Archetypal Discourse Reading of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: From Within to Without

Abstract

     This article presents a discoursal archetypal discourse analysis of James Joyce's masterpiece, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Following the path of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology and Northrop Frye’s myth criticism, this paper attempts to explore to what extent Joyce uses myth and archetype to express his concerns and philosophical thoughts towards the concept of intellectual and artistic freedom. By tapping into the network of implicit attitudes tethering these signifiers -- the myth of Daedalus; the persona of Stephen Dedalus as Joyce's biographical voice; the historical prototypes in the iconically significant figures of the Palestine problem in the contemporaneous world situation, A Portrait of the Artist signposts yet another critical landscape by creating a Janus face that combines the archetypal, the universal (beneath the Human collective unconscious) and the historical, the particular (the historical realization without). The archetypal symbols and motifs that organize the thematics of the novel call forth a panoramic chart of the collectively paralleling pattern along the course of the world of the awakening of the Palestinian Hero as "an artificer" of human freedom. In the novel, the Anima an in the bird-girl- like image forms a stimulus for metamorphosis which reconciles Stephen's inferior dream world with his superior waking existence as an artist, lit up by this grand and everlasting archetype of the Daedalus, "the Old Artificer". Therefore, Stephen’s unconscious drive toward self-separation (individuation) indirectly relates to his direct conscious protest and rebellion against the imposed tyrannical patterns and laws, and finally to his self-realization and self-definition. Similarly, Gaza breeds an Animus that radicalises and encourages today's audience to revolt and fight off the story of the Israelis – and to find the Palestinians as the real historical Self of the land.