Stephen Dedalus- in the Rough (original) (raw)
February 11, 1945
Stephen Dedalus- in the Rough
By WILLIAM TROY
STEPHEN HERO By James Joyce. Edited by Theodore Spencer.
or admirers of Joyce, for students of modern literature generally, this is bound to be, in an altogether unhackneyed sense of the word, the most important literary event of the year. And indeed there is hardly an exact parallel for it in all our literary history. Through the joint enterprise of the Harvard Library and the New Directions Press, we have here about one-third of the hitherto unpublished first draft of one of the most influential novels of our time.
Earlier versions of lyric poems and short stories we have has frequently in the past, but never of a full-length novel of any significance. Not only does the present manuscript throw much light on Joyce's own individual development as an artist, filling in lacunae of thought and experience obscure in his later work, but it provides also invaluable laboratory material for anyone interested in the technique of the novel.
Detailed comparison with the sections of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" to which it corresponds- the period of Dedalus' college years in Dublin- will make bright the labors of the scholars and critics of the future. It will be noted that certain members of his family- his mother, his sister Isabel and his brother Maurice- play a much more extensive part in this version than does his father. And it will probably be explained that it was only in the interim that father-son relationship, the basis of Joyce's work from "Dubliners" to "Finnegans Wake," had become a dominating obsession.
There is also much more analytical and dramatically immediate rendition of the love affair that is merely hinted at in "A Portrait." And we see Stephen (Joyce) in a somewhat more social role, attending parties in the shabby, confused, puritanical Dublin world into which he is born, and even contributing his fine voice to the entertainment. In a purely quantitative sense, there is much more of everything that we are curious to know about in this version. But that is at the same time a measure of its inferiority.
What did Joyce learn about his profession between the two drafts of his first novel? Primarily he learned, as Gertrude Stein once observed to Hemingway, that "remarks" do not make literature. He learned selection, concentration through the telescoping of disparate materials in some single concrete symbol or situation, the beauty that comes from controlled relations. Novel-writing was not to be just "talking into a typewriter"; the novel was not a catch-all for whatever passed through a writer's head; as an art it had to be grounded in the intelligible and not the abstract. The medium of this art being words, and the essence of art discipline, the discipline of the novelist lay in the appropriate use of words.
And in his choice of title for this "schoolboy's production" Joyce leaves no doubt that because of this discipline he conceived the role of the dedicated artist in our society as pre-eminently heroic. In Greek the word Stephen means "the crowned one," whether applied to the filleted animal brought to sacrifice or the garlanded athlete of the Olympic Games. Above all else, this is a touching and impressive statement of faith on the part of one of the truly educated writers of our age.