A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Chapter 5, Part 1 Summary & Analysis

In the time that has passed between chapters, Stephen’s family has become increasingly impoverished. Stephen drinks tea and looks at the pawn tickets indicating the many items the Dedalus family has had to sell to survive. The objects that remain are old and broken, like the clock that is always running fast. Stephen’s mother washes his ears and neck before he goes to class, grumbling about the university’s bad influence on his character. His parents’ bad-tempered words and the screams of a nun in a neighboring insane asylum have ruined Stephen’s mood a little, but the damp autumn smells of the street cheer him up.

Different stretches of his walk to school remind Stephen of different authors: Hauptmann, Newman, Cavalcanti (a friend of Dante’s), and Ibsen. He spends most of his time studying the aesthetics (theories on art and beauty) of Aristotle and Aquinas, but for pleasure he reads Elizabethan poems (rhymed verse from the 16th century). He spends his time searching for insight in old texts, and when he finds it he feels both intense pleasure and complete withdrawal from the world. When some clock tolls eleven, he realizes that he missed his English and French lectures and decides to wander around til his physics lecture at one.

The thought of class makes Stephen bored and restless. He thinks of the face of Cranly, his closest friend, and decides that he looks a bit like a priest. The memory of his bored friend somehow drains all the street signs of meaning, and he feels surrounded by nonsense language. He makes up a nonsense rhyme about ivy, which he dismisses scornfully, but the word ‘ivy’ sets off a lovely chain of associations and memories. He recalls a Latin phrase that means “the orator summarizes, the poet-prophets transform,” and thinks fondly of his old edition of Horace.

Stephen comes across a statue of Thomas Moore, the national poet of Ireland, which he looks at with some contempt because of Moore's sentimentality and his immigration to London. He thinks Moore is a “Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian” – in the language of Irish national stereotypes, a crude-minded peasant masquerading as a true artist. The statue reminds him of his friend Davin, a somewhat simple-minded student from the countryside. Davin is seen at the college as a “fenian,” a radical Irish nationalist devoted to Irish heritage and hostile to European influences.

Stephen recalls a story Davin once told him. One October night, Davin was walking home to his village through the countryside. The walk was long and lonely, so he knocked on the door of a strange house to ask for a glass of water. A woman in her nightgown invited him to stay the night, but he couldn’t bring himself to come in. As Stephen remembers this story, a flowergirl stops him and begs him to buy some of her wares, but after a moment he begins to find her revolting. He walks by a monument to Wolfe Tone, an Irish revolutionary hero, and remembers its noisy construction with aversion. The smell of wet trees and earth seems to Stephen to be the soul of the city.

Stephen walks to his physics classroom, where he finds the dean of studies struggling to light a fire. The man seems pathetic to Stephen – old, servile, and withered, but not at all enlightened. The dean stands up from his task and questions Stephen about his definition of beauty. Stephen quotes Aquinas, who says that the beautiful is that which pleases and that which is desired, and emphasizes that he only gives credence to ideas that are useful to him. The conversation fizzles out a little. Stephen continues thinking with pity of the dean’s cold and thankless life. They exchange a few vague pronouncements about similarities between truth and light; Stephen’s condescension is palpable. The smell of the candles and the sound of the dean’s voice mingles in Stephen’s mind with the meaning of the words.

They continue their conversation, which trips awkwardly over linguistic confusions and distinctions. Stephen uses the word ‘tundish,’ an Irish word for ‘funnel’ that the English priest doesn’t recognize, and Stephen thinks with irritation that they are speaking a language that belongs to the priest but not entirely to Stephen: that it is a language from which he is forever alienated. To conclude, the dean advises Stephen to do what he must in order to graduate.

Soon the physics professor comes in and takes attendance, which finds Cranly absent. The lecture begins and Stephen dutifully copies down complex and puzzling formulas. Meanwhile, a student named Moynihan makes crude and irritating jokes in Stephen’s ear. Stephen has a brief vision of his professors as a stampede of variously shaped animals. The professor drones on gravely, and class soon ends.

Next to the classroom door, a student named McCann sits at a table collecting signatures for Czar Nicholas II’s petition for universal peace. Cranly has been waiting outside, and he has already contributed his signature. Stephen thinks the Czar looks like an insane Christ. The friends complain to each other about Moynihan, but Cranly’s thuggish manner of speech depresses Stephen. McCann notices Stephen and pressures him to sign the petition, but Stephen proudly refuses. McCann accuses him of callousness and snobbery, but Stephen laughs him off. A student named Temple, an awkward aspiring intellectual who inspires everyone’s collective contempt, takes Stephen’s side. He follows the friends outside, where a larger group of friends is loitering.

It turns out that everyone has signed the petition except Stephen. Davin asks whether Stephen considers himself an Irishman; Stephen explains that he does not want to be bound by “nationality, language, religion,” but Davin does not understand.

When the other boys begin to play a game, Stephen and a student named Lynch walk away, talking. Stephen tells Lynch his ideas about pity and terror: pity, he says, connects the observer with the person suffering, and terror connects the observer with the root of suffering. He goes on to say that real art is static, because it raises the mind above human passions, and bad art is kinetic, because it plunges the mind into passion. The passions, he argues, are not aesthetic, because they are merely physical, like reflexes. Real art, in contrast, inspires not passions but “an ideal pity or an ideal terror.” Lynch mocks these ideas affectionately.

Stephen pays little attention to Lynch and continues his dry disquisition. Art, he says, is drawn out from the sensory prison of the human body. The beautiful and the true both create a sort of exalted mental paralysis; beauty is a particular combination of the sensible (that which can be perceived by the senses), and truth is a particular combination of the intelligible (that which can be understood). To understand beauty, one must understand the structure of the imagination.

Lynch, unsatisfied by these high-minded definitions, persists in asking about the nature of beauty. Stephen sighs inwardly and gives an example. Why do we find women beautiful, he asks? One answer holds that we are subconsciously attracted to their reproductive capacities, because we want to survive as a species. Stephen finds this answer depressing. He favors another theory, which holds that all beautiful entities share some universal aspects of beauty.

They run into a plump student named Donovan and talk briefly with him about exam results and dinner; Stephen quietly mocks his mundane interests. They resume their conversation after he walks away. Stephen refers again to Aquinas, who believes that the three components of beauty are wholeness, harmony, and radiance. To see a basket, he says, you have to separate the basket from the rest of the world and understand it in isolation; then you must consider its structure; then you can see its radiance – the universal qualities of its beauty, as well as that which makes it unique. Stephen thinks with self-satisfaction that his words have cast an enchantment over his listener.

Next, Stephen divides art into three forms: the lyric, which is centered on the artist; the epic, which is centered somewhere between the artist and the external world; and the dramatic, which is centered so completely on the external world (or rather its image) that the artist disappears behind the artwork. He mentions some aesthetic questions he likes to ask himself, related to the rules he has set out. “Can excrement or a child or a louse be a work of art?” Lynch thinks that these ideas are out of place on a miserable rainy afternoon, in a muddled and violent country.

Lynch sees E____ C____ standing on the steps of the Irish academy. She had been flirting with a priest last time Stephen saw her, so he looks at her with spite. Other students talk dully about medical salaries in different parts of the country. Stephen looks at the girl again and wonders whether her life is beautiful, unconscious, and simple.