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  • Paired Repetition as a Formulaic Element in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Katy Marre

One stylistic element of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Stephen Dedalus’ remembrance of events he experiences earlier in one or more paired repetitions in close proximity within a chapter, or appearing at a later point in the novel. “Paired repetition” in my argument means a passage repeated two or three times with slight variation or differentiation in the second and third instances. The second and third instances of repetition are often very close to the first in form, are usually remembrances of the first experience and generally are about significantly pleasurable or painful feelings. Joyce uses Stephen’s remembrances or recollections as synectic1 triggers for ellipted tellings of the first event, just expressed differently. These remembrances are selective in details and often differ in the form in which they are remembered. It is my purpose in this paper to show that paired repetitions in Portrait (P) function as neo-Homeric formulaic elements, and serve to develop theme as well. This type of repetition illustrates Joyce’s deep interest in language and his stylistic ingenuity in assimilating and extrapolating the techniques of other writers to his narrative purposes for developing theme. As John Rickard points out (joining the ranks of other critics who say that the nature of personal identity is a central question in Joyce’s work), as a Kunstlerroman, Joyce’s portrait of Stephen focuses on attempts to “find himself” (in terms of vocation of course), but also to establish “a coherent sense of self” (15). My argument here is that the pattern of paired repetition in Portrait shows how Stephen’s recollections serve to establish a coherent sense of himself.

Using Northrop Frye’s well known definition of theme in narrative—according to which “narrative in literature may also be seen as theme, and theme is narrative, but narrative seen as simultaneous unity” (7)—we see that Stephen’s memories of earlier experiences form a pattern of paired repetition which functions as theme. The stylistic similarity between paired repetition in Portrait and repetition in formulaic elements in Homer, with which Joyce was familiar from his reading of Homer, is notable. Of course, there are great differences between the two types of repetition. Repetition in Portrait is not direct imitation of Homeric formulaic elements, and the analogy is functional in that the characteristic paired repetition enhances our understanding of Joyce’s narrative style in yet another dimension. [End Page 208] R.B. Kershner reminded us in 1986 that “it was thirty years ago that Kenner, echoing Eliot, suggested that Joyce had many voices but no ‘style’; twenty years ago Scholes and Kain [also] noted that ‘it becomes increasingly apparent that Joyce had either an actual or a literary source in mind for almost every passage in A Portrait’” (“The Artist as Text” 881).2 Paired repetition in Portrait prompts the reader to connect specific situational contexts in the narrative by recognizing thematic words, phrases, or sentences, thereby understanding themes and sub-themes as well.

Kershner observes that “in the wake of Barthes and Derrida, it is more acceptable to see Joyce as the enormously inventive and resourceful arranger, paradoist, pasticheur of the texts of the world, simultaneously master of and mastered by language, rather than the creator whose authenticity, selfhood, and patriarchal status as origin is reflected in a privileged logos” (881). He argues that Bakhtin perhaps offers the “most accurate metaphor of heteroglossia … and surely no author illustrates more elegantly than Joyce Bakhtin’s image of the novel as a consciously structured hybrid of languages” (881). He points out that “the implications of this view for Joyce’s portrait of an artist are manifold, and may help to illuminate several aspects of the text,” most noticeable among which is the “most strikingly unusual but seldom remarked characteristic of the text, its frequent use of incremental repetition” (882, my emphasis). Paired repetition in Portrait is not direct imitation of the Homeric formulaic element nor do the differences between the two go unnoticed, but in Portrait paired repetition is “conscious and deliberate” (Calhoun...

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