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

Abstract

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