Dealing with Criticism

James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dealing with Criticism as Stephen Dedalus.

James Joyce Tower, Ireland

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When young Stephen Dedalus goes to the playground, he faces a typical schoolboy challenge:

—Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth and smiling and frowning upon it tolerantly. It’s always getting stuck like that. Do you use a holder?
—I don’t smoke, answered Stephen.
—No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt and he doesn’t damn anything or damn all.

In the most commonplace of all schoolyard trials, whatever is particular or unexpected or eccentric is attacked. For Stephen, as for every child, these attacks come when he struggles to orient himself in the world. And of course the appearance of differences on a playground triggers a fight.

Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was born back against a barbed wire fence.
—Admit that Byron was no good.
—No.
—Admit.
—No.
—Admit.
—No. No.
At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free.

Thus we have a disagreement, and a rather admirable bit of steadfastness on Stephen’s part to hold his ground against the prevailing view. Though Stephen is obviously correct, and his cause for Byron the right one, that’s not the easiest of positions to hold against a mob filled with nothing less than absolute certainty. But his correctness is incidental to a more crucial point: regardless of the position, the mob isn’t choosing Stephen’s conclusion. For a schoolyard and a budding intellect, it’s a good start, and we watch as this challenge is repeated and escalated over the coming chapters in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A maturing Stephen must decide how to divide his impulse to be part with his impulse to be apart—from his heritage, with his religion, in his artistic drive. Is his individuality a threat to his nation? A denial of his obligations? Or does it affirm his character?

At the moment of Stephen’s first breath, he is surrounded by storylines: the stories told by his family, the stories which explain his nation, the stories which undergird his religion. Here is the unspoken, unobserved scaffolding within every mind, all those assumptions which order the world, all those invisible familia rules, all those oppressive yet comforting storylines. And he’s immersed in these stories from his first grasps of light on page one, as baby Stephen hears songs, feels a warm bed, discovers dance.

His father told him that story: His father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

For adolescent Stephen—and for every adolescent—there’s an expected, typical path, the one prescribed by the tangle of storylines that arrive on day one. Stephen’s world comes with the strictures of family and religion and nation; these are the guardrails that he’s supposed to follow. If he, however, gives his life a different shape, how can he assess the choice? Because he has been taught since birth to measure his life based on these guardrails—the expectations of his family and his church and his nation. Even the smallest step away from the consensus is a lonely path, but it, perhaps more importantly, doesn’t come with a storyline that provides ballast against life’s storm. The Stephen we meet in the schoolyard is determined, earnest, anxious to create his own path, but what if he’s wrong?

The infantile answer is to join the consensus, and the juvenile answer is to reject the consensus. Stephen sees examples of both in his country’s history and in the intellectual tradition he’s slowly discovering. Obviously a reflexive acceptance or denial isn’t the mature response to the world, thought that’s certainly where most people stop. Stephen, like any struggling adolescent, tries both postures. In the visceral urge to join we find all of history’s mobs; in the impulse to deny we find all of history’s tedious contrarians, all the trite rebellions, all those doomsayers who are laughably predictable in their exact reversal of the consensus. Of course there’s only a smidgen of space between the infantile desire to join every crowd and the adolescent desire to scream at every crowd.

Stephen is prodded throughout the novel by both impulses, with each aspect of his life—family, friends, teachers—nudging him a bit more, sculpting him toward a particular path, until he finally selects his own direction. The storylines he discovered at birth are still crucial to the creation of his character, yet Stephen’s ability to mold them into a life that’s intrinsic to him is what opens up a new path—one that is truly his.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he? He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.

When you confront the storylines in your life, there’s always an irreparable dichotomy: the need to incorporate lessons from others, and the need to ignore the opinions of others. Stephen learns from his teachers and then rejects his teachers. Both steps, however complex and difficult and even contradictory, are crucial. Of course any rejection of those around you brings criticism, mocking, and the harassment that’s part of every playground. So Stephen meets this whenever his feet stray from expectations. Whenever he questions, wonders, or considers one of those unspoken alternatives. To never hear any criticism, however, is to ensure that you’re still comfortably within the consensus and probably a faceless member of the crowd, not quite doing what’s truly needed and, even worse, not quite being truly you.

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And it’s worth remembering that carving your own path is guaranteed to be confrontational. As Stephen steps away from his church, he reminds those around him of their choices: his originality is a mirror that reveals their conformity. But his choices aren’t atypical, nor does Joyce intend this progression from youth to maturity, from consensus to rejection, to be a unique challenge. Every child discovers the expectations of their world; Stephen just happens to discover the rules that fit his environment. What makes him unique is his desire to question that environment and the path in front of him, despite how much those already on the path dislike questions. Should he keep going? Or switch directions? Take a detour? There’s no simple answer to these fundamental questions, and that’s part of the point.

Perhaps one lesson that’s apparent in the novel and useful for all readers is the necessity of buttressing your confidence long before the moment of choice arrives. Long before you meet those in life who have certainty, you should have at least a bit of conviction yourself—even if that’s a hazy, shapeless form of conviction that’s really only about your purpose and its righteousness. Sticking up for Byron against a throng of schoolyard bullies, for instance, might be good practice for the trials yet to come. Once you have that inchoate sense of conviction about yourself, and you’re not lying to the bathroom mirror each morning, then perhaps you can deal with the muck and grime and mayhem of the mob’s criticism—since you know the certainty of its arrival—so that you can accept the useful bits, and forget the rest with a smile.