ABSTRACT
Joyce's affinity for Flaubert was explicit and strong. In A Portrait of the Artist Joyce presents an alternative language to the weariness and banality of everyday life, but it is a language already in the process of becoming banal itself. The profanity of Joyce's art is the outcome of a curiously unresolved struggle with his Catholic heritage. In A Portrait of the Artist Stephen's childhood humiliations, his perception of hatred around the Christmas table, his sense of the spiritual vacuity of the priests at Clongowes provoke the countervision of art. Much of Ulysses reads like a demystification of early Joycean art and thought. Joyce, the artist, neither escapes nor transcends; he "triumphs" through immersion—the only victory possible to a renegade Catholic and modernist. The Dublin of Ulysses is certainly not invested with the spirit promised by Stephen at the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist.
