In Our Time - Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Episode Date: November 26, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Roy Foster, Jeri Johnson and Katherine Mullin discuss A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's groundbreaking 1916 novel about growing up in Catholic Ireland.Many novelists choose their own young life as the subject for their first book. But very few have subjected themselves to the intense self-scrutiny of the great Irish novelist James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, Joyce follows his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, from babyhood to young adulthood. He takes us from Stephen wetting the bed, through a teenage visit to a prostitute, and on through religious terrors to the prospect of freedom. When it was published, the book met with shock at its graphic honesty. Joyce shows Stephen wrestling with the pressures of his family, his Church and his nation. Yet this was far from being a straightforward youthful tirade. Joyce's novel is also daringly experimental, taking us deep into Stephen's psyche. And since its publication almost a century ago, it has had a huge influence on novelists across the world.With: Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History and Fellow of Hertford College, OxfordJeri Johnson, Senior Fellow in English at Exeter College, OxfordKatherine Mullin, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Leeds.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, many novelists choose their own young life as the subject for their first book, but very few have subjected themselves to the scrutiny of the great Irish novelist James Joyce. In a portrait of the artist as a young man, published in 1916,

Joyce followed his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, from babyhood to young adulthood. He takes us from Stephen wetting the bed through a teenage visit to a prostitute and on through religious terrors to the prospect of freedom. When it was published, the book met with shock at its graphic honesty as well as with great praise. Joyce shows Stephen wrestling with the oppressive forces of his family, his church and his nation. Yet this was not simply a youthful to raid. Joyce's novel is also experimental and takes us deep into Stephen's psyche. And since its publication almost a century ago, it's had a large influence on novelists across the world.

With me to discuss a portrait of the artist as a young man, Roy Foster, Carol Professor of Irish History and Fellow of Hartford College Oxford, Catherine Mullen, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Leeds, and Jerry Johnson, Senior Fellow in English Exeter College Oxford. Roy Foster, can you give us something of the social and political landscape that James Joyce grew up in and that he takes as a setting for this novel. The period he grew up in,

which is the period of the novel, is I guess, from the late 1880s to the turn of the century, and it's superficially a period of stasis, the great political excitements of the 1880s when it seemed like home rule, a sort of autonomous parliament for Ireland, might be granted, or over. The great nationalist leader, Charles Stuart Parnell,

has died in disgrace. It's a time of anglicisation, modernisation, stability. The two great authorities in Ireland, the British government and the Catholic Church, seem to be in control. And that's

the background of the novel. Everything's going to change, though. And Joyce writes the novel in the next period 1904 to 1914 against a period where upheaval is altering the world that the novel reflects.

And that coming change begins to be indicated towards the end of the novel itself. But the period he's writing about is a period of a sort of the sunset really of Victorian Ireland. Can we just touch that a little more,

Roy. We're talking about Joyce coming from beginning a fairly well-off Roman Catholic family when the Roman Catholics were in quite as strong position as it were, socially at least, in Dublin. Can we just fill that in a bit more? Yeah, it's the period really when the Catholic Church has achieved on bourgeoisness, when it's a very powerful authority in the land. They're bullockdoms, as Joyce would have described them,

when the Catholic hierarchy has immense social and implicitly political power, which is why, of course, the nationalist leader, Charles Stuart Parnell, fell in some senses. Joyce's own family, which, as you mentioned, are initially prosperous but sliding down the scale. In this, they don't really reflect what the Catholic bourgeoisie is doing in other areas. There are Catholic millionaires, there are Catholic high court judges. There is a Catholic establishment, which is working along with the British imperial establishment, essentially in running Ireland. but there is a countering movement against the anglicisation of Irish society and Irish politics. There is the beginnings of what will be a cultural nationalist revolution,

which we can now discern happening in the 1890s in this period. And as you say, he wrote the book between 1994 and published first in a magazine in 2014, Ezra Pan's magazine, and publishes a book in 1916. Can you just again identify the main changes that are happening? to the island he is writing about 20 years ago because the dynamic there is very important. The dynamic is very important because Joyce is writing the book

against an alteration in the political temper of the times, the rise of independent nationalist movements, the rise of cultural nationalism of an emphasis on regaining the Irish language on declaring for independence rather than the autonomy within the empire, which was the home rule. agenda. This again, of course,

inflects the novel and the conversations in the novel between Stephen, the hero, and his friends. Joyce is, of course, writing all this from abroad. He's writing it largely from Trieste, with very occasional visits back to Ireland. But he keeps, as he always will, all his life,

he keeps immensely close tabs on what's happening back home, through his family, through reading the papers, through his obsessive reconstruction of the immediate Irish past. Catherine Marley, can you tell us more about James Joyce and his family? Yes. Joyce was born in 1882 into a Catholic middle-class family.

He was the eldest child of John Stanislaus and May Joyce, and May Joyce went on to endure 13 further pregnancies. Ten of those children survived. He received a Catholic gentlemanly education at two schools run by Jesuits, Clongos Wood College and Belvedere. And by the time Joyce was entering into his adolescence, however, the family fortunes, as well as has just mentioned, were fading very fast. John Stanislaus Joyce, his father was a kind of championship drinker, a pub philosopher,

a praiser of his own past, as Stephen describes his own father, Simon Dedalus, in a portrait. And he was repeatedly sacked, he couldn't hold jobs down. He got rid of the property that he had in Cork, family inherited property. And he subjected his family to frequent members. moonlight flits because they couldn't pay the rent. So Joyce's adolescence was a time of dispossession and usurpion, in a sense, and of social anxiety. It was also characterised by religious, sexual and literary experimentation. Joyce became, gathered a reputation for cleverness as an adolescent, as you might expect.

And he also boasted that he lost his virginity to a prostitute at 14. and he had a similar religious, enthusiastic phase that Stephen has in portrait. How close is Joyce himself to the character Stephen in the book? I think that's an extraordinarily complicated question. Well, could you give me an extraordinarily simple answer? Then we can move on. Okay. I think he is, Joyce is ironically distant from his younger self.

Well, actually, let's play fair. You've said a lot of things about Joyce, that. You're in the book. Yes. Right. So he's closer. So he is, he's the, the events of his life are certainly coincide with the events in the novel. But that closeness is compromised by the novel's ironic distance from the central protagonist.

So Joyce is looking back at the events in his younger self's life. Yeah, I taught a biographical fiction, is it? Is there any, which is a very well-established form in British literature? He modernises and takes it on, but it's in that area that he's working. He's taking his own life as the material and using it out of which, and out of that he creates a fiction. That's correct, yes, he does create a fiction out of the events of his own life. Roy mentioned at the start that he wrote this novel while he was in Europe. He left Ireland for silence, exile and cunning, and went to Trieste, went to Paris.

Why was he drawn to continental Europe? Well, I think he did a degree in modern languages at the University College, Dublin, so he was already interested in the exploration of other cultures through their language. He went to the continent partly to escape Dublin. Dublin was in his early short story collection. It was presented as the centre of paralysis. Short story collection was the Dublin. The Dubliners, yes.

It was presented as a centre of. paralysis and he was wanting to escape Dublin because he wanted to elope with his girlfriend Nora Barnacol but he didn't want to marry her he didn't want to submit himself to the Catholic Church and go through a Catholic marriage ceremony and going to the continent allowed him to do that the continent was also imagined by Joyce to be a place of literary freedom in that he had burnt his bridges somewhat with the Irish literary revival

people like Yates and Lady Gregory when he met Yates when he was 20 he had a kind of fractious discussion with him which concluded with Joyce telling him that he was too old for him to help him Yates was in his late 30s Yes and Yates was 37 at the time That could have been fun

That could have been a bit of riving couldn't it? It could have been fun and I think Yates took it in that light but more difficultly perhaps He also was also helped by Lady Gregory Yates' friend who got him a job reviewing on the Dublin version of the Daily Express

and he slated her own poetry in one of his reviews. So he wasn't clubbable. He didn't really kind of, he didn't get on in the Irish literary establishment and leaving Ireland for Trieste, where he eventually settled, was a way out. And Trieste was a very kind of cosmopolitan centre. It's in the north of Italy and it's a kind of trading port and he was excited by its mix. Well, it was one of the most famous self-exiles, and it was done for aesthetic reasons in the end,

and that is one of the marvellous things about his life, I think. Anyway, can we move on just to Joey Johnson? Can you give us a summary for listeners who can't recall it all to mind at the moment? Briefly, what happens in a portrait of the artist? Well, as both Roy and Katie have already said, this is a novel which traces the development of a young man from early infancy until he's about 20 years old. Joyce had had an earlier go at this,

with Stephen Hero, which is pretty much a straightforwardly autobiographical novel. It follows the events of Joyce's life very, very carefully, and he got about as far as 23 chapters and decided it wasn't going to work that way. Hugh Kenner describes it as a pretty middling Edwardian novel. In 1907, Joyce decides to rewrite, that he must rewrite, that this isn't,

it hasn't got the density or the intensity that Dubliners, for example, has. So he reshapes the entire thing. In 1907, he decides it must have five chapters. As Stanislaus says, long chapters. It has five chapters. And it's a very, very carefully shaped novel. So those five chapters,

each covers a particular period of the boy's life. So, excuse me again, The first chapter is Stephen's early childhood, from infancy through his time at Clongos. The second chapter... That's the first school he goes to... That's right, Plongos is his first school. The second chapter... You're a upper-class Jesuit school.

Absolutely, absolutely, in Salons in County Kildare, run by the Jesuits, as you say. The second chapter, his burgeoning sexuality, his entrance to Belveteer, his acting as a forcical pedagogue in a school play, his defense of Byron against the boys who try to make him admit that Byron is not a great poet. And it ends with his visit to a prostitute. The third chapter,

principally dominated by a long sermon at a retreat about hell, meant absolutely to be a kinetic sermon and to get those boys to get down on their knees and repent. And chapter three ends with Stevens confessing. Chapter four sees the gradual decline of this religious intensity on Stephen's part and the gradual rise of the importance of art. He's asked whether he has a vacation for the priesthood.

He says, nope, he's going to go to university instead. And it ends with one of the most famous tableau vivant, if you like, in the book. which is Stephen walking on the beach, seeing a girl who he figures and tropes and metaphorically produces as a bird girl. Stephen's name, of course, being Stephen Deadless, and there's a whole theme running throughout the book about flight. Deadless was the great fabricator. He fabricated the wings where across his son to fly. In Ovid Smith, Deadless is the great artificer, as Joyce will always call him. and Stephen, with his extremely strange name in an Irish context, is somehow figured as wanting to take upon the mantle of that great artificer.

So it ends with this epiphanic scene in which he embraces art and turns away from the religious impulse. Chapter 5, the end, Stephen at university. Stephen famously saying he will not serve either his home or his father. or the church. He's having conversations with three friends, one about art, one about religion, one about mother love. He writes a Villanelle, which is a pretty poor production for this young esthet.

And Stephen is very much an esthet in this book. And the very last section of the book is a diary entry, a series of diary entries written by Stephen. For the first time Stephen gets his own voice. and gently, ironically, makes his declarations about his mother's getting his second-hand clothes in order and those kinds of things and he's going to leave

and the famous ending in which he makes his declaration that he's going off, he's going to fly, he's going to create the consciousness that his race has been lacking. Yeah, thank you very much. Now, nobody who made any doubt of what the novel is about and its starting point, we've laid that all out. So let's talk about it in a lot more detail. Standing here, Roy, as Jerry said, it wasn't his first attempt to write a novel.

He had written Stephen Hero, which is much more plonkingly autobiographical. What major changes, would you say, happened when he took up himself again as a theme for the portrait? I think by then he had differentiated himself. very totally from family, from country, from contemporaries. The first thing he wrote, actually, that was called a portrait of the artist, wasn't a novel, and as before Stephen Hero, it was an essay that was rejected by a short-lived magazine called Dana. And in that, he wrote about his contemporaries.

He described them as young men who admired Gladstone Shakespeare's tragedies, believed in the authority of the Catholic Church and the Church diplomatic. It's an excoriating portrait really of a generation from whom he was going to separate himself. And I think this project of separation, which has all sorts of dimensions, political, religious, aesthetic, as well as national, is what fires him into creating the strict impressionism of portrait of the artist out of, as you rightly say, I think, the clunking experiment

of Stephen Hero. When he ends Porto of the Artist with the astonishing last scenes or last reflections which Jerry mentioned, Ezra Pound who read it, wrote to him that it was hard, perfect and permanent.

And I think that's exactly what he was trying to make out of his art. But it takes an agonising ten years to do it. And when he does it, he's in a sense finished and ready to project on into probably his greatest work Ulysses. Can I just ask you briefly take a digression here

to go back slightly to part of one and then I'm going to come to you to talk more about. We've got to tell this and what a clamp the Roman Catholic Church then was on him and Roman Catholic's liking. He was drilled in it. He was trained in it. He was saturated in it at a very good school. He's driven to it. The book is imbued with it and so is he for the rest of his life. And also the idea of Ireland and then being part of Ireland, also their family. So when we say he goes away, lots of people drift around these days.

They go in gap years and this years and that years. This is a big thing. It was a huge thing. And of course, by going away, he takes with him, preserved inside him, all this essence. But I would like to say that what you just said, Melvin suggests that he is, you say, drilled, clamped, all the rest of it. He is also intellectually educated, in certain ways liberated, certainly inspired by the Catholic Church. different in this from his brother Stanislaus, who accompanies him some of the time in Trieste,

who is violently anti-clerical, who hates the church, who won't go to Mass. Joyce always goes to Mass on Holy Thursday and Good Friday every year because it still infuses in him that sense of intellectual excitement, I think, as well as emotional mystery.

So, though much of this book is often seen as the repudiation of a religious experience, and he was a deep, religious boy. He was a prefect of the sodality of Our Lady. He was one of those very, very emotionally involved

Catholic adolescents. Okay, he leaves it behind, but it remains with him in all sorts of inspirational ways. And I think that must be remembered when one's trying to understand Joyce. Right, thank you for that. Jeremy Johnson, can you tell us about the narrative voice, the only major innovation

this is the voice. Can you? Yes. Sorry. What Joyce does in Portrait of the Artist is to give us a third-person narrator. Now, that's the kind of narrator that most of us are used to in reading novels. Someone outside the characters, so the characters are described as he or she. So this, the narrator, is outside Stephen, and yet extraordinarily close to Stephen at the same time. So there are two things that contribute to this proximity, the first of which is,

is that the entire novel is told as though seen and experienced by Stephen. We call that focalization as though the camera eye what it's seeing, what this narrator is relating is what Stephen sees. The second is

we don't have any very easy name for this. Hugh Kinner calls it the Uncle Charles principle. But what this narrator does is use the idiom, the idelect if you like, the particular language of the character him or herself. Wyndham Lewis famously criticized Joyce saying that he really was, he was tired

of hearing him being praised as a stylist. He was pretty hackneyed and had recourse to some pretty poor phrases. And he cites the example, excuse me, of Uncle Charles at the beginning of chapter two, who brushes his top hat and repairs to the outhouse. And Lewis says characters repair to outhouses in very second-rate fiction. But of course, Uncle Charles repairs to the outhouse because Uncle Charles, where he describing himself, would say, I repaired to the outhouse. So that the narrator is using a language which adds an intense characterizing layer.

Now, what portrait does is use that idelectic or that idiomatic similarity to the character all the way through. So we begin in infancy, and the language of the first chapter is very, very simple. simple. It's immediate, it's sensory, it's repetitive, but with a very basic vocabulary. And it gets more complicated as we go along. Syntactically, lexically, the words, the vocabulary that's being used. So what Joyce has done here is produce a style which, for the narrator, the proximity of the character, like light bending around a star as Einstein would have it out there in the distances, the narrative voice approaches a character, it bends, is directed towards that

character. Catherine Mullen, so we're taking that on from what that's been clearly explained there, is the rather repressive Victorian context in which you was brought up, does that have relevance here? I think it does. I think something to think about when you're reading portrait is to imagine how Joyce was committed to inventing the Victorian, that as a modernist he needed something to react against. And so he's very concerned to describe the recent past as a repressive time. And the repressive quality of the life in which Stephen is born connects into the focalised narrative that Jerry has just described

because it encourages Stephen to sort of borrow into himself to produce a kind of, it is evident in the form of the novel, which is in the form of an interior monologue often. So that focalised interiority of the novel's form, it has much to do with the kind of Victorian repressive nature of the society he's describing. Can you just spell out in more detail? What was, give us some examples of what he saw as repressive about the Victorian society, what works? What works? What was? or social limitations. Well, I suppose of sexuality in a portrait of the artist

is the most obvious instance, that Stephen is for much of his, even before puberty, but also for much of his adolescence, is preoccupied by his sexuality as something that is freighted with guilt and fear. And he veers between indulgence and penitence. And he feels his sexuality is surveyed and watched over, both obviously by the Catholic Church and through its priests,

but also more generally through other members of society while watching him. And that experience, that feeling of being watched and being policed, is integral to a portrait. Jerry's talked, sorry, can I just ask one question, Jerry. Jerry's talked about being inside the current. Is the one sense in which he is also being essayistic and writing back almost 20 years before looking back on the period and commenting on it.

Is that part of it? I think, yes, I think it is. I mean, he's, he is from the perspective of a self-consciously modern and modernist writer. He's looking back on the past. Having said that, the novel is very kind of fond also about his, about the culture of the 1880s and 1890s in which Joyce grew to manhood. For example, it's fascinated by music. music, the popular music of the day, Joyce himself as a singer, and that comes across, I think, in portrait and the way it represents song.

Joie, you want to come in? I was just going to add to what Katie said about sexuality and the oppressiveness in the book. I mean, it is true. It is the portrait of an adolescent boy, most of whom, I think, are still oppressed in these kinds of ways by guilt and so on about sexuality and absorbed by it. Joyce was intensely enraged at what he saw as a kind of hypocrisy about sexuality. in Ireland and writes endlessly to Stanislaus while he's, when he first goes to Europe, about what he sees as the lying drivel about pure men and pure women in love forever. So there's an insistence on Joyce's part that it's not just that he's creating a stifling atmosphere of the Victorian, but that he is determined to write

against that, and so to produce an honest and open sexuality, which is exactly why he gets into so much trouble, I think. the frankness of the book at that level. The leaving of... Sorry, Roy, do you want to take that up? Because I'd ask you another question. The leaving of Ireland, we've talked about the leaving and the not leaving of Catholicism,

but Ireland itself, people talk particularly towards the end of the book about your Irish. Being Irish becomes very important and defining a definition of your character. So he's leaving a club as well as a country and a group of friends as well as a country and so on. Can you talk to that?

Yes, it's important that he's leaving Ireland And just at the point, the very early years of the 20th century, when he could have opted for a new Irish identity, like his friend called Davin in the book, a man called Clancy, who actually would become a very active Irish nationalist during the revolution, he suggests to the Stephen character ways, you know, in which he should adopt a new Gaelic, if you like, gaelic-sized identity.

He preaches to him about past nationalist history. Stephen says, just because my ancestors gave up their language and allowed themselves be conquered, why should I pay their debts? You know, he's differentiating himself from that, but that is an option. And Joyce is interested in the early Sinn Féin movement. We know this because he writes about it from Trieste. He writes back to friends to find out what's going on. His relationship to the rising independent nationalism is curiously complex. His memory of the old, the previous era of independent extremist nationalism, the Fenian movement, is essentially admiring.

The famous scene in Portia of the artist, the Christmas dinner, where the rejection of Parnell causes an immense explosion between the very pious Catholic figure, Mrs. Reardon, and an old Fenian who's been invited to the Christmas dinner. This is, of course, one of the pivots upon which the politics of the novel turns. But Joyce leaves Ireland at a point when that kind of advanced nationalism, as it was called, is coming back into focus. And his relationship to it will always be distanced but interested. And in a sense, I think that is one of the important motives that's propelling him away. Before I move away from Estelle, Catherine Mullen, can you just mention, He was fascinated by the cinema. There wasn't a cinema in Dublin,

and maybe he went to Trieste because of the three cinemas. And he tried to open a cinema in Dublin at one stage. It failed commercially. Was he influenced? We know that Eisenstein was very impressed by Joyce and so. Do you find his style influenced by the cinema? Yes, very much so. Joyce loved cinema going, as you mentioned.

As Jeremy said earlier, the focalised narration can be described as a sort of camera eye travelling through Dublin Stephen's own perception of the world might be seen as a kind of camera vision in the way the novel is narrated. But more directly, there are techniques that Joyce borrows from cinema

and puts into portrait. For example, there are flashbacks. So when in Chapter 5, Stephen is discussing whether he's got a vocation or not with the Dean of Studies, he's asked to consider whether he has a vacation and he has a flashback to his boyhood

at Plongos and the atmosphere of priestly repression that he was brought up in there. So that's a kind of flashback seat. There's also montage where Joyce cuts from one scene to another very quickly

and to sort of comment on each scene. So just after the young Stephen has been dreaming about Mercedes as an idealized female figure, we cut straight away to the caravan that's come to move the Daedeless's possessions out of one house to another, and one of these flittings. So there's a kind of pathetic effect that we move from idealisation to the banal realities, the rather sordid realities of everyday life. Another example of montage is when he's composing his villanelle,

and there's an abandoned suit plate in the corner of his bedroom, which reminds us of the sordid scenes downstairs in the Daedles family kitchen, where everything's been pawned and there's porn tickets there and soup from the charity shop or charity soup kitchen nearby. So that's the examples of montage. There are also tracking shots. There's a tracking shot.

The quick tracking shot. Sorry. The tracking shot. Okay, the tracking shot. I'm sure it's a tracking shot. Never mind. The tracking shot is when the camera follows an object. And we have that at the end of the portrait

Christmas dinner scene when Dante gets up and leaves the room in a temper and her napkin ring rolls across the floor and that we see there that the narrative focuses on the napkin ring which is eloquent of Stephen's terror that he's looking away and looking at the floor, not at the quarreling adults. I'm sure there's a thesis there

and there's some contradictions and paradoxes in it, but no mind, we'll do that another time. I think there's no, there doesn't seem to be any question about the passion you had for cinema and the effect it might well have had in his prose. Roy Foster, do you mention the Christmas dinner sequence which is the big clash, it's very vivid, and it's an extraordinarily vivid argument still,

and I hadn't read the book for years. Come back, it powers out here. The nub of it, then you can say what the point of it is. The nub of it was that Parnel, the man who might well have brought home rule to Ireland, a great powerful politician, and then he was discovered to have been having had a ten-year affair with Kittiochet, a married woman.

The Catholic bishops and the Catholic priest are against my... got hold of that, and drummed him out of politics, crashed into him, destroyed that movement in a way, and that is the basis of the fury. It's serious and wonderful fury in this seat. Yes, to be fair, and I'm not going to bring in a little historical riff here, but in fact, Parnell was repudiated by his liberal allies in British politics before the Catholic Church jumped. The Catholic Church always wise in its knowing when to jump, waited to repudiate him until clearly, home. rule was going to be a loser. The effect of Parnell in Ireland was the thought of the Catholic Church. The effect in that dinner party, the effect

that they've talked about is the Catholic Church moving in. Yeah. In a sense what happens in Ireland is that the Parnellite split, as it's called, is fought out in very religious moral terms. A vote for Parnell is a vote for the principle of adultery, says one

priest in a famous sermon. So if you like the principle of adultery is what's been argued about over the Christmas dinner as well as the failure, the moral failure of Parnell. So he's broken all the taboos, and he is a cast-out figure. He's also, Parnell stands for a kind of proud, aloof, aloneness, as opposed to Daniel O'Connell, the previous great nationalist hero, who was very hell-fellow well-met.

And this is one of the reasons why Joyce makes of Parnell a cult figure. And this Christmas dinner scene, I think, is immensely focal in bringing all sorts of identities for Joyce into focus. Yates, when writing about moments when Irish history turned, uses that Christmas dinner scene. Yates was a huge of my reporter at the artist thought it was a great, great novel. And he uses that Christmas dinner scene as one of the instances when Irish history reached a turning point.

He said it was never better expressed than in that great conflict. Do you want to add to that, Jerry Johnson, because as Roy said, we have fear, as it were, The novel planted, its themes planted there. We're talking about sex, we're talking about nationalism, we're talking about Catholicism, and we're talking about the family, because his mother sees this Christmas dinner disintegrating

that she's prepared so arduously, lovingly we see. So it's all there. I'm not quite certain what the question is, Melvin. I'll just see if you've been to think about what Roy said. Well, from the point of view of the reader experience, Yes, there's an intense political conflict, but the seat of our identification, if you like, is with Stephen, with the small boy who is terror-stricken as he hears this.

This is clearly a scene which is going to have a vivid and profound impact on him, which indeed it does. He recalls it again and again. The phrase, you know, the uncrowed king of Ireland, which resonates for Stephen all the way through, the intensity of that emotion and the intensity of that conflict. The idea, I can't remember who rose it, It might have been Roy, but Joyce could have been part of a new island

and a Gaelic-speaking island, as it were. Was the decision to stay with English a difficult one for him to make? No, in short, it was not a difficult one for him to make. We get it played out more dramatically in portrait, I think, than Joyce himself actually experienced it. again from trieste he writes to stanislavson says were it not for the language question I might consider myself a nationalist

the language question being the impulse or the desire to return to an indigenous language Irish Celtic Gaelic and Joyce refusing that so it's dramatized in the book in various ways he has a conversation with Davin that Roy has already referred to

in which he says I'm not going to pay this debt my ancestors threw off this language. I'm not going to pay in my own person. But there are other scenes which layer that irony. So the scene of the Dean of Studies trying to get Stephen to work harder in which the dean keeps trying to produce a little vignette about the quality of the light you get is dependent upon the quality of the oil that you put into the lamp. And as he's telling this, he uses the word funnel. And Stephen says, what's a funnel?

Is it not a tundish? And the dean of study says, what's a tundish? And so they go. And Stephen says it's an English word, and they use it in the part of Ireland, which, where they speak the best English. And later it comes back in the diary that Stephen has looked it up, and tundish is indeed an English word. And so we're not talking about in this scene, Gaelic versus English.

We're talking about a contestation of language. And the irony is that the English Dean of Studies is using the word funnel, which in fact is a 17th century French word arrived in England. And Stephen the Irishman is using the word Tundish, which is a good old, blunt English word, which goes back further. So language is a fraught topic,

but for Stephen, it's about language. It's not simply about the Gaelic versus the English question. You want to go back? I thought you were raising your finger. I'm misinterpreted. Roy, can we talk a little bit more about Catholicism? It's drenched in Catholicism. The plausibility in a way,

we're thinking about, we're reading the thoughts of a 16-year-old boy, page after page after page, you have brilliant analysis and thoughts on the aesthetics of Aquinas and so on. So maybe we put the plausibility aside, but that intensity

is really, is a remarkable part of the novel and the length of it and the length of these sermons, the hyperbole. If you can have an exaggerated hyperbole, it's exaggerated hyperbole, isn't it? It is, but remember what Joyce thinks he's doing? Once he says to Stanislaus,

round about this period, you know, what I do in my writing is like the mystery of the mass. I'm turning the bread of everyday life into something miraculous that will lift people up spiritually. That seems the most extraordinarily pretentious thing to say. but it is in another way

a very classic version of what the artist does and Joyce thinks of the mystery of the mass, the mystery of transubstantiation, and as you say, the aesthetics of Aquinas as an artistic construction when again this thing

of still going to mass and Stanislaus says he wouldn't go I've heard it before he says Joyce says you've heard Norma before you know this is an aesthetic pleasure And I think that one has to remember that when reading the agonies that Stephen is going through about religious, the domination of his soul by religion.

It's also the creation of his soul through religion, which he will himself mediate into art. It's a very high-flown version of the artist's role, but Joyce's version of the artist's role is nothing if not high-flown. In the same way that Joyce leaves Ireland and spends the rest of his life writing about Ireland, Joyce leaves the Catholic Church. And in a way, he doesn't spend the rest of his life writing about the Catholic Church per se, but he pulls out of Catholic doctrine, as it were, a series of ideas which he will then turn to art. So this business of the transubstantiation or the transfiguration, he's going to desacralize these terms and use them to talk about art. Catherine Malign, can we talk a little about Stephen's adolescent sexuality? Can you bring those in relation to his Catholicism? Yes, I think...

Bring that in relation to sexualism. First of all, I think the first thing to note, there are many kind of proliferating sexualities in this book that Stephen himself is sexually variable. He is brought up in an atmosphere of homoerotic confusion in a sense. through his education at school and one of the first things he learns about sexuality is that four boys

from a senior form have been caught smugging in the square, the school latrines, and we're not quite sure what that involves, although we can speculate. And that develops into a rather confused heterosexuality, which is very much in dialogue with the Catholic Church. Don't we know what smugging means?

Well, there's been a lot of speculation about that. It appears to mean masturbation, but it's never defined and that's indeed part of the point of the episode that because Stephen himself is only about six or seven he does not understand what smoking is and we are kept in a similar state of ignorance as though we too were prepubescent children

and anyway when he grows up to adolescence and he becomes conscious of sexuality his debauch with the prostitute at the close of chapter two is followed by a period of religious repentance and interestingly Joyce associates the two although the one is repressing the other, they are also entwined. So Stephen's religious life becomes eroticised in a sense. It is sensual.

And his religious devotions are even described as pious ejaculations. And he also, he thinks about the Virgin Mary and compares the Virgin Mary to his fantasy, sort of not really a girlfriend, his kind of love object, who is only named as E.C. in the novel. So it is not simply a question of Catholicism, repressing sexuality.

rather that they feed off each other. Is there any sense in which we can talk about the way novel portrays women, Jerry? Or is it's... Well, if we can certainly talk about the way in which the novel portrays women. The problem is that it's enormously complicated by these narrative facts that I talked about earlier. In other words, that what we're getting is a representation of Stephen's representation of women or Stephen's thoughts about women,

that Joyce is tying this narrative so very closely to Stephen's ideas. So that the bird girl is not merely... She's not obviously a bird girl. She is a girl that he figures as a bird girl because it accords with his own private symbolism. And what Joyce does is frame that as an act of representation. So we're seeing what this young ethete steeped in the poetry of aestheticism, for example,

weary as he is. He says, I am weary of ardent ways quoting early Yates. We're getting that kind of representation of woman framed as a historically contextualised idea of women. I'm afraid I'll have to leave that there. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Catherine Wallin.

Thank you, Gerry Johnson and Roy Foster. Next week we'll be talking about the Silk Road from the Hand Inn-In-Ane-200 BC until 1368. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

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