A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

"Irish intellectual life is deeply indebted to its literary culture. In Ireland, in the 20th and the 21st centuries, there’s been a relative dearth of what you might call dedicated intellectuals and, by comparison, a dominant role played by the image of the writer, in a more traditional literary sense. This undoubtedly has something to do with the subtle hegemony exercised by priestcraft in Ireland, coupled, over the longer term, with the declining fortunes of philosophical ingenuity within Catholic thinking. The figures of Joyce, Yeats and Heaney, for example, have been very prominent on the cultural landscape. Their contributions were meant to serve, rather self-consciously, a purely literary program; they did not see themselves as intellectuals, philosophers or political thinkers. For that reason, it’s important to begin any discussion of Irish history and Irish culture with an iconic figure of the literary efflorescence of the early 20th century, in this case James Joyce. “Poetry, drama and the novel provided means of negotiating the past while promising to transcend it.” Within the novel itself, Joyce develops a view of the vocation of literature. The job of literature , as he sees it, is partly to provide liberation from history . To achieve that goal, a vision of history is included in that ambition. It is not an accident that the most prominent and successful forms of Irish intellectual culture took the form of an avowedly literary culture. Poetry , drama and the novel provided means of negotiating the past while promising to transcend it. They dealt with an immediate historical predicament with a view to processing the legacies of the past. You’re asking about the figure of Stephen Dedalus’s father, the elder Dedalus, in the book. I see the novel as very much about the boy liberating himself from the heritage of the father in various ways. The idea that he is rescuing himself out of the shadow of the father overlaps with the larger narrative of the book, which presents Stephen freeing himself from his own inherited culture. This involves a shift in perspective as a new prospect is opened up. There’s a promise of handing initiative to a new generation, from father to son; but the son is still finding that he is a prisoner of the world of the father. The world of the father is not simply the father’s worldview, but also a world in which the father has had to struggle to cope. That’s completely right. Joyce’s depiction is one of Ireland in the aftermath of the fall of Parnell. At the start of the 1890s, much of Ireland glimpsed the prospect of national unity based around Parnell himself, embodying a national project, whilst offering credible leadership. This, as the Portrait reflects, fell apart under the weight of sexual scandal and ensuing religious polarities. One can see all the characters participating in the Christmas dinner scene as representing different strands of contemporary Irish opinion. Casey, Dante, Mrs Dedalus, Mr Dedalus — all of them had been united around the figure of Parnell. In the world of the novel, this has now been shattered by the fact that Parnell has fallen into disgrace in the eyes of, first of all, Victorian Britain and its mores, but also the Irish Catholic Church. Irish nationalist opinion then divides. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter You can see these divisions around the dinner table collide in various ways. There’s Dante, who represents a strand of Catholic piety, there’s Casey, who is the representative of a Fenian strand of nationalism, and there’s Dedalus senior himself, the anti-clerical Parnellite. The collision between these perspectives leaves the child dismayed and baffled; the narrative of the novel plots his emergence from the concussion induced by that bewildering experience. There’s a great poignancy arising from Stephen Dedalus’s relation to the Catholic church. Obviously, from early on, the central character has a longing for escape. There is at first a prospect of liberty supplied by Catholicism itself, in the sense that it provides release in the form of intellectual absorption. It’s an intellectual investment, and it offers a structure of thought. The poignancy arises from the gradual discovery that this structure is actually oppressive and disabling. And I see this as one strand of the national culture from which he feels obliged, ultimately, to free himself. “ Finnegans Wake seems to me to sacrifice both pathos and argument to experiment. ” The other strand is the national story populated by a succession of heroes constituting what amounts to a republican tradition, hoping to realise final political deliverance. There’s a scene in the novel where Stephen is having a conversation with Davin, one of his college friends, and finally we realize that he’s come to the conclusion that the Irish national self-entrancement, if you like, is really a system of delusion. The reality has been that Ireland has ‘devoured’ its own train of would-be liberators. For this reason there’s a disconsolateness about the novel in the face of the lived realities of Irish social, political and religious history. Yes, though this is my favourite novel, without a doubt. Ulysses is palpably a work of genius but I prefer the realist depiction of the Portrait. I like the subtle, psychological, nuance rather than the intense literary experimentalism of Ulysses which just doesn’t captivate me to quite the same extent. Dubliners , again, is a masterpiece of insight and concision. Finnegans Wake , on the other hand, seems to me to sacrifice both pathos and argument to experiment."