly set him apart from the young boy who is his earlier self. The fact that the boy is much younger than any of the later protagonists contributes to the comparatively more hopeful implications of these first stories. The retrospective form of the narration indicates at the least that he has a future that may consist of more than continuing paralysis, though we do not know what exactly that future will be.

While there is irony in the retrospective narration, particularly in the presentation of the boy's ‘foolish’ (D 30) adolescent romantic desires in ‘Araby’, the distance between narrator and character is never as great as in the stories told in the third person prior to ‘The Dead’. The combination of first-person narration, a relatively innocent, young central character, and an intimate style for rendering his thinking creates a potential for sympathy that is largely lacking in the stories that follow. The intimacy of the narration is evident in all three stories, since the narrator regularly presents the character's thoughts seemingly directly without summarizing or explaining them in language that seems inappropriate for the character. The adjectives in ‘Araby’, for instance, are sometimes descriptive in a psychological rather than an objective way; they originate in the child's thinking rather than in the narrator's. Near the story's ending, when the boy sees ‘the magical name’ (D 34) on the building, it is ‘magical’ only from his adolescent perspective. Having by this point in Dubliners already encountered many similar indications of thinking, the reader will likely realize, even though there is no comment from the narrator, that the word emanates from the child's mind.

The opening sentence of ‘The Sisters’, with its references to a person and a situation about which the reader as yet knows nothing, presents the character's thinking in a less understated way: ‘There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke’ (D 9). It is only after we become acquainted with some details of the boy's life that we understand that ‘him’ refers to an old priest who has befriended the boy and ‘stroke’ refers to the priest's illness, not to a clock. Whereas a realistic style can often seem transparent, apparently giving us direct access to the details of a world that is independent of the style's language and fully intelligible, Joyce here produces a relatively opaque realistic style. It draws attention to its own language because the illusion of transparency is not maintained. In this particular instance, even once we understand the references, there remains the question of the specific circumstances in which the statements are made. These are never clarified. In producing a style that presents memory at work and raises more questions than it answers, Joyce has turned his realistic writing into an allusive style of memory.⁸

In ‘The Dead’ Joyce brings his early realistic style equally close to his later style when he employs a wide range of strategies for presenting thought in the third rather than the first person. Although Joyce uses many of these strategies in the other stories told in the third person, especially the more complicated ones, such as ‘A Painful Case’, in this one the effect of the narration resembles the intimate effects of the stories narrated in the first person. The kinds of techniques used and the specific ways they are used affect the reader's sense of distance or irony with regard to the characters. In first-person narration a sympathetic response is almost automatically created, unless of course what the character thinks and feels is obviously unpleasant and unattractive. One of Joyce's great achievements as a stylist is his development of third-person narrating strategies that create an effect of intimacy essentially similar to the effect of first-person techniques. By the end of ‘The Dead’, his mastery of these strategies is evident.

In part because the story is longer than the others, in ‘The Dead’ the narrator can rely on the reader's having become sufficiently acquainted with Gabriel Conroy's life and his thinking for an intimate, allusive presentation of his thoughts to be possible. By the time Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, have reached their hotel room after his aunts' party, we have already learned a great deal about his values and the circumstances of his life. Much of the information suggests his limitations, particularly in dealings of an emotional sort. He has failed in his attempt to be friendly with Lily, the caretaker's daughter who is acting as maid at the party, and he has botched his encounter with his colleague, Miss Ivors, who has criticized his anti-nationalist attitudes. It is no surprise that Conroy's attempt to evoke an affectionate response from Gretta is also a failure. It is surprising, however, that he seems to learn something about his own deficiencies from the final encounter. He admits, for instance, that ‘He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love’ (D 223). Conroy's realization about this lack and his decision to help Gretta tell her story are bound up with his new sense of communal relations. Those relations are based on a common mortality he has, until now successfully, tried to forget.

Equally surprising is the lengthy passage rendering Gabriel's thoughts, which begins ‘She was fast asleep’, and with which the story closes; this passage brings the reader in a sustained way into the sometimes ambiguous texture of Gabriel's thinking. Unlike the opening sentence of ‘The Sisters’, the one about Gretta's sleeping has an immediate, though subtle, effect even though the person referred to is not named. There is no need for a name; we know the character's thinking well enough that a pronoun will do. As in ‘Araby’, we understand some of the adjectives as Gabriel's interior language. When we read that the tears filling his eyes are ‘Generous’ (D 223), however, the word can elicit a more complicated response than the adjective ‘magical’ in ‘Araby’. There the discrepancy between the narrator's view and the character's created some sense of distance and irony. Here the word, with its combined psychological and physical meanings, which the reader is invited to recognize as ambiguously conjoined, cannot so easily be assigned to the character's view only. There may not be any irony, since the word can be the narrator's description, too, rather than evoking the character's perspective only, or both character's and narrator's perspectives as somehow separable. The kind of intense activity that such a style encourages from the reader as it captures the multiple, shifting perspectives of the character's thinking in its relations to the narrator's language is typical of Joyce's later writing as well.

That activity is a kind of play, a transformational process that takes many elements and perspectives and combines them variously, at times in a fashion that is nearly aleatory. It is surely no coincidence that the complexities of style that give rise to this activity in Dubliners occur most insistently in such stories as ‘The Sisters’, ‘A Painful Case’, and ‘The Dead’, all of which involve encounters with death and retrospective views. In Stephen Hero, Stephen responds to his sister's death by turning toward realism and fantasy as modes of protest; realism that depicts coldly and without illusion the apparent limits of ordinary experience and fantasy that claims to exceed and escape those limits. The Ulyssean Stephen, who is older but perhaps no better able to respond to death, realizes that fantasy, too, has its limits. He may be on the way to learning that there are alternatives to defensive, self-enclosed, and self-protective styles of writing and thinking. Joyce gives us one form those alternatives can take when he produces a style of recollection, one that recovers and revivifies as it invites engaged responses. By writing stories in a style that evokes memory, Joyce can focus on mortality and yet ask for and enable an active redefining of the apparently unalterable limits all of us face.

Notes

1. Vicki Mahaffey discusses the epiphanies in ch. 8 of this volume.

2. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961). Hereafter referred to as ‘Pater’.

3. Wayne Booth discusses the difficulty the reader faces in judging Stephen without explicit guidance from the narrator in a widely reprinted essay, ‘The problem of distance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 323-36. Robert Scholes also discusses the difficulty in ‘Stephen Dedalus, poet or esthete?’, PMLA 89 (1964), 484-9. Hugh Kenner, whose negative judgement of Stephen has been influential, discusses Stephen in ‘The Portrait in perspective’, in Dublin's Joyce (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), pp. 109-33, which has also been widely reprinted. He extends his argument in a more convincing later essay, ‘The Cubist portrait’ in Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock, eds., Approaches to Joyce's ‘Portrait’: Ten Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), pp. 171-84. S. L. Goldberg provides a more sympathetic judgement of Stephen in his James Joyce (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962). I argue for a positive judgement of Stephen in Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

4. Many critics have emphasized one aspect of Joyce's language over another by arguing that his writings are essentially naturalistic, that is, filled with straightforward, external detail, or essentially symbolic, that is, filled with seemingly straightforward details that actually involve spiritual revelations. The terms were set long ago by Edmund Wilson in his seminal book, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931). William York Tindall's interpretations in James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950) and in A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959), for example, assume that Joyce's narratives are to be read symbolically. Kenneth Burke convincingly challenges the critical tendency toward symbolic readings in his essay on A Portrait, ‘Fact, inference, and proof in the analysis of literary symbolism’ (Terms for Order, ed. Stanley E. Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 145-72), in which he outlines a critical procedure that pays careful attention to the shifting meanings of words. More recent critics have also frequently challenged the emphasis on symbols. In James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist (London: Edward Arnold, 1977; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), for instance, Charles K. Peake takes exception to symbolic interpretations and provides well-reasoned, detailed commentaries on all Joyce's early fiction. In the present essay I argue that we witness in the early fiction a shift in Stephen's allegiances away from a symbolic art toward an art that grapples more directly with the sufferings and uncertainties of mortality.

5. Readers need to be aware of an error in the chapter numbering in all editions of Stephen Hero to date (edited by Theodore Spencer in 1944, revised by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon in 1955 and 1963). Hans Walter Gabler explains the error in his ‘Preface’ to Archive 8, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’—A Facsimile of the Manuscript Fragments of ‘Stephen Hero’:

   The eleven chapters of the University College episode in the manuscripts are numbered [xv] to xxv. Theodore Spencer's edition mistakenly numbers twelve chapters as xv to xxvi. The editorial error arises in chapter xviii. Halfway through the manuscript chapter xviii, at the bottom of page 610, appears the note ‘End of Second Episode of v’ in a large scrawl of red crayon. The text it obliterates is repeated in the margin of the subsequent leaf. This leaf is again headed ‘Chapter xviii’ in blue crayon. These as we now know, are markings related to the composition of Portrait and do not constitute a revision of Stephen Hero. Yet, unfortunately, Theodore Spencer assumed a revisional new chapter division and, introducing ‘xix’, renumbered all subsequent chapters. Users of the Stephen Hero editions must be warned that chapters ‘xviii’ and ‘xix’ consecutively are one chapter, chapter xviii, and the chapters ‘xx’ to ‘xxvi’ should be correctly numbered xix to xxv. Only with this correction can the editions be matched with the manuscript and Joyce's comments on the novel in his letters.

   (p. xi)

   I refer to the corrected chapter numbers throughout my discussion. The order in which the surviving fragments of Stephen Hero are printed in the revised edition can also cause confusion. The fragments published at the end of the volume, which are from the middle of the original manuscript, should precede the much longer segment that comes before them in this edition. A freshly edited critical edition of Stephen Hero is in preparation.

6. Hugh Kenner was probably the first critic to discuss the pattern of triumph and undermining in the five parts of A Portrait in ‘The Portrait in perspective’, cited above.

7. The best-known critical discussion of Stephen's villanelle is Robert Scholes's essay, ‘Stephen Dedalus, poet or esthete?’, cited above. Dorrit Cohn provides an alternative perspective in her brief discussion of narration in A Portrait (in her book Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 30-3). Although her book is not primarily about Joyce's fiction, it provides some useful strategies for describing Joyce's varied attempts to present thinking as a process in his writing.

8. Fritz Senn was the first critic to argue for a close relationship between Joyce's later style and the apparently simpler style of Dubliners. He makes that argument briefly in ‘“He was too scrupulous always”: Joyce's “The Sisters”’, JJQ 2 (1965), 66-72.