Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

While it is tempting to read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" purely in terms of the spiritual and artistic growth of its main character, it is also profitable to look at the way in which Joyce uses details to construct the reality of the world of his novel. In his essay, “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes argues that authors include incidental details – details that don’t add to plot, character development, or atmosphere – which indicate the reality of the story in which they are deployed. While Barthes’ argument is primarily applied to Realist authors, the inclusion of seemingly insignificant details in a modern text, such as the use of specific place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” can also produce this ‘reality effect,’ while raising questions as to whether these kinds of detail in Joyce’s novel are actually incidental.

One of the most obvious uses of specific detail in Joyce’s novel is the inclusion of place names in the text. Throughout the book the protagonist Stephen Dedalus goes on numerous walks through Dublin and its environs, where the story is set: “Along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum,” or, “from the door of Byron’s publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel” (Joyce, 64 and 128). It is arguable that if the novel focused solely on the apotheosis of Stephen’s character, these specific place names would be incidental to both plot and character. Their inclusion primarily sets the story in a reality – that of the recognizable and historically accurate Ireland – and as such produces Barthes’ ‘reality effect.’

To say that this use of place names is incidental however seems to evade the fact that the novel is essentially a working out of the protagonist’s perspective in relation to the reality in which he exists. That the place names set the novel in a ‘real’ Ireland is not insignificant to the plot, as Stephen is trying to grapple with the nets of Irish “nationality, language, religion” (Joyce, 220). The place names make the references to Parnellian politics, the revival of the Gaelic tongue, and the intricacies of Irish Catholicism more specific and valid for the character. For example, “the name of [Maple’s Hotel]… stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm” (Joyce, 258). Without these specific locations, it might be easier to read this story as taking place anywhere, but in doing so we would miss the way in which Stephen’s character is driven by his specific culture.

We furthermore see that Stephen has a fascination with language throughout the novel: “We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names” (Joyce, 98). It is essential to the protagonist’s development into a writer that he pays attention to names in this way. As he later suggests in his aesthetic theory, “that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases” (Joyce, 225), and as such, the apprehension of specific place names adds to this artistic aspect of Stephen’s character. He is the kind of character who finds names and language beautiful, or at least worth attending to.

There is another, brief passage that illuminates a third way in which the use of place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is intimately related to the character and structure of the story. In an aside, Stephen remarks that his friend Cranly has a “way of remembering thoughts in connection with places” (Joyce, 267). Place names do not just serve as cultural or aesthetic signs, but are also markers for memory and association. As the novel is directly concerned with Stephen’s associations, it is possible to take the inclusion of specific places in the story as a structure on which the events of Stephen’s life are hung.

This connection between location and personal association furthermore suggests an identification between the character and specific places, as when Stephen remarks in his journal: “Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green” (Joyce, 271), identifying himself with the actual Stephen’s Green. From a young boy living in Ireland but feeling culturally separate from it, Stephen is able to identify with his country through specific place names to the extent that he feels “the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes” (Joyce, 259). This identification with Ireland, as a real place full of memories and associations, ultimately allows Stephen to both leave the country and begin creating the conscience of his race, a conscience that that is born nowhere but in the specific setting of Ireland. So though Joyce’s use of place names does at some basic level create Barthes’ ‘reality effect,’ this specific kind of detail is crucial to the development of plot and character through the story, and as such is hardly what Barthes might call incidental.