![]() On the one hand, this portrait “as a Young man” hints at the teleological romantic trope of the artistic vocation. The story centres on his negotiation with these outside pressures, rather than on his achievements as an individual.ģIn this respect, the title of the novel is very telling. Yet by the end of the story, he has come to terms with none of these determinisms, and is still caught in their contradictions, still struggling in search for his own voice. The novel presents its protagonist as defined, in his attitudes and ideas, by his family, his social class, his Irishness, and vying to find a path for his individuality to liberate itself and find expression. This is particularly visible in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which eschews the notion of “hero” present in the first iteration of the narrative (“Stephen Hero”), while making a case for Stephen's evolution as an artist in the making. In a social world which places evident emphasis on abstraction, represented in the novel by the philosopher Mr Ramsay, this realisation is presented as going counter to standards–a certain form of inner rebellion, or at the very least a liberation from cultural stereotypes.ĢI will argue that this confrontation between the materiality of everyday life, the cultural stereotype of the inspired artist, and the search for a new stance as a creator in the modern world, shapes the personality and evolution of Stephen Dedalus. For instance, the painter Lily, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is depicted as trying to reach for a more refined perspective, free from self-doubt and the censure of others, only to realize that her existence in context, with all its anxieties and fragilities, is what gives her works meaning, enabling her to reclaim the memory of the past and of the deceased Mrs Ramsay. The trope of the exceptional Hero, as well as the genius Craftsman, revealed their ties with a romantic vision of personal transcendence, which jarred with the experience of everyday life and even with the workings of the artistic world. Furthermore, new trends in production, such as Fordism, as well as mass communications and mass warfare, undermined the notion of individual agency, both in action and in poiesis. As modernism probed the depths of psychology and sociology, questioning the idea of free will and the conscious intentionality of actions, the possibility of demiurgic individual creation naturally came into question. This is particularly true of artistic figures. 1 See in particular the opposition that he proposes between individual heroes and a “mass of extras (.)ġAs Benoît Tadié argued, modernist authors constructed their characters in opposition to classical notions of literary “heroes” and protagonists, and to the underlying myths that these notions conveyed 1.
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