Life as c yclical in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Elliot Coulson
Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on 2 September 1930 that she was ‘ writing The Waves to a rhythm, not to a plot ’ . This intention is evident throughout what is her most experimental work. The stream-of- consciousness style Woolf had been refining throughout the 1920s in such works as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927) is approached differently in The Waves, creating an interior monologue that gives a poetic account of the experiences of the six interweaving voices that make up the narrative. However, the ‘ rhythm ’ that Woolf describes in The Waves is present also in a work written 17 years earlier by James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a semi-autobiographical work mirroring Joyce’s own childhood and adolescence in Ireland, is a stylistically varied and powerful text. The Waves and Portrait , whilst entirely different in scope – The Waves follows the almost entire lives of six people, whilst Portrait concerns only the adolescence of a single character, Stephen Dedalus – both contain features that resemble Woolf’s ‘ rhythm ’ ; both depict a conception of life ultimately structured in a series of cycles; events and experiences organize themselves in a ways that seem to recur. The primary way in which Joyce creates a sense of cycle in Portrait is through his subversion of structural convention. Portrait is broadly a Bildungsroman or, more specifically, a Künstlerroman, depicting a young artist coming to maturity. However, it is often atypical of this form. The typical novel in this genre begins with an immature, often naïve character, who, across the course of the novel, gradually learns about and experiences the world, until they leave the novel mature, and ready to embark on the rest of their life. It is in this sense linear, and therefore depicts a view of life as linear also – a constant and gradual acquisition of knowledge and maturity. Portrait subverts this completely. It is made up of five chapters, each themselves made up of disjunct episodes in Stephen’s development. Each of these chapters has an internal structure: ‘the movement of each chapter mimics the rise and fall of the novel as a whole: each begins with Stephen in humility, and ends with him triumphant’ (Johnson, 2001, p. xxxviii). It is in this way that the very structure of the novel arranges the highs and lows of Stephen’s experience of growing -up into a cyclical form, his hardships being gradually overcome, only to be replaced by new hardships, in turn themselves overcome. In the third, fourth, and fifth chapters of the book this cycle is most clear. After his visit to the prostitute at the end of chapter 2, Stephen hears a priest preaching on death, judgement, and hell, in explicit detail, and is wrought with a terrible fear at the prospect of his own damnation: ‘The preacher’s knife had probed deeply into his diseased conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in sin. ’ In order to save his own soul, he becomes zealously religious, and after having confessed his sins to a priest he enters a state of religious ecstasy, expressed in rapturous and elated prose: ‘ Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! ’ This is the first of Stephen’s epiphanies. Soon after, however, his devotion subsides , as he declines to join the Jesuit Order as a priest. But soon there arrives a new epiphany, and by the end of chapter 4, he is overwhelmed by the idea of what he perceives as an artistic life: ‘ Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable. ’ This powerful language as the chapter draws to a close is
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