The Passion of Apprehension: The Soul’s Activity as the Agent Intellect in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

James Joyce was interested in those most minute details of experience and language that indicate a character’s habits, that transform a character’s will power or understanding, or that reveal to the readers the conditions, especially the’ habits, of a character’s will power, understanding, or ability to change. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, these practical, worldly concerns with habits, will power, and understanding embody a less-apparent narrative of the development of the soul of Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s chronological “material” development is inseparable from and fused with his “transcendent” soul; his passions and actions occur in time, in words that are chosen carefully, are repeated with varying kinds of stress, and are ordered to correspond simultaneously with each other as if in a single portrait of his soul. The joining-point between the “temporality” of the everyday and the “eternity” of his soul is the developmental progress of the soul; the soul-in-time is teleologically at one with the complete soul. That spiritual progress in strict sequence gives the novel its structure, controlling all its small-scale events of gestures and phrases and organizing the large-scale units of the chapters and their subdivisions.