Stephen Dedalus's non serviam: patriarchal and performative failure In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.(Critical Essay)

In "Parry Pieces in Joyce's Dubliners," I analyzed Joyce's complex depiction of the Irish trope of "parry 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 nor as it was-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), 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 hi s 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" (M BK 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 Joyce, who was not only a singer but had also starred as a comic performer in college theatricals (ZVIBK 24- 25). Joyce and his father seem to have communicated best through music, and it was through music that Joyce and his father, who had objected to his elopement with Nora, ultimately made peace. On Joyce's visit to Ireland with Giorgio in 1909, his father played and sang for him. In response to his father's quizzing him, Joyce identified the ari a as one sung by Germont to his son in Verdi's La Traviata: learning that his son's beloved is dying, Germont expresses remorse for having treated them cruelly (JJII 276-77). And so John Joyce accepted Nora, and father and son were reconciled through the mediation of performance. But in his fiction Joyce radically reinflects the father/son relationship, denying Stephen his Nora and omitting the benign paternal performance and consequent reconciliation.

Joyce's self-representation in Portrait enacts or evades a series of performances almost from the first, as "in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him, the nature of which he only dimly apprehended" (P 64). Like Stanislaus', Stephen's earliest memories are of performances, three of which occur on Portrait's opening page when his sense of rhythm, along with his five physical senses, begins to operate. All three performances promise domestic order, and identity, that is soon destabilized. His father, an inveterate storyteller as well as singer, begins the narrative with "Once upon a time and a very good time it was ...," asserting an assured and fabled tone that soon degenerates into discord, and a defining role for Stephen as the story's central figure, "a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." (3) A lyrical song, "Lilly Dale," the first of some 25 songs embedded in the text, immediately follows the story:

 
        O' the wild rose blossoms 
        On the little green place. (4) 
He sang that song. That was his son. 
        O, the green wothe bothetb. (P 3) 

The song subsequently reappears when Stephen conflates its elements into the fanciful "green [or Irish) rose" that he first longs to discover "somewhere in the world" (9, 67); then, failing that, in the world of his imagination into which he increasingly retreats: "I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world" (273). In the third of Portrait's opening performances, Stephen's mother "played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance [while] Uncle Charles and Dante clapped" (3). The young Stephen later recalls such scenes of ephemeral musical and familial harmony as more substantial than Simon's place in the world: "He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys' fathers" (24). The expansive paternal performance, which displaces worldly and familial responsibility for Simon, soon degenerates into " a long and incoherent monologue" about his fallen fortune (68). Stephen's response is increasingly condescension and alienation rather than the "filial piety" expected of him (102).

Like Joyce, Stephen himself comes to play numerous performative roles--storyteller, essayist, actor, singer, piano player--and to the applause of schoolmates, teachers, priests, and family. But the initial mood of benign performance is quickly countered by accusations and imperatives--beginning with Dante's demand that he "apologize" (presumably for his friendship with the Protestant Eileen), followed by submit, obey, admit, confess, pray, repent, commune, sign, conform (the list is lengthy) (5)--and by Stephen's growing resistance to all such imposed speech acts. At first he accepts the roles that others want him to perform: according to his father, "He was baby tuckoo" (3); he doesn't reveal that Wells pushed him into the cesspool because "His father had told him, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow" (6, 19); he says the grace before the Christmas dinner, cued by his father's "Now, Stephen" (28); and urged on by his classmates, he resolves to report his pandying to the rector, doing "what the fellow s had told him. He would go up and tell the rector that he had been wrongly punished" (54).

Soon, however, Stephen determines that "he was happy only when he was far... beyond" all who call or demand of him (89)--whether the call is "to the religious life," or to empathize with the "recurrent note of weariness and pain" he hears in his siblings' voices, or to mind the mocking cries of his friends or Davin's appeal to join the Nationalist cause. Heron and Wallis demand that he admit to his…