Joyce, The Artist Looked by The Words

Abstract

In A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce assumes the task of making a name, while confesses the strangeness in front of the body and shows the early awareness of the language. It is interesting to show how, in the face of this novel, Umberto Eco insists on the scholastic dress, or the transverse medieval mentality in Joyce's work, concluding that the ironic “portrait of the adolescent tomist”, does not coincide with Joyce’s Ulysses, but that it is the portrait of a “cultural situation” recognized by the Irish writer and endowed with objectivity (Eco, 2000, p. 58). On the other hand, Jacques Lacan (2013) privileges in this novel, made with children's memories, the function that the letter and the body fulfill there. The adolescent artist drops the body, while slips in a cascade of letters and words that seem to look you in the face. This is how the young artist of the fall and the letter emerges, with the name of martyr-inventor, Christian-pagan, saint homme-sinthome, augur and labyrinth maker: Stephen Dedalus.