Stephen Dedalus's non serviam : Patriarchal and Performative Failure in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 13, Summer 2002© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 See my “Party Pieces in Joyce’s Dubliners.” Stephen Dedalus’s non serviam: Patriarchal and Performative Failure in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ALAN WARREN FRIEDMAN In “Party Pieces in Joyce’s Dubliners,” I analyzed Joyce’s complex depiction of the Irish trope of “party pieces,” and of performance generally , in his first fictional text.1 After writing the first fourteen stories of Dubliners in a style he called “scrupulous meanness,” Joyce felt that he had given short shrift to the Irish tradition of expansive hospitality and to a Dublin that was, as Mary and Padraic Colum put it, “oral as no other [city] in Western Europe was” (Colum 57). So in “The Dead” Joyce depicted a more complex and nuanced social world, one whose ambiguities derive in part from his treatment of “party pieces,” which become cultural, political, and moral barometers, especially for Gabriel Conroy, whose after dinner speech (a form of singing for one’s supper) engages the host/guest economy, while both praising and exposing the dying tradition that Joyce sought to recuperate. For all of his and its failings, Gabriel’s generous-spirited speech, and especially his praise of Aunt Julia’s singing as a “revelation ,” underscores the privileged status of party pieces in this story and leads both to Gretta’s praising him for generosity and to his own potentially life-transforming revelation at the end. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which as his brother Stanislaus says is “almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical” (CDDSJ 12), Joyce further complicates the moral valance of performance that he depicts in Dubliners. He does so primarily by fictionalizing his relationship with John Joyce not as it was 03-T2429 9/13/02 12:07 PM Page 64 alan warren friedman 65 2 Joyce mockingly alludes to his nickname as “Sunny Twimjim” (FW 211.6). —tolerant and amicable for the most part—but defined by Stanislaus -like bitterness toward his father. Commenting on the autobiographical gap, Roger McHugh suggests that in Joyce’s creation of Stephen, “His sense of humour and his gay tomfoolery are little to be seen” (32): no one in or out of Joyce’s fiction calls his protagonist “Sunny Stephen.”2 According to Stanislaus Joyce, “People like Jim easily” (CDDSJ 146), unlike himself. In both Portrait and Ulysses, Joyce recreates John Joyce, who, according to Stanislaus, “was quite unburdened by any sense of responsibility ” toward his large family (MBK 50), as the stage Irishman he seems to have been. According to John Joyce’s biographers, “even Stanislaus had to admit that his father had the stage skill and temperament to make an audience friendly towards him: he was perfectly at ease on the boards. In fact he shone in the limelight” ( Jackson and Costello 76). But Joyce depicts him as a caricature of conviviality whose excesses of oral performance (of song, drink, and foulness of mouth) utterly displace familial, economic, political, and religious obligations. Where Gabriel Conroy had evoked John Joyce’s oratorical style in praise of hospitality, Simon Dedalus increasingly embodies performance as either self-serving (like Bartell D’Arcy in “The Dead”) or mean-spirited and ungenerous, to the point of using it as a weapon against his son. And Stephen reacts with growing hostility to his father and all he represents, a reaction that ultimately inhibits his growth as an artist since it negatively characterizes performance itself. As his earliest recollection of his brother, Stanislaus describes “a dramatic performance of the story of Adam and Eve, organized for the benefit of his parents and nursemaid,” in which Joyce “was the devil. What I remember indistinctly is my brother wriggling across the floor with a long tail probably made of a rolled-up sheet or towel” (MBK 3)—Joyce’s first recorded Luciferean moment, and with his parents cast as Adam and Eve. Saturating all his texts with evidence of the career not taken, Joyce embodied the performative above all in his representation of John...