The transit from a Bildungsroman novel to a Künstlerroman one
It is difficult to define with a simple term the James Joyce´s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While some scholars as Parrinder (72) express their nature as a formation, personal development or coming-of-age novel and typify it as a Bildungsroman novel; other as Levin (47) classify it in the Künstlerroman genre , and others highlight its biographical nature or, even more specifically, denominate it a pseudo-autobiography.
Under this theoretical discussion between those who prefer framing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in one or another group is the relevant question: What is the more substantial part of the novel, the mental and personal growth of Stephen or the appearance of the Stephen Artist?
Despite the limitations that is always trying to answer in just one sentence a complex question (and that the artistic personality can not arrive without the personal growth), little by little the nature of the artist monopolizes Stephen and in this sense may be affirmed that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a Bildungsroman novel that evolves in a Künstlerroman one.
The term Bildungsroman is used to refer to those novels that concentrate on the psychological, moral or social development of a central character. It works as Bildungsroman has become a kind of umbrella term for a novel of formation, a novel of education, or a coming of age story. This genre was introduced in 1820’s by the German philologist Karl Morgenstern, spreading its uses when it was applied by Wilhelm Dilthey who considered that the first novel that initiated the genre was the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, published in 1795.
The Künstlerroman novels deal specifically with the growth of an artist from childhood to maturity and the recognition of his/her artistic destiny. Thus the Künstlerroman can be seen as an “extension” of the more traditional Bildungsroman.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents the Bildungsroman characteristics, especially in the first chapters, in which the novel revolves around a clear protagonist, focusing in tracking the personal growth of Stephen Dedalus until when he builds his own self-awareness and becomes owner of his own destiny. In this process of coming-of-age, formal education plays an important role but even more important are his religious, social and sexual experiences in his personal growing.
But from a point, when Stephen realises that his religious vocation has been replaced by something else in the fourth chapter, the text starts to be more concerned of the appearance of the Stephen artist. As the narrative progresses, Bildungsroman genre starts to weaken and is relieved by the Künstlerroman, focusing in aspects as the commitment of the artist, or his isolation from society.
In this way we could also describe this novel as the narration of a religious vocation transformed into an artistic vocation, the story of a lost faith, of abandoned beliefs, of a child who wants to believe in the God that adults show him, but when he becomes man, he will forever deny that will, to transpose all his faith into another very different divinity, that of art.
