Stephen Hero: Laughing in — and at — the Institution

Abstract

This chapter suggests a reading of Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s prototype Portrait, as a text which, though obviously ‘unfinished’ and seemingly less ‘experimental’ than either A Portrait or, obviously, Ulysses, none the less offers a model of dissonant identity. This fragmentary novel clearly can be read as demonstrating the beginnings of what Vicky Mahaffey calls Joyce’s ‘vast repertory of stylistic techniques in order to attack the traditional, univocal model of authority reflected in the organizations of the Church and State’ (Mahaffey 1995, 1). With this in mind, Stephen Hero may be read as engaging with issues of agency and structure through acts of reading and interpretation, addressing indirectly the limits of agency within structure, and the limitations for oppositional activity as a means of affecting the dead weight of imposed institutional structure. It does so in a seemingly less serious, more insolent, but also more conventional manner than James Joyce’s canonical works. At one point, the point which interests me in this chapter, it mocks directly academic structure and authority.