Brent Seegmiller and I have been corresponding on literary achemy and related topics since 2014 but he just gave me his permission yesterday to publish his thoughts on the hermetic aspect of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I think it is important work for three reasons: (1) The alchemy in Joyce has been explored for his Ulysses and for Finnegan’s Wake but not for the eary works most students have read, i.e., Dubliners and Portrait, (2) Joyce, especially for those who have never read him, is the consensus pick for “Greatest Novelist Ever;” and (3) therefore, learning that Joyce, a la Shakespeare, Dickens, and the Inklings, used alchemical story scaffolding and symbolism, makes Rowling’s use that much more credible and, one hopes, the subject of further study. We need more Potter Pundits like Brent Seegmiller and Evan Willis, whose exposition on the hermeticism embedded in Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike I posted last week. Enjoy!

A Portrait of the Alchemist as a Young Man: Alchemy, Myth, and Metaphor in Joyce’s Work

Brent A. Seegmiller 

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been called James Joyce’s “most personal work”1. This rings true in light of the title, Stephen’s experiences, and Joyce’s vocation as renown Irish aesthete. Both Stephen and Joyce have a complex way with words and even more complex relationship to them.

As one scholar has opined, “A Portrait illustrates a contradictory dynamic by narrating Stephen’s gradual move towards a diasporic vocation that is imagined both as a radical break with the homeland and as its symbolic renewal. Epiphany and leitmotif represent the antagonistic yet closely intertwined extremes of this development. By switching back and forth between them, Joyce creates not only a “polyrhythmic” texture previously unknown to Anglophone fiction, but also moves the time-honored novel of development. The dozens of different motifs that circulate in A Portrait gain in complexity with each and every occurrence. In a word, they develop. Their structuring logic isn’t that of the closed circle, but rather that of William Butler Yeats’s ‘widening gyre’.”2

This relationship is represented well in the epigraph from Ovid, “And he turned his mind to unknown arts”3 as well as in the final words of the novel “Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”4. These passages, which echo the sentiment of each other, imply not only invention within the arts but also within what is known as the “Royal Art” of alchemy.

As Stephen Daedalus grows so too does the narration and its complexity. Much has been made of the religious intonations, the cries of Irish Nationalism, and the philosophical underpinnings of Stephen’s aesthetic epiphanies replete throughout the novel but there is a key element of the novel which has gone underwhelming represented in the academic literature; that is the novel’s relationship to the alchemical process. [Read more…]