I will not serve that
in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or
my church is the way Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of the book, A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, puts it. Interestingly it is also the leitmotif
of the life of its author James Joyce and most of his works. His mastery of the
craft of writing induces him to scale newer heights in using language as an
instrument and explore wider dimensions within the language through symbols and
metaphors so as to enrich his works and also the body of literature in English
language. His works like Dubliners, a collection of his poems, A Portrait…., Ulysses
and Finnegan’s Wake present this art as a wildly rising crescendo. The next work
has a surrealism that was absent in the first and is succeeded by almost
psychedelic fantasies in the following work. His craft finds its culmination in
Finnegan’s Wake where the characters, time and place seldom remain fixed for
more than a sentence. The ultimate male character appears in a wide variety of
guises signaled by initials like HCE – Here Comes Everybody or in the garb of
not so easily identifiable characters like Humpty Dumpty or King Mark of the
Tristan. This figure merges into that of Tim Finnegan, hero of an Irish comic
song about a man who arises at his own wake to share the drink and also morphed
with the mythical Irish hero Finn, who is also a mountain. The character of the
daughter Issy merges into virtually any young woman or splinters into groups of
young women. In the novel, Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce created and followed a
structure that mirrored the cycle of history which says history has a fourth phase
of ricorso or return after passing through theocratic, aristocratic, democratic
and chaotic phases.
James Joyce was born
on February 2, 1882, in Dublin Ireland. His father was from merchants’
community and his mother from the Irish nationalist movement. They exercised
such influence in the locality that a large area in the west of Ireland is
still known as ‘the Joyce Country’. Joyce in his youth struggled with the
narrow belief system of the church and society and only his precocious reading
of modern and so called dangerous authors like Byron, Thomas Hardy, Henrik
Ibsen and W B Yeats instilled in him a critical attitude towards social
institutions. By the time he entered university, he was permanently weaned away
from Catholicism, much to the distress of his mother. Joyce had several of the
poems of W B Yeats by heart and he probably veered towards prose as he feared
that he could not compete with Yeats as a poet, who was seventeen years, his
senior. Joyce met and in the Irish phrase ‘walked out with’ Nora Barnacle, a
country girl who worked as a hotel chambermaid, in 1904 when he was all of
twenty two years. She was to remain a central figure in the remainder part of
his life though only in 1931 he married her so as to reconcile with his dying
father.
James Joyce is
arguably the most influential modern writer in the western world. His influence
on writers of all genres, from traditional to wildly experimental has been
decisive. Though his Ulysses has evoked greater amount of critical discussion,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man remains the most widely read work and
is among the most frequently taught novels in the modern university curriculum.
Most under graduates though discover this novel on their own as Stephen
Daedalus as a sensitive youth with remarkable self-involvement and continuous
frustration under the authority of state, religion and parents, gets
transfigured before their eyes by the idea of beauty.
