Stephen's Diary in Joyce's Portrait--The Shape of Life

Abstract

Despite the unflagging controversy over the character of Stephen Dedalus, remarkably little' attention has been paid to the of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, where one might have supposed that the problem would become acute. The diary that concludes the novel has had the rare distinction of being virtually unannotated specimen within the Joycean oeuvre,1 and while it is tempting to keep it free from the endless profusion of inky scholia, it raises issues too important to leave unremarked. One of the most intricate mechanisms in an intricate novel, its workings bear directly on the problem of interpreting Stephen's development. Questions of characterization join with questions of genre, and the relationship between individual agency and impersonal form becomes vivid. In elaborate, though submerged, patterns the diary reinterprets the narrative that it will soon conclude and offers some trenchant answers to question that governs the novel as it governs this essay: What is the shape of life? Those who have not neglected the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist have typically mentioned it only to express their dismay. Edward Garnett, reporting on the manuscript for Duckworth, spoke of the as a complete falling to bits; the pieces of writing and the thoughts are all in pieces and they fall like damp, ineffective rockets. More recently Kenneth Grose has called it flat ending which contains many trivialities and unexplained references. The few attempts to interpret this puzzling conclusion have usually tried to understand it by assimilating it-either to Stephen's own theory of genre or to the larger design of Joyce's career. Susan Lanser, for instance, holds that the diary is Stephen's lyric but Joyce's drama, while Anthony Burgess, addressing the problem biographically, writes that the diary entries anticipate, in their clipped lyricism and impatient ellipsis, the interior monologue of Ulysses. Both approaches have their merits, but in each case the novel's tends to disappear, lost in the configurations brought forth to explain it.2 The method of proceeding here