A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a Bildungsroman

The Bildungsroman (the novel of personal development or of education) originated in Germany in the latter half of the 18^th century and has since become one of the major narrative genres in European and Anglo-American literature. German in origin, "bildungs" means formation, and "roman" means novel. It charts the protagonist’s actual or metaphorical journey from youth to maturity. Used generally, it encompasses a few similar genres: the Entwicklungsroman, a story of general growth rather than self-culture; the Erziehungsroman, which focuses on training and formal education; and the Kunstlerroman, about the development of an artist. The Bildungsroman is a novel of formation or development. These terms imply that the Bildungsroman is also a novel about education, yet not necessarily in the narrow sense of the Erziehungsroman (novel of educational development).  The notion of the Bildungsroman is that of a simple one: the author treats the life of a young man through the important years of his spiritual development, usually from boyhood through adolescence. He is shown as being formed and changed by interaction with his milieu, and with the world. Experience as opposed to formal education, is considered central to the development. The young man must encounter life, and be formed in that encounter. The Bildungsroman is inevitably open–ended: it prepares the hero for maturity and life but does not go on to depict that life; in place of experiencing his destiny the hero is made to ready to confront it. There is no guarantee of his success, but there is usually good reason to hope for it. The hero of the Bildungsroman also has his characteristic traits. He is normally good-hearted, naïve, and innocent. Often he is completely separated from society by birth or fortune, and the story of his development is the story of his preparation to enter into the society. The Bildungsroman thus has as an important concomitant interest the relationship of the individual to the society, the values and norms of that society, and the ease or difficulty with which a good man can enter into it.

The basic concerns of the Bildungsroman have their effect on the structure and style of the novel as well. The novel is held together as a work of art not by the story (as in a conventional novel) but by our interest in the development of the main character. The action tends to be episodic rather than arranged into a tightly woven plot. The form of the novel is itself “open” rather than, for example, “closed” circular structure of Finnegans Wake (James Joyce). Since it is closely concerned with internal development, the Bildungsroman also shows a typical mixture of narrative techniques suited to such an interest, including interior monologue, quoted thought, internal analysis, and use of the first person.

The Bildungsroman first appeared in eighteenth-century Germany and has continued to reappear in almost every national literature of the western world. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795-96) established a model for this new form of the novel and encouraged others to try their hand on it. The influence of Wilhelm Meister has been both profound and pervasive. It is safe to say that no major German novel about a young man’s development has been written without a backyard glance towards Goethe. And to an important degree his influence may be felt in the major novels of development in France, England and America as well. Other examples of Bildungsroman are Emma by Jane Austen, Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, If Human Bridge by William S. Maugham. If we look for look for Goethe’s influence on Bengali literature, we may mention Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali that depicts the story of the development of the young protagonist, Apu. 

When Joyce first began work on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Bildungsroman already had a long established tradition. In light of even this brief description of the traditional Bildungsroman, it is obvious that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in many ways almost surprisingly conventional, in the literal sense of the term. This is in itself worth pointing out, for Joyce is an author of such inventiveness and originality that points of contact with traditional literary forms are worth holding on to. Joyce seems to conform to the basic patterns of the Bildungsroman.

The basic difference between Joyce’s A Portrait and other Bildungsroman is that the protagonist of the novel does not seek integration with his society- it prepares a way for Gunter Grass’s Tindrum where the protagonist deliberately refuses to grow.

Like the typical Bildungsroman hero, Stephen begins as a good-hearted and naïve little boy, unable to understand why his older classmates laugh when he says he kisses his mother good night. The correct answer to their questions is beyond him, for he has yet to learn that there is no answer. Later, at Belvedere, the sin of sacrilege and the mysterious sexual offenses hinted at by his schoolmates stand for yet another realm of life beyond his grasp. He feels set apart from the others and dimly perceives that he differs from them in important ways. In this later respect Stephen resembles the typical Bildungsroman hero as well. Traditionally the hero is cut off from society by birth or fortune, and Stephen is certainly dogged throughout the novel by his humiliating sense of grinding poverty and squalor: “The life of his body, illclad, illfed, louseeaten, made him close his eye- lids in a sudden spasm of despair.” But the feeling of otherness that possesses him goes far beyond economic conditions: “Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth.” It is this same sense of spiritual isolation which has left him a spectator since early childhood. The gap that separates him from others cannot be closed by wealth, as he soon learns when his prize money has been quickly spent: “How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life… Useless”. It is this unbridgeable spiritual distance which, in the 20^th century Bildungsroman, replaces the more literal exclusion of the hero from society in earlier examples.

The changes that Stephen undergoes in the course of the novel, and the choices he is forced to make, arise out of the texture of his everyday life. In the very first chapter he already knows that the tears in his father’s eyes must somehow be weighed against Dante’s fervent cry “God and religion before everything! God and religion before the world!” ultimately, he will seek to escape both politics and religion, but for the moment he is a lost and deeply puzzled little boy:” Who was right then?” as he grows older it is the interaction with the world around him which contributes to the formation of his character. His fall into a life of youthful degeneration seems temporarily redeemed by his moral decision to repent and confess. But this too is simply a stage in his spiritual growth, and his rejection of the religious life carries with it a clear commitment to a wider realm of experience: “He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders”. For the moment it seems to Stephen as if life, in all its untidiness, has triumphed. But the final choice of a new and higher ordering of life has yet to be made. His final decision to reject the life of the church is marked by a passage which might almost serve as an epigraph for the traditional Bildungsroman: “he was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.”

When Stephen at last recognizes the true shape of his destiny, he feels that his soul has “arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave clothes.”  This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. “He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.” The final chapter of “A Portrait” provides the necessary counterweight to these flights of rapture. Poverty and disorder of life have not miraculously vanished. At the university Stephen must struggle with one last decision to escape the world he knows, completely.

Not only the content, but also the structure of A Portrait are in part determined the particular demands of the Bildungsroman. Since interest is focused on Stephen’s spiritual progression, the novel tends to be episodic. It is clear that the basic division of the work into five chapters reflects this progression and that each chapter presents us with a distinct stage in Stephen’s development. Because that development is far from the smooth path of maturity, it should not surprise us that the narrative line of A Portrait has its ups and downs as well. The upbeats come at the end of each of five sections. Nevertheless, the upswing of emotion and release which occurs in the final pages of each chapter is always balanced by the corresponding deflation of the initial pages of the next. Thus Stephen’s triumph at Clongowes in the first section is followed in the second by his move to Belvedere and his discovery of the true face of the encounter through his father’s conversation with the rector. The tears of joy and sexual relief with which the second chapter is closed are transformed in to bitter remorse in the third. The power of confession and communion that makes life so beautiful and peaceful at the end of the third section soon evaporates in the fourth, leaving only a sensation of spiritual dryness.

The profane joy and rapture Stephen experiences on the beach at the close of the fourth section is given its inverse mirror image at the beginning of the fifth chapter in the dark pool of the jar and the squalid life which still surrounds him. Thus the progression of each chapter contributes in the development of Stephen’s character. In the fifth chapter Stephen rejects his home, country and religion. As Joyce deliberately left its conclusion vague by making it an open-ended novel the fifth chapter would point toward yet another spiritual deflation following his departure from Ireland. And indeed many readers feel a fall is in the offing.

In this context Joyce’s narrative technique of this novel also needs a mention. Joyce largely employs the technique of narrated monologue; but at the same time he utilizes symbolism in order to deepen the significance of Stephen’s different experience of life. Joyce also has introduced a handful number of epiphanies in the novel. There are as many as forty epiphanies in A Portrait. These epiphanies contribute to a great deal in giving the novel the form and action needed for a Bildungsroman. Major epiphanies, occurring at the end of each chapter, mark the chief revelations of the nature of Stephen’s environment and of his destiny in it. Perhaps the most important of all these is the one that occurs when Stephen encounters with a wading girl. The image of the wading girl instead of causing any erotic sensation in Stephen, results in an aesthetic inspiration. It is this image that gives Stephen to write his first poem, which is surely a major juncture of the development of his career of art. In this context it should be mentioned that Stephen’s theory of art is actually an adaptation from Aristotle and Aquinas.

Therefore, there is a progression toward maturity and self-knowledge, toward the acceptance of both life and error. If we are not convinced that Stephen has, by the end of the novel, achieved a full measure of wisdom, we must at least admit that the path he has traced is close enough to that of the invisible author hovering behind the work to admit the possibility of his ultimate success. Stephen’s Wanderjahre (travels) still lie before him, but the basic choices have been made, and the elements of his Bildung are all in place. On the surface, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seems to be a typical example of the Bildungsroman; but within the tradition Joyce works out his own innovation.

Movement Poetry & Philip Larkin as a Movement Poet

Movement Poetry

&

Philip Larkin as a Movement Poet

                                                -ARGHAJIT CHAKRABORTY

T

he term Movement was coined by J. D. Scott in 1954 to refer to a group of poets including Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest and of course, Philip Larkin. Together they marked the emergence of the petit-bourgeois provincial intelligentsia, impatient of the Establishment but ultimately committed to neutrality. Indeed, there was never an organised school of poets armed with manifestos and some of the lead figures even denied a conscious involvement, though they appeared together in a number of anthologies and radio programmes. Later, the term came to theorise a distinctive poetic sensibility. 

Essentially the Movement was a reaction against the extreme romanticism and surrealist detachment of the New Apocalyptic like Dylan Thomas. On the other hand, the Movement poets reconstructed neoclassicism. According to John Press, it was "a general retreat from direct comment or involvement in any political or social doctrine." The Movement writings clearly reflect a startling transformation in the poetic ideology and it is evident in an anonymous leading article, “In the Movement” which appeared in the London weekly periodical, The Spectator edited by J.D. Scott on 1^st October 1954.

 
One way of accounting for the emergence of the Movement is to see it as a part of the general post-war period of reconstruction. The thematic shift and the return to traditional forms and rhythms therefore seem to be natural responses to a national mood of rebuilding. One of the Movement poets, John Wain, once commented: "At such a time, when exhaustion and boredom in the foreground are balanced by guilt and fear in the background, it is natural that a poet should feel the impulse to build." Another of them, Donald Davie, also echoed the same thought: "We had to go back to basics." The Movement poets sought to create an ordinary brand of poetry. They preferred everyday pictures to sensational imagery, and prioritised a friendly, colloquial tone over rhetorical complications. A lead figure of this group, Kingsley Amis, found that they have placed poetry in between "the gardening and the cookery" instead of libraries and seminar hall.

Larkin established himself as a poet of high esteem in the galaxy of the Movement writers. He rose as a poet on the literary scene in the post-War British era with the characteristics of the Movement poetry apart from the distinctive poetic features of his own. The attitudes and some of the craft strategies of the Movement writers influenced Larkin in the evolution of his poetic vision and sense of craft. Larkin also in turn influenced the writers of the Movement group and those of coming generations.

The Movement group of writers shared some similar views about the kind of poetry which became a herald of the new era in the post-War period of British poetry that was in the mid 1950s. The poetry of Larkin and other Movement writers eclipsed both the politically committed poetry of the 1930s and the neo-Romantic surrealism of the poetry of the 1940s. These writers shared similar opinion about poetry as also similar concerns with jazz. Their tutor, Gavin Bone, influenced them in several ways and they consequently developed their interest in clarity, simplicity and intelligibility which are the primary characteristics of Movement writings in contrast with those of Modernists writings. It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Among its writers were Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn. Conquest saw the group's work "free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes."

As poet Larkin made his debut with the collection The North Ship in 1945, written with short lines and carefully worked-out rhyme schemes. It was published with his own expense and showed the influence of Yeats. It was followed by two novels, Jill (1946), a coming-of-age story, and A Girl in the Winter (1947), after which he abandoned fiction. "I tried very hard to write a third novel for about five years,” he later said, "the ability to do so had just vanished."

“Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.”
(From 'Next, Please', 1955)

In The Whitsun Weddings the title-poem describes the poet's journey by train from Hull to London. Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter. In the 1950s, British tax law made the Whitsun weekend a financially advantageous time to be married:

"Just long enough to settle hats and say

I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side."

 Larkin used the tones and rhythms of ordinary speech, and focused on the urban landscape of the industrial north.

"Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

 A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

 And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

 Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

 Until the next town, new and nondescript,

 Approached with acres of dismantled cars."

High Windows (1974) includes two substantial poems about ageing, illness and death, 'The Old Fools' and 'The Building'. In these works Larkin explored the mood of post-war England and its bleak views of the future. “Deprivation is to me what daffodils are to Wordsworth,” was Larkin's famous confession. Larkin avoided "big" words, sentimentality and philosophising, his language was plain, his approach was cool and restricted, which led critics to accuse him of lack of emotional involvement.

Antithetical to Romanticism, Larkin rejects the famous dichotomy of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. "I have always believed," he writes, "that beauty is beauty, truth truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know." He thus briskly separates the realms that Keats held in ambiguous balance. Larkin often discouraged all sorts of comparative readings, yet 'The Whitsun Weddings' may be viewed as a searching revaluation of the Keatsian odes. Keats's stanzas are autonomous and focus on different aspects of the urn sequentially, while their invocatory openings except the second stanza convey a sense of starting afresh every time. The Keatsian stanzas in 'The Whitsun Weddings' differ from those in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ both rhythmically and thematically. Instead of varied sestets, Larkin's evenly rhymed stanzas with the a b a b c d e c d e pattern as well as the enjambement take on the reader unstopping like the narrator's journey by the train. Keats held beauty as timeless. Larkin's poem is rooted in a specific time and is also aware of its flow: "That Whitsun, I was late getting away." Paradoxical to the Romantic sensuousness, our organs are here smothered by hot cushions, blinding windscreens and stinking fish-docks. Later the noise of "whoops and skirls" irritates our auditory perception, strikingly in contrast to the "unheard melodies" of Romantic literature. And above all, Larkin's view of marriage as a "happy funeral" and a "religious wounding" strongly destabilizes the Romantic creed of "More happy love! More happy, happy love!" In 'High Windows', too, Larkin is not romanticising the amorous attitude of young people like Keats. He prefers to simply narrate it, as if it is nothing ceremonial, and uses colloquial words from day to day sex life:

"When I see a couple of kids

And guess he is fucking her and she's

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm"

In fact, it is difficult to find a complex syntax or an unusual word in Larkin's poetry. His pen-picture of English suburbs with "industrial froth" and "acres of dismantled cars", and the occasional portraits of the verdurous countryside in 'The Whitsun Weddings' are quite familiar to the common English reader. 'The Explosion' is also very colloquial and picturesque in its depiction of humdrum mortals like the miners. The outward structure of 'Water' and 'Days' are almost like nursery rhymes, however subtle philosophy they may convey inwardly. Larkin thus breaks the barrier between the poet and the general reader, as Amis observes in 'A Bookshop Idyll’. "Life as it appears from day to day" thus comes again and again in Larkin's poetry. He is neither existentialist nor romantic; from a neutral point he writes what he says in a plain language for the non-specialist recipient, which is the ultimate credo of the Movement poetry.

Larkin’s poetic sensibilities was bound to be transformed because of his affinities with the Movement and his poetry reflects his great concern with the general characteristics of the Movement writers as follows:

1.      The Movement poets portray the element of time and its effects on life. They employ time as the most significant concept. Larkin mainly considers time as man’s element as in “Days”: “Days are where we live”. The Movement poets deal with time in different ways in contrast with the modernist poets like Eliot.

2.      Larkin observes the post-War British life that welcomes changes in all walks of life in the governance of time and shares social concerns of the post-War British society like the Movement poets in different sociological backgrounds.

3.      Larkin’s poetry establishes the consciousness of social differences or of class distinctions on the basis of social or physical status in Movement poetry. It is evident in Larkin’s “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”-

        “Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole…/That this is a real girl in a real place.”

4.      Larkin’s poetry has a common man as its speaker to narrate his feelings and experiences to a common man. We find man speaking to man in the poetic scene he describes. It seems he has regarded Keats’s attitude towards audience as a Movement poet.

5.      Larkin has fundamental honesty to experience. He, therefore, invites the reader to share his experience.

6.      The Movement poetry and its audience have sensitivity to loss, regret, wistfulness and immediate past. Larkin’s poem “At Grass” presents the feeling of loss and regret. The horses as depicted in the poem represent the loss of power in the incessant flow of time.

7.      Like Movement poets Larkin does not worship nature in the tradition of the Romantics.

“A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded.

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.”

(“Coming”)

Though Larkin shared some thematic concerns and craft techniques with the other Movement writers, he distinctively established himself as a poet of high esteem in the galaxy of the movement poets, heralding the new era in ye post-War period of British poetry by virtue of his own poetic ideology. He observes all social events around him and presents their vivid picture to the reader, enabling him to participate in the scenes. He portrays the churches that fell “out of use” in the British society. The changes that the movement of time brought about in physical structure of churches and the reverence for religious activities are quite obvious to the reader’s eyes in the poetic scene:

“Once I am sure there’s nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats and stone,

And little books; sprawling of flowers, cut…

Up at the holy end; the smell neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless I take off

                                                     My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”                (“Church Going”)

Larkin’s well known poem “Sunny Prestatyn” presents a poster to advertise the fight against cancer:

“She was too good for this life.

Very soon, a great transverse tear

Left only a hand and some blue

Now fight cancer is there.”

This is the way in which he portrays the life of a pretty girl in the poster on the sands and his observations and experiences.

Thus it is evident that Larkin certainly had the impact of the Movement poetry in transforming his poetic sensibility and The Less Deceived including the forthcoming volume reflects the fact that there are the characteristics of the Movement. Terry Whalen presents a clear picture of his transformation; “Larkin was undeniably shifted to amore unillusioned perspective since The North Ship and his affinities with Thomas Hardy and with the Movement writers have had effect on his vision and craft… Larkin’s affinities with the Movement writers and with an almost endless series of living poets who share with him related craft and thematic concern”. Peschmann also points out his evident link with the Movement: “What particularly links Larkin with the Movement is The Less Deceived in its fundamental honesty to experience: a clear eyed, unillusioned view of contemporary living and its problems, and a refusal to sentimentalize them, the whole couched, for the most part, in a language instantly recognizable as the colloquial idiom of our day, free from pedantry, grandiloquence, or the recherché phrase.”   

But Larkin’s Critics are unanimous as to the degree to which he shows his allegiance as to the Movement. Actually, Larkin was little annoyed by the academic sterility of much of Movement poetry, and never actively promoted himself as one of the group. After reading Conquest's draft introduction to New Lines, Larkin privately reveals to him what should be his aesthetic theory: "I feel we have got the method right – plain language, absence of posturings, sense of proportion, humour, abandonment of the dithyrambic ideal – and are waiting for the matter: a fuller and more sensitive response to life as it appears from day to day." It is true that almost all the poems of The Less Deceived and many of The Whitsun Weddings do bear testimony of Larkin’s adherence to some of the Movement tenets like building a poem around a rational structure, the use of colloquial, frequently defensive asides, hesitations and qualifications, a resorting to a pose of embarrassed awkwardness, intellectual wit, an impatience with neo-Romantic excess and a fidelity to formal framework. It is also true that some of the themes which he takes up- themes like loss and regret, retirement, the past, and the countryside-are typical of the Movement which historically came to terms with the tremendous socio-economic, political and cultural changes that overtook England after the Second World War. But many of the thematic and stylistic features of Larkin – his beliefs in determinism, his desire for a transcendence of the bounds of the material world, his juxtaposition of an empiricist diction and a mystical metaphysical mode, etc.- are absolutely his own. What is indeed important to note is that after The Whitsun Weddings Larkin’s poetry begins to move away from the Movement’s literary ideology and High Windows  poems show the completion of his departure from the Movement. In addition, the fact may be noted that Larkin’s worship of Nature and elemental presences in a number of celebratory lyrics ( for example “Coming”, “Spring”, “Water”, ”First Sight” in The Whitsun Weddings; “Sad Steps”, “The Trees”, “Cut Grass” in High Windows) clearly reveals his non – conformity with the principal poetic practices of the Movement. Also Larkin’s obsessive preoccupation with old age and death, so evident in all his volumes beginnings with The North Ship (though most conspicuously in High Windows), bears out the fact of his deviation from the main Movement line.

We can conclude our discussion with the reference of Blake Morrison who after discussing Larkin and his confederates, in terms of their adherence to and departure from the movement tenets remarks that “Larkin is by far and away the group’s finest poet”. A. Alvarez subscribes to Morrison’s view, and observes that Larkin’s poetry embodies “everything that was best in the Movement and at the same time shows what was finally lacking”. It may be argued that Larkin both belongs does not belong to the Movement. In fact, Larkin’s poetry – its thematic significance and its scope of signification – is too great and too profound to be narrowed down and fitted within the bounds of any decade – specific literary movement.