Joyce's Metamorphoses: The labyrinth in the novel A portrait of the artist as a young man

Abstract

The novel A portrait of the artist as a young man, written by James Joyce and published in 1916, is one of the marks of prose in the 20th century English language, mainly in the field of Bildungsroman. Following the intellectual development of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus - Joyce's alter ego, the narrative starts with the character as a child, and ends when Stephen reaches the beginning of his maturity, that is, when he discovers his vocation as an artist, or more specifically, as a poet. The present work, therefore, sought to analyze one of the symbols identified in the novel, that of the labyrinth of the inventor Dedalus, and how that mythical figure ends up influencing the very structure of the narrative. It begins with a brief history of the work, to later identify the influence of the Latin poet Ovid - who sang the myth now under discussion in his epic Metamorphoses - on English-speaking modernist writers, limited to approaching, besides Joyce, the poets TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, as a way to contextualize the use of the classic poem in the early 20th century. Finally, it analyzes the extent to which the symbol of the labyrinth can be seen in the novel, making use of a critical apparatus, as in the studies of Ellmann (1989), March (2015), Paris (1992), Parrinder (1984), Levin (1959), among others.