Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero[2] of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and as a major character in his 1922 novel Ulysses. Stephen mirrors many facets of Joyce's own life and personality. Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in UlyssesLeopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen's tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep's song "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit".
In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait, Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus," a more obvious allusion to he mythological figure Daedalus, a brilliant artificer who constructed a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escaping the island of Crete, where they had been imprisoned by King Minos. Buck Mulligan makes reference to Stephen's mythic namesake in Ulysses, telling him, "Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!" His surname also suggests his desire to "fly" above the constraints of religion, nationality, and politics in his development as an artist. Daedalus had been contracted by King Minos to build the Labyrinth in which he would imprison his wife's son the Minotaur.[3] Stephen's surname may also reflect the labyrinthine quality of his developmental journey in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen's first name recalls the first Christian martyr. The theme of martyrdom runs throughout the novel.
Fictional biography
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
—James Joyce, Opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his feelings. The reader experiences Stephen's fears and bewilderment as he comes to terms with the world in a series of disjointed episodes.[4] Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour. While he cannot yetgrasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is witness to the social, political and religious tensions in Ireland involving Charles Stewart Parnell, which drive wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith in.[5] Back at Clongowes, word spreads that a number of older boys have been caught "smugging" (the term refers to the secret homosexual horseplay that five students were caught at); discipline is tightened, and the Jesuits increase use of corporal punishment. Stephen is strapped when one of his instructors believes he has broken his glasses to avoid studying. Prodded by his classmates, Stephen works up the courage to complain to the rector, Father Conmee, who assures him there will be no such recurrence, leaving Stephen with a sense of triumph.[6]
Stephen's father gets into debt and the family leaves its pleasant suburban home to live in Dublin. Stephen realises that he will not return to Clongowes. However, thanks to a scholarship obtained for him by Father Conmee, Stephen is able to attend Belvedere College, where he excels academically and becomes a class leader.[7] Stephen squanders a large cash prize from school, and begins to see prostitutes, as distance grows between him and his drunken father.[8]
As Stephen abandons himself to sensual pleasures, his class is taken on a religious retreat, where the boys sit through sermons.[9] Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven). He feels that the words of the sermon, describing horrific eternal punishment in hell, are directed at him and, overwhelmed, comes to desire forgiveness. Overjoyed at his return to the Church, he devotes himself to acts of ascetic repentance, though they soon devolve to mere acts of routine, as his thoughts turn elsewhere. His devotion comes to the attention of the Jesuits, and they encourage him to consider entering the priesthood.[10] Stephen takes time to consider, but has a crisis of faith because of the conflict between his spiritual beliefs and his aesthetic ambitions. Along Dollymount Strand he spots a girl wading, and has an epiphany in which he is overcome with the desire to find a way to express her beauty in his writing.[11]
As a student at University College, Dublin, Stephen grows increasingly wary of the institutions around him: Church, school, politics and family. In the midst of the disintegration of his family's fortunes, his father berates him and his mother urges him to return to the Church.[12] An increasingly dry, humourless Stephen explains his alienation from the Church and the aesthetic theory he has developed to his friends, who find that they cannot accept either of them.[13] Stephen concludes that Ireland is too restrictive to allow him to express himself fully as an artist, so he decides that he will have to leave. He sets his mind on self-imposed exile, but not without declaring in his diary his ties to his homeland:[14]
... I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
In Ulysses, Stephen is back in Dublin, having returned because his mother was dying. He refused to kneel at her deathbed, a memory that will haunt him throughout the day. He is the character who corresponds to Telemachus; less overtly, he embodies aspects of Hamlet. He is the protagonist of the first three episodes. Subsequently, Leopold Bloom is introduced. The two will miss each other, not meeting until late in the novel.
Ovid described Daedalus in the Metamorphoses (VIII:183–235) as being shut up in a tower to prevent his knowledge of the Labyrinth from spreading to the public. Stephen is introduced taking breakfast in the SandycoveMartello tower in Dublin on the morning of 16 June 1904. Stephen shares his opinions about religion, especially as they relate to the recent death of his mother, with his quasi-friend Buck Mulligan, who manages to offend Stephen before making plans as they part ways to go drinking later that evening. In the second episode Stephen teaches a class of boys a history lesson on ancient Rome. In the "Proteus" episode (in Greek myth Proteus was the old man of the sea and the shepherd of sea animals who knew all things past, present, and future but disliked telling what he knew), Stephen ambles along the strand as his thoughts are related in the form of an internal monologue.
Following several episodes centering on Bloom, Stephen returns to the fore of the novel in the library episode, in which he expounds at length to some acquaintances his theory of the obscurely autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's works and questions the institution of fatherhood, deeming it to be a fiction. He discredits his own ideas afterward, suggesting a lack of self-confidence.
Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of Buck Mulligan. The young men become boisterous, and start discussing such topics as fertility, contraception and abortion. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of a son to Mina Purefoy.
The episode is written as a play script, complete with stage directions. The action is frequently interrupted by "hallucinations" experienced by Stephen and Bloom—fantastic manifestations of the fears and passions of the two characters. Stephen and his friend Lynch walk into Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Bloom pursues them and eventually finds them at Bella Cohen's brothel. Bloom sees Stephen overpay at the brothel, and decides to hold onto the rest of his money for safekeeping. Stephen hallucinates that his mother's rotting cadaver has risen up from the floor to confront him. He cries "Non serviam!," uses his walking stick to smash a chandelier,[15] and flees the room. Bloom quickly pays Bella for the damage, then runs after Stephen. He finds Stephen engaged in an argument with an English soldier, Private Carr, who, after a perceived insult to the King, punches Stephen. The police arrive and the crowd disperses. As Bloom tends to Stephen, he has a hallucination of his deceased son, Rudy, as an 11-year-old.
Bloom takes Stephen to a cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge to restore him to his senses. There, they encounter a drunken sailor, D. B. Murphy (W. B. Murphy in the 1922 text). The episode is dominated by the motif of confusion and mistaken identity, with Bloom, Stephen and Murphy's identities being repeatedly called into question. Bloom returns home with Stephen, makes him a cup of cocoa, discusses cultural and linguistic differences between them, considers the possibility of publishing Stephen's parable stories, and offers him a place to stay for the night. Stephen refuses Bloom's offer and is ambiguous in response to Bloom's proposal of future meetings. The two men urinate in the backyard, Stephen departs and wanders off into the night,[16] and Bloom goes to bed, where Molly is sleeping.
Hugh Kenner, writing in 1948, was critical of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait, arguing that he “does not become an artist at all . . . but an aesthete” and “to take him seriously is very hard indeed.” Kenner lamented, “It is painful to be invited to close the book with an indigestibly Byronic hero stuck in our throats.”[17]
A later version of Kenner’s 1948 essay appeared in his first book on Joyce published in 1955.[18]
Writing in 1959, William York Tindall was also critical of Stephen Dedalus, saying “he never sees himself entirely.” Tindall regretted Stephen’s “failure to realize himself,” adding that “this is attended to in Ulysses, which makes A Portrait seem preliminary sketch.”[19]
In 1963 S. L. Goldberg took issue with Kenner’s negative appraisal of Stephen, conceding that “Mr. Kenner is certainly right in pointing to the irony with which Joyce views him in both the Portrait and Ulysses,” but faulting him for concluding that in doing so Joyce is rejecting Stephen himself. For Goldberg, Joyce’s “irony is a qualifying criticism, which does not imply a total rejection.”[20]
It has been argued that Joyce used the doctrines of the Incarnation cited early in Ulysses to characterize his relation to both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and their relation to each other. Two of the doctrines have been linked to signify that Stephen, though a separate person, shares Joyce’s nature and that Joyce speaks through him. His Hamlet theory is a continuation of his aesthetic theory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[21]
Quotations
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When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 5
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
—Ulysses, Episode 9
Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
—Ulysses, Episode 2
I fear those big words that make us so unhappy.
—Ulysses, Episode 2
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.
↑ Lang, Frederick K. (1993). "Ulysses" and the Irish God. Lewisburg, London and Toronto: Bucknell University Press, Associated University Presses. pp.20–2, 67–91. ISBN0838751504. Retrieved 7 March 2024.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". According to the writer Declan Kiberd, "before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking".
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, the novel was Joyce's final work. It is written in a largely idiosyncratic language that blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms, and puns in multiple languages. It has been categorized as "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables [...] with the work of analysis and deconstruction"; many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of dreams and hypnagogia, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people, and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It has also been regarded as an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his prior aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text. Although critics have described it as unintelligible, Joyce asserted that every syllable could be justified. Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place on a Thursday in 1904, the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Daedalus was a figure in Greek mythology.
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
The Irish National Invincibles, usually known as the Invincibles, were a militant organisation based in Ireland active from 1881 to 1883. Founded as splinter group of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the group had a more radical agenda, and was formed with an intent to target those who implemented English policies in Ireland.
Clongowes Wood College SJ is a Catholic voluntary boarding school for boys near Clane, County Kildare, Ireland, founded by the Jesuits in 1814. It features prominently in James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. One of five Jesuit secondary schools in Ireland, it had 450 students in 2019.
Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the 1922 novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The wife of main character Leopold Bloom, she roughly corresponds to Penelope in the Odyssey. The major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not. Molly is having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan. Molly, whose given name is Marion, was born in Gibraltar on 8 September 1870, the daughter of Major Tweedy, an Irish military officer, and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of Spanish descent. Molly and Leopold were married on 8 October 1888. She is the mother of Milly Bloom, who, at the age of 15, has left home to study photography. She is also the mother of Rudy Bloom, who died at the age of 11 days. In Dublin, Molly is an opera singer of some renown.
Stephen Hero is a posthumously published autobiographical novel by Irish author James Joyce. It is the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Its published form reflects only a portion of the manuscript: the first 518 pages have disappeared; 383 pages remain.
Malachi Roland St. John "Buck" Mulligan is a fictional character in James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. He appears most prominently in episode 1 (Telemachus), and is the subject of the novel's famous first sentence: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
Peter Costello is an author and editor, described by the American critic Robert Hogan in the Greenwood Dictionary of Irish Literature as “a contemporary embodiment” of the “tradition in Irish literature of the independent scholar, who has an erudition embarrassing to the professional academic”.
Ulysses is a 1967 drama film based on James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. It concerns the meeting of two Irishmen, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in 1904 Dublin.
George Dempsey born in the parish of St. Mary's, Dublin was a teacher of English at Belvedere College, Dublin, Ireland, who taught English to the writer James Joyce and later the poet Austin Clarke during the time they attended the Jesuit school. At the same time he ran a grocer's shop and post office at 13 Dunville Ave, Rathmines. The character of Mr. Tate in Joyce's novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero is based on George Dempsey. George Dempsey died at 13 Dunville Avenue at the age of 70.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a 1977 film adaptation of Irish novelist James Joyce's 1916 novel of the same name, directed by Joseph Strick. It portrays the growth of consciousness of Joyce's semi-autobiographical character, Stephen Dedalus, as a boy and later as a university student in late nineteenth-century Dublin.
Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction. Author James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904–1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines 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 epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life, non-religious and non-mystical in nature. They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 1898 and 1904 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time," as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a “commercial-industrial-capitalist society” during the early twentieth century.
John Stephen Conmee SJ was an Irish Jesuit educator. He was born in County Roscommon into a wealthy farming family and was educated at Castleknock College and Clongowes Wood College. He influenced his student James Joyce and became a character in Joyce's novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. He was a rector of Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare and prefect of studies at Belvedere College.
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