Definition
The portrait-of-the-artist novel is a species of literature that has been popular since the late 18th century. A major theme of such fiction is the idea of the artist as a split self, one who is both a human being and, in the words of the psychologist Carl Jung, "one who allows art to idealize its purpose through him . . . who carries the unconscious, psychic life of mankind." Pulled in two directions, the artist may respond either by a passionate commitment to the experience of life, converting the experience into art, or by insulating himself from life, becoming a "priest of art."
The artist/hero theme is rooted in, and a central conception of, Romanticism. The Romantics created two types of artist/hero, the "sensitive plant" and the Byronic hero. The first type is the ineffectual dreamer, too refined for the tawdry reality of ordinary life; the second type is the passionate rebel, mocking both God and man. Goethe's artist-heroes include both types, the sensitive Werther and the defiant Faust.Charles Dickens departs from this tradition in David Copperfield (1849–50), presenting his novelist/hero as an unexceptional figure, a transparent window through which we view the novel's other, very colorful characters. In the stories of Henry James, such as "The Jolly Corner," the artist is rendered as a detached observer who withdraws from life in order to capture it in the lens of his art. The danger of such withdrawal is the theme of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1910), in which elemental forces long suppressed by the artist's self-discipline erupt and bring about his death.The 20th century's most significant example of the genre is James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), whose flawed hero, Stephen Dedalus, is as much pretender as artist until he encounters the warmth and humanity of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922). Nevertheless, Stephen's creed, formulated as the determination to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"—to recreate one's culture so that its moral essence will be made clear—stands as the paradigmatic statement of the function of the artist in the 20th century.
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