Summary of the Work

Stephen Dedalus attends elementary school in a boarding parochial school, where he is unfairly punished by his teacher. After class, he musters the courage to complain to the principal and is embraced by his classmates. Later Stephen's family moves to Dublin, where he is beaten by classmates for his praise of Byron. He also has a crush on a girl, and in a fit of adolescent sexual restlessness, he has an affair with a ***. During the school retreat festival, Stephen is y shaken by the priests' vivid depictions of the depravity of man and the punishments of hell, and his mood is not calmed until he goes to church in town for confession. Stephen's strict discipline of himself to atone for his sins leads the school to consider making him a priest, but the figure of a young girl on the beach makes him realize his determination to pursue a career in creative writing. At the university, Stephen establishes his own aesthetic ideas and recognizes his alienation from the world around him. Finally, he resolves to leave Dublin and forge in his mind the conscience of the Irish nation.

Selected Works

- Stephanos Didaros! Booth Stephanoumanos! Booth Stephanus Roumanos!

It was not the first time he had encountered this kind of flirtation on their part, but now it threw itself squarely into the path of the light-hearted superiority of the man he had thought to be the man of the hour. As before, now his quaint name seemed to him a prophecy. The dark, balmy air before him seemed so time-boundless, his own emotions so uncertain and impersonal, that he felt himself blended with all time. A moment before, the ghostly spirit of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had shown its head before his eyes through the smoke-shrouded city. Now the name of the mythical inventor was mentioned, and he seemed to hear the distant sound of the waves, and to see an object of some kind being held slowly overhead on the waves with open wings. What in the world did all this mean? Was it some strange invention that had turned the page of some medieval book full of fables and symbols, and had thus shown him an eagle-like figure flying over the sea toward the sun, as a prophecy to him of what he had been born for, and of the ultimate goal which he had been striving for since his vague childhood and boyhood, and as a symbol of what that artist was creating in his own studio out of this earthly lifelessness? Is it an image of a new, upward-flying, elusive, everlasting life that the artist is creating in his own studio out of the lifelessness of this earth?

His heart began to tremble; his breath grew quicker and quicker, and it seemed to him as if his limbs were possessed by a wild spirit, as if he himself were flying towards the sun. His mind trembled from the ecstasy of fear, and his soul had gone out of his body. His soul had transcended this world in soaring toward the sky, while his physical body, which he knew had been quickly cleansed, could not shake off its fluttering state and mingled with the cosmic spirit, letting loose its light. The joy of soaring caused his eyes to shine, his breath to breathe wildly, and made his wind-swept limbs warlike, wild, and radiant now.

-- One! Two! ...... Quick attention!

--Ah, heck, I'm drowning!

--One! Two! Three, run!

-Next! Next!

--One! ...... Ah!

--Stephene Frost!

His throat ached with the suppression of his desire to cry out, to howl like an eagle on the wing, to shake the heavens with the joy with which he had flown with the wind, the howl of life to his soul, not the barbarous and tiresome shouts of a world full of all kinds of duty and despair, or the inhuman voices that had summoned him to the altar to carry on the tedious activities of his days. A short wild soaring had brought him to complete emancipation, and the shouts of triumph which his lips endeavored to seal almost crumbled his brain.

- Stephanie Frost!

The horror that followed him by night and by day, the inscrutable circumstances that never left him, the humiliation that he found intolerable from the inside to the outside-all these could now be called anything else but corpse-clothes, the attire that the dead wear in their graves?

His soul had risen again from the grave of his boyhood, and thrown off the corpse-clothes which she wore. Yes! Yes! It is! He would, like the great inventor who shared his name, proudly create a new, upwardly mobile, beautiful, elusive, ever-present life with the freedom and power of his soul.

He climbed nervously upward from that rock, for he could no longer extinguish the fire that burned in the stream of his blood. He felt his cheeks burning as the song filled his throat. He felt a frenzied desire to travel around on his feet, compelling him like a burning flame to the ends of the earth. Forward! Forward! his heart seemed to cry out. The dusk on the sea would soon thicken, the plains would be shrouded in night-mist, and a new dawn would appear before him, the cloud-wanderer, and show him many outlandish fields and hills and human faces. But where?

He faced north, and looked out toward Howth. On the shallower side of the barrage the sea had ebbed, exposing the wreckage of the shipwrecked vessels, and the waves were rapidly receding from the foreshore. In the middle of a small patch of water, an oval beach had warmed up. Here and there in the waves on the shallow sandy beach were sand islands glittering brightly, and on all sides of those islands and alongside the embankment, in the shallow currents along the beach, were half-naked people, sometimes wading and sometimes diving.

After a while he, too, took off his shoes, folded up his socks and put them into his pockets, and his sail shoes, tied together with laces, were slung over his shoulders, and from some ragged thing that had drifted in the waves and rested in the rocks he picked up a salt-water-soaked stick with a pointed end, and then made his way down the slope of the barrage.

There was a long little river on the beach, and as he walked slowly through it he was quite surprised by the seaweed floating in the water. The blue, black, brown and olive-colored seaweeds kept swinging with the water and kept pulling in circles. The water in that creek appeared dark due to the refraction of the color of the seaweed, and took the clouds flowing in the sky clearly on its surface as well. The clouds drifted silently over his head, and the black horned algae brushed silently past his feet, and the gray, warm air was so still that a new wild life began to chant in his veins.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had fled from its destiny now? Had he gone alone to bear the shame of his wounds upon her, or to reign alone in his own rude little world of isolation, in her faded garments, wearing garlands of flowers that wither at the touch of the hand? Or where has he himself gone?

He was alone. There is no one who pays attention to him, full of joy and closer to the core of a life full of wild flavors. He was alone, young, capricious and wild, alone in a barren field of wild air and black pools of water, alone among countless shells and seaweeds, surrounded by the thin gray sunlight, by a number of half-naked men and girls dressed in gray, and the air was echoed by the sound of the voices of boys and girls.

A little girl stood in the river in front of him, alone and quiet, watching the ocean in the distance. She seemed to be driven by magic; the image was like that of a strange and beautiful sea bird. Her *** long legs were as slender and clean as those of a white crane, and there was no other spot to be seen except a strand of seaweed that pretended to be a dark blue pattern in the crook of her leg. Her rounded, ivory-colored thighs were bare almost to the side of her hips, where a circle of exposed ***'s underparts resembled exactly the feathers of a whooping crane made of fine, soft down. Her pale blue skirt was boldly lifted up and wrapped around her waist and held from behind. Her breast was also as gentle and slender as a sea-bird's, slender and gentle as the breast of a dove with a dark plumage. But her long, yellowish hair exuded womanhood: her face had the divinity of a little girl's, but there was a surprising earthly beauty about it.

She was alone and quiet as she gazed out over the distant sea; and when she noticed him, and found his eyes infinitely adoring her, she turned her face to him, and confronted his gaze with a very skilful demeanor, neither shy nor lascivious. She allowed him to gaze for a long time, and then quietly turned her head back to the river before her, ambling her head to look at the river before her, and stirring her feet gently in the water, one from the east and the other from the west. The stirred water made a very small ringing sound, which broke the silence of the place, a low, whispering sound, faint as if it had been a silver *** heard in a dream; a little to the east, a little to the west, a little to the east, a little to the west; and at the same time a light passionate ignited giddy blush swept over her face.

- O gracious Lord! Stephen's soul cried out uncontrollably under a thrill of uncontrollable human joy.

He turned suddenly behind her back, and started toward the beach. His face was on fire, he felt his whole body burning; his limbs could not help trembling. Forward, forward, forward, forward, he took great strides forward, footsteps on the beach into the distance, singing wildly to the sea, giving a passionate cheer for the coming of the life that had been calling him.

Her image had been eternally set into his soul, and no words broke the serenity of his divine ecstasy. Her eyes had called to him, and his soul could not cease to rejoice at the sound of that call. To live on, to err, to fall, to rejoice in victory, to create life within life! Before his eyes appeared a wild angel, the messenger of earthly youth and beauty, a messenger from the court of just life, who was to open for him in a burst of ecstasy all the paths of error and light in the world of men. Onward, onward, onward, onward!

Suddenly he stopped and gazed intently at the voice of the heart from within. How far had he traveled? What time is it now?

There was no one around him, and no sound came from the distant air. But the tide was going out, and that day was drawing to a close. Turning his back towards the sea, he turned and ran towards the sandy side of the beach, regardless of the hard stones under his feet, until he reached the sloping sand, where he saw a calm nook in a small circle of grass-stemmed sand, and there he lay down, letting the stillness of the dusk slowly freeze his boiling blood.

Above him he could feel the vast cold heavens and the uncountable celestial bodies in their silent orbits; and he felt the earth beneath his body, the very earth that had given him life and held him in its arms.

He slowly closed his eyes and slowly fell asleep. It was as if his eyelids quivered with the sensation of the earth and the vast circular motion of her beholders, as if they quivered with the outlandish splendor of a new world. His soul entered in a vertigo into another world, new, bizarre, obscure, and as difficult to guess as the sea below, where some shadowy images and beings were passing to and fro. Was this a world, a flash, or a flower? It flashed and trembled, trembled and unfolded slowly, like a light that had just torn through the darkness, like a flower that was opening, and it never ceased to stretch itself over and over again, leaf after leaf, flash after flash, and at last it took on a reddish color, and then continued to stretch, and withered slowly, and turned to a light rosy color, and covered the whole of space with its soft reddish halos, each of which was more red than the next, and each of which was more red than the next. Each halo red was more brilliant in color than the previous one.

It was dusk when he awoke. The fine sand and hay that served as a bedsheet no longer glowed. He rose slowly from the sand, recalling the ecstasy he had just experienced in his dream world, and could not help sighing joyfully.

He mounted to the top of a mound of sand and looked around. A deep twilight had swallowed the earth. The dark, desolate space was broken by a crescent moon, which was like a silver ring embedded in the gray sand; and the tide murmured and whispered as it pushed rapidly up the beach, so that the dunes along the shallow water in the distance formed small islands one after the other.

(Translated by Anchi)

Note:

This refers to Didalus, father of Icarus. According to Greek mythology, the father and son made their own wax wings and flew up into the sky, before they were melted by the sun and fell into the sea.

Appreciation

The Portrait of a Young Artist is a fine example of James Joyce's fiction. It is widely regarded as a portrait of Joyce's own upbringing and is highly autobiographical. In this work, Joyce began to adopt the stream-of-consciousness technique, choosing the perspective of the main character, Stephen Dedalus, for internal focus, taking his inner feelings and psychological activities as clues, and sketching Stephen's growing up experience from his birth to his departure from Dublin after his graduation from the university, with the narration of free indirect quotations and the structural method of free association. And like Joyce himself, there are no legendary events in Stephen's upbringing; the book is mostly a collection of trivial slices of life, with the guilt caused by visiting prostitutes alone being enough to take up nearly a chapter of the book. However, as in all of Joyce's works, there are in fact conflicts, *** and twists in Stephen's development, except that these dramatic phases of life are not presented as external events, but take place within the character. Joyce himself refers to this view of conflict as an epiphany, a spiritual awakening triggered by a vulgar word or action, or by a noteworthy fragment of the mind. Thus, in keeping with the book's stream-of-consciousness approach, some of the book's seemingly mundane events are in fact crucial to Stephen's spiritual maturation.

The moment of seeing the girl on the beach is an epiphany. Prior to this, the confessional priest at the high school Stephen attends asks him to consider becoming a priest, and paints him with a picture of the highest earthly honors and powers that a priest possesses. And indeed, by this time, Stephen's family had fallen on hard times, and becoming a priest would therefore mean that he could live a relatively comfortable life. Until then, Stephen, although he loved and excelled at writing, had no clear goals in life, and like most of his classmates, followed the path set for them by their families and society. The sequence with the beach maiden marks Stephen's spiritual awakening, one of the most important turns in his life. What he rejects as a result of this epiphany is not only the identity of a priest, but also all of society's constraints and oppressions on the human spirit, which come from the family, the school, the classmates, and the community, which is where Stephen has spent most of his previous life. It is they that regulate Stephen to do and live by their principles. The pure earthly beauty represented by the seaside maiden makes Stephen turn from the purely spiritual pursuit of the past to the concern for life itself; and the image of the flying bird of the seaside maiden, as well as the image of the Greek artisan from whom his own family name comes, the artist who builds the wings to fly out of the labyrinth and into the sky, all make him finally realize the social constraints, and also realize that his whole life should be a quest for spiritual freedom. Thus this very ordinary moment signifies Stephen's self-awakening and maturity of thought.

In this process, all the changes take place within Stephen's heart, and it can be said that nothing happens in the external world, and it is difficult to understand the significance of the events without carefully analyzing the subtle psychological changes of the characters. This is the main mode of narration in Portrait of a Young Artist, and because Joyce follows the objective and neutral principle of narration at this point in time that the artist "always stays within, after, beyond, or above his work, invisible to others, transcendent of existence, indifferent, and trimming his nails," avoiding as much as possible any interpretation of the narrated work, this book is a good example of how the artist's work can be interpreted, and how the artist's work is interpreted. The book puts high demands on the reader's ability to read carefully, and the reader must be able to grasp the insignificant details to accurately grasp the changes in the characters' moods and thoughts. This makes reading Portrait of a Young Artist very different from reading a traditional novel with a strong plot.

This difference comes both from the book's modern narrative approach and from Joyce's different view of art. Joyce made it clear that "idea and plot are not so important as some people say. The object of all works of art is to convey emotion; and genius is in the ability to convey that emotion." As an autobiographical novel, Portrait of a Young Artist is not so much a record of Stephen's upbringing as a depiction of his feelings and emotions. The book*** is divided into five chapters, the first of which begins with an impressionistic portrayal of a baby's first sensory feelings about his mother's smells, the sounds around him, and a wet mattress. The school experience that follows is equally filled with the smells in the auditorium, the wet air in the corridors, but more importantly, the feelings toward classmates felt in contact with them, not the least of which is wariness and disgust. At this point, Stephen is a child who has just entered the great forest that is the world, confused and overwhelmed. And in the end, it is the confidence to walk in this forest that he ultimately gains by appealing to the principal and overcoming the unjust teacher. All these trivial details can only be understood from the perspective of the maturity of inner feelings in order to find out the correlation, and if this vein of emotional change is taken out of the picture, the complaint to the principal becomes an isolated episode. From Joyce's high regard for emotions, it can be seen that, in Joyce's view, what really constitutes life is what Virginia Woolf called the "moments of being" (moments of being). This should perhaps be regarded as a deeper understanding of human beings. In the lives of ordinary people, dramatic events are minimal, but everyone is experiencing trials and changes that are no less than those of the traditional heroes, except that these changes occur at the emotional and spiritual level.

The sequence of the seaside maiden, too, has always been recognized as representing Joyce's exquisite artistic talent in terms of writing technique. By lifting up the skirt wrapped around her waist, revealing the *** hairy edges of the fluffy white cranes underneath the skirt, and gazing back at the girl in a serene manner, as well as turning back and lowering her head to tread water, the girl's pure, natural and innocent beauty is clearly conveyed with just a few brushstrokes. The details chosen are accurate and appropriate, showing Joyce's excellent observation and descriptive talent. Stephen's yearning for a new world in his half-awake sleep is also different from the traditional depiction techniques, but directly by means of the rhyme and rhythm of words, through the endings of the word "-ing", by means of topicality, rhyme, repetition, and prose, in order to obtain a sense of flow and magic in the dream world as well as in the new world. The other fragments of Portrait of a Young Artist may not all be as beautiful as the excerpt, but they are all equally subtle and introspective, imaginative and meaningful, and beautifully worded.

Researchers have often divided Joyce into two phases: the early Joyce at the time of Portrait of a Young Artist, and the later Joyce at the time of Ulysses. One of the major artistic differences between the early Joyce and the later Joyce is that he paid more attention to classical unity, compactness, and harmony in the early period, which makes Portrait of a Young Artist ring close to Stephen's psychological growth, compared with Ulysses, which is too delicate and lacks the latter's grandiose social vision and richness. However, as far as its theme is concerned, Portrait of a Young Artist grasps the psychological changes in the character's self-growth process in a very profound and delicate way.

(Dai Congrong)