The controversial political and moral debate on the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man highlights an essential obstacle to the artistic spirit of Stephen Dedalus. Ireland imposes a set of oppressive binaries “notably in the form of religion and nationalism” from which it can only escape through the ambiguity of language and its developing theory of aesthetics. His progression toward systems of continua over binaries also functions as an implicit instruction from Joyce on how to read the novel. In a work of art so consumed by its own internal order, the author recognizes the textual value of a structural analysis, but only for the ideological content of the work. To ingest the novel's “tragic emotion,” the reader must split the emotional binary of pity and terror and maintain a “face looking both ways” (176). In other words, the reader cannot process the emotion of the novel in a schematic form, as he can, for example, when connecting the endings and beginnings of chapters or the motif of the word "ivory." From this continuum flow Stephen's ideas about stasis and radiation through which, presumably, we should view the Portrait as a work of beauty. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay However, Joyce complicates his Janus-like theory with Stephen's proclamation that the simplest form of art is "the lyrical form, the form in which the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself -even” (184). The next form, the epic, is only “the image of the artist in a mediated relationship with himself and with others” (184). The portrait is, at its most fundamental level, the authorial framing of the world of a young self "both self-interrogation and mediated surveillance of self with others" and therefore an ostensible aesthetic failure. Joyce's final project, then, is the elevation of his literary adolescence beyond lyrical and epic autobiography and into drama, in which the "artist's personality 'is finally refined to disappear' (185). He can only achieve this by applying the novel's concept of rhythm to the biographical amalgam of Joyce and Stephen "the primary solipsistic and monochromatic deterrent to an imaginative dramatic aesthetic" seen through the kaleidoscopic lens of exile. When a jeering classmate asks Stephen whether or not he kisses his mother goodnight, Stephen initially responds yes and, when his peers mock him, recants and is again confronted with the derision. There is no way out for him, and the first lesson of impossible logic imprints itself on him: "What was the correct answer to the question?" He had given two and Wells was still laughing” (10). To escape the laughter or, in other words, to claim his own voice and not listen to that of others, Stephen must find a third way, a triangulation that opens up a multiplicity of non-exclusive responses. Language is a powerful signifier in Irish culture, as evidenced by both the content and form of Christmas dinner. Dante opens the discussion with an “identity” logic, arguing that a priest must be a singular entity who relates a Manichaean morality: “A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is good and what is which is not” (25). Joyce repeatedly emphasizes the table's attention to the power of the word in the various rebuttals. Uncle Charles pleads "Not another word now" and Dante returns with "? Pleasant language for any Catholic to use!" (25) Othersattempts at conciliation “No one says a word against them” are met with Dante's return to oral interaction: “Have the bishops and priests of Ireland spoken? and we must obey them” (25). Dante, who appeals to Mrs. Dedalus with "You Hear," reaffirms the importance of language as a vehicle of memory and morality: "Oh, he will remember all this when he grows up, Dante says warmly the language that he heard against God and religion and priests in his own house” (27).Obviously, Stephen does, but from an early age he discovered a defense against accepting the priests' binary morality. first establishes Stephen as a poetic mind, capable of finding beauty in the ordinary use of language The "author" at the beginning of the second episode of the novel is ambiguous, because the language is in harmony with his own poetics (and. so perhaps with Stephen's own voice) but also with the overall narrative: "The vast playgrounds were teeming with boys all shouting and the prefects urging them forward with loud shouts. The evening air was pale and. cool and after each charge and each thud of the footballers, the orb of greasy leather flew like a heavy bird through the gray light. of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of reach of rough feet, pretending to run from time to time. (4) Structurally, many of the touches here are Joyce's work. Stephen's terror at the end of the first episode is offset by a claustrophobic refuge under the table, and here the agoraphobia of "vast playgrounds" juxtaposes his lingering fear. Just as Joyce is clearly concerned with contrasting the closed with the open and the domestic with the recreational, he also rhymes the word "cry" with Stephen's poem from the end of the first episode ("Pull your eyes / Excuse -you” [4]). But the internal tension of the words here shows a growing awareness and expertise of linguistic play, and should be read like Stephen's. Instead of the simple “abba” rhyme scheme of the “apologize” poem, the language here divides in a more sophisticated way. The "f"/"b" sound of "footballers" is reversed by the sequential pairing of "orb" and "fly", but not before "fat leather", sandwiched between them, finds its alliterative match at the end of the sentence with "gray light". The piece continues with the "f" and "r" sounds in the next phrase, beginning with "fringe" and finding further inversion with "rude feet" and "pretending to run." Stephen sets up a phonic chiasm whose crossed lines blur the binary; the Manichean world of black and white fades as Stephen expands his tonal range into new harmonious and discordant octaves. However, when motifs develop throughout the novel and not just in one passage, we must yield them to Joyce's structural control. Stephen's later prediction that "There would be a gray, cloudy light on the playing field" (20) and his eventual aesthetic triumph of "A Day of Dappled Sea Clouds" reconfigure his growing sensitivity to his "periodic prose » interior under Joyce's own attention to periodicity, to the rhythmic pattern of the novel (143). Pun has always been a weapon of play, a double-edged sword that cuts through the ignorance of a monochrome world. Joyce wants his reader to combine appreciation of narratological and linguistic structures. When Stephen notes that "girdle also meant to give a man a girdle", that the word functions both as a means of self-help and as a violent action towards others, we must remember this as Stephen experiences d other binaries (5). The printed names of “cold and hot” on the school toilet taps seem “queer” to him (7).That water, the most miscible substance, must be defined at only two temperatures contradicts Stephen's own recognition of the scale of degrees: "He was cold and then a little hot" (7). At this point in the story, these pieces of information are just factual examples whose intellectual content overrides any emotional connection we may feel to “hot” and “cold.” In Stephen's late teens, he explores the same hot/cold binary in a distant context. more intimate setting. When the dean of studies at his university asks Stephen if fire is beautiful, the student's response explains why he is indeed a student and not a priest: "To the extent that it satisfies the animal's need for warmth, the fire is good. hell, however, is evil” (159). The restrictive religious view of fire receives a major blow here, and the reader senses something in Stephen's response beyond a mere philosophical slip. The next paragraph again adds the intellectual fuel of Joyce's structural mastery to Stephen's impassioned voice: "How lame Ignatius [the Dean] was but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius's enthusiasm." Even the company's legendary craft, a more subtle and subtle craft. more secret than his fabulous books of subtle and secret wisdom, had not inflamed his soul with the energy of the apostolate” (160). The repetition of the imagery of fire "burned no spark" and "set his soul on fire" still uses indirect style as a means of extending the analytical and emotional reach of the words. The reader is able to “cope in two ways.” As the prose is a fusion of Joyce and Stephen, the novel maintains a vocal rhythm that coincides with Stephen's theory of the aesthetic appreciation of an object: "you apprehend it as being in balance part against part within 'an object'. its limits; we feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension” (183). By turns immediate perception and analytical apprehension, the Portrait and its constituent episodes are also “limited to themselves and autonomous on the incommensurable background of space or time which is not it” (183). Yet, as the progression of fire imagery shows, much is lost in appreciating the singular rather than the total. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with its titular appeal to the reader to recognize his inherent artistic self-production, is therefore an integral part of two larger works: Ulysses' and Joyce's own lives. Although Joyce may not have known that he would later write Ulysses, he probably knew that he would keep Stephen Dedalus as a recurring character in some later works, as he often spread his characters across multiple stories (especially in Dubliners). In this sense of playing with Ulysses (especially the first three episodes featuring Stephen), Portrait achieves Stephen's first definition of rhythm, the "relationship of one part to another in any aesthetic whole" (177). The episodic structure of the portrait alone satisfies Stephen's second definition, the relationship "of an aesthetic whole to its part" (177). Considering the entirety of Ulysses as the ocean and Portrait as the stream, Portrait finalizes Stephen's definition of rhythm: the relationship "of any part to the aesthetic whole of which it is a part" (177). The autobiography of Portrait rises beyond the lyric because it assumes the polyphony of Ulysses, and the flamboyant radiance of the "burning out coal" of the shorter novel retains the heat of the fireplace of the epic . This may seem like specious reasoning; according to this logic, everything that is written now (like this article) has the, 1994. 91.