The contentious political and moral debate of the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man highlights an essential obstacle for Stephen Dedalus' artistic mind. Ireland imposes a series of oppressive binaries “namely in the form of religion and nationalism” from which it can only escape through the ambiguity of language and its developing aesthetic theory. Its progression towards continuous systems on tracks also functions as Joyce's implicit instruction on how to read the novel. In a work of art so consumed by its own internal order, the author recognizes the textual value of a structural analysis, but only for the ideological content of the work. To absorb the novel's "tragic emotion," the reader must split the emotional binary of pity and terror and maintain a "face that looks in two directions" (176). In other words, the reader cannot process the emotion of the novel in schematic form, as he can, for example, when connecting the ends and beginnings of chapters or the motif of the word "ivory." From this continuum follow Stephen's ideas about stasis and luminosity through which, presumably, we should regard the Portrait as a work of beauty. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. However, Joyce complicates his two-faced theory with Stephen's assertion that the simplest art form is "the lyrical form, the form in which the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself" (184) The next form, the epic, is simply "the image of the artist in mediated relationship with himself and with others" (184). younger self “both self-interrogation and mediated surveillance of the self with others” and thus an apparent aesthetic failure for Joyce, then, is the elevation of his literary adolescence beyond lyrical and epic autobiography and towards the. dramatic, in which the "artist's personality" finally refines itself until it disappears from existence" (185). He can only achieve this by applying the novel's concept of rhythm to the biographical fusion of Joyce and Stephen's "initial solipsistic, monochromatic deterrent to an imaginative dramatic aesthetic" seen through the kaleidoscopic lens of exile. When a defiant schoolmate asks Stephen whether or not he kisses his mother goodnight, Stephen first answers yes and, when his peers tease him, retracts and is once again met with derision. For him there is no way out, and the first lesson in impossible logic is imprinted on him: "What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and Wells was still laughing" (10). To escape laughter or, in other words, to claim his own voice and not listen to those of others, Stephen must find a third way, a triangulation that opens up a multiplicity of non-exclusive answers. Language is a powerful signifier in Irish culture, as evidenced by both the content and form of Christmas dinner. Dante opens the discussion with "identity" logic, arguing that a priest must be a singular entity that relates to a Manichean morality: "A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong" ( 25 ). Joyce repeatedly emphasizes the table's attention to the power of the word in the various rebuttals. Uncle Charles pleads "Not another word now" and Dante returns with "? Nice language for any Catholic to use!" (25) Further attempts at conciliation "No one says a word against them" are met with Dante's return to oral interaction: "IHave the bishops and priests of Ireland spoken? and we must obey them" (25). Dante, addressing Mrs. Dedalus with "You listen", reaffirms the importance of language as a vehicle of memory and morality: "Oh, he will remember all this when he grows up", said Dante with warmth, the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home” (27).Evidently Stephen does, but already at an early age he discovered a defense against accepting the binary morality of priests. Joyce first establishes that Stephen he is a poetic mind, capable of finding beauty in the ordinary use of language. The "author" of the beginning of the second episode of the novel is ambiguous, since the language is in tune with his own poetics (and therefore, perhaps, with Stephen's voice) but also with the general narration: "The large courtyards were teeming with boys. Everyone was shouting and the prefects encouraged them with loud shouts. The evening air was pale and cold and after every charge and splash of the footballers the greasy leather ball flew like a heavy bird through the gray light of its line, out of sight of its prefect, out of reach of rude feet, pretending to run now and then." (4) Structurally, many of the touches here are Joyce's work. Stephen's terror at the end of the first episode is remedied in the claustrophobic refuge under the table, and here the agoraphobia of the "large playgrounds game" juxtaposes his ongoing fear. Just as Joyce is clearly instructed to contrast closed with open and domestic with recreational, he also rhymes the word "cries" with Stephen's poem from the end of the first episode ("Pull out his eye / Apologize " [4]). But the internal tension of the words here shows a developing awareness and proficiency in the language game, and should be read as Stephen's. Instead of the simple "abba" rhyme scheme of the "apologise" poem , the language here fractures in a more sophisticated way. The "f"/"b" sound of "foot-ballers" is inverted by the sequential pairing of "orb" and "flew", but not before "fat leather", inserted between them, finds its alliterative match at the end say the phrase with "gray light". The play continues with the "f" and "r" sounds of the next sentence, which begin with "fringe" and find more inversion with "rude feet" and "pretending to run." Stephen creates a phonic chiasm whose crisscrossing lines confuse the track; the Manichean world of black and white blurs as Stephen extends his tonal range into new harmonious and discordant octaves. When motifs develop throughout the novel and not just in one passage, however, we must concede them to Joyce's structural control. Stephen's later prediction that "There would be a gray and cloudy light upon the yard" (20) and his final aesthetic triumph of "A day of sea-dappled clouds" reconfigure his growing sensitivity to his "periodic prose" interior under Joyce's attention to periodicity, the rhythmic pattern of the novel (143). The play on words has always been a weapon of play, a double-edged sword that cuts through the ignorance of a monochrome world. Joyce wants his reader to combine an appreciation of both narratological and linguistic structures. When Stephen notes that “belt also served to give a belt to another,” that the word functions both as a tool for self-help and as a violent action toward others, we must remember this as Stephen experiments with other binaries (5). The printed names of "cold and hot" on the school toilet taps seem "strange" to him (7). That water, the most miscible of substances, should be defined under only two temperatures contradicts Stephen's own recognition of the degree scale: "He felt cold and then a little hot" (7). At this point in the narrative, this information is just that, concrete examples whereintellectual content surpasses any emotional connection we may feel with “hot” and “cold.” In his late adolescence, Stephen explores the same hot/cold binary in a distant, more intimate framework. When the dean of his university asks Stephen if fire is good, the student's response explains why he is actually a student and not a priest: "Insofar as it satisfies the animal desire for heat, fire is good. In hell, though , it is bad” (159). The narrow religious vision of fire receives a blow here, and the reader feels something in Stephenal's response beyond a simple philosophical change. The next paragraph adds the intellectual fuel of Joyce's structural mastery to Stephen's impassioned voice: "How Ignatius [the headmaster] was lame but no spark of Ignatius' enthusiasm burned in his eyes. Even the legendary craft of the fellowship, a craft subtler and more secret than his fabulous books of secret subtle wisdom, had not inflamed his soul with the energy of the apostolate" (160). The repetition of the fire images "did not burn no spark" and "set his soul on fire" still uses indirect style as a means of extending the analytical and emotional reach of the words. The reader is able to "face two paths." Because the prose is a fusion of Joyce and Stephen, the novel maintains a vocal rhythm that coincides with Stephen's theory of the aesthetic appreciation of an object: "you learn it as a balanced part against a part within its limits." words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension” (183). time that is not it" (183). However, as we see from the progression of fire images, much is lost in the appreciation of the singular over the total. A portrait of the artist as a young man, then, with its invitation to the reader to recognize his intrinsic artistic self-production, is an integral part of two larger works: Ulysses and the life of Joyce. Although Joyce perhaps did not know that he would later write Ulysses, he probably knew that he would keep Stephen Dedalus as a recurring character in some later works, as he often distributed his characters across several narratives (especially in Dubliners). In this sense of imitation of Ulysses (especially the first three episodes with Stephen), Portrait achieves Stephen's first definition of rhythm, the "relationship of part to part in any aesthetic whole" (177). The portrait's episodic structure alone satisfies Stephen's second definition, the relation "of an aesthetic whole to its part" (177). Viewing the whole of Ulysses as the ocean and the Portrait as the stream, Portrait finalizes Stephen's definition of rhythm: the relation "of any part to the aesthetic whole of which it is a part" (177). The autobiography of Portrait rises beyond the lyric because it takes on the polyphony of Ulysses, and the shining splendor of the "fading coal" of the shorter novel retains the fireplace heat of the epic. This may seem like specious reasoning; by this logic, anything written now (like this article) has the potential to be a greater achievement by virtue of its place within a future work. A safer place to look for a reservoir is in Joyce's life after leaving Dublin. The word polyphony has become a literary catchphrase deriving from its etymological roots of "many voices". Gary Morson explains in Narrative Freedom: "As Bahktin coined the term, a polyphonic novel is one in which a special relationship is established between author and, 1994. 91.