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.