Dedalus and Icarus
Hubris and nationality in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This post is dedicated to my mum, who saw me carrying around a heavily-annotated, dog-eared, pencil-marked copy of Portrait and asked if I would write something about Joyce to follow my earlier post about Yeats.
That A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book suffused with irony is a point of consensus among basically all interpreters. But the consensus breaks down almost immediately when you ask the most basic questions about the irony: which features of the life of his barely-fictionalised alter ego Stephen Dedalus did Joyce seek to portray with irony? and what is the significance of that irony? This post is my own attempt to say something about where the irony lies in Portrait, and what it tells us about Joyce’s self-image and artistic development.
Let’s follow established practice around these parts and start at the end, with a passage written in such glorious, magnificent prose that you are tempted to go along with it fully, and ignore the obvious bitter irony that marks it out as a display of hubris.
26 April: Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of existence and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
27 April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
[James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 5, pp. 275–276 in the Penguin Modern Classics edition.]
The ‘old father, old artificer’ is not named, but his identity is no secret. In his final diary entry, Stephen is addressing Daedalus, the creator of the labyrinth in Greek mythology and subject of the novel’s Ovidian epigraph: ‘Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes’; ‘to unimagined arts / He set his mind’.1
The figure of Daedalus, the master craftsman, thus bookends Portrait. But at the end of the novel, Stephen takes on a very particular role vis-a-vis Daedalus, calling the ‘old artificer’ also ‘old father’. Again, this positioning comes in such a wonderful line that the reader wants it to be an uncomplicated affirmation. But Joyce lays the irony on thick. By positioning Daedalus as his ‘old father’, Stephen is inadvertently taking on the mantle of Daedalus’ son: that is, Icarus, the very symbol of hubris, the boy who flew too close to the sun.
This much is relatively clear to most readers. But the temptation has often been to effectively read Portrait in reverse, starting from the beauty and relative clarity of Stephen’s diary entries at the end of chapter five and working back through the rest of the novel. As such, the correspondence set up at the end of chapter five (between Stephen and Icarus, with Daedalus standing as the father figure) gets read into the rest of the novel. Hence the note at the very end of my Penguin Modern Classics copy of Portrait, telling me that in his diary entry of 27 April, ‘Stephen, as ever, is harping on the father [emphasis mine]’.
But not only logically but literarily, this is the opposite to the procedure we should follow: the concepts and ideas presented in Stephen’s diary in 1904 should be interpreted in terms of the development we have watched up until that point, not vice versa. If you follow the story in order, you find that nowhere else in Portrait does Daedalus feature so unambiguously as a father-figure for Stephen. For instance, take the aforementioned epigraph. In Ovid’s original the pronoun, ‘he’, refers to Daedalus the craftsman, not Icarus his son. Yet in the context of Portrait the epigraph is clearly supposed to refer to Stephen, the artist. The metaphor is not that Daedalus is Stephen’s father; rather, it is that Daedalus is Stephen.
Now, Joyce was no simple pedlar of analogy, and the metaphorical and symbolic importance of Daedalus is never completely unambiguous in the novel—except right at the very end, when Stephen makes it completely unambiguous in his diary. In particular, the ideas of Daedalus-as-Stephen and Daedalus-as–father to Stephen are linked by the symbolic idea of the son becoming the father, or taking the father’s place.2 So they cannot be completely separated. But there is one central and crucial difference between the two metaphors: Daedalus succeeded in his escape from the labyrinth, while his hubristic son died. So teasing out the relative role of these two analogies in Portrait is crucial to understanding Joyce’s perspective on Stephen’s prospects, and thus the place of irony in the novel. My first suggestion in this post is that, before the diary entry of 27 April 1904, the metaphor that preponderates is Stephen taking on the role of Daedalus, and not that of his son.
A basic indication of this is that Stephen’s surname is Dedalus, after all, not Icarus (or, I suppose, Icrus). Indeed, the tension between Stephen’s surname and his forename—his Christian name, as it were—is a key theme of chapter four, where the artificer and the protomartyr are both offered to Stephen as potential models.
First, following on from Stephen’s (re)conversion in chapter three, the director of Belvedere College tries to convince him to join the priesthood, invoking in his attempt the example of Stephen’s namesake saint. Responding to this attempt at recruitment, Stephen recoils—recoils from the model of St Stephen; ‘an instinct subtle and hostile… armed him against acquiescence.’ He walks away not only from the priesthood but from Catholicism as a whole, and finds himself weary of life, until (some time later) he is rescued from his weariness and pain by the invocation of his surname.
In the novel’s next episode, Stephen comes across a group of his schoolfriends playing on Dollymount Strand, and they address him in faux-Greek: ‘Stephanos Dedalos!’ ‘Their banter was not new to him’, yet in the context of his recent (re)apostasy, it suddenly made him think more on his ‘strange name’—meaning his faux-Greek surname, not his eminently ordinary forename.3 He suddenly feels that his link to his ancient Greek namesake is a ‘prophecy’; and unlike the model provided by St Stephen, he embraces the model of Daedalus. I will quote at length, with the excuse that this is an unbelievably beautiful passage:
Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?
His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs. [Chapter 4, p. 183.]
The rest of the chapter explores Stephen’s sudden artistic epiphany, his embrace of the aesthetic life, his adoption of a new ‘ground project’—all of which come with his taking on of the mantle of Daedalus: ‘He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.’
Again, the symbolism is not completely unambiguous, and there are elements that suggest the risk of Stephen being more Icarus than Daedalus—note that he imagines himself ‘flying sunward’, the very thing Daedalus avoided in order to successfully fly by the nets of celestial heat and ocean spray. In addition, Ovid tells us that Icarus’ downfall came
… when the boy
Began to enjoy his thrilling flight and left
His guide to roam the ranges of the heavens,
And soared too high. [Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 8, trans. A. D. Melville; emphasis mine.]
So the ‘ecstasy’ of Stephen’s flight is also Icarian, as is his isolated aesthetic individualism.
But then again, Icarus’ defining element was his youth, his boyhood. By contrast, the narrator describes how, in the moment of epiphany, Stephen entered into maturity: his ‘soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes.’ The point is that at the end of chapter four, with Stephen’s newfound dedication to create something new out of his soul, there is some ambiguity—and certainly, there are as yet no references to Daedalus as ‘old father’, or anything like that. While neither metaphorical possibility is yet a certainty, the hopeful Daedalian option seems the stronger force.
But as we have seen, at the end of chapter five (and the novel as a whole) Stephen personally resolves the symbolic ambiguity in favour of Daedalus-as-father-figure, inadvertently standing himself in Icarus’ stead. It’s notable that this comes immediately after he fully specifies his aesthetic project, deciding that his quest to create a ‘new and soaring and beautiful’ object would be best fulfilled by forging the as-yet-uncreated conscience of the Irish race.
At the end of both chapters four and five, then, we have two elements: a statement of Stephen’s artistic project, and an invocation of Daedalus. But in chapter five, Stephen specifically orients his project towards the nation, and at the same time invokes Daedalus as father, positioning himself as Icarus. These, I think, are linked developments; this is my second suggestion in this post. Stephen’s hubris at the end of the novel (his becoming Icarus rather than Daedalus) is linked with the desire that develops through chapter five, the desire to create specifically national art. This is the core of Portrait’s irony.
Conversations about nationality in Portrait typically orbit themselves around Stephen’s (second) conversation with his friend Davin in chapter five, which gives us some of Joyce’s most famous lines: Stephen’s refusal to pay in his own life and person debts that his ancestors made, his dedication to fly by the nets of nationality, language, and religion. But to wrench this conversation out of context is to miss something important about it. Stephen talks to Davin after his prior encounter with the dean of studies at the university, the late-converting English Catholic come to teach the Irish.
The dean’s treatment of Stephen (and, presumably, Stephen’s fellow-countrymen) is marked by a deep linguistic condescension, starting with his ‘polite’ correction of Stephen over the meaning of the word ‘detain’, but peaking when Stephen and the dean briefly fall into mutual incomprehension after the dean uses the word ‘funnel’ for what Stephen calls a ‘tundish’. No matter that the dean feigns to find the episode ‘most interesting’, the falseness of his courtesy—his deep-seated feeling of superiority—is obvious. Stephen’s laughter as he insists that ‘in Lower Drumcondra… they speak the best English’ betrays his insecurity; no matter his outward urgency to turn back to the philosophy of art, his inner thoughts are consumed:
—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. [Chapter 5, p. 205.]
The shadow of the dean’s language haunts Stephen for much of chapter five: he displaces his resentment into a hostile knee-jerk reaction to the accent of Ulsterman MacAlister, and is depressed by the speech of fellow Dubliner Cranly: ‘unlike that of Davin [my emphasis]’, Cranly’s language ‘had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms.’
Right before meeting with Davin, then, Stephen’s national insecurities had been heightened by his meeting with the dean. He felt uncomfortable in the English language, yet constrained by his inability to leave it behind: for he knew no Irish, nor even had ‘quaintly turned’ echoes of the language in his speech. The English language governed his tongue, preventing him from achieving an authentic connection with his home country. In his mind, authentic Irish speech—and, indirectly, authentic Irishness—became connected with Davin, the Gaelic League– and GAA-supporting Fenian ‘peasant’. By contrast, Stephen drew a connection between his own modern and urban Dublin upbringing and a bleak, deadened, unrestful form of speech, without any of the ‘sacred eloquence’ the city might once have possessed. Davin came to stand for all that stood ‘between Stephen’s mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of Irish life’; never mind that they are ‘hidden’ from Stephen only because he believes them to be.
This is the context for Stephen’s conversation with Davin, to whom he speaks with ‘cold violence’ about Ireland and expresses his Icarian isolation from the country. It is at some point after this conversation that Stephen develops his plan to go into exile, to leave his possible Irish ‘guides’—pushing him further from Daedalus, who hated his exile on Crete (this is, indeed, the first thing Ovid tells us about Daedalus’ character). All the while, Stephen later reveals in his diary, the tundish was on his mind.
Of course, famously, it turns out that Stephen’s assumptions about the word ‘tundish’ were wrong:
13 April: … I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! [Chapter 5, p. 274.]
‘Tundish’ is a very old English word, preserved in Irish speech while the English themselves adopted the Latinate ‘funnel’ from French.4 The idea that Elizabethan elegance was foreign to Stephen’s Dublin voice was false; his shame before the dean of studies, and the dean’s own patronising manner, are shown up and rejected.
But the realisation comes too late for it to provide Stephen with assured self-confidence about his use of English, and a corresponding self-confidence about the ‘authenticity’ of English-speaking Irishness. The realisation instead provokes resentful anger—a natural reaction, but not a productive one. The anger does not have the power to move him off the path he has started down.
That path is the desire to create in his art and poetry something new that might define his country. His decision to go into exile from Ireland is justified as an essential step towards understanding the soul of Ireland: ‘the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead.’ Yet Stephen is no Michael Robartes (the figure from W. B. Yeats’ poetry), calling back to romantic Ireland. Stephen feels alienated from Ireland as it is and was: he wants to use his art to create Ireland as it will be. Much of his alienation is reasonable, the result of Stephen’s rejection of the suffocating intellectual straitjackets of Catholicism and nationalism in post-Parnell Ireland. But this alienation is radicalised, fired, expanded by the shame Stephen feels before the figure of the condescending Englishman, embodied in the dean of studies. The dean implicitly communicates that Stephen’s language could neither echo a Gaelic-cum-Yeatsian ‘old Ireland’ nor be accepted into the ranks of the literature of the metropole; and Stephen (and not just Stephen!) internalises this idea. He desires to forge a ‘new Ireland’, a national consciousness that could be authentically represented by his language because it will be created by his language.
I do not mean to suggest that these developments in Stephen’s ‘national’ thought are the only forces pushing him towards Icarian hubris at the end of chapter five. Just as important is his slow drift from his own father Simon Dedalus, whose absent presence (leading to Stephen’s flight across Dublin to the university at the beginning of the chapter) leaves the younger Dedalus searching for a surrogate father. But the national dimension does, I think, give us the content of his hubris, what it consists in: Stephen is portrayed as an Icarus figure immediately after he explicitly states his desire ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’
For this is a hubristic goal, no matter the glories of the language used to state it. After all, a newly-forged national conscience will only be accepted and taken up by the people of the nation if it can make sense of their prior experiences and ideas; even if the artist is somehow able to cast off the yoke of history, he cannot ignore that tradition will still weigh on the minds of his audience, the people who will determine whether he succeeds or fails. (The reception history of Ulysses in Ireland makes this all too clear.) Stephen’s diagnosis, his picture of the forces hindering Irish freedom, retains its power a century later; but he went wrong in ignoring the fact that any possible cure would have to involve innovations in the practical (political) realm, as well as the aesthetic.5
Importantly, James Joyce himself came to realise this: one element of Ulysses is an emerging, incomplete synthesis between the practical (Leopold Bloom) and the artistic (Stephen Dedalus), climaxing in ‘Ithaca’. But in coming to this realisation, Joyce was rejecting the ambitions of his younger self as represented in Portrait. National consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be forged entirely anew by the artist, created in perfect, ahistorical freedom.6 If the artist is to create a work of art that is ‘new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable’, he will have to take a more ambiguous, less alienated stance towards his country.
And this is exactly what Joyce did. In creating Ulysses and to a lesser degree Dubliners, Joyce worked to faithfully recreate the life of his city. Ironically (but not paradoxically), Joyce freed himself from the burden of creating ‘national’ art precisely by concerning himself with the ‘ways of Irish life’. His younger self (represented by Stephen Dedalus) had been anxious that these ways were ‘hidden’ from him, and it was this anxiety that led to the desire to create a new Irishness ex nihilo that would not be ‘hidden’. Joyce’s mature works are free of this anxiety, and so can explore Ireland without this burden.7
To be sure, Joyce did not abandon all his national ambition (he believed that in Dubliners he had ‘taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country’).8 He never became entirely reconciled to Ireland as it was, living his life in exile and hoping for change at home. But as Henry Oliver put it in an excellent recent piece on Joyce for the Fitzwilliam: ‘He wanted to reform his country, but he was loyal to art first.’ In his mature works, Joyce was no longer seeking to forge anew the conscience of his race; this is precisely what enabled him to actually forge something new and truly great.
In Portrait, in the character of Stephen, Joyce is presenting himself as he was, up to the age of twenty-two. Joyce portrayed his own development: partly in positive terms of artistic development, his growing abilities and self-consciousness; but also in terms of his gradual adoption of an isolated, hubristic approach to life and art.
But in Portrait, he did not portray how he overcame this hubris. My third (brief) suggestion in this post relates to this overcoming.
In April 1904, both Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce were dedicating themselves to a task fated to fail. They had taken on the role of Icarus, not because their vaulting ambition was not backed up by genuine ability but because the object of their ambition was essentially unachievable. Their hubris was the hubris of Thomas Hobbes trying to square the circle: it is not so much that the mind was not up to the task, but rather than that this choice of task would doom any mind.
At the end of April 1904, then, what mattered for both Dedalus and Joyce was whether they were destined by fate to fall into the sea of nemesis, or whether something would intervene to make them reassess their goals, to mark a new chapter in their life and put them on a new path, whether or not they consciously realised its significance. That is to say: what mattered was what came next.
What came next, for both men, was 16 June 1904.
From Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 8; translation by A. D. Melville.
There is also Joyce’s obsession with the Trinity, the idea of the son who is (in a strong metaphysical sense) of the same substance as the father. I think a complete engagement with this theme could plausibly alter my conclusions about Stephen: the great craftsman Daedalus and the hubristic Icarus may not be opposite possibilities for Stephen but, in some sense, the same possibility seen from two different perspectives—two persons of the same artistic substance.
But with Joyce one has to stop somewhere, be aware of the risk that if you do not draw a mental line—‘this far and no further’—he will take over your mind and you will never come to any conclusions. Treat everything I write about Joyce (and frankly, everything anyone else writes about him) as tentative, subject to radical revision or rejection the very next time the interpreter picks up Ulysses and opens it to a random page.
This is slightly outside the scope of the post, but I cannot resist the urge to mention it. The boys’ ‘banter’ is so linked to Stephen’s naming that it recalls all three of his names—yes, three.
In full, they call to him: ‘Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!’; ‘bous’, βοῦς, is the ancient Greek for bull or cow. The echo is of the very first lines of the novel:
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…
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
Throughout Portrait, Stephen is referred to by (variants of) three names: ‘Stephen’, ‘Dedalus’, and ‘baby tuckoo’. It is possible that Stephen has at some point let slip to his schoolfriends his childhood memory of the encounter between ‘baby tuckoo’ and the ‘moocow’, and they are teasing him with reference to it.
It’s equally likely, though, that it’s a coincidence, and the boys’ bovine banter is in reference to something else or nothing at all. If it is a coincidence, though, the very possibility of such a meaningful coincidence—their calling him by a name with such significance, purely by chance—continues to torment Stephen. He turns it into one of the questions at the basis of his jejune philosophy of art, still using a cattle-themed example:
—If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?
—That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true scholastic stink.
Then again, I say ‘jejune’—here’s Hilary Putnam asking essentially the same question as Stephen many decades later, and finding significance in it.
In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan’s influence multiplies Stephen’s names: ‘Kinch’, ‘the bullockbefriending bard’, etc. But now we are really moving out of the scope of the post.
Every Irish person should have at least one example of a ‘tundish’ in their own speech or the speech of their family. My favourite comes from my Daideo (grandad), who—if you were greedily rushing your food or asking for more as a child—would call you a ‘gormandiser’. Insofar as I ever thought about this term, I just assumed it was a Bogside nonsense word, or maybe a Scotticism (Daideo’s mother was Glaswegian, and his vocabulary also has a small quantity of Ulster Scots–origin words, like ‘oxter’ for armpit). That was until I read Henry IV, Part 2, and came across Hal telling Falstaff:
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men. [William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, act 5, scene 5; emphasis mine.]
Admittedly, when I told Daideo about this, he observed that he also uses the term ‘big-belly beater’ in the same context; somehow I doubt that’s Shakespearean.
Insofar as Seamus Deane can be read in a fox-y manner, not just as a hedgehog with the single idea ‘“national character” is a dangerous fiction’, this is his idea. See ‘Joyce and Nationalism’, and Celtic Revivals more generally. But my interpretation is that Joyce (and, to a certain degree, Stephen Dedalus) ultimately overcame the error that Deane diagnoses, while Deane himself thought that it bewildered Joyce till he died.
Notably, in Stephen’s diary entry dated 21 March, freedom is associated with laziness. This is not Joyce denigrating the very concept of artistic freedom; it is his denigration of Stephen’s particular idea of how that freedom works and ought to be exercised.
Stephen’s faux-Thomist aesthetic theory in Portrait is a useful test case for exploring the difference between Joyce’s mature approach to literature and Stephen’s youthful projects. Speaking to his friend Lynch, Stephen talks of a development of art from the ‘epical’ to the ‘lyrical’ to the ‘dramatic’, with progress in art coming as artists gradually ‘impersonalise’ their experience. Only in ‘dramatic’ art, the most advanced stage where the artist can stand stand ‘in immediate relation to others’, is the ‘mystery of esthetic … accomplished.’
But Portrait itself shows exactly the opposite progression: Stephen’s personality becomes increasingly individualised and more distant from others. The approach to art that Stephen endorses, whereby the artist impersonalises himself so as to play the role of midwife at the birth of the nation’s soul, is the precise opposite of the process that Joyce followed in composing Portrait. And while this process of personalisation and individualisation is perhaps not good for the character of Stephen (although equally, it may be necessary for him), it is what creates the structure and beauty of the novel itself.
Letter to Grant Richards, 20 May 1906.