Autobiography and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

For literary scholars, the presence of the author sometimes poses a problem.

We know that all texts have some kind of author, even if that authorship is collaborative or anonymous. But when we sit down to interpret a piece of writing for ourselves, scholars have long been plagued by the question of what meaning should be derived from the author themselves. Should we look to their biography for clues about their creative intentions? Should an author’s explanations in essays or letters take precedence over our own interpretations? Over the past century, this conundrum led to literary theory around ‘the intentional fallacy’ or the symbolic ‘death of the author’, which urges us to resist treating the author as the foundation of a work’s meaning.

Where does this leave a writer like James Joyce, who not only drew from personal experience for many details in his fiction, but went to great lengths to spell out his intentions? Ulysses might be even more bewildering if we ignored the episode titles and the structural ‘schemas’ that he wrote out for friends but didn’t include in the book itself. Connections with Joyce’s life are also inescapable, from setting Ulysses on 16 June 1904 – the day of his first date with Nora Barnacle – to characters and scenes taken from his life. Reading the novel’s opening, with Stephen Dedalus atop the Martello Tower, we have to decide how to weigh up the fact that Joyce himself stayed in this same tower in 1904, with an Irish friend who is clearly a model for Buck Mulligan and an English friend who woke them after a nightmare about a panther – all very much as the ‘fictional’ novel describes.

The main character at the start of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, poses the biggest challenge for separating Joyce from his fiction. In many ways, Stephen bears an uncanny resemblance to what we know of Joyce’s life. This is true in Ulysses, but maybe more so in Joyce’s earlier novel – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the title of which seems to prompt an autobiographical interpretation, followed by images of Stephen’s childhood, including where he lived, went to school and university, and countless other details we can find in Joyce’s life. Nevertheless, Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, warns us against thinking Stephen is Joyce. As Joyce’s brother Stanislaus writes, based on everything he knows about the writer: ‘Stephen Dedalus is an imaginary, not a real, self-portrait.’

So, how do we interpret Portrait of the Artist, if it’s not a literal self-portrait of Joyce? We can start by thinking about its form. In the previous step, I talked about the messy evolution of this book, following Joyce’s 1904 essay ‘Portrait of the Artist’ and an abandoned novel called Stephen Hero. The key breakthrough from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was Joyce’s shift from fairly conventional third-person narration in the earlier version to the use of ‘free indirect discourse’, moving fluidly between third-person description and the thoughts and feelings of characters as they experience them. Joyce didn’t invent the technique of free indirect discourse, which nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen helped develop. But his use of it in Portrait allowed him to explore the growth of Stephen’s consciousness as he grows up. The language itself also changes across the book’s five chapters, showing Stephen’s mind at different ages. This is clear in the childish opening lines:

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…

Welcome, 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.

This is from Stephen’s fictional diary. In the narrative then, it is Stephen’s ‘soul’ which serves as the ‘smithy’ from which ideas about art, religion, and life are forged. But Portrait is also Joyce’s book, and we could equally say it is his soul in which Stephen’s conscience was created, for a ‘reality of experience’ recreated with our reading. These layers of reality aren’t a problem to be solved, but a thrilling provocation throughout Joyce’s writing.

Pause for thought…

Now that you’ve read this article, take a look at the question below and tell us what you think!

• Portrait is often described as a ‘semi-autobiographical’ novel. Are there other labels that better describe fiction that blurs with the reality of an author’s life? Which labels seem more like marketing descriptions, and which tell us something about the form of the book itself?