modern Ireland. After Joyce completed his Dubliners collection in 1904 and sent the manuscript to Ireland for publication, an Irish printer destroyed the plates for fear of legal suits. Joyce wrote in a broadside what he often voiced about the Irish: 'This lovely land that always sent / Her writers and artists to banishment / And in a spirit of Irish fun / Betrayed her own leaders one by one.'
Each of the stories in Dubliners is written in a style Joyce described as 'scrupulously mean,' though he had a larger design in mind that would open up his land's spaces to the more encompassing territory of his vengeful imagination. He begins the first story of the volume, 'The Sisters,' with a reference to a dying priest, 'There was no hope for him this time,' and the phrase calls to mind the famous inscription on the gate to the underworld that initiates an earlier Western epic, Dante's Divine Comedy: 'Abandon every hope, you who enter.' That the city shield of Dublin represents two sisters framing the city's motto makes the title of the opening story an invitation to the reader to enter into -769- Joyce's version of Dublin as a dying city of Christendom, the dear dirty «Dustbin» of Finnegans Wake.
Joyce's Dubliners suffer strikingly similar Irish fates-the social, religious, and political atrophy that shrinks the human soul; the intense struggle and rivalry within families; the loss or bartering of vocations. Joyce recognized the Irish as a nation of self-betrayers, haunted by that particularly paralyzing element in the political culture that made life so difficult and dispiriting: the myth of legendary Irish political failure that immobilizes real national spirit and confidence in the face of British imperial domination. He had a thorough distrust of the sentimental lethargy of the popular imagination and of the blowhard nationalism that masks the bankrupt politics represented, say, in the Dubliners story 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room.' He scorned the intolerant biases of the Gaelic League, represented by Miss Ivors in 'The Dead,' and he feared the unpleasantness and futility of the radical Irish exiles beyond Irish borders, the 'wild geese,' who are little better than Irish drunks at home besotted by the product of the great national brewing industry, what Joyce called by the time of Finnegans Wake, the 'wild guineese.'
Joyce thought of Dubliners as a 'chapter in the moral history of my nation,' and his stories register something of his political soul, insofar as his politics originate from an inner core of respect and concern for those not so easily empowered, nationally or within the core of religious and familial life. His best vision in Dubliners, whatever the actual lot of the Irish, centers on what is often missing in Ireland: freedom from material domination and release from oppressive homegrown conventions. Joyce's sensibility is close to that of Leopold Bloom in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses-practical and humane: 'Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that is really life.'
The husband of the story, Gabriel Conroy, confronts the remembered image of a bygone rival, his wife's long-dead admirer from many years before. Joyce contrives the pathos of the story so that Gabriel's blundering insensitivity to the deeply emotional reaction of his wife, Gretta, does not entirely cancel the legitimacy of his love for her. The renowned ending of the story, like so much else in Joyce, especially the fading strains of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is complex but strangely affirming. The word yes makes its way into the deep freeze of Ireland in a surge of emotion that crystallizes the world for the artist's vision of it: 'Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland… His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'
It took ten years for Dubliners to see the light of day, from its inception in 1904 to its publication in 1914. In the interim Joyce scrapped his first narrative effort, an overtly autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, and worked it into his equally autobiographical but far more inventive Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In part, Portrait presents the great influences of Joyce's formative years in the late 1890s, the one embodied in realist European drama, primarily that of Henrik Ibsen, and the other in the fin-de-siècle symbolist movement in France. Joyce's goal throughout his career was to combine these movements, to convey the voices and sounds of realistic civic surroundings in the powerful and resonant figure or symbol he called the epiphany. The epiphany is a manifest, discernible narrative moment where impressions become symbolically charged and meaningful.
Only an attuned and powerful artistic consciousness can perceive and arrange sequences of epiphanies within a complete narrative action, and Joyce's autobiographical fiction-in Portrait and through to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake-reflects the means by which writers struggle to form such a consciousness. Joyce was one of two prominent novelists of the twentieth century to make the progress of a career as a realist/symbolist writer a focal point of his fiction. The other was Marcel Proust. For both writers, young men are the subjects of books whose action, in part, consists of training them-as artists-to write something like the books they are in. In one of those phrases from Ulysses that aids the -771- reader trying to grasp Joyce's methods, the narrative describes 'a sort of retrospective arrangement' by which the present casts light back on the past. Progressive and retrospective arrangements provide a double texture, and part of the interest, say, in Stephen Dedalus as artist is the way he once was the portrait that Joyce would have him draw. This notion is implicit in the two ways of reading the title, a portrait of an artist when he was a young man or a portrait of an artist by a young man.
Joyce is well aware that his portraits, whatever their provenance, are of artists who have not accomplished very much at the time he writes of them. Indeed, the failures and trials of the artist are among the sorrier and funnier spectacles of life, and he is quick to include that part of the artist's story in his fiction as well. Much of Ulysses deals with the agonies of the same Dedalus who was so enthralled at his aesthetic prospects in Portrait. The same is true of Finnegans Wake. Nowhere does Joyce make more fun of the artist than in the portrait of Shem the Penman, where the exilic Irish artist is everything from a sham to a shame, the Wake's 'poor trait of the artless.' As much as Joyce venerates the artist he also recognizes the selfishness and perversity of his being. 'Shun the Punman,' is the advice given in the Wake, and it is not altogether clear whether Joyce is describing or recommending the reaction by others to his surrogate self.
But the artist has to begin somewhere, and Joyce begins him at the beginning. Portrait of the Artist opens with the narrative formula, 'Once upon a time.' Joyce the innovator soon cancels the cliché with a supplement, '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… ' Baby talk is the first portrait of the artist as a young man, though in the larger vein of the narrative-its mythic backdrop-the first sentence calls up the dilemma of Stephen's namesake, the Greek artist Daedalus, outsmarting the moocow or Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth. Here, however, the putative speaking voice is that of Stephen Dedalus's real father, Simon Dedalus.
From the very beginning of the novel the key question for the young Irish artist is who possesses his narrative voice. The rest of the action of Portrait focuses on all the claimants-family, church, friends, educators, revolutionaries. Stephen's task by the end of the narrative is to replace the voices that had rivaled and usurped his own from childhood. Joyce concludes Portrait with a series of diary entries in which the
-772- young artist, in first person, invokes an even older father, the mythical Daedalus, to aid him in telling what he had formerly heard. If the novel is read retrospectively, the very first voice taken over in print-the first sentence we now have of the physical book Portrait-is the voice of the father rendered by the son. When Stephen invokes the mythic Daedalus in the last sentence of Portrait and asks for help from the old artificer-'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead'-he is asking for the linguistic power that would transform his real father's voice into an artistic resource. In life that voice was the child's memory; in book form it is the beginning of the artist's own portrait, his 'once upon a time.'
By Ulysses, Joyce makes it clear that the artist needs more than a voice; he needs a body. One key difference between Portrait and Ulysses is the degree to which the latter refocuses the artistic process away from intellect and onto the actual things people touch or onto the things that touch them. Joyce explores the crucial notion that he enters in his own notesheets for Ulysses: 'The imagination has a body to it.' 'My book,' Joyce told Frank Budgen of Ulysses, 'is among other things the epic of the human body.' Joyce took great care to make it so, developing as part of his style a method of narration where each chapter would correspond stylistically to a different body organ or body process. 'How's the body?' McCoy asks Leopold Bloom in the Lotuseaters episode, and the answer to that question is what each character confronts before the action is done.
Joyce's willingness to make his story a body's day-its desires, its movements, its functions, its satisfactions-
