December 29 marks one hundred years since James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published, at the urging of Ezra Pound (after first appearing in serialised form in the periodical The Egoist). The novel guaranteed that Joyce’s position as a titan of modernist writing, already established by Dubliners, was set in stone forever. The arrival of the novel in Ireland’s relatively conservative literary scene could be described much like Joyce describes our beloved college in its pages: “the grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a great dull stone set in a cumbrous ring[…]” It’s worth remembering always that Joyce went to UCD.

 

A Portrait of the Artist has stood the test of time and remains, even a century later, as a hugely significant text in both college curricula and the public mind. It’s a work that manages to capture and dissect a uniquely Irish identity, all while challenging the very conventions and traditions that moulded it. The inner turmoil and battles that the young artist Stephen Dedalus grapples with are themes that have been shared by every generation of young Irish men and women that have come after Joyce: issues of self-identity and spirituality; morality and sexuality. Dedalus’ ultimate self-exile from Ireland is perhaps more prescient than it’s ever been in the 21st Century, when thousands left the country following the Celtic Implosion.

 

Like somebody with a famous sibling, A Portrait of the Artist will perhaps always be doomed to stand in the shadow of Ulysses and be known only as Joyce’s more accessible work; a prelude for tackling the magnum opus. However Joyce’s incredible debut novel deserves to stand on its own two feet and be treated for what it is: a masterpiece in its own right.

 

I asked some of the professors here at Trinity to lend their own thoughts on A Portrait of the Artist in order to celebrate its centenary, and here’s what they had to say.

 

Gerald Dawe
Dawe is a poet and professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. His poem “To James Joyce”, written in honour of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, is included in his Selected Poems (2014).

“I would have been fifteen or so when I first read Joyce’s A Portrait in Belfast during the mid-sixties. The novel had a huge impact. It made me all the more convinced that I had to be a writer. Stephen’s disaffection with his Church and the social world of his upbringing chimed all so deeply, as well. The shifting registers of the prose, Joyce’s mastery of different kinds of English – from dirty realism to the faux ‘high’ romanticism – and the dreamy self-absorptions in-between, was really quite a bravura performance and heady stuff. It sat alongside the cool jazz of MJQ, the r’ ‘n’b of Canned Heat, the discovery of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and the awesome depths of Dostoyevsky and D. H. Lawrence that fanned the flames of a provincial Belfast educational adolescence. The student exchanges of Stephen with Cranly and the rest of the lads may have been at a different tempo and intensity to ours but the family life and sexual longings sounded right, though, there again, I’m not sure we were anywhere near as anxious, political or guilt-ridden. A Portrait’s terraced cityscape was familiar – the parks, the street networks, the atmosphere – and much of the novel’s interior home world was identifiable. But it was probably the grand and ironical finale that resonated so much back then, and clearly still does, one hundred years on, as Stephen, like his contemporary Paul Morel, hits out for new territory; or, at least, so it seemed like at the time.”

 

Dr Philip Coleman
Coleman is an Associate Professor in the School of English and a Fellow of TCD.

 

“Before Bloom and his ‘relish for the inner organs of beasts and fowls’, in Ulysses (1922), we have Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ordering ‘drisheens for breakfast’ in the Victoria Hotel in Cork. Father and son take the ‘night mail’ train down from Dublin the previous evening….

drisheen, n.

Etymology: < Irish drisín intestine.

•       A kind of sausage made from sheep’s blood, milk, and seasoning.

Two of the examples used to illustrate the word ‘drisheen’ in the Oxford English Dictionary are from James Joyce: the first is the example given above, from A Portrait. The other is from Finnegans Wake.

 

Another example, as luck would have it, is from a book by another Joyce (P.W.): English As We Speak it in Ireland (1910).

“I first studied James Joyce in University College Cork in the early 1990s, at a time when the Hibernian Metropolis of Dublin, and Trinity College, felt very distant. The image of Stephen and his father walking along the Mardyke in Cork, not far from the University, in A Portrait made a strong impression on me. Like all of Joyce’s writing, it is an acquired taste. (Not unlike drisheen.) It is often thought of as one of Joyce’s more accessible works but appearances can be deceiving. (Like drisheen?)”

Joyce is rightly celebrated as a great writer of Dublin, but there is a lot more of Ireland in his work than is sometimes granted, and especially in A Portrait, where the Corkonian context is crucial. The food, the different streetscapes, the accent:

“They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech and made him admit that the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey. […] [and] covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls.”

Questions that continue to cause confusion, perhaps?

 

How best to serve drisheen? In the Wake, Joyce provides the best and only answer, as he does, it seems, to almost everything:

“Tansy Sauce. Enough.”

Dr Daragh Downes
Downes is a Teaching Fellow at TCD responsible for two Sophister Option courses, “Dickens” and “The Revolutionary Muse: Form and Theme in Romantic Poetry and Poetics.”

“For me, the greatness of Joyce’s Portrait will always come down to one rather traumatic memory. I went to Belvedere, and Joyce was an even bigger god there than Ollie bloody Campbell or Tony bloody O’Reilly. We were fifteen or sixteen when one day a soutane-wearing actor came in to reenact Chapter 3’s hellfire sermon in situ. All a bit of a vomit—until he delivered the line, “Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit?”. Reader, we went scarlet as only pimply adolescents know how. In Portrait’s Clongowes and Belvedere scenes, Joyce does what so, so few school story writers have done: he remembers what it was really like.”