A Portrait of the Artist as a ‘Biologist in Words’: Language, Epiphany and Atavistic Bildung

This chapter explores how James Joyce’s Bildungsroman disrupts the recapitulatory plot by fusing the ostensibly primitive body to the ostensibly advanced linguistic faculties of its budding poet-protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. This fusion results in repeated reversionary digressions from the progressive movement toward artistic self-realization: the very words that Stephen seeks for his art bring him instead into the realm of the sexual and procreative body. These atavistic reversions allow Joyce’s to ironize and supply an alternative to his protagonist’s desire to separate the body from aesthetic experience and artistic maturity.