Customer Reviews

Stephen Hero

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Stephen Hero, the latter half of a rejected first draft of Portrait (apocrypha: Joyce flung his manuscript into a fire only to have Nora save part of it), offers Joyce fans a glimpse of his literary style and development as a young buck of nineteen to twenty-four. Portrait, written ~7-12 years later, is a condensation of the initial thousand pages of Hero with several layers of symbolism and effects added. Portrait shines the spotlight of Stephen's intellect upon the dim world of his own perception; Hero sets an objective reality in the plain light of day in simple, effective prose. Hero's style allows Stephen's arrogance to come across much more clearly than in Portrait. His adolescent conflicts are more easily relatable to the reader, whereas in Portrait those conflicts are arranged dramatically to occasion his birth as an artist, complete with his moderately original neo-Aristotelian, applied Aquinas heuristic. This text is NOT suitable as an introduction to Joyce (Dubliners is obviously the way to go in that respect). Those who are already committed fans of Portrait should with a little patience find Hero an engaging read.

Stephen Hero is part of the now-mostly-lost first draft of Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The legend goes that Joyce, in a moment of disillusionment, flung the manuscript on the fire and his sister Eileen rescued it. Odd, then, that the MS shows no apparent signs of burnmarks. Either way, the first few hundred pages are missing, so what we have here is a fragment of what would probably have been a very long and rather insufferable autobiographical novel about a clever young man realising that he's too good for the society into which he's been born.

The remarkable thing about it is that even though Joyce is basically transcribing the events of his own life, he's impressively objective. Stephen Daedalus (it became "Dedalus" in the later version) is presented as a bit of a prig, almost comically outraged when it looks like he can't read out a speech to a college debating society, and for all his erudition and genius a twit when it comes to getting his end away with the luscious Emma Clery. Joyce obviously realised this, because when he rewrote the novel he made it not more objective but less so, forcing us to see the events from Stephen's point of view, modifying his method as Stephen grows from frightened boy to disdainful young man. Stephen Hero is all told in the same cool third-person that Joyce used in his early stories. He abandoned it when he realised that it was quite inappropriate for the book he really wanted to write.

So what are the virtues of Stephen Hero? For one thing, it shows a lot more of the life around Stephen; Joyce has a lot of fun recording the inane remarks of Stephen's fellow students and the dimwitted inanity of the college president. The family is presented as less of a threat and more of a slightly baffling background hum (Joyce seldom wrote as kindly about his mother as he does here, even if he made her death one of the equivocal emotional centres of Ulysses). Stephen's artistic theories are _explained_, rather than being _demonstrated_ as they are in A Portrait (and while this is part of how much better a book A Portrait is, it's nice to see them set down, as well.) But in the end you have to admit that if Joyce had published this as his first novel, he mightn't have had the reputation he has today as being a man who published nothing but masterpieces. Dubliners is the best starting point if you've never read Joyce before and want to see what the fuss is about. Stephen Hero, on the other hand, is no masterpiece, but it's perhaps the only book by James Joyce that you could recommend to people going on a long train journey.

'Stephen Hero' the autobiographical novel Joyce would have completely destroyed, was converted at the urging of his friend Italo Svevo into the literary masterpiece ' A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. The early work is longer, more discursive and relaxed . Joyce takes the same material and transforms it in a portrait to a 'mythic story' of ideal artistic development.
The comparison of the two works , the transformations and condensations Joyce makes, the making more startingly clear in the latter work the development of the sensibility in stages- do provide a double - portrait of a master artist at work.

Adds depth to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but stands well alone as well.