Essay on Stephen’s Heroic Quest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ma

Stephens Heroic Quest in Portrait of the Artist as a upstart Man ...His mother said -O, Stephen will apologise. Dante said -O, if not, the eagles will come and pull give away his eyes. This utterance, which comes at the climax of the short first passage that Joyce presents to us, defines the daring quest that Stephen (and/or his latent identity as mythic Daedalus) must undertake. He is, in this instance, bound by a strict commandment from supra (from the towering grown-ups above him, from the air-borne, attacking eagles), from the poets of the past , and - most superficially from his elders, to perform an act of apology. Stephen seals this cosmic agreement with his little song Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. Stephen internalizes his predicament or legacy - by chanting the words that descend to him from layers of higher authority. He shapes the received words with his own voice (whethe r it be out loud or only inside his head), compresses /extractions phrases from the longer syntax, and utilizes rhyme in a copy repetition. (In short, he has applied a craft.) If his mother, a temporal and merely parental figure, initiates young Stephens artistic covenant in a mundane way, Dante (whose real number identity in Stephens world is sparsely revealed in this passage) is the accidental and incidental avatar of an old poet, or the poetic tradition, or the artist-creator that Stephen (or Joyce, if we treat this thrash as autobiographical) must become. The implied historic Dante serves as a representative, for Stephen and Joyce, of the poetic c... ...e University of Windsor Review. vol.1, no. 1. Spring, 1965. 1-15. Rpt. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. ed. Dennis Poupard. Detroit Gale Research Company, 1985. 16229-234. Litz, A. Walton. James Joyce. wise York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1966. Peake, C.H. James Joyce The Citizen and The Artist. Stanford Stanford University Press, 1977. 56-109. Pope, Deborah. The Misprision of Vision A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce. vol.1. ed. Harold Bloom. parvenue York Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 113-19. The World Book Encyclopedia. New York World Book Inc., 1987. 3. Wells, H.G. James Joyce. The New Republic. March 10, 1917. 34-46. Rpt. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. ed. Sharon K. Hall. Detroit Gale Research Company, 1980. 3252.