James Joyce cannot be described as simply a novelist.

He was a poet before he had even

attempted to write prose. In fact, he composed a poem at the age of 9 that was so incredible his
father mailed it to the Vatican. Calling him a writer simply doesnt do the trick either, its best
to describe him as an artist and Joyce himself made the distinction clear in the title of his first
novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which details Joyces own life from childhood
through young adulthood in a prose style that grows more complex and intelligent as the
character does.
He is also a philosopher, at times outlining his own philosophies and theories through his
characters (mainly, his alter ego Stephen Dedalus) and this is especially so in Portrait. In the
final chapter of the book, Stephen is a student in the first years of college and hes already
gained a reputation for being an aspiring poet. Weve heard him describe his goal to escape the
nets of nationality, language, and religion which are flung at souls to hold them back from
flight. And, in a conversation with the schools dean, we learn that Stephen has been working
on an esthetic theory using ideas from Aristotle and Aquinas. A few pages later, in conversation
with his friend Lynch who jokingly acts disinterested, Stephen outlines in detail his esthetic
philosophy.
Proper vs Improper Art
Joyce first distinguishes between proper and improper art.
The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to
go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic
emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.
The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised
above desire and loathing.
Proper art = static
Improper art = kinetic
Proper art is art in the service of what is properly the function of art and that function is to elicit
a state of esthetic arrest. Arrest = static (from the Greek statikos, causing to stand). You
apprehend a proper piece of art and you can only stand there in sensational (esthetic)
contemplation and enjoyment. Youre in awe, raised above desire and loathing. Whereas a
picture of a pretty girl or even of a plate of delicious food draws you physically to desire it.
Joyce calls this pornographic art and, in this sense, all advertising art is improper art.
Derogatory satire, art with social criticism that causes you to loathe or dislike something: thats
improper art---its didactic, instructing you what to do.
The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not
only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our
flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely
reflex action of the nervous system.
What is art?
We then get into what exactly art is and there is a quote which I think perfectly describes James

Joyce or Stephen Dedalus (or, perhaps, any artist) at this point in his life:
To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try
slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it
brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image
of the beauty we have come to understand---that is art.
Once art and its proper function (esthetic arrest) are understood, the artist crafts an image of
beauty using things like sound, shape, and color which open the gates of the soul.
Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
Beauty
In response to his friends question What is beauty? Stephen (Joyce) gets even deeper.
Thomas Aquinas simple definition (that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases) does
not suffice because, using woman as example, he notes how the many different cultures around
the world admire a different type of female beauty. The popular hypothesis explaining the
phenomenon is that the physical qualities admired by men are in direct connection with the
manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. Stephen dislikes that dreary
hypothesis (It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic) and describes his own:
This hypothesis is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all
people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and
coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible,
visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary
qualities of beauty.
And a few pages later he continues:
The most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases
of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty[Now
quoting Aquinas again] Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony and
radiance.
Looking at each one now:
1. Wholeness: [He points to a basket someone is carrying on their head] In order to see that
basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible
universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn
about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in
time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or
spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained
upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend as one
thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness.
2. Harmony: Then you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as

balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words
the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first
felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple,
divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.
3. Radiance: When you have apprehended that object as one thing and have then analysed it
according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is
logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing.
The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This
supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination.
The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant
wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended
luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its
harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that
cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as
beautiful as Shelleys, called the enchantment of the heart.
Joyce alludes to this kind of esthetic apprehension in Ulysses: Any object intensely regarded
may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods. And Joseph Campbell elaborates
the experience for us in his book Mythic Worlds, Modern Words:
This is a breakthrough. You have gone through the object and felt the transcendence that
manifests through it, the transcendence of which you are yourself a manifestation. Pure object
turns you into pure subject. You are simply the eye, the world eye, regarding beyond desire and
loathing
Forms of Art
Having explained what (proper) art is and how we apprehend beauty, Stephen now goes on to
describe what he sees as the three forms of art, in all of which the image must be set between
the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. The three forms, each
progressing from one to the next, are:
1. the Lyrical form: the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to
himself
2. the Epical form: the artist presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others
3. the Dramatic Form: the artist presents his image in immediate relation to others
He elaborates each one:
The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry
such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who
utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.
The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and
broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of

emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no
longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narrative itself, flowing
round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.
The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each
person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible
esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid
and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself so to speak.
The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and projected from the human
imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist,
like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
The lyrical form seems quite easy to understand from his explanation, its as simple as a poem
written by someone in love. The poet is presenting his image (the poem) in immediate relation
to himself while everybody else reads the poets feelings expressed in lyrics. In the epic, the
artist presents his work in mediate relation to others, I find Ulysses to be a perfect example as
Joyce (through Stephen) is directly involved in the action but the story is presented with a full,
detailed backdrop of the city, its inhabitants and especially the other main characters. One could
perhaps make an argument that, in his three books, Joyce displayed the progress from one form
to the other: the self-centered autobiographical Portrait (lyrical) leading into Ulysses (epical) and
then the intricately crafted dream world of Finnegans Wake (dramatic). But, more likely,
both Portrait and Ulysses should be considered epics and Finnegans Wake the absolute epitome
and farthest extreme of the dramatic form.