On the Distinctions Between Spoken and Written Language in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract:

Figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Marshall McLuhan have lauded Joyce for his unusual awareness of the distinct conventions and characteristics of language as it occurs in different forms (primarily spoken and written). Such commentary usually focuses on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While more formally restrained than Joyce’s two greatest works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Joyce forging the philosophy and aesthetic which consciously treats language in these different forms, implicitly (through, for example, the strategies he develops to represent sound) and explicitly (through, for example, ruminations on the properties of writing and speech). This is shown not least by the fact the book begins not (as is sometimes claimed) at the beginning of Stephen’s life, but at the beginning of his linguistic life, and from the outset uses a variety of print-oriented techniques (such as italicization, indentation, and ellipsis points) to represent the phonic world. This implicitly demonstrates a further distinction, also crucial to Joyce’s later work, not only between speech and writing, but between handwriting and print. The distinction also looms large in A Portrait, which at various times references the manual in a way that emphasizes the labored means of production of the yet-to-be published writer, but also is written very distinctly (as Hugh Kenner observes about Ulysses), for “technological space” or “printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning.” It is notable in this context that Joyce rejected one strategy in particular for representing the sounds of speech within the visual medium of writing: non-standard spelling. He experimented with a more phoneticized style in Stephen Hero, but this is largely abandoned by the time it becomes A Portrait. We are left with one notable dialectal spelling: “shite.” The deployment of this word speaks volumes about Joyce’s journey from sound to print.