A Portrait of the Animal as a Young Artist: Animality, Instinct, and Cognition in Joyce’s Early Prose

John Rickard

doi:10.3390/h6030056

Abstract

This essay situates James Joyce within the competing discourses of Catholic theology, evolutionary biology, and Nietzsche’s philosophy, with emphasis on their attitudes towards the body and the animal-human boundary. Joyce’s use of “instinct” in his early works (Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) helps us understand his movement from a view of animals and the human body as frightening or paralyzing to a more open acceptance of the body and its impulses. This transition from portraying the body as an impediment in Dubliners to a source of knowledge or cognition in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helps us better understand Joyce’s early prose and his embrace of both animal and human bodies in his later works.

Highlights

This essay situates James Joyce within the competing discourses of Catholic theology, evolutionary biology, and Nietzsche’s philosophy, with emphasis on their attitudes towards the body and the animal-human boundary
Donovan Schaefer has argued that “Ulysses might be called a piece of animal literature—a book that always leads to sex, deviation, desire, excess, and defilement, moments where the sovereignty of the human self over the body is blurred” (Schaefer 2016, p. 134)
In Joyce’s early prose, the Catholic idea of the soul remains in tension with the growing sense that the liberation of the human being requires an embrace of our animal nature, represented by the body and by instinct

Summary

Introduction

This essay situates James Joyce within the competing discourses of Catholic theology, evolutionary biology, and Nietzsche’s philosophy, with emphasis on their attitudes towards the body and the animal-human boundary. In Joyce’s early prose, the Catholic idea of the soul remains in tension with the growing sense that the liberation of the human being requires an embrace of our animal nature, represented by the body and by instinct.

Results

Conclusion