Joyce was the son of a father who had been educated at the Queen’s College, Cork (though without graduating), was in receipt of a comfortable inheritance - which he ultimately squandered - and for some years held a virtual sinecure in the Rates Collection Department of the Dublin Corporation and an office in Dublin Castle. The young Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit establishment and the “best” Catholic boarding school in Ireland. After his father’s financial collapse he was spared the humiliation of a Christian Brothers education, in which he was briefly immersed, when the Jesuits took him on for free at Belvedere College, a day-school in the city, in recognition of his precocity. Through their good-will, and later with the support of scholarships, he was able to continue on at one of the best contemporary schools in spite of the increasingly poverty and squalor of life at home. Afterwards he went to the Royal University, Dublin (later renamed University College, Dublin and part of the National University of Ireland) - also run by the Jesuits at that time.

Joyce’s adolescent exposure to the rapidly-changing circumstances that brough his family from a good terrace in the fashionable resort of Bray, just south of Dublin on a coast-line - sometimes compared to the Bay of Naple for its beauty and grandeur - to the mean-streets of a crumbling neighbourhood in inner-city Dublin that had once laid claim to Georgian glory but was now ravaged by poverty and even prostitution taught him an acutely critical lesson about the society around him. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he speaks of the depressing effect that the “dull phenomenon of Dublin” made on his “soul” - as he characteristically calls it - at this time. His response was to begin making a careful “map” of the city “in his mind”: a response which he would elaborate to an astonishing degree in all his later works, but especially in Ulysses which is our pre-eminent guide to Dublin as it was then and perhaps even today.

He also became acquainted with the inner-city in a more intimate way and, at some time in late adolescence (though not as early as he tells us in A Portrait), he began to visit prostitutes. In this he was certainly at odds with his more comfortable student companions and others who formed his own social cohort in late-Victorian Dublin. Joyce’s educational peers were members of the rising Catholic middle class who mostly regarded themselves as pious Catholics, faithful to the religion and the nation of their fathers, and who consequently did not recognise themselves in the cowed, bullying and brutalised creatures whom that he depicted in his fiction - especially in the stories of Dubliners (1914) which he wrote with the intention of exposing the “spiritual paralysis” of the city that they shared. On the contrary, Joyce’s contemporary were bouyed up by the enthusiastic mood of the cultural nationalism from which he kept himself apart as long as he lived in Dublin.

Joyce’s school- and college-peers were all involved in the contemporary Home Rule movement and, a little later, grew strongly sympathetic towards, or even actively involved in the more populist physical-force movement that led to the end of British rule in Ireland in the wake of the 1916 Rising, following the War of Independence waged by a“guerrilla” army during 1919-21. Under the terms of the ensuing Anglo-Irish Treaty, the new Ireland was to be partitioned north and south into the Free State and Northern Ireland - respectively the Catholic and Protestant parts of the country. When those events occurred, Joyce was already living in on the continentm- “self-exiled in upon himself”, as he puts in it in Finnegans Wake. From that vantage-point, he regarded the hollow revolution at home with much disdain since the new rulers identified with the Catholic Church so strongly that they bestowed a position of social and legal privilege on it - a Church which Joyce himself regarded as the “real tyrant of the islanders”.

As a young man Joyce identified himself with the continental rather than the English literary tradition. Flaubert was his literary model and he regarded the vaulting individualism and social realism of Henrik Ibsen, in particular, as the proper form of liberation. When he first read Ibsen’s plays  - to whom he soon wrote a letter of homage, announcing himself as a successor and the exponent of a“higher and holier enlightenment” - he felt their“souls” merge in a moment of what he called “radiant simultaneity”.

This personal commitment to the idea of the modern kept him far apart from the dominant ethos of Irish-Ireland, as it then was: increasingly persuaded of its its own moral rectitude and intellectual worth based on a heady mixture of Catholic fideism and Celtic archaeology. In contrast, Joyce’s vision of Ireland was anti-Catholic, anti-nationalist and scornful of the“alibi” of Gaelic civilisation. He was also strongly antagonistic to the both the matriarchal and the patriarchal aspects of that society, especially as these effected the conduct of family life about which he knew all too well.

In this regard, his own family was both an example and a caution since his father was hopelessly gregarious and impecunious and - as Stephen Dedalus tells a friend in A Portrait - ‘at present a praiser of his own past’, while his mother was slavishly obedient to the Catholic Church and was correspondingly pained by her son’s agnosticism. (She died of cancer when he was twenty-one - an experience which supplies a central strand in Stephen’s thoughts throughout the single day of Ulysses, set on 16 June 1904. For Stephen, as for Joyce himself, his father was to blame for her death, having given her an unbearable existence. And behind his father lay a masculine pattern of conviviality and self-indulgence which included arts of story-telling and song which are among the chief resources of his own art.

For Joyce, the damage that gregarious sentimentality combined with social hypocrisy and religious formalism actually did to individuals and families provided the basis of an unrelenting animosity to any form of national self-praise in Ireland. In that respect, he set himself sternly against the dominant national mood since the Ireland of the day was convinced of its own virtues compared with“materialist” England and the“joyless” Protestantism of their northern neighbours on the island of Ireland. Ironically this very animosity to things national and Irish would turn Dublin into the central focus of all his future works - works which revolve around the daily realities of the lower-middle class denizens of Ireland’s capital with barely a glimpse of the comfortable Catholic middle-class and still less of the Protestant upper class which still formed the rump of Anglo-Irish power in Ireland in 1904.

When out of Dublin for three years, Joyce wrote to his brother in a thoughtful letter of 1907 that he had come to think he had been unfair to the city of his birth in overlooking its “ingenuous insularity and its hospitality”, and the last story in the Dubliners collection was written as a corrective to this - a fact that makes its title, “The Dead”, profoundly ambiguous since this is no longer simply a “vivisective” portrait of a moribund culture so much as a personal accommodation with his own social and familial roots - and also with the spirit of the nation as embodied in Gretta Conroy, a woman who is very like Joyce’s life-partner (and later his wife) Nora Barnacle. No relationship could have been more contradictory: for, if Joyce was a hyper-educated metropolitan, Nora was a barely literate country-woman whose ignorance in cultural terms was matched by a directness of feeling and a realistic outlook in regard to human sexuality which was foreign to the educated young women of the period. On these personal foundations Joyce built the character of Molly Bloom in Ulysses but also, to a considerable extent, his own mature personality.

II
In Joyce’s early way of treating his material there is an emphasis on the exposure of everything that debilitates (or ‘paralyses’) the human spirit. Indeed, the very term ‘spiritual paralysis’ became for him a motto and a legend to describe what he considered the dominant condition of life in Ireland. (He ingeniously introduced the word ‘paralysis’ into the first paragraph of the first story in Dubliners when he revised it two years after its first publication in an issue of The Irish Homestead for August 1904.) More practically, he began to identify the three-fold powers of family, religion and nationality as those things which really enslaved the Irish mind; and all of his Dubliners stories can be regarded more or less as an illustration of this point. The examples that he gives, in this spirit, range from an abusive father to a scheming mother, a romantically disillusioned boy to a sexual pervert, a syphilitic priest to a loveless - or, rather, an unloved - suicide in the seering story called “A Painful Case”.

Ironically, several of these stories can be read as portraits of the artist as he might have been he remained in Dublin and succumbed to the local culture. Mr. Duffy in the story just mentioned is a dried-out intellectual of the kind that Joyce might have become if he had compromised and taken an office job in Dublin, while Gabriel Conroy’s personal life is essential the same as Joyce’s own in respect of wife and her prior experience of a romantic love-affair in the West of Ireland. Finally, the character Frank in "Eveline" is unnervingly like the young man who ran away with Nora Barnacle.

The landscape in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses is undeniably depressing. For the writer, however, it is intended as an assault on the bastion of Catholic conscience and a protest against the prevalence of a false set of values. It was also the announcement of a “new humanity, humanity, active, unafraid and unashamed” - as he wrote in the draft novel Stephen Hero. In this drama of redemption, he cast himself in the role of saviour - an attitude which obviously could not survive much beyond early manhood - and even soke of himself a little ironcially as a messiah bringing the “word to the masses in travail’, as he once wrote in the very earliest version of A Portrait of the Artist - that is, the “Portrait Essay” of 1904, written on January 7th 1904 and rejected by the literary journal Dana in time for him to commence Stephen Hero on his own twenty-second birthday, being 2nd February 1904.

By August of that year he had published “The Sisters”, the first of his Dubliners stories, in an Irish journal edited for the small farmers as part of the agricultural co-operative movement which reformed the production and sale of goods such as butter, milk and eggs and laid the foundation of self-help and independence which provided one of the main supports of economic separatism. But a farmer is a farmer and Joyce's stories really had no place in their literary diet. In that sense, the story was brilliantly maladjusted to its intended audience - especially since he darkly hints that the real reason for the decay and death of the priest Father Flynn is syphilis - in other words, that Irish priests frequent prostitutes and contract venereal diseases from them. (We are used to clerical scandals in our age; at that time the Church “cleaned up” such problems with comprehensive efficiency of an all-powerful social institution.)

After three such stories, the editor of the journal had enough and discontinued the contract - but by then Joyce had already left Ireland with Nora Barnacle, unmarried and unblessed by family - or, at least, by his father who thought that he had ruined himself, just as he had failed to fulfil the family expectation that he would use his educational qualificatoins to save the others from the poverty which had been bestowed upon them by their errant pater familias. Nor was there a mother alive to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty-stricken home-life and, in the event, Joyce's siblings either migrated or joined religious orders or both as in the case of his sister Margaret (“Poppie”), second to him in order of birth.

There is an undeniable callousness in the self-professedly ‘egoistical’ way in which the young Joyce asserted his individuality at the expense of his family’s best interest. Alternately, it can be said - as he did say in Stephen Hero - that it took an immense amount of personal energy to project himself out of Irish society and beyond what he called “the region of reattraction”. It could be said, in fact, that the decision to abandon a genuinely needy family consisting of five siblings and a hopelessly improvident father necessarily involved a heroic self-image irrespective of the literary utility of such a mask. Whether such a pose would have been possible if his mother had not died in 1903 is a counterfactual question: but the supposition can be made that, like several other writers, Joyce gained in intellectual independence from the early death of his mother in combination with the despicable behaviour of his father. A lesser mind might of have been depressed or even destroyed. For Joyce those were exactly the conditions of intellectual self-fulfilment.

III
In exile in Trieste, a maritime Italian city in the Austrian Empire where Joyce worked sporadically as a language teacher, he polished his self-defence both as a writer and a man. The fruits of his early years of exile are the stories of Dubliners (which he continued to write) and the several texts of A Portait of the Artist. I say ’texts” because his essentially egoistical novel Stephen Hero - which reached 250,000 words before it was abandoned - was ultimately rewritten in the very different manner of A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, begun in 1907 and probably finalised in 1911, though only to appear in 1916.

In Trieste, too, he abandoned the heroic stance of his early writing, seemingly after a miserable spell of employment as a bank-clerk in Rome and a spell in a fever ward in Trieste where, a corridor away, his partner Nora was giving birth to their second child Lucia. (Georgio had been born in Trieste in 1905.) By the time he left the fever ward he had substantially composed a new story for Dubliners - “The Dead” and had already conceived a further story to be called “Ulysses”, based upon a certain kindly person called Mr. Hunter whom Joyce had encountered in Dublin on one of his drinking expeditions. Here, then, was the germ of the great novel of that name - a novel which revolves around the twin poles of Stephen and Leopold Bloom, with Molly Bloom providing a kind of stable centre symbolised as Gea-Tellus, the Greek earth-goddess.

The effect of these events - which might be regarded as the nadir of his career - were to produce a moral shift which made it possible for Joyce to embody his best insights into the nature of common humanity in the character of the “keyless competent citizen” who is Bloom in Ulysses rather than the ‘futile alter ego’ (as one critic has called him) who is Stephen Dedalus in that novel. With this adjustment the author of Ulysses was born. It is strange to think that all the pieces for the mature career of James Joyce - and essentially those elements of vision and of style which we commonly call “Joycean” - came together in such a brief period, entitling us to speak of the summer of 1906 and the winter of 1907 as Joyce's annus mirabilis in terms of his imaginative formation. He was twenty-five years old when the plan for Ulysses the novel was conceived.

Ulysses remains the chief wonder of literary prose modernism - although, in an Irish perspective, it need not be considered a modernist work at all: at least, its inspiration is not Modernism per se so much as a technically exacting response to conditions of life which demanded representation and expression in an “elastic” stylistic form remote from the authorial voice of the conventional English novel. In fact, Joyce said that he had nothing to learn from the English novelists, and Ulysses is the demonstrable proof of his indifference to their example though it cannot be said that he did not owe the very genre in which he was working to the English literary tradition, which developed it before the French.

The question of Joyce’s gleeful animosity to the received methods of English fiction-writing and the rules of decorum associated with them is a  subject unto itself, but the general point cannot be overlooked that he discovered in the conditions of Irish life a necessity to replace the univocal techniques of that tradition - based, however disguisedly or subliminally, upon a consensual attitude towards social and moral truth which stemmed in turn from the English Reformation and from the political “settlement” represented by the English idea of the Constitutional Monarchy (ruling all but subject to Parliament), as well as from the democratic power of the English middle class and the prestige of the British Empire in which they basked for many generations.

It happens that Joyce’s revolution in literary style, consisting essentially in the repositioning of style as the subject of fiction not simply its modality, coincideed with the collapse of English empiricism as the dominant culture form and with the explosion of social and psychological relativities in its place. In scientific terms, the paradigm of the Newtonian world gave way to the model of the Einsteinian universe and, with it, the hierarchies and certainties of the “civilised” world as defined by European - and especially - English bourgeois culture gave way to cultural relativities of an entirely new order. In practice, however, it was American literature that had most to gain by Joyce's challenge to English norms. Hence his pre-eminence in American universities long before he became a major figure on the English university syllabus. And hence, too, the conundrum that that Ulysses, one of the great unread classics of world literature, has been repeatedly voted the greatest modern novel by the readership of the New York Times.

IV
But that is looking forward. In 1906 Joyce did not know that he would write Ulysses - only that he was having trouble finding a publisher for Dubliners. And it was in the manner of the proteagonist of Stephen Hero that he set out his literary stall in a series of carefully-worded  letters to the London publisher Grant Richards which supply the key-terms for any appreciate of his method and intentions in that collection short stories. The quarrel with Richards turned on the fact that Joyce had employed some words considered indecent at the time, as well as make an uncomplimentary allusion to the Prince of Wales (by then the King of England).

In setting out his aims in Dubliners for the publisher Grant Richards, Joyce spoke expressly of his intention of writing a ‘chapter in the moral history of [his] country’ and quite specifically identified ‘spiritual paralysis’ as the dominant symptom of his country’s illness. (Remember that, around this time, he had revised "The Sisters" to include the “strange” words paralysis, gnomon and simony.) Richards had proved unwilling to take the risk of publishing stories which might attract libel actions and, more, generally, offend their readership by the obviously distasteful aspects of some of Joyce’s realistic studies of contemporary Irish life. In the end, one objection served for all the rest when he came up some words considered indecent at the time along with an uncomplimentary allusion to the play-boy Prince of Wales (by then the King of England).

Joyce made it clear that he would not alter or suppress anything that he had ‘seen or heard’ in real life, and took the trouble of writing to the King’s to enquire if the reference in question was considered offensive in that quarter. A blandly evasive answer was came back from his Highness’s secretary which Joyce took to be a rebuttal of the publisher’s complaint. For him, the attempt to censor his realistic stories was a blasphemy against the fundamental principle of his literary art - that is, its grounding in actual experience and actual perception. What is more, he actively believed that Dubliners would have a civilising influence on his compatriots - as he told the publisher in this famous correspondence of 1906 which he conducted with great rigour and preserved with typical meticulousness as part of the history of his writings:

‘It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs [89] my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.’ (Letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906; printed in Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters, 1967, p.90.)

In the liturgical context where he found it, the Epiphany is the annual liturgical feast-day on 6th February commemorating the arrival of the three Magi to worship the infant Jesus, though the same feast-day is variously associated in the Eastern Church with the appearance of Jesus as an infant in the Temple at Jerusalem. There exists, in fact, triptych of the Epiphany in the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Streeet, Dublin, which represents the first event and which Joyce undoubtedly must have seen, perhaps even from the altar in his capacity as an altar-boy studying at the nearby Belvedere College - also a Jesuit establishment.

In Stephen Hero, the first epiphany is localised as a casual event captured in the rather disgruntled gaze of Stephen Dedalus as he passes down Eccles Street one “misty” morning in a “misty” Irish spring. It is crucial to Joyce’s symbolic handling of the passage that the verses on the Introit for the Epiphany similarly advert to the “mist” upon the people which the “light” of the saviour will dispel - that is, the lumen gentium of the Gospel prefigured in the Book of Isiaih from whence the Introit for the Epiphany is taken. However, if “epiphany” had the sense of “theophany” in this connection - being an interchangeable term in the Orthodox tradition - Joyce used the word in a very different, essentially secular, and intensely psychological sense as referring to the moments when the ‘being’ of anything or person - whether through ‘word’ or ‘gesture’ or in a ‘memorable phase of the mind itself’ was revealed to the attentive artist.

The strict validity of this idea, outlined so brilliantly in the philosophical discourse that Joyce’s autobiographical persona Stephen Dedalus lavishes on his friend Lynch in Stephen Hero (with a close equivalent in the corresponding episode involving Cranly in Chapter Five of A Portrait) need not concern us very much at this point especially since Joyce’s coinage, however inexactly, has long since passed into common use in English. (It is a word known to all culturati but also to Homer Simpson, as his conversation with an Intuit shaman in one episode reveals.) As regards the implied description of the way in which we see and recognise objects, persons and events in the world around us, both psychologists and philosophers have question its accuracy if only because Stephen’s theory postulates an ‘act of apprehensiveness’ involving three successive ‘phases’ (or temporal stages) in any moment of perception rather than the instantaneous activity of mind which is postulated by Gestalt psychology. Allowing for this difference, however, Joyce’s theory is peculiarly modern.

Literary historians, too, point out that Stephen has distorted the meaning of the Trinitarian definition of beauty which Joyce borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas as a framework for his theory when he equates integritas, consonantia and claritas with the ‘phases of apprehensiveness itself’. Aquinas had no interest in the analysis of perception and concentrated instead on fixed inherences of the beautiful object which he chose to identify, in fact, by means of a Trinitarian formula inasmuch as the“qualities he describes belong in the highest instance to God and are therefore fittingly triune. More tellingly, perhaps, Joyce implicitly equates the ideas of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ when he argues that an adequate perception of the ‘whatness’ of any thing is all that is required for that thing to be recognised as beautiful thus suggesting that the most beautiful work of art is also the most realistic inasmuch as it represents (or reproduces) the image of some entity in such a way that it is revealed to artist or to audience as ‘the thing that it is’.

In this revision of Aquinas it is easy to discern some slight of hand but the overall impact is quintessentially modern: Joyce tells us that any thing, whether conventionally beautiful or ugly is beautiful insofar as it answers to the three phases of perception and thereby announces ‘achieves its epiphany’. In this view of the matter, it would be truer to say that Joyce has exploited the terminology of Aquinian aesthetics - strictly speaking an anachronism because that term was not coined before Baumgarten’s eponymous study of 1768 - in order to speak of a very different matter: literary epistemology - and that, in practice, he has no aesthetic interest as such, only an interest in the philosophical veracity of the artistic process and its products.

The groundwork for Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, each of which I have quoted here, although the versions are subtly different (chiefly in the omission of the word ‘epiphany’ from the later), was laid by Joyce in the notebooks that he kept while reading Aristotle’s De Anima [Psychology] in Paris in 1902-03. The nature of his investment of time and labour in revisiting and, in some respects, revising Aristotle - he offers a redefinition of tragedy and comedy, for instance, resulting in a re-rating of the latter as the superior form of drama - is worth looking at with some attention.

Here we witness the distinctive engagement of a wilfully independent young Catholic thinker who is intensely aware of his remoteness from the modern tradition of thought represented by Anglo-American empiricism and of the supposedly obsolete character of the scholastic tradition in which he has been educated - hence ‘a shy guest at the feast of the world’s learning’ - as Joyce describes himself in A Portrait of the Artist. Some of this is a form religious recusancy and some of it a kind of intellectual fetishism but the driving force is the idea that a truly modern aesthetic which squares with the phenomenological and dialectic outlook of Hegel and his followers might be constructed in such terms while avoiding obiescence to the Protestant tradition in European thought.

VII
Patently the attempt to found a new theory of realism on a body of ancient Greek and medieval Christian sentences set Joyce enormously at odds with the conventional spirit of contemporary English fiction-writing. Indeed, in writing to his brother on one occasion he baldly declared that he had nothing to learn from the English novelists at all. On the other side, however, knew he had everything to learn from modern French fiction-writers such as - chiefly - Gustave Flaubert, whose stories in Trois Contes he actually knew by heart (a distinction that they share with W. B. Yeats’s mystical story “The Tables of the Law”).

The key to Flaubert’s method is that he used what is called le style moyen indirect [medium-indirect style] - a method of composition that actually excerpts its narrative language from the hearts and minds of it scharacters and presents them on the page without the usual mediation of a genteel narrator which is the usual method of English novelists, tradition of fiction-writing. (The destruction of that complacent moral centre of social understanding which was the English narratorial method is one of the chief revolutionary fact of twentieth literature.)

Joyce had another great model in Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist who first put put on the European stage the themes of matrimonial unhappiness, women’s rights and especially the right to happiness and divorce in pursuit of it. For Joyce Ibsen was the writer who, in the words of one of his own characters, ‘Let in light’, and Joyce said in Stephen Hero that when he first encountered his works he felt their minds meeting in a moment of ‘radiant simultaneity’. Thus was born the greatest modern Irish realist, the precursor of all the others and - incidentally - the first Irish Catholic prose-writer to attain the status of world-fame and a place in the very first rank of literary revolution.

The relationship between James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, the founder of the Irish Literary Revival, is a complex and intriguing one best summarised, perhaps, in the somewhat apocryphal story that the twenty year-old Joyce accosted the older writer, asked him his age, and then professed: ‘It is as I expected. You are too old for me to help you.’ Turning from the legendary Irish materials of which Yeats was the foremost exponent, he set out consciously to established a new direction for Irish writing consisting in a form of realism about the social and psychological facts of life that turned out to be very much in tune with the intellectual temper of the age. One thinks here of Sigmund Freud’s role in raising sexual experience to the place of highest interest in attempts to explain the contents and behaviour of the human mind.

But Joyce’s revolution did not consist solely in a new attention to the ‘unconscious’, about which he remained quite sceptical, remarking for instance: ‘Why do they always talk about the unconscious mind? What do they know about the conscious mind, that is what I ask’. It also involved a complete rethinking of the way in which prose fiction represents the world as we experience it - in other words, a revolution at the level of literary form. There is an early glimpse of this in the essay - also called “A Portrait of the Artist” - which he submitted to a Dublin magazine called Dana edited by young intellectuals like himself whose editor John Eglinton nevertheless refused to print it on the grounds that he ‘would not publish’ what he ‘could not understand’. (In retrospect this is hardly any wonder and - in view of the subsequent course of Joyce's autobiographical project - hardly to be regretted.

In it Joyce complains about the continual adherence of English novelists to a manner of describing characters which invokes an ‘iron memorial aspect’ of height and beard - a method based on the idea that a given personality has a more-or-less fixed mature form, endowed with specific temperamental and moral traits (or ‘faculties’) whose effects are simply enacted - or perhaps veiled and then revealed - in the course of the novel. Most of traditional fiction is like that; and the evolutionary version of character-portrayal that Joyce was implicitly advocating is a distinctly modern and modernistic innovation.

Yet though Joyce thought that there was a better way, he was unsure at this stage precisely what it was. The language of his essay is correspondingly tentative. The fact is that it would take him fully ten years between the composition of this sketch in 1904 and the publication of A Portrait of the Artist in 1914 to evolve a satisfactory method. Yet the objection to conventional methods of character-description and the intuition that a better method must be founded on the fact that human personality is formed and operates in time according to an ‘individuating rhythm’ (or a pattern of growth of development) is firmly in place from the outset:

The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannnot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those members who seek through some art, by some process of mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.’ (“1904 Portrait”, quoted in Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, p. 205-12; see also Richard Ellmann, et al., eds., The Shorter Critical Writings, OUP 1991, p.211-18.)

What we witness here is a striving to express the idea that it might be possible to shape prose so that it actually reflects the pattern of growth in a human mind from childhood to maturity and, perhaps also, the different world-views of different characters according as their minds differ from each other. No longer would autobiographical narrative (or, more strictly speaking, auto-diegetic narrative - meaning narrative about the author even if related in the third person) serve as an ‘identificative paper’ - that is, a sort of passport photo. Instead, it would be subtilised so that it traced the woof and warp of changing of selfhood, a developmental graph or simply, as he puts it, ‘the curve of an emotion’.

VIII
The history of Joyce’s technical development between the composition of this essay and the accomplishment of the revolutionary idea contained in it is not a straightforward one. In an extended effort to compass an autobiographical celebration of his own ‘soul’ (to which, incidentally, he dedicated his first juvenile play), Joyce wrote a draft novel of perhaps 200,000 words in which no glimmer of a transformative version of fictional technique appears from end to finish - so far as can be judged by the surviving segment published in 1944 as Stephen Hero.

Regrettably this proved to be the most acutely self-regarding, static and opinionated piece of writing from any modern hand otherwise regarded as a writer of genius, and almost unimaginable as the work of James Joyce, author of Ulysses. If we read it - and it is not necessary for any student on this module to do so - we do so to get some sense of the outlook of the young author rather than for any anticipations of his mature craft. To grasp something of that it is to the Dubliners stories that we must turn, with their brilliant art of ‘double writing’ that makes it possible and necessary to read every sentence as a tacit revelation of some state of mind not the authors.

Hence it is that the language of the Dubliners stories is often faulty from the lexical and grammatical standpoints, or else characterised by gaps sometimes even rendered as ellipses - i.e., ... - standing for what the characters know but will not say in a complex network of complicity and silence. In other places it is the inner voice of the characters, no matter how insignificant, that shapes the sentences, as in the opening phrases of “The Dead” which informs us that ‘Lily the caretaker’s daughter was literally run off her feet’ [italics mine]. It is worth paying a little attention to this small example, which was first brought into critical focus by Hugh Kenner in his profoundly stimulating little book Joyce’s Voices (1978).

What does the phrase mean? If literally run off her feet, Lily would be on the flat of her back, supposing that a figure of speech of this description - if it is anything more than a mindless idiom - imports a process of haste with resultant prostration. In reality, however, the sentence is shaped and formed by Lily’s voice as she expressed to herself or to a willing ear that she is overworked at her present task. (Notice that no paraphrase I could give can get the proper accent of her self-awareness in this moment.) It is the measure of Joyce’s innovative method of writing that henceforth all his sentences would reflect the way that a given character thinks or feels about the world around him or her.

From that first sign of a revolution in method of composition a clear line of development through A Portrait leads to the astonishing innovations of Ulysses in which the ‘stream of consciousness’ of Leopold and Molly Bloom, as well as the mentality of less admirable characters are all precisely tabulated in moments of stylistic exactitudes on the printed page. Ultimately Joyce would attempt to gather up this world of phenomenal diversity - an almost anarchic domain of interpersonal difference - in the epic characters of Here Comes Everybody (HCE) and Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), the leading figures in his great experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1939) which - at one point in the text - he aptly describes as ‘the last word in stolentelling’.

That is perhaps the key to the Joycean method of narration: each phrase belongs to someone in a way that prose does not pertain to character in conventional fiction, except of course for dialogue, which is is generally marked by inverted commas- distinguishing it from the narrative supplied by the narrator himself, that all-important personage in conventional fiction. Joyce disparaged those quotations marks, calling them ‘perverted commas’, as if to point out the illusory nature of the authorial perspective from which the world is divided into things observed and things said.

To enter the Joycean world is to enter a domain in which language and reality are co-extensive: there is no difference between ways of saying and ways of seeing; or, in other words, the world is the totality of our perspectives on it.