Mythical Elements in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The employment of Greek, Christian and Egyptian mythodologies together with Ovid's metamorphises in creation of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
{A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man} by James Joyce is a novel about growing up. It is, therefore, a Kn?stlerroman (in German: ?artist?s novel?), a class of Bildungsroman, or apprenticeship novel, that deals with the youth and development of an individual who becomes ? or is on the threshold of becoming ? a painter, a musician, a poet, or in this case, a writer. It portrays the struggle of the nascent artistic temperament to overcome the repressions of family, state, and church. This struggle involves a series of choices made by the novel?s main character - Stephen Dedalus, who will accept some influences and demands and, at the same time, reject the others. Sometimes he is humiliated or frustrated. On other occasions he tastes success and victory. Still, he is always moulded into a character who is to embark boldly and idealistically on his adult life at the end of the book.
From the beginnings of Western culture, myth has presented a problem of meaning and interpretation, and a history of controversy has accumulated about both the value and the status of mythology. Namely, myth is a complex cultural phenomenon that can be approached from a number of viewpoints. In general, it is a narrative that describes and portrays in symbolic language the origin of the basic elements and assumptions of a culture. However, because of its all-encompassing nature, myth can illuminate many aspects of individual and cultural life.
In order to give the novel an atmosphere of its own, James Joyce created a world composed of mythical material from Ovid?s Metamorphoses, Greek, Egyptian and Christian mythologies. Thus the novel grew into a new myth with its main character who is in himself, half-common ? half-mythical, lingering on that border throughout the whole story. Stephen Dedalus is a boy who grows up into an ambitious young man, and yet, his life is not so simple. For there are in him embodied ?great Daedalus of Athens? [1], Icarus ? Daedalus? son, Prometheus, Thoth, St. Stephen, Lucifer, Jesus and God. There are as well many other allusions to seraphim, oxen, birds, water. Not only generalizing Stephen, these parallels serve other purposes as well: psychological, moral, social, and comic.
The most important of these counterparts in {A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man} is, of course, Daedalus. According to the ancient Greek myth, The Athenian Daedalus was a famous architect, inventor, and craftsman. His homeland was Athens. Because he murdered his sister?s son Perdix in fear that the boy?s talent might surpass his own, he had to flee to Crete. He began to work at the court of King Minos and Queen Pasiphae, in the magnificent palace of Knosos. There he constructed a wooden cow for the queen to satisfy her amorous longings for a beautiful white bull and by which she became pregnant with the Minotaur. When the Minotaur was born, Daedalus built the Labyrinth to contain the monstrous half-man, half-bull. Later, Minos shut Daedalus and his son Icarus into the Labyrinth. To escape, Daedalus built wings for himself and Icarus. They successfully flew from Crete, but Icarus? wings melted when he flew too close to the sun, and he drowned in the sea.
Named as he is, Stephen naturally identifies himself with Daedalus. As the boys shout ?Bous!?[2] (ox) at him as he sets on his way for the Bull, he thinks of the strange prophetic name he shares with one who once made walls for the Minotaur, a greater bull than his own: ?Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy.?[3] His mind is so flattered that he keeps fantasizing:
[q]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 he had be 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?[4][/q]
He is suddenly brought down by the boys shouting: ?O, cripes, I?m drowned!?[5]. Daedalus no more ? or as Ovid had put it: ?The father, now no more a father?[6] ? he is Icarus now, the son of Daedalus who, trying to fly on his father?s wings, went too near the sun and fell into the sea. Not the product of his own fancy there, Stephen as Icarus is the product of Joyce?s ironic juxtaposition. Yet, on the last page, about to fly off over the waves, Stephen himself, as if unconsciously, calls upon Daedalus as father:
[q]O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good steed.[7][/q]
Another identification which is to be expected on account of his name comes from Christian mythology. Namely, it is St. Stephen who is in question. St. Stephen, known as the Promartyr, was the first Christian martyr according to the New Testament. He was noted for the strength of his Christian faith and was the first to be chosen of the original seven deacons of the early church. He was brought to court on a charge of blasphemy and condemned to death by stoning. Stephen shares his namesake?s fervent devotion to Christian doctrine only as a young boy, but as he grows up, he abandons it for a more secular life. Actually, what really connects the two is not so much the ardent faith, but the fact that they are both, each in his own way, martyrs. One - the real one, the other - a would-be saint, for Stephen, as it becomes more and more obvious throughout the novel, worships in fear of hell and not in hope of being good.
Therefore, the identification with another character from Christian mythology is more elaborate, more profound, and, indeed, more important. In his sermons on the four last things Father Arnall brings that fallen angel up twice, both times in connection with Adam and Eve, who fell from disobedience, tempted by eloquent Lucifer, who fell from pride. This supreme spirit of evil who was once radiant, but who because of his sin of pride fell from heaven into darkness and became Satan said: ?Non serviam: I will not serve?[8] and thus brought upon himself the everlasting wrath of God. As a young boy, Stephen feels fear, but later, he must have been aware of the heroic rebel and his grand monologue from John Milton?s Paradise Lost. It is then easy to understand how, after his immediate terror passed, Stephen, whose sin is also pride and whose great desire is to bring light to his people (Lucifer means ?Light Bringer?), finds Lucifer congenial. The glorious rebel against traditional authority, denying service to the Father, fell from glorious life, just like Icarus, only farther and more gloriously. Still, it is only after seeing the wading girl at the Bull and his immediate epiphany, that Stephen first finds his counterpart in Lucifer:
[q]To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on![9][/q]
Lucifer, the bringer of light, has become patron of life and letters, and Stephen, his disciple if not that radiant being himself. His identification with Lucifer echoes later when he refuses to make his Easter duty and he calmly comments: ?I will not serve?[10] thus disrespecting the central rite of the Christian religion ? Eucharist or Lord?s Supper. Furthermore, he clearly states his opinion on his country, family and religion:
[q]I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use ? silence, exile, and cunning.[11][/q]
To fall from spirit to matter, to bring radiance to dull earth, is the creative act. So happily fallen and creative at last Stephen goes into a new life, a new future.
A logical conclusion follows from Stephen?s identification with Lucifer: if he dared to identify himself with the one who was once a Seraph (for it is only glorious fallen angel that he relates to, not the outcast Satan) ? and therefore just one step lower in the celestial hierarchy than Jesus and God the Father, he could also identify with the Father and the Son. Stephen compares himself to Jesus on several occasions, but these are not so overt. He mentions that their mothers have the same name (Mary) and on one occasion remembers of Jesus that ?He was born in a poor cowhouse?[12], thus alluding to his own connection to cow, i.e. bull. Yet, Stephen clearly becomes Jesus when thinking of his friend Cranley?s hurt head, he confuses him with John the Baptist, and if Cranley is John, than Stephen is Jesus. But as Icarus is the son of Daedalus, Jesus is the son of God. Being God the Son is more or less justifiable because Jesus is the body of believers, hence everyman, but Stephen wants to be God the Father, creator of Heaven and Earth and all the Seraphim. Stephen is an artist, and the artist is a creator, and thus, in himself, godlike.
Another thing that Stephen connects Lucifer with is most certainly his quality of the ?Light Bringer?. Well educated as he was, Stephen must have made a connection with another ?light bearer? and a rebel ? Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, one of the Titans, is known as the friend and benefactor of humanity. He and his brother Epimetheus were given the task of creating humanity and providing humans and all the animals on earth with the endowments they would need to survive. When it came time to create a being who was to be superior to all living creatures, Prometheus (whose name means ?afterthought?) took over the task of creation. To make humans superior to animals, he fashioned them in nobler form and enabled them to walk upright. He went up to heaven and lit a torch with fire from the sun. The gift of fire that he bestowed upon humanity was more valuable than the gods intended and because of his actions Prometheus incurred the wrath of the god Zeus. For his transgression, Zeus had him chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where he was constantly preyed upon by an eagle. Finally he was freed by the hero Hercules, who slew the eagle. Even at the very beginning of the novel, Stephen is identified with Prometheus when he is threatened that ?the eagles will come and pull out his eyes?[13] if he did not apologize. Repetitive images of fire also bring Stephen close to this great hero from Greek mythology, the romantic outcast and that is why this fire is always warm and soothing and is closely related to the fire of Christian God, as opposed to the fire of hell:
[q]But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner.[14][/q]
Later, at university, Stephen is on the steps of the library and he contemplates symbolic birds. As always, birds make him feel uneasy and to him they are always an omen. As he watches them and thinks of his primary counterpart, he identifies with yet another mythical creature ? this time from ancient Egypt:
A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.[15]
Thoth is a self-conceived deity and he appeared at the beginning of time. He is the God of the moon, drawing, writing, geometry, wisdom, medicine, music, astronomy, and magic. Thoth is most often depicted as wearing an ibis mask, with the head of an ibis, a large bird of the Nile. Egyptians associated the ibis? long curved beak with the moon. The ibis was regarded as one of Thoth?s Earthly representatives. Thoth was also depicted with a symbol combining the Sun?s disk and the Moon?s crescent upon his head, and ? in words reminiscent of the biblical adoration of the Celestial Lord ? the Egyptian inscriptions and legends said of him that his knowledge and powers of calculating ?measured out the heavens and planned the Earth?[16] He is also represented as carrying a pen, tablet, and palm branch. In Greece, his equivalent was the all knowing Hermes. Surely, it is no wonder that Stephen identifies with this supreme deity.
As it was stated at the beginning of this paper, there are also numerous allusions which are closely connected with these mythological creatures. The structural value of these recurrent images is clear, because they knit the whole together. Many of these motifs that help make {A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man} dense and coherent are stated in the first pages of the novel. There the following symbols are introduced: road, cow, father, water, fire, and bird. They are the ones which truly guide the reader through the labyrinth of Stephen?s life.
Cow, or bull, and father as main motifs, are omnipresent throughout the whole novel. On the very first page Stephen?s father is telling his son a story in which: ?Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road?17 When Stephen looks up, he sees his father?s hairy face ? just like a child?s idea of God?s, and an eye looking through a monocle ? a single, all-seeing eye. Therefore he hears a story of himself and a cow under paternal, or godly care. Later, as it has already been mentioned, it is stated that Jesus was born in a cowhouse, that Stephen is addressed to as ?Bous? or ox, he goes to the Bull and invokes Daedalus ? the artificial cow maker. Near the end, when he is trying to explain the theory of aesthetics, he is using the following example:
[q]If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood makes there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?[18][/q]
and just before he leaves Ireland he dreams ?the sound of hoofs upon the road?[19]
As for roads, they are sometimes straight, sometimes circular and they run everywhere throughout the novel to the last page where they call to escape. Most of roads are, however, not so encouraging: the dark country road where Davin sees the beckoning woman, and all the circular tracks implying custom and confinement. When Stephen breaks his glasses at a track in Clongowes, he is almost blinded. Still, bridges are good roads to him because they mean overcoming an obstacle and getting across water.
Water also appears on the first page of the book. In the first half of the novel water is absolutely disagreeable, and in the second, completely agreeable. When only a little boy, Stephen wets his bed and from this moment on this great image of water proceeds, evolves and grows to become the sea. The image changes and expands. At the beginning, as Stephen is lying at Clongowes due to his illness he remembers ?How cold and slimy the water had been!?[20] Going across water is what he dreads the most: ?A faint click at his heart, a faint throb in his throat told him once more of how his flesh dreaded the cold infrahuman odour of the sea?[21] Yet soon enough, when he sees the wading girl water is no longer his enemy. Namely, it is across water that he flies to exile and that flows under the bridge he had to cross.
Flying is a natural transition to the bird, an image of no less importance than any of the others. Encountered first as the eagle which would punish Stephen unless he apologized, bird becomes less and less threatening. Finally, it is a friendly creature. As an angel, before his fall, Lucifer is a kind of bird, and Daedalus, when he created the wings is ?hawklike?. The wading girl is to Stephen
[q]like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as crane?s.[22][/q]
Finally, fire is there to provide warmth for the righteous and to scorch the sinful. Father Arnall in his sermon cries:
[q]Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels[23][/q]
This line is repeated several times throughout the novel ? once again in the sermon, but the third time it is a joke made by Cranley who throws his fig into the fire. Of course, the fire which is there to shield the humanity and to keep it safe and sound is the gift of God or the stolen present from Prometheus. In either case, it is the symbol of knowledge, of enlightenment which is needed in the country where people are living in political and religious dark.
To sum it all up, it is from this dark that Stephen Dedalus tries to escape and thus fly away from Ireland ? his island where he, just like his spiritual father Daedalus, has been confound for so many years:
[q] Then to new arts his cunning thought applies,
And to improve the work of Nature tries.[24][/q]
So he spreads his wings and flies across the dreaded sea into the new future ? young Icarus, flying on his father?s wings. Still, the penalty of escape, whether positive, negative, or romantic, is loneliness. Escape, despite Stephen?s beliefs, is not the creator?s necessary condition. In any case, his first attempt at exile is unsuccessful. The first chapter of Ulysses shows him back in Ireland ? instead of Daedalus he is Icarus who wanted all and got almost nothing. At the end of Ulysses he will try again, perhaps more successfully, though we never now.
[b]NOTES[/b]
[!1]) Ovid ? http://classic.mit.edu/
[!2]) Joyce, J. (1990): 162
[!3]) ibid: 173
[!4]) ibid: 173
[!5]) ibid: 173
[!6]) Ovid - http://classic.mit.edu/
[!7]) op. cit: 257
[!8]) ibid: 121
[!9]) ibid: 176
[!10]) ibid: 243
[!11]) ibid: 251
[!12]) ibid: 122
[!13]) ibid: 8
[!14]) ibid: 124
[!15]) ibid: 229
[!16]) www.crystalinks/thoth.html
[!17]) op. cit: 7
[!18]) ibid: 218
[!19]) ibid: 255
[!20]) ibid: 10
[!21]) ibid: 171
[!22]) ibid: 175
[!23]) ibid: 117
[!24]) Ovid - http://classic.mit.edu/
[b] REFERENCES[/b]
1) Beja, M. ed. (1973), James Joyce: Dubliners and {A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man} ? a selection of critical essays, London: Macmillan
2) Blamires, H. (1987), Studying James Joyce, London: Longman
3) Cronan Robe, E. (1982), ?Dancing Daedalus: Another Source for Joyce?s Portrait of the Artist?, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 28, Nr. 4
4) Drabble, M. ed. (1985), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press
5) Druff Jr, J. (1982), ?The Romantic Complaint: The Logical Movement of Stephens Aesthetics in {A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man}?, Studies In the Novel, Vol. XIV, No. 2
6) Joyce, J. (1990), {A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man}, Oxford: Heinemann
7) Kalezic, D. (1992), Krsne slave u Srba, Beograd: IP Neven, Agencija JRJ
8) Markovic, V. (1972), Podeljena licnost
9) Seymor-Smith, M. (1975), Guide to Modern World Literature, London: Hodder and Stoughton
10) http://classics.mit.edu/
11) www.crystalinks.com/thoth.html
12) www.pantheon.org/mythica/
13) Microsoft, Encarta Encyclopedia ?96
14) Encyclopedia Britanica, CD
