Humiliation, Warm Affection, Disgust, Lust and Doubt Percolate in Little Chandler As He

James Somers

An Easy Challenge: Fabricated Fear in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A “sense of fear” invades Stephen as he watches a flock of birds from the steps of his college library.1 His apparent unease is surprising if only because earlier, on that day of dappled seaborne clouds, a parallel moment had caused him such “profane joy” (171). Perhaps in the interim he has found reason to doubt the symbols, visions, and prophecy that had before been “the call of life to his soul” (169). Or perhaps —and this seems likely for a sentimental egoist like Stephen—he is contriving his fear of mystic symbolism to make art seem more profound and himself more bold.

Stephen is moved by an “instinct subtle and hostile” against the cold mornings and quiet company of priestly life to reject the order of Melchisedec (161). But in that act he also foregoes the “secret knowledge and secret power” that had so tempted him in the first place (159). If art is to be a fulfilling alternative to the “pale service of the altar,” then, it ought to have its own rich mythology—replete with

“obscure things” and mysteries—to compensate for the loss (Ibid., 161).

There is evidence that Stephen, consciously or not, does in fact construe art as a religion. A vision of his namesake Daedalus signals for him “a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve [. . .] a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop” (169). Like Christ’s he imagines his life divinely ordained, not by God but by the word of a great poet (Ovid). His divine mission: to “create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul [. . .] a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable” (170).

That vague imperative, the impetus for his aesthetic and artistic project, is couched in spirituality: a

“radiant,” “magic,” angelic bird-girl opens for him “the gates of all the ways of error and glory”; “Heavenly

God!” he exclaims before settling in “holy silence” to consider the future (171-172).

That sensation of profound rapture appears to have worn off by the time Stephen stands “gazing at birds in flight” on the steps of the library (225). He “leans wearily on his ashplant,” watching as their

“flying beaks cloved the air,” slowly counting them, being soothed by them (224). He appears more composed and mature, his thoughts in full sentences instead of exclamatory bursts. Yet a mystic aura pervades the scene: Agrippa and his occult auguries, Swedenborg’s “mysticism and psychic research”;

Stephen likens his staff to a divining stick and the library to a temple (540, 225). His mind wanders to

11. Chester G. Anderson, ed., A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 225. Hereafter cited in the text. “symbols and portents,” to Daedelus again, to “Thoth, the god of writers” (225). But apparently he is not inspired—in fact, he claims a vague “fear of the unknown” as if these visions disturbed him: are the birds an “augury of good or evil?” he asks, a “symbol of departure or of loneliness?” (224, 226). He seems to be equivocating, wondering whether that project for which he was once so ecstatic is nothing more than

“putting commas into a document” (225).

We might be concerned for Stephen if we had not just seen in such unabashed detail2 the full range of his romantic, egoist, Platonist tendencies. The fact that his “fears” link art to ancient gods, or that he quotes Yeats just a moment later (“Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel”), should make concrete our speculation: Stephen is as he ever was, at the epicenter of a self-important symbolic world (225). But for someone occupying the Christ-like role in his own religion, doubt and difficulty make the correspondence easier to swallow. Calling Thoth’s art “folly,” then, sets up an easy challenge for his conquering soul. “Was it for this folly that he was about to leave [. . .] the order of life out of which he had come?” he asks with the answer in mind—an emphatic “Yes!” (Ibid.).

When Stephen finally leaves Dublin to, in his words, “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” we are therefore not surprised. And in spite of whatever he thought he thought on the library steps, neither is he.

22. I am referring to the whole novel (especially the more epiphanic monologues) up to this point which makes proving the claim beyond the scope of this paper. As support I have in mind Rebecca West’s criticism cited by Chester G. Anderson on p. 448.