Question- Comment on the artistic alienation in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.

Answer -

James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man' as the name suggests is an account of the artistic growth of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus. In the gradual unfurling of the pages, it is not just the actistic growth that catches fancy of the readers, the growing alienation of Stephen from his family, nation and religion also goes hand in hand with the former. There is no doubt that Stephen is gifted with extraordinary artistic sensibility right from his childhood as evident in his love for shymes the way he turns Dante's 'threat into a rhyme. But, it is from childhood itself that Stephen feels himself dissociated from his immediate community ie his fellow students in Clongowes Wood College.

All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.

Stephen's alienation in Clongowes, nevertheless is not without reason, since everyone feels isolated in new surroundings, and in Stephen's case a couple of mishaps further aggravate his misery. First of all he is s houldered into a ditch by Wells because he would not swap his little snuffbox for Well's seasoned hacking chestnut, the cold slime of the ditch causes fever and he has to go to the school infirmary for his treatment. Secondly, he is 'Pandied' by Father Dolan in front of the whole class without any fault of his own.

Stephen feels more and more distanced from his fellow students and also from the teachers after going through his bitter experience. Towards the close of the first chapter, he, however gets back some sense of companionship when he is given a huge wave of applause by the students for going before the rector and registering a complaint against the unjust act of Father Dolan. But before that Stephen could deepen the bonds of friendship with his fellow students in Clongowes he is called back to Blackrock.

In Blackrock also his stay could not be longer, he is forced to move to Dublin due to the financial degradation of his family. This frequent movement from one place to another also played a crucial part in making Stephen a socially aloof creature. During his stay in Dublin, a vague dissatisfaction grew up within him. In fact, it was the time when sexual desires started taking birth in his juvenile consciousness. He craved for the company of women and hoped to find a remedy for his lonely and tortured psyche by delving deep into the sea of carnal desires. When on a visit to Cork in the company of his father, Stephen is told about the flirtatious youth of his father, he feels still lonelier.

It is not that Stephen does not make an attempt to stay close to his family. He tries to buy all the possible creature comforts for himself and his family with the money earned by him from exhibition and essay prize, but the money soon exhausts, and he realises that he had not gone one step never the lives he had sought to approach hor bridged the restless shame and rancor that divided him from his mother and brother and sister. His 'savage desire' was increasing with every passing day and ultimately he finds himself wandering into a maze of narrow and dirty streets of the brothels.

Stephen's brief spell of sexual indulgence also fails to provide any solace to his distorted psyche; it gives him, rather, a sense of guilt that haunts him day and night. His sin guides him to the 'refuge of sinners' and after listening to the sermon of Father Arnall about the tortures of hell, Stephen decides to atone for his sins by kneeling in prayer before the Almighty. He starts on a course of stric religious piety, subjecting his senses to rigorous discipline. But even this did not satisfy him for long.

The moment of his complete break away from the religion can be identified as the one when the director of Belvedere encourages him to priesthood. It is this very moment that the awareness of the vital circumstances' concealed in his memories comes, opening the way to his artistic vision. Thus, he finds himself alienated from the religion as well.

Disengaging himself from the bonds of family and religion, Stephen initiates the life of a university scholar. His mind becomes a dwelling place for the ideas of the great thinkers like, Aristotle, Aquinas Ben Jonson, Newman, Guido Cavalcanti and Ibsen. He also forms his own aesthetic theory in the light of the ideas taken from Aristotle and Aquinas. In his theory he divides art in three forms the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. According to him, art progresses from one form to the other and the dramatic forms is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life.'

Acting upon his aesthetic theory, Stephen wants to be indifferent not only to his handiwork but also to the society at large. He emphatically declares that he does not feel any affiliation to his nation, language and religion. For him these are nothing but a trap to limit the free soul of an artist. Expressing his resentment against Ireland, he says:

"When the soul of a man is born in this country. There are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality language, and religion, I shall try to fly by those nets."    - (Joyce 203).

Stephen growth as an artist seems suspect when he expresses his intense desire to be free from the bonds of family, society, nation and religion. Even Cran by does not agree with Stephen when the latter says that he does not 'fear to be alone, to be without even a single friend'. Cranly's words strike 'some deep chord' in Stephen's nature and he realises that loneliness is something that he has always feared, so his claim for leading a lonely and alienated life does not hold water. In fact, his desire for complete freedom makes him akin to Lucifer, who brought his own damnation with the notion of non serviam.

Taking a more optimistic stance it can be said that in the novel Joyce is giving us 'precisely a portrait of the artist as a young man and the tension between his ambition, but his process of mental development is not complete at the end of the novel, since there are still some grave flaws in his artistic vision, which, it is hoped that he will remove once he takes flight in the world. at large with a vision to 'forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race'.    - (Joyce 253).

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