Stephen Hero

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Stephen Hero
StephenHero.jpg
First edition
Author James Joyce
Cover artistN. I. Cannon
LanguageEnglish
Genre Autobiographical, Modernism
Publisher Jonathan Cape
Publication date
1944
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  

Stephen Hero is a posthumously published autobiographical novel by Irish author James Joyce. [1] 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. [2]

Contents

Background

Work on Stephen Hero probably began in Dublin in 1903, [3] although some scholarship suggests a date between 1904 and 1906. [4] According to Derek Attridge, it was to be "a thinly disguised autobiography, stylistically undistinguished and immensely long." [3]

Joyce abandoned the work in Trieste in 1905. [3] It was left among manuscripts given to the care of his brother Stanislaus when Joyce moved to Paris, who later sent it back to him. [5] Sylvia Beach, to whom Joyce later gave the surviving pages, wrote that, "When the manuscript came back to its author, after the twentieth publisher had rejected it, he threw it in the fire, from which Mrs. Joyce, at the risk of burning her hands, rescued these pages." Biographer Herbert Gorman supported this claim which has been widely reported. [6] It has been noted that no surviving parts of the manuscript have any signs of burning. [7] This surviving portion, missing the first 518 pages, was published in 1944. Stanislaus Joyce retained a separate portion of the manuscript which include a self-contained episode that would later be developed into a scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: This section was later rediscovered and published in 1955. Five additional pages were of this additional section later came to light in 1959 and were later reintegrated into the additional scene in 1963. [8] [9]

Literary theory

Joyce introduced the concept of “epiphany” in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Thomas Aquinas’s three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object “seems to us radiant, [it] achieves its epiphany.” [10] The term isn’t used when Stephen Dedalus covers the same ground in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Editor Theodore Spencer wrote in his introduction to the published edition of the manuscript that only in Stephen Hero does Joyce explicate an esthetic theory that pervades all of his other works. [11] He points to the following passage:

Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.…This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. [12]

There’s a reference to Stephen Dedalus’s collection of epiphanies in Ulysses. [13] Joyce himself recorded over seventy epiphanies, of which forty have survived. [14]

William York Tindall has suggested that in Dubliners the concept is the basis of an overall narrative strategy, "the commonplace things of Dublin [becoming] embodiments or symbols . . . of paralysis". [15] Another critic has said of A Portrait that "in at least three instances an epiphany helps Stephen decide on the future courses of this life". [16] She has also identified four distinct epiphany techniques in Joyce's work, noting their use in Ulysses, from the simplest device, such as the revelation of Gerty Macdowell's limp, to the more complex, such as the bowl symbolism in "Telemachus". Cited as an example of Joyce's major epiphany technique—quidditas produced directly—is the revelation of Molly Bloom as "female essence". [17]

Australian scholar S. L. Goldberg has argued that interior monologue in Ulysses is rooted in Joyce's epiphany technique. For Goldberg, the epiphany is "the real artistic (and dramatic) unit of Joyce's 'stream-of-consciousness' writing. What he renders dramatically are minds engaged in the apprehension of epiphanies—the elements of meaning apprehended in life." [18]

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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.

John Jermain Slocum (1914–1997) was an American diplomat, book collector, literary agent, and scholar. He spent most of his career in the Inspection Corps of the United States Information Agency. As a bibliophile and philanthropist, he influenced two major US archives and contributed to scholarship on James Joyce.

References

  1. Joyce, James (1944). Stephen Hero. London: Jonathan Cape. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  2. Joyce 1944, p. 15.
  3. 1 2 3 Attridge, D. (2012). Joyce: The modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner. In R. Caserio & C. Hawes (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the English Novel (pp. 581-595). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.038
  4. Slocum, John J. And Herbert Cahoon, "Introduction", Stephen Hero, New Direcrions, New York, 1963
  5. Slocum, John J. And Herbert Cahoon, "Foreword", Stephen Hero, New Direcrions, New York, 1963
  6. Gorman, Herbert. "James Joyce", Farra & Rinehart, New York, 1940, p. 196
  7. Slocum, John J. And Herbert Cahoon, "Foreword", Stephen Hero, New Direcrions, New York, 1963
  8. Slocum, John J. And Herbert Cahoon, "Foreword", Stephen Hero, New Direcrions, New York, 1963
  9. Gorman, Herbert. "James Joyce", Farra & Rinehart, New York, 1940, p. 196
  10. Joyce 1944, p. 216.
  11. Joyce, James (1963). Stephen Hero. New Directions. p. 16.
  12. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero, New Direcrions, New York, 1963 pp. 210-211
  13. Joyce, James (1922). Ulysses. London: Egoist Press. p. 41. Retrieved 8 March 2024.
  14. Joyce, James (2024). Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition. University Press of Florida. ISBN   978-0813080710 . Retrieved 8 March 2024.
  15. Tindall, William York (1959). A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 12. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  16. Hendry, Irene (1946). "Joyce's Epiphanies". The Sewanee Review. 54 (3): 454. JSTOR   27537675 . Retrieved 14 March 2024.
  17. Hendry, Irene (1946). "Joyce's Epiphanies". The Sewanee Review. 54 (3): 449–67. JSTOR   27537675 . Retrieved 14 March 2024.
  18. Goldberg, S. L. (1961). The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce's "Ulysses". London: Chatto and Windus. p. 253. Retrieved 9 March 2024.

Further reading