Icarus and Daedalus ancient red relief plastic pottery beaker, Roman-Greece
In Greek mythology, Icarus (the Latin spelling, conventionally adopted in English; Ancient Greek: Ἴκαρος, Íkaros, Etruscan: Vikare) is the son of the master craftsmanDaedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris,
asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness
would not clog his wings nor the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored
his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun; when the wax
in his wings melted he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea
where he drowned, sparking the idiom "don't fly too close to the sun".
This tragic theme of failure at the hands of hubris contains similarities to that of Phaëthon.
Etymology
Icarus /IK-uh-russ/, IkarosἼκαρος Greek: ‘mallet, chopper’. Compare with ἴκαρ (= τακέως) ’at a strike, immediately’ and ἴκρια ‘wooden partition (as on a stage), compartment; abatis, entanglement’ and Latin īco ‘to strike, hit, smite, stab, sting’; ictus ‘a blow, stroke, thrust, bite, sting, a beat’.
Daedalus /DED-uh-luss/, /DEED-uh-luss/, Δαίδαλος anciently /DIGH-dah-lohs/, ‘art, skill, craft, trade, profession’ (German Kunst); thus 'cunningly wrought'.
Icarus's father Daedalus, a very talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
Modern street art of Icaria island and falling Icarus just outside the village of Evdilos in Icaria, Greece
Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for
himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before trying
to escape the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun,
nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by
the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared into the sky, but in
the process he came too close to the sun, which due to the heat
melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that
he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and
so Icarus fell into the sea and drowned in the area which today bears
his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.
Hellenistic writers give euhemerising
variants in which the escape from Crete was actually by boat, provided
by Pasiphaë, for which Daedalus invented the first sails, to outstrip
Minos' pursuing galleys, and that Icarus fell overboard en route to
Sicily and drowned. Heracles erected a tomb for him.
Icarus' flight was often alluded to by Greek poets in passing, but the story was told briefly in Pseudo-Apollodorus. In the literature of ancient Rome, the myth was of interest to Augustan writers. Hyginus narrates it in Fabula 40, beginning with the bovine love affair of Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur. Ovid narrates the story of Icarus at some length in the Metamorphoses (viii.183–235), and refers to it elsewhere.
In Renaissance iconography,
the significance of Icarus depends on context: in the Orion Fountain at
Messina, he is one of many figures associated with water; but he is
also shown on the Bankruptcy Court of the Amsterdam Town Hall – where he
symbolizes high-flying ambition.
The 16th-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally but perhaps erroneously attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was the inspiration for two of the 20th century's most notable ecphrastic English-language poems, "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams. Other English language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton, "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish, "Mrs Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy, "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, and "Icarus Burning" and "Icarus Redux" by Hiromi Yoshida.
Literary interpretation has found in the myth the structure and consequence of personal over-ambition. An Icarus-related study of the Daedalus myth was published by the French hellenistFrançoise Frontisi-Ducroux. In psychology there have been synthetic studies of the Icarus complex with respect to the alleged relationship between fascination for fire, enuresis, high ambition, and ascensionism. In the psychiatric mind features of disease were perceived in the shape of the pendulous emotional ecstatic-high and depressive-low of bipolar disorder. Henry Murray having proposed the term Icarus complex, apparently found symptoms particularly in mania where a person is fond of heights, fascinated by both fire and water, narcissistic and observed with fantastical or far-fetched imaginary cognition. Seth Godin's 2012 The Icarus Deception
points to the historical change in how Western culture both propagated
and interpreted the Icarus myth arguing that "we tend to forget that
Icarus was also warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin
the lift in his wings. Flying too low is even more dangerous than flying
too high, because it feels deceptively safe."
In Greek mythology, Daedalus (/ˈdɛdələsˈdiːdələs/; Ancient Greek: ΔαίδαλοςDaidalos "cunningly wrought", perhaps related to δαιδάλλω "to work artfully" or “of knowledge”; Latin: Daedalus; Etruscan: Taitale) was a skillful craftsman and artist, and was seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and power. He is the father of Icarus, the uncle of Perdix, and possibly also the father of Iapyx, although this is unclear. He invented and built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete,
but shortly after finishing it King Minos had Daedalus imprisoned
within the labyrinth. He and his son Icarus devised a plan to escape by
using wings made of wax that Daedalus had invented. They escaped, but
sadly Icarus did not heed his father's warnings and flew too close to
the sun. The wax melted and Icarus fell to his death. This left Daedalus
heartbroken, but instead of giving up he flew to the island of Sicily.
Family
Daedalus's parentage was supplied as a later addition, providing him with a father in Metion, Eupalamus, or Palamaon, and a mother, Alcippe, Iphinoe, or Phrasmede. Daedalus had two sons: Icarus and Iapyx, along with a nephew either Talos or Perdix.
Athenians transferred Cretan Daedalus to make him Athenian-born, the grandson of the ancient king Erechtheus, claiming that Daedalus fled to Crete after killing his nephew Talos. Over time, other stories were told of Daedalus.
Mythology
The Labyrinth
Daedalus is first mentioned by Homer as the creator of a wide dancing-ground for Ariadne. He also created the Labyrinth on Crete, in which the Minotaur (part man, part bull) was kept. In the story of the labyrinth as told by the Hellenes, the Athenian hero Theseus is challenged to kill the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of Ariadne's thread. Daedalus' appearance in Homer is in an extended metaphor, "plainly not Homer's invention", Robin Lane Fox observes: "He is a point of comparison and so he belongs in stories which Homer's audience already recognized." In Bronze Age Crete, an inscription da-da-re-jo-de has been read as referring to a place at Knossos, and a place of worship.
In Homer's language, daidala refers to finely crafted objects. They are mostly objects of armor, but fine bowls and furnishings are also daidala, and on one occasion so are the "bronze-working" of "clasps, twisted brooches, earrings and necklaces" made by Hephaestus while cared for in secret by the goddesses of the sea.
Ignoring Homer, later writers envisaged the Labyrinth as an
edifice rather than a single dancing path to the center and out again,
and gave it numberless winding passages and turns that opened into one
another, seeming to have neither beginning nor end. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, suggests that Daedalus constructed the Labyrinth so cunningly that he himself could barely escape it after he built it. Daedalus built the labyrinth for King Minos, who needed it to imprison his wife's son the Minotaur. The story is told that Poseidon
had given a white bull to Minos so that he might use it as a sacrifice.
Instead, Minos kept it for himself; and in revenge, Poseidon, with the
help of Aphrodite, made Pasiphaë, King Minos's wife, lust for the bull.
For Pasiphaë, as Greek mythologers interpreted it, Daedalus also built a
wooden cow so she could mate with the bull, for the Greeks imagined the
Minoan bull of the sun to be an actual, earthly bull, the slaying of which later required a heroic effort by Theseus.
This story thus encourages others to consider the long-term
consequences of their own inventions with great care, lest those
inventions do more harm than good. As in the tale of Icarus'
wings, Daedalus is portrayed assisting in the creation of something
that has subsequent negative consequences, in this case with his
creation of the monstrous Minotaur's almost impenetrable Labyrinth,
which made slaying the beast an endeavour of legendary difficulty.
Daedalus and Icarus
Daedalus and Icarus, c. 1645, by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690)
The most familiar literary telling explaining Daedalus' wings is a late one, that of Ovid: in his Metamorphoses
(VIII:183–235) Daedalus was shut up in a tower to prevent the knowledge
of his Labyrinth from spreading to the public. He could not leave Crete
by sea, as the king kept a strict watch on all vessels, permitting none
to sail without being carefully searched. Since Minos controlled the
land and sea routes, Daedalus set to work to fabricate wings for himself
and his young son Icarus.
He tied feathers together, from smallest to largest so as to form an
increasing surface. He secured the feathers at their midpoints with
string and at their bases with wax, and gave the whole a gentle
curvature like the wings of a bird. When the work was done, the artist,
waving his wings, found himself buoyed upward and hung suspended,
poising himself on the beaten air. He next equipped his son in the same
manner, and taught him how to fly. When both were prepared for flight,
Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high, because the heat of the sun
would melt the wax, nor too low, because the sea foam would soak the
feathers.
They had passed Samos, Delos and Lebynthos
by the time the boy, forgetting himself, began to soar upward toward
the sun. The blazing sun softened the wax that held the feathers
together and they came off. Icarus quickly fell in the sea and drowned.
His father cried, bitterly lamenting his own arts, and called the island
near the place where Icarus fell into the ocean Icaria in memory of his child. Some time later, the goddess Athena visited Daedalus and gave him wings, telling him to fly like a god.
An early image of winged Daedalus appears on an Etruscan jug of ca 630 BC found at Cerveteri, where a winged figure captioned Taitale appears on one side of the vessel, paired on the other side, uniquely, with Metaia, Medea:
"its linking of these two mythical figures is unparalleled," Robin Lane
Fox observes: "The link was probably based on their wondrous,
miraculous art. Magically, Daedalus could fly, and magically Medea was
able to rejuvenate the old (the scene on the jug seems to show her doing
just this)". The image of Daedalus demonstrates that he was already well known in the West.
Sicily
Further to the west Daedalus arrived safely in Sicily, in the care of King Cocalus of Kamikos on the island's south coast; there Daedalus built a temple to Apollo, and hung up his wings, an offering to the god. In an invention of Virgil (Aeneid VI), Daedalus flies to Cumae and founds his temple there, rather than in Sicily; long afterward Aeneas confronts the sculpted golden doors of the temple.
Minos,
meanwhile, searched for Daedalus by traveling from city to city asking a
riddle. He presented a spiral seashell and asked for a string to be run
through it. When he reached Kamikos, King Cocalus, knowing Daedalus
would be able to solve the riddle, privately fetched the old man to him.
He tied the string to an ant which, lured by a drop of honey at one
end, walked through the seashell stringing it all the way through. Minos
then knew Daedalus was in the court of King Cocalus and demanded he be
handed over. Cocalus managed to convince Minos to take a bath first,
where Cocalus' daughters killed Minos. In some versions, Daedalus
himself poured boiling water on Minos and killed him.
The anecdotes are literary and late; however, in the founding tales of the Greek colony of Gela, founded in the 680s on the southwest coast of Sicily, a tradition was preserved that the Greeks had seized cult images wrought by Daedalus from their local predecessors, the Sicani.
Daedalus and Perdix
Daedalus
was so proud of his achievements that he could not bear the idea of a
rival. His sister had placed her son, named variously as Perdix, Talos, or Calos,
under his charge to be taught the mechanical arts. The nephew was an
art scholar and showed striking evidence of ingenuity. Walking on the
seashore, he picked up the spine of a fish. According to Ovid, imitating
it, he took a piece of iron and notched it on the edge, and thus
invented the saw. He put two pieces of iron together, connecting them at
one end with a rivet, and sharpening the other ends, and made a pair of
compasses.
Daedalus was so envious of his nephew's accomplishments that he took
an opportunity and caused him to fall from the Acropolis. Athena turned
Perdix into a partridge and left a scar that looked like a partridge on Daedalus' right shoulder and Daedalus left Athens due to this.
Innovator
Such anecdotal details as these were embroideries upon the reputation of Daedalus as an innovator in many arts. In Pliny's Natural History (7.198) he is credited with inventing carpentry "and with it the saw, axe, plumb-line, drill, glue, and isinglass". Pausanias, in travelling around Greece, attributed to Daedalus numerous archaic wooden cult figures
that impressed him: "All the works of this artist, though somewhat
uncouth to look at, nevertheless have a touch of the divine in them."
It is said he first conceived masts and sails for ships for the
navy of Minos. He is said to have carved statues so well they looked as
if alive; even possessing self-motion. They would have escaped if not
for the chain that bound them to the wall.
Daedalus gave his name, eponymously, to any Greek artificer and to many Greek contraptions that represented dextrous skill. At Plataea there was a festival, the Daedala,
in which a temporary wooden altar was fashioned, and an effigy was made
from an oak-tree and dressed in bridal attire. It was carried in a cart
with a woman who acted as bridesmaid. The image was called Daedale and the archaic ritual given an explanation through a myth to the purpose.
In the period of Romanticism, Daedalus came to denote the classic artist, a skilled mature craftsman, while Icarus
symbolized the romantic artist, whose impetuous, passionate and
rebellious nature, as well as his defiance of formal aesthetic and
social conventions, may ultimately prove to be self-destructive. Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
envisages his future artist-self "a winged form flying above the waves
... a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end
he had been born to serve”.
Daedalus's statues
Daedalus
is said to have created statues that were so realistic that they had to
be tied down to stop them from wandering off. In Meno, Socrates
and Meno are debating the nature of knowledge and true belief when
Socrates refers to Daedalus' statues: "... if they are not fastened up
they play truant and run away; but, if fastened, they stay where they
are."
The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.
It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published
during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of
Santiago, an aging Cubanfisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.
The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin. The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish, and now being seen as "salao",
the worst form of unluckiness. He is so unlucky that his young
apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with him
and has been told instead to fish with successful fishermen. The boy
visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing
food, talking about American baseball and his favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream, north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff into the Gulf Stream, sets his lines and by noon, has his bait taken by a big fish that he is sure is a marlin.
Unable to haul in the great marlin, Santiago is instead pulled by the
marlin, and two days and nights pass with Santiago holding onto the
line. Though wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a
compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a
brother. He also determines that, because of the fish's great dignity,
no one shall deserve to eat the marlin.
On the third day, the fish begins to circle the skiff. Santiago,
worn out and almost delirious, uses all his remaining strength to pull
the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon.
Santiago straps the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home,
thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and
how many people he will feed.
On his way in to shore, sharks are attracted to the marlin's blood. Santiago kills a great mako shark with his harpoon, but he loses the weapon. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar
to help ward off the next line of sharks; five sharks are slain and
many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by
nightfall the sharks
have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton
consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail, and its head. Santiago
knows that he is defeated and tells the sharks of how they have killed
his dreams. Upon reaching the shore before dawn on the next day,
Santiago struggles to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his
shoulder, leaving the fish head and the bones on the shore. Once home,
he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.
A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where
the fish's skeleton is still attached. One of the fishermen measures it
to be 18 feet (5.5 m) from nose to tail. Pedrico is given the head of
the fish, and the other fishermen tell Manolin to tell the old man how
sorry they are. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a
shark. The boy, worried about the old man, cries upon finding him safe
asleep and at his injured hands. Manolin brings him newspapers and
coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once
again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth—of lions
on an African beach.
Background and publication
No good book has ever
been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck
in .... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a
real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they
would mean many things.
Ernest Hemingway in 1954
Written in 1951, and published in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final full-length work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to "Charlie Scribner" and to Hemingway's literary editor "Max Perkins", was featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days.
The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity. Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies. The illustrated edition featured black and white pictures by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard.
In May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people. The success of The Old Man and the Sea made Hemingway an international celebrity. The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.
Literary significance and criticism
The Old Man and the Sea
served to reinvigorate Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a
reexamination of his entire body of work. The novel was initially
received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence in
Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket, called the novel a "new classic", and many critics favorably compared it with such works as William Faulkner's short story The Bear and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick.
Ernest Hemingway and Henry ("Mike") Strater with the remaining 500 lbs of an estimated 1000 lb marlin that was half-eaten by sharks before it could be landed in the Bahamas in 1935.
Gregorio Fuentes, who many critics believe was an inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
After going to sea at age ten on ships that called in African ports, he
migrated permanently to Cuba when he was 22. After 82 years in Cuba,
Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish citizenship in 2001.
Critics have noted that Santiago was also at least 22 when he
immigrated from Spain to Cuba, and thus old enough to be considered an
immigrant—and a foreigner—in Cuba.
Hemingway at first planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son. Relationships in the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as "The Sea Book". Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter (Esquire, April 1936).
Joseph Waldmeir's essay "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest
Hemingway's Religion of Man" is a favorable critical reading of the
novel—and one which has defined analytical considerations since. Perhaps
the most memorable claim is Waldmeir's answer to the question—What is
the book's message?
The answer assumes a third level on which The Old Man and the Sea
must be read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his previous
work, by means of which it may be established that the religious
overtones of The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar to that
book among Hemingway's works, and that Hemingway has finally taken the
decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy of
Manhood to the level of a religion.
Waldmeir considered the function of the novel's Christian imagery, most notably through Hemingway's reference to the crucifixion of Christ following Santiago's sighting of the sharks that reads:
"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for
this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make,
involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.
One of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P. Weeks. His 1962 piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea"
presents his argument that the novel is a weak and unexpected
divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway (referring to the rest
of Hemingway's body of work as "earlier glories"). In juxtaposing this novel against Hemingway's previous works, Weeks contends:
The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea,
is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary
because one would expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of
natural objects in a writer who loathed W. H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick,
and who was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for
his devotion to the facts and his unwillingness to 'invent.'
Legacy
In 1954, Hemingway donated his Nobel Prize gold medal in Literature to the venerated Marian image of Our Lady of Charity. The Swedish medal was stolen in 1986, but was returned later upon the threat of Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel Castro.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology.
Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish
conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from
Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more
fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
A Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero
in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a
condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making
extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.
Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce
(1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College,
Dublin, in 1902. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it
up. He returned to Ireland at his family's request as his mother was
dying of cancer. Despite her pleas, the impious Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to make confession or take communion, and when she passed into a coma they refused to kneel and pray for her.
After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own
newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books.
Joyce made his first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero, in early 1904. That June he saw Nora Barnacle for the first time walking along Nassau Street. Their first date was on June 16, the same date that his novel Ulysses takes place.
Almost immediately, Joyce and Nora were infatuated with each other and
they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ireland and the Church. Nora and Joyce eloped to continental Europe, first staying in Zürich before settling for ten years in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary),
where he taught English. In March 1905, Joyce was transferred to the
Berlitz School In Trieste, presumably because of threats of spies in
Austria.
There Nora gave birth to their children, George in 1905 and Lucia in
1907, and Joyce wrote fiction, signing some of his early essays and
stories "Stephen Daedalus". The short stories he wrote made up the
collection Dubliners (1914), which took about eight years to be published due to its controversial nature. While waiting on Dubliners to be published, Joyce reworked the core themes of the novel Stephen Hero he had begun in Ireland in 1904 and abandoned in 1907 into A Portrait, published in 1916, a year after he had moved back to Zürich in the midst of the First World War.
Composition
Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes. ("And he turned his mind to unknown arts.")
— Ovid, Epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce in 1915
At the request of its editors, Joyce submitted a work of philosophical
fiction entitled "A Portrait of the Artist" to the Irish literary
magazine Dana on 7 January 1904. Dana's editor, W. K. Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, "I can't print what I can't understand." On his 22nd birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which incorporated aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in A Portrait.
He worked on the book until mid-1905 and brought the manuscript with
him when he moved to Trieste that year. Though his main attention turned
to the stories that made up Dubliners, Joyce continued work on Stephen Hero. At 914 manuscript pages, Joyce considered the book about half-finished, having completed 25 of its 63 intended chapters.
In September 1907, however, he abandoned this work, and began a
complete revision of the text and its structure, producing what became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By 1909 the work had taken shape and Joyce showed some of the draft chapters to Ettore Schmitz,
one of his language students, as an exercise. Schmitz, himself a
respected writer, was impressed and with his encouragement Joyce
continued work on the book.
In 1911 Joyce flew into a fit of rage over the continued refusals by publishers to print Dubliners and threw the manuscript of Portrait into the fire. It was saved by a "family fire brigade" including his sister Eileen. Chamber Music, a book of Joyce's poems, was published in 1907.
Joyce showed, in his own words, "a scrupulous meanness" in his use of materials for the novel. He recycled the two earlier attempts at explaining his aesthetics and youth, A Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero, as well as his notebooks from Trieste concerning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas; they all came together in five carefully paced chapters.
Stephen Hero is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but in Portrait Joyce adopts the free indirect style,
a change that reflects the moving of the narrative centre of
consciousness firmly and uniquely onto Stephen. Persons and events take
their significance from Stephen, and are perceived from his point of
view.
Characters and places are no longer mentioned simply because the young
Joyce had known them. Salient details are carefully chosen and fitted
into the aesthetic pattern of the novel.
In 1913 the Irish poet W. B. Yeats recommended Joyce's work to the avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound, who was assembling an anthology of verse. Pound wrote to Joyce, and in 1914 Joyce submitted the first chapter of the unfinished Portrait to Pound, who was so taken with it that he pressed to have the work serialised in the London literary magazine The Egoist. Joyce hurried to complete the novel, and it appeared in The Egoist in twenty-five installments from 2 February 1914 to 1 September 1915.
There was difficulty finding a British publisher for the finished
novel, so Pound arranged for its publication by an American publishing
house, B. W. Huebsch, which issued it on 29 December 1916. The Egoist Press republished it in the United Kingdom on 12 February 1917 and Jonathan Cape took over its publication in 1924. In 1964 Viking Press issued a corrected version overseen by Chester Anderson. Garland released a "copy text" edition by Hans Walter Gabler in 1993.
Major characters
Stephen Dedalus – The main character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Growing up, Stephen goes through long phases of hedonism and deep
religiosity. He eventually adopts a philosophy of aestheticism, greatly
valuing beauty and art. Stephen is essentially Joyce's alter ego, and
many of the events of Stephen's life mirror events from Joyce's own
youth. His surname is taken from the ancient Greek mythical figure Daedalus, who also engaged in a struggle for autonomy.
Simon Dedalus – Stephen's father, an impoverished former medical
student with a strong sense of Irish nationalism. Sentimental about his
past, Simon Dedalus frequently reminisces about his youth. Loosely based on Joyce's own father and their relationship.
Mary Dedalus – Stephen's mother who is very religious and often argues with Stephen about attending services.
Emma Clery – Stephen's beloved, the young girl to whom he is
fiercely attracted over the course of many years. Stephen constructs
Emma as an ideal of femininity, even though (or because) he does not
know her well.
Charles Stewart Parnell
– An Irish political leader who is not an actual character in the
novel, but whose death influences many of its characters. Parnell had
powerfully led the Irish Parliamentary Party until he was driven out of
public life after his affair with a married woman was exposed.
Cranly – Stephen's best friend at university, in whom he confides
some of his thoughts and feelings. In this sense Cranly represents a
secular confessor for Stephen. Eventually Cranly begins to encourage
Stephen to conform to the wishes of his family and to try harder to fit
in with his peers, advice that Stephen fiercely resents. Towards the
conclusion of the novel he bears witness to Stephen's exposition of his
aesthetic philosophy. It is partly due to Cranly that Stephen decides to
leave, after witnessing Cranly's budding (and reciprocated) romantic
interest in Emma.
Dante (Mrs. Riordan) – The governess of the Dedalus children. She is very intense and a dedicated Catholic.
Lynch – Stephen's friend from university who has a rather dry personality.
Synopsis
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 ...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
— James Joyce, Opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that
changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his
feelings. The reader experiences Stephen's fears and bewilderment as he
comes to terms with the world in a series of disjointed episodes. Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College,
where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule
of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour.
While he cannot grasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is
witness to the social, political and religious tensions in Ireland
involving Charles Stewart Parnell,
which drive wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with
doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith in.
Back at Clongowes, word spreads that a number of older boys have been
caught "smugging"; discipline is tightened, and the Jesuits increase use
of corporal punishment.
Stephen is strapped when one of his instructors believes he has broken
his glasses to avoid studying, but, prodded by his classmates, Stephen
works up the courage to complain to the rector, Father Conmee, who assures him there will be no such recurrence, leaving Stephen with a sense of triumph.
Stephen's father gets into debt and the family leaves its
pleasant suburban home to live in Dublin. Stephen realises that he will
not return to Clongowes. However, thanks to a scholarship obtained for
him by Father Conmee, Stephen is able to attend Belvedere College, where he excels academically and becomes a class leader.
Stephen squanders a large cash prize from school, and begins to see
prostitutes, as distance grows between him and his drunken father.
As Stephen abandons himself to sensual pleasures, his class is taken on a religious retreat, where the boys sit through sermons. Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the Four Last Things
(death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven). He feels that the words of the
sermon, describing horrific eternal punishment in hell, are directed at
himself and, overwhelmed, comes to desire forgiveness. Overjoyed at his
return to the Church, he devotes himself to acts of ascetic repentance,
though they soon devolve to mere acts of routine, as his thoughts turn
elsewhere. His devotion comes to the attention of the Jesuits, and they
encourage him to consider entering the priesthood.
Stephen takes time to consider, but has a crisis of faith because of
the conflict between his spiritual beliefs and his aesthetic ambitions.
Along Dollymount Strand
he spots a girl wading, and has an epiphany in which he is overcome
with the desire to find a way to express her beauty in his writing.
As a student at University College, Dublin, Stephen grows
increasingly wary of the institutions around him: Church, school,
politics and family. In the midst of the disintegration of his family's
fortunes his father berates him and his mother urges him to return to
the Church.
An increasingly dry, humourless Stephen explains his alienation from
the Church and the aesthetic theory he has developed to his friends, who
find that they cannot accept either of them.
Stephen concludes that Ireland is too restricted to allow him to
express himself fully as an artist, so he decides that he will have to
leave. He sets his mind on self-imposed exile, but not without declaring
in his diary his ties to his homeland:
... 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.
Style
The novel is a bildungsroman novel and captures the essence of character growth and understanding of the world around them. The novel mixes third-person narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The omniscient narrator of the earlier Stephen Hero informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write "some pages of sorry verse," while Portrait gives only Stephen's attempts, leaving the evaluation to the reader.
The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative
with minimal dialogue until the final chapter. This chapter includes
dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davin and
Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits
his complex Thomist
aesthetic theory in an extended dialogue. Joyce employs first-person
narration for Stephen's diary entries in the concluding pages of the
novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his own voice
and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others.
Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's
intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to
his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young
man. The style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters,
as the complexity of language and Stephen's ability to comprehend the
world around him both gradually increase.
The book's opening pages communicate Stephen's first stirrings of
consciousness when he is a child. Throughout the work language is used
to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist and the
subjective effect of the events of his life.
The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of
quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a
dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications.
Themes
Identity
As
a narrative which depicts a character throughout his formative years,
M. Angeles Conde-Parrilla posits that identity is possibly the most
prevalent theme in the novel.
Towards the beginning of the novel, Joyce depicts the young Stephen's
growing consciousness, which is said to be a condensed version of the
arc of Dedalus' entire life, as he continues to grow and form his
identity.
Stephen's growth as an individual character is important because
through him Joyce laments Irish society's tendency to force individuals
to conform to types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist
character. Themes that run through Joyce's later novels find expression there.
Religion
As
Stephen transitions into adulthood, he leaves behind his Catholic
religious identity, which is closely tied to the national identity of
Ireland. His rejection of this dual identity is also a rejection of constraint and an embrace of freedom in identity. Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus
throughout the novel conjure up something demonic in Stephen renouncing
his Catholic faith. When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter
duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and
Lucifer in its rebelliousness.
Myth of Daedalus
The myth of Daedalus and Icarus
has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his
surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
According to Ivan Canadas, the epigraph may parallel the heights and
depths that end and begin each chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the
interpretive freedom of the text.
Stephen's surname being connected to Daedalus may also call to mind the
theme of going against the status quo, as Daedalus defies the King of
Crete.
Irish freedom
Stephen's
struggle to find identity in the novel parallels the Irish struggle for
independence during the early twentieth century. He rejects any
outright nationalism, and is often prejudiced toward those that use
Hiberno-English, which was the marked speech patterns of the Irish rural
and lower-class.
However, he is also heavily concerned with his country's future and
understands himself as an Irishman, which then leads him to question how
much of his identity is tied up in said nationalism.
Critical reception
While some critics take the prose to be too ornate, critics on the
whole praise the novel and its complexity, heralding Joyce's talent and
the beauty of the novel's originality. These critics view potentially
apparent lack of focus as intentional formlessness which imitates moral
chaos in the developing mind. The lens of vulgarity is also commented
on, as the novel is unafraid to delve the disgusting topics of
adolescence. In many instances, critics that comment on the novel as a
work of genius may concede that the work does not always exhibit this
genius throughout.
A Portrait won Joyce a reputation for his literary skills, as well as a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the business manager of The Egoist.
In 1917 H. G. Wells wrote that "one believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction," while warning readers of Joyce's "cloacal obsession," his insistence on the portrayal of bodily functions that Victorian morality had banished from print.
Adaptations
A film version adapted for the screen by Judith Rascoe and directed by Joseph Strick was released in 1977. It features Bosco Hogan as Stephen Dedalus and T. P. McKenna as Simon Dedalus. John Gielgud plays Father Arnall, the priest whose lengthy sermon on Hell terrifies the teenage Stephen.
The first stage version was produced by Léonie Scott-Matthews at Pentameters Theatre in 2012 using an adaptation by Tom Neill.
Hugh Leonard's stage work Stephen D is an adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero. It was first produced at the Gate Theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1962.
As of 2017 computer scientists and literature scholars at University College Dublin, Ireland
are in a collaboration to create the multimedia version of this work,
by charting the social networks of characters in the novel. Animations
in the multimedia editions express the relation of every character in
the chapter to the others.
