time in joyce portrait of the artist

7/29/2019 Time in Joyce Portrait of the Artist

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2) so capricious are we, that we cannot 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

(James Joyce). Discuss the uses of history AND/OR the relationship between past

and present in works by Joyce.

Frank Macpherson

27th January 2013

W1/HT

Abstract:

InDubliners andA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (henceforth Portrait) the

narrative structure and technique interact with the influence of time on the

representation of the literary self, from an internal and external perspective. This

varied between the personal past and historical past, as well as their influence on the

present, and connects with the Modernists re-shaping contemporary notions of time.

Joyce explores the interplay between different kinds of time, and what they might

mean for the present or the future.


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In the 1880s William Wundt performed a series of experiments in order to

determine the duration of the present1. Joyce was born at the beginning of this decade,

and his experiments to re-shape way in which we perceived our personal past as well

as our histories and their influence upon us show a similar focus on re-establishing a

new relationship between people and their pasts.In order to do this he rejected the

Victorian historicism that had left the present seeming pre-determined and smothered

by the past2 in favour of a fundamental convulsion of the creative human spirit that

seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions

and stimulate frenzied rebuilding3. Whilst the boundaries between the past and the

present are not always clear inDubliners orA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

(henceforth Portrait) the difference between the past and history can be brought into

focus comparatively: the past specifically referring to the personal past, whilst

History as an area of study for Joyces contemporaries was still the study of great

men. Furthermore, history entailed entertained the desire for objectivity- whilst the

personal past was distinctly subjective by its very nature. Simultaneously present in

Joyces statement is the causal relationship between our capricious(ness) and the

iron memorial aspect of memory: memory seems to be so stationary because our

characters are so changing and we require memory to be as strong and unchanging as

this to give a sense of solidity to the presence. In this way the full impact of the re-

imagining of the past by Joyce can be realised. As the Moderns became more

conscious of their independence4

they began to be drawn to the examination of the

personal past, as opposed to the historical past, crucially because it was something

1Kerr p82

2Kern p61

3 Bradbury and McFarlane p194

Bradbury and McFarlane p98


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over which they might gain some control5. This desire for control is directly

manifested in Portraitas Joyce returns to the point someones life when they arguably

have least control: infancy. Simultaneously when reading this opening the

consciousness of Stephen that a reader adopts when reading the novel is overlaid the

background of our own memories6

and recalls both for Stephen and for the reader

what it was like to be a child. Once upon a time7 is such a universal opening line

for a story that it is probably recognised in the readers own mind. The boundary

between past and present is an easy one to distinguish consciously, externally to the

text, but unconsciously and intellectually Iser suggests that we are drawing on our

own memories and personal past. Yet with Stephen a reader sees them being acted

out, and dont know exactly how they affect him in the future. In PortraitJoyce

clearly attempts to refute the iron memorial aspect of the past and instead display

the fluid succession of presents. Whilst it is impossible to effectively externalise and

convey a persons complexities to an outsider Portraitattempts to bestow a sense of

the unified single entity8 that is Stephen, and our external perspective allows us to

effectively perceive the unity of his previous presents as a synthesised entity.

Equally a reader is conscious that all of these memories somehow form a background

of memory for Stephen, against which new experiences will be played out, and these

will interact in new ways9. Their placement in a text allows us, having read them, to

view them almost simultaneously. This entity seen on completing the work could

then perhaps be described as Joyces Modernist soul. The language ofPortraitis

initially sparse and develops as the artist does. At the first paragraph the narrative

5Kern p63

6Iser

7Portraitp5

8 Title Quotation9

Iser p192


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voice cannot even initially be distinguished as that of Stephen or as that of his father.

Whilst the opening appears to be from the point of view of Stephen himself, the use of

the masculine second person pronoun creates a distinct space between the reader and

the character. This prevents us from becoming Stephen completely, and yet allows

Joyce to develop a sense of supposedly unbeknownst intimacy with Stephen. In being

contemporaneous with the development of Freuds notion of the subconscious, the

text might also be seen as almost eerie or unhiemlich as we are made privy to the

private formative experiences of an individual through his own mind that echo the

formative experiences of our own. However this application ofunhiemlich may be an

overextension depending on how far a reader identifies with Stephen throughout the

novel. Yet the Iserian notion of background and foreground memory is in fact echoed

by Joyce, albeit to a different end, in his Paris Notebook on Aesthetics: the act of

apprehension involves at least two activities, the activity of cognition and the

activity of recognition10. This seems to establish firmly Joyces interest in the

internal intellectual development of the reader and the role that memory, the

subconscious, or in his words a fluid succession of presents plays.

Kerns assessment of the thrust of the age establishes this facet ofPortraitas

a crucial one; part of the contemporary attempt to affirm the reality of private time

against that of a single public time and to define its nature as heterogeneous, fluid,

and reversible11

. Therefore the narrative progression ofPortraitis about establishing

the bearing of the interior according the exterior. As a whole the work jumps between

time frames with no reference or warning, and an events importance within the

narrative has little attachment to how long the incident lasted for. An example of this

10 Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writings (ed. Barry, OWC 2008) p10511

Kern p34


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is Father Arnells invocation of hell12

and Stephens internal musings on them, where

for over 10 pages the reader is embroiled in Stephens inner turmoil with no anchor to

his physical movement or the passage of time apart from the knowledge that he is on

the walk home. The thick fog (that) seemed to compass his mind becomes a fog of

words for the reader. Public time has no importance when the private is faced with

such serious questions.

Later Stephens Mother has to work out the time for Stephen by straightening

the battered clock that was lying on its side in the middle of the kitchen mantelpiece

until its dial showed a quarter to twelve and the laid it once more on its side13. Henri

Bergsons exposure of fallacies in thinking of timespatially14, such as on the face of

a clock is referenced here, as in turn time suggests little order for Stephen who is then

late to his lectures. Bergson also developed a theory of relative and absolute time in

hisAn Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). The manipulation of the clock in Portrait

is an example of relative time, as it is impoverishedachieved by coming to know it

(the object) through symbols or words that fail to render its true nature15

. This might

equally be applied to JoycesDublinersthat is only coming to know whatever it

aims to show by moving around the object16

. Equally whilst initiallyDubliners less

experimental narrative might imply that it is an example of the past in its iron

memorial aspect. However its snapshot stories also might be described as a fluid

succession of presents in that they entice us to develop a unity between them, despite

their different characters. When a memory is recalled, the mind visualises it in a way

that attempts to replay or relive it and equally the conscious mind seemingly has no

12Joyce p91

13Joyce p146

14Bergson,An Introduction to Metaphysics,

15 Kern p2516

Ibid p25


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control over the memories that are recalled- just asDubliners refuses to allow

satisfyingly cohesive links between the individual stories to develop, and yet presents

them as a single entity in volume form. This rapid cutting and freedom of movement

might recall cinema. In the early stages of movies being shown to a consumer

audience, no conventional story was deemed necessary as the way in which images

were sped up, slowed down and cut together was enough to attract audiences. This

persisted until the late 1920s, as VertovsMan With A Movie Cameras fragmented

narrative shows. Joyce also managed the first cinema in Dublin, so clearly showed at

least an interest in film although it is difficult to know how far this can be allowed to

feature in an analysis of his work.

At the end ofPortraitthe novel takes diary form. 6th

April: Certainly

she remembers the past. Lynch says all women do. Then she remembers the time of

her childhood- and mine if I was ever a child. Statues of women, if Lynch be right,

should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling regretfully her nether

parts17

. In taking the diary format, this pretends to be an account of the past written

in the present. The implication is that these thoughts come directly from the character

as he writes. At this point, it is almost as Stephen has become a character in his own

right and is slowly escaping the world of text, as this form suddenly makes the

distinction between reader and narrative voice much sharper but carries with it the

readers background knowledge of Stephen as Baby Tuckoo. The diary form might

be seen to be consuming the present of the narrator and representing it as past text- in

which sense it is as close to the fluid succession of presents as it is perhaps possible

to be. It is unclear whether his questioning of whether she remembers the time of her

childhood- and mine if I was ever a child is intended to be a joke based on how

17Joyce p211


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altered he is from childish innocence, or whether it carries in it a grain of truth that he

cannot remember his early childhood- and yet the reader can hold these successive

presents in unity even as the narrator can not. In framing the phrase within the diary

format he acknlowedges the constant absorbtion of the present into memory as well as

effectively transposing the idea of successive presents into literary form as each

entry is clearly labelled with its date. Juxtaposed with Lynchs comments about

statues of women, the reader is equally reminded of how quickly this abstract

questioning of the nature of time and memory is itself forgotten by more immediate

concerns.

Therefore Joyce's work is drawn together by his desire to escape and even

redefine the conventional notions of time. In this he was representative of the

Modernists in general, but also to re-shape the readers expectation of how they

viewed and interacted with the personal past, and by implication the historical past.A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manmight be read as a slow layering of successive

presents until upon its ending the reader can view a completed entity. It almost

seems to push at its confinement to text, as the reader partially absorbs the completed

entity and its successive presents alongside its own, and they have the potential to

become jumbled.

time in joyce portrait of the artist

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