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MY PLACE IN THIS WORLD
THE ROLE OF ART AND THE ARTIST ACCORDING TO JAMES JOYCE
AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
B. A. VARGHESE
COPYRIGHT 2016. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
5,354 WORDS
JUNE 22, 2016
ABSTRACT: Through Joyce’s and Woolf’s works, the nature of art and the role of the arst in
society is a major concern for both writers. In A Portrait of the Arst As a Young Man and To
The Lighthouse, both writers form their ideas of the role of the arst in modern society through
the characters of Stephen Daedalus and Lilly Briscoe respecvely. Their aesthecs are
compared and contrasted to each other as well as examined in how they hold up to the
perspecve of the arst in today’s global society.
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The nature of art and the role of the arst in society are major concerns for both James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The narrave form and structure of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Arst as
a Young Man and Woolf’s To The Lighthouse contribute to the discussion of the role of art and
arst in their modern society through characters like Stephen Daedalus and Lily Briscoe. Both
characters’ arsc aspiraons can be examined closer to understand Joyce’s and Woolf’s own
perspecves on art/arst as well as understand how their perspecves measure up to the
views of today’s society. One queson to ask is whether their aesthecs were dened for their
me period and whether a more complex aesthec is necessary in today’s ever expanding
global community.
Before we can examine Joyce’s and Woolf’s ideas of art and the arst, we must rst
explore the development of the art/arsc concepts through the characters of Stephen and
Lily respecvely. As we progress through Joyce’s novel, we see the growth of Stephen as an
arst who believes that he must be free to create and must be free from constraints in order
to create art. Stephen’s growth is evident from the text in both content and form. In Stephen’s
aesthec theory (“Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance”
(Joyce, 243), he states that there are three stages of literature. First is the lyrical form in which
“the form wherein the arst presents his image in immediate relaon to himself” (245). This
stage is the simplest form displaying the arst’s personal emoon/experience. It is the most
subjecve and almost like the immediate outcry of the soul. Second is the epical form, “the
form wherein [the arst] presents his image in mediate relaon to himself and to others”
(245). This is the next stage and the form is no longer simply personal, but also displays the
arst’s emoon/experience in relaon to others. The arst creates some distance and it is the
midway point between arst and audience. The last and truly the highest form is the dramac
form, “the form wherein [the arst] presents his image in immediate relaon to others” (245).
This form is where the arst’s emoon/experience passes into the narraon completely
(impersonal) and the arst is invisible to others as well as where characters are fully realized
and detailed.
To Stephen (Joyce echoing Gustave Flaubert), “the arst, like the God of creaon,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, rened out of existence,
indierent, paring his ngernails” (246). In order to be a true arst of the highest caliber, one
must be like God who is free from constraints, from limits, and is invisible. A true arst must
be “free to create” and have no constraints. In Paul Sporn’s arcle, “James Joyce: Early
Thoughts on the Subject Maer of Art,” Sporn states that “for Joyce these theories were
convicons which formed a view of man, the universe and society opposed to the
convenonal instuons of church, state and family” (19). The opposion to these types of
instuons, for Stephen, starts as the novel opens. The opening text shows Stephen as a child
freely expressing his innate desire or aracon toward Eileen. Stephen says he's going to
marry Eileen, who is a protestant, and Stephen is scolded for his free expression. His fear
makes him run under the table (an aempt to become invisible). His mother asks him to
apologize and his aunt, Dante, says, “O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes”
(Joyce, 62). Since Stephen is young, inexperienced as an arst, and cannot fully express
himself freely, he turns what Dante says into a sing-song poem. The form is very basic and
lyrical where he takes his fear and punishment and creates poetry. Later in the novel, Stephen
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will begin to feel the pull of his family's problems (which become a constraint on his freedom
to create).
At Clongowes Wood College, Stephen experiences another constraint. A boy quesons
him about his father's social rank (“What is your father?...Is he a magistrate?” (63)) through
which Stephen learns about “class” and how one should act or what one should possess in his
“class”. The boy asks him about kissing his mother and Stephen responds that he does to
which he is laughed at. Stephen retracts and then gives a response that he feels might
conform to what the boys are thinking, but that response is also laughed at. It seems that he
cannot escape these voices and feels confused and trapped. Stephen again cannot express
himself freely since his expressions are contrary or made fun of by the boys in his school.
Near the end of chapter two, Stephen goes to the bank to cash in the prize money he
has won for his essays. He uses his money to buy presents for his family, take them to
restaurants, and make investments for his family’s future. He hopes this would make up for his
family’s poor nancial standing and his father’s poor handling of their nances. Unfortunately,
when the money runs out, “his household returned to its usual way of life…He too returned to
his old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell to pieces” (143). Stephen’s aempts to
get closer to his family and possibly raise their class fails and ulmately he realizes “how
foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against
the sordid de of life…He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach
nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother
and sister” (143). Again, Stephen feels trapped by both family and class. The failure to raise his
family’s nancial standing pushes him to turn to his more erce longings of his heart and he
dives head rst into his lusul passions.
Later, as Stephen gets older, he hears a message from Father Arnall at a retreat. The
message is about the physical and the spiritual nature of the torments in hell. Stephen is
haunted by the sermon and repents of his sinful ways. He then makes his body conform to
resisng dierent sins. He does this to work toward becoming part of the priesthood. Stephen
is at rst aered and intrigued by this noon of becoming a priest, but he feels a great inner
unrest as “[h]e shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that
all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual should assign to him so
clear and nal an oce” (195). He believes priesthood to be a very structured and boring life
for himself; a life of conformity to a loy and lonely oce. “It was a grave and ordered and
passionless life that awaited him, a life without material cares” (197). Stephen feels that
“religion” is another constraint. Conforming to the priesthood would make him outwardly
appear respected, pious, and holy, but he would feel hollow inside. His “desny was to be
elusive of social or religious orders... He was desned to learn his own wisdom apart from
others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world”
(198).
In a discussion with Davin, Stephen reveals his feeling about his country and language.
Davin is simple but is an Irish naonalist much like Stephen’s father, Mr. Casey, and Charles
Stewart Parnell. Davin implores Stephen to “try to be one of us…In heart you are an Irish man
but your pride is too powerful” (235). Stephen believes that Ireland has become a constraint
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by responding “my ancestors threw o their language and took another…They allowed a
handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and
person debts they made? What for?” (235). It is here that Stephen starts to construct his
aesthecs by dening constraints and in turn dening what “free to create” means.
Throughout the novel, Stephen compares himself to his namesake, Dedalus. He longs to y, to
soar, to be free of his prison in order to create something of beauty (Dedalus was a crasman).
“The soul is born…It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets ung at it to hold it back from
ight. You talk to me of naonality, language, religion. I shall try to y by those nets” (235).
Stephen compares his constraints to nets (family, class, language, religion, naonality) that
limit him in his thinking and creaon. God has no constraints or limits and can freely create.
Stephen in turn denes “free to create” as being like God. Only then, when you are free of
your constraints, can you create something eternal and of beauty where the arst is invisible.
In the last chapter of the novel, Stephen, the character, is no longer visible, but we, as readers,
only get an impression of him through his journal entries.
It may seem that Joyce through Stephen is distancing himself from life or aempng
isolaon, or disappearing into his surroundings, and is only concerned with beauty for art
sake. Daniel M. Shea, in “From 'God of the Creaon' to 'Hangman God': Joyce's Reassessment
of Aesthecism,” states that Joyce and Stephen are not just concerned about art for art’s sake
(l'art pour l'art). Both Joyce and Stephen rest their arguments “upon a forceful claim of ‘truth’
as the highest end of drama” (127). Shea states that the problem with art for art’s sake or in
Stephen’s terms, beauty for beauty’s sake, is that “it shapes a religion of art, it ignores the
human being’s role in that religion” (128-9). Joyce and Stephen are aer truth more than
beauty. Sporn states that to Joyce, “beauty depends on truth” (Sporn, 20) and that “Joyce
diminishes the importance of beauty” (20) by “direct[ing] art towards a more vigorous and
specic purpose. For art to be authenc it must express life and interpret it truthfully…Art is
true to itself when it deals with truth” (20). Through Stephen, Joyce shows how an arst must
free himself of restraints in order to nd himself and create art to reveal truth to his society.
Near the end of the novel, Stephen is one who will “go to encounter for the millionth me the
reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his]
race” (Joyce, 280). Sporn suggests that:
[Stephen’s acons] foreshadow Joyce's need to isolate himself from the snares
of what is false in life; but it does not suggest that he abandon wring about social and
religious convenons, only that he oppose them. In seeking to present freely and
truthfully what Joyce calls the eternal laws of humanity…art becomes a serious cricism
of contemporary life. (Sporn, 22)
Joyce concerned himself with how art showed truth even if crical to modern life and the role
of the arst was to get at this truth, this beauty, and reveal it to his society.
In Woolf’s novel, Lily’s arsc aesthecs are not formulated and wrien out like
Stephen’s but must be interpreted from the text. In the beginning of the novel, we see Lily
aempng to paint a portrait of “Mrs. Ramsay reading to James” (42) except that the painng
is abstract (“no one could tell it for a human shape…she had made no aempt at likeness”
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(42)). Lily tries to capture something more about Mrs. Ramsay than what can be captured by
painng her physical form. It seems that Lily is taken with Mrs. Ramsay and her surrounding,
“her impulse to ing herself…at Mrs Ramsay’s knee and say to her…‘I’m in love with you?’ No,
that was not true. ‘I’m in love with this all,’ waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the
children” (17), and wants to capture the essence in her portrait. She tries to freeze a moment
in me, a moment of truth, and preserve her experience with Mrs. Ramsay.
Along with her are other characters in the novel who also try to capture or freeze me.
In chapter 17 of “The Window” secon, Mrs. Ramsay holds a dinner party bringing all of her
family and her guests together. It seems that the dinner starts o on shaky ground. Mr. Tansley
is irritated that he should be bothered for such trie maers as a dinner. Lily is unable to fulll
her womanly obligaons and adhere to Mrs. Ramsay’s prompngs to comfort Mr. Tansley, but
rather pokes fun at him. Mr. Ramsay is preoccupied and furious that Augustus Carmichael asks
for another plate of soup. Minta and Paul have not arrived for dinner. Mrs. Ramsay feels that
“nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the eort of
merging and owing and creang rested on her” (65). So Mrs. Ramsay helps her family and
guests to mingle and when the candles are lit, she brings “the faces on both sides of the
table… nearer…into a party round a table, for the night was now shut o by panes of glass”
(76). At that moment, Mrs. Ramsay uses her social gathering as a canvas to paint her art, social
harmony. Mrs. Ramsay is able to remove the obstacles between her family and guests to bring
them together and allow them to experience a moment of life, a moment of truth that will be
frozen in their memories. Her party evokes emoons and art as it ends with Mr. Ramsay and
Augustus Carmichael recing poetry. But unfortunately, Mrs. Ramsay knows that her aempts
to freeze me is eeng when “she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing
even as she looked, and then…it changed, it shaped itself dierently; it had become, she knew,
giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past” (87).
Another character in the novel also aempts the freezing of a moment in me. Mr.
Ramsay aempts through thought and philosophy. If philosophy’s range can be set down like
an alphabet then Mr. Ramsay has “reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever
reach Q” (28). But then a doubt seeps in whether Mr. Ramsay is able to get to Z and he feels
that even R might be out of his grasp:
But aer Q? What comes next? Aer Q there are a number of leers the last of
which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only
reached once by one man in a generaon. Sll, if he could reach R it would be
something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could
demonstrate... [but] R was beyond him. He would never reach R... He had not
genius...He would never reach R. (28-29)
Mr. Ramsay realizes his work, his aempts to freeze his experiences and his thought, was
eeng. Mr. Ramsay considers heroes and their fame and quesons, “fame lasts how long? [A
hero’s] fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? What,
indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one
kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” (29).
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Both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay fail at their aempts to freeze a moment of me and
acknowledge that their methods are inadequate to preserve their experiences. In “Portrait of
an Arst as a Mature Woman” by Margaret E. Melia, Lily is examined as Woolf’s model for a
great arsc mind. “[Woolf] states that it is [the writer's] business to nd [reality] and collect it
and communicate it to the rest of us” (7). By this denion, we can see how Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay’s aempts fall short. But by the end of the novel, only Lily is able to preserve her
experience and she succeeds, in Woolf’s denion, by using art to collect and communicate
reality. Lily succeeds in freezing a moment of truth. At rst, Lily struggles with the abstract
portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James, but during Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner:
She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had
her work. In a ash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in
the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That’s what I shall do. That’s what
has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a ower
paern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree. (Woolf, 66)
It is through Mrs. Ramsay’s aempt at preservaon of experience using the dinner party that
Lily gains her insight. But Lily does not nish her painng unl years later. It seems that Lily,
like Stephen, needs distance from her environment to create art. Melia states that “Lily's quest
is the hardest of those of the three characters, because she has rejected Mrs. Ramsay's form
of femininity and has been excluded by birth from masculinity” (13). Even from the beginning,
the readers will note that Lily’s appearance, “with her lile Chinese eyes and her puckered-up
face” (Woolf, 15), sets her apart from the family and guests. She is also set apart from Mrs.
Ramsay since Mrs. Ramsay’s impression of her is that “she would never marry…she was an
independent lile creature” (15). During the dinner scene, Lily resists Mrs. Ramsay’s
prompngs to comfort Mr. Tansley, which shows how Lily is distant in regards to her adherence
to the roles of women at the me. Lily, as an arst, has distance in naonality (Chinese eyes)
and has distance in gender (following neither expected gender roles). But Lily struggles with
her portrait because she is sll under the great inuence of Mrs. Ramsay and must acquire
distance from this force to create as an arst.
Aer ten years (and aer Mrs. Ramsay’s death), Lily returns to the Ramsay’s house and
is able to nish her portrait. Lily reects on how Mrs. Ramsay turned the dinner party into a
moment to remember, creang art out of a social gathering. “Mrs Ramsay bringing them
together; Mrs Ramsay saying, ‘Life stand sll here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment
something permanent…In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and
owing…was struck into stability. Life stand sll here” (124). Inspired, Lily paints the abstract
portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James, stang “it was done; it was nished…I have had my vision”
(159). Melia states that “unlike the Ramsays, who had abstract goals (the leer "R" for Mr.
Ramsay and resul happiness for Mrs. Ramsay)…Lily's is quite concrete. She wants to nish an
abstract painng in tangible oils and canvas, and she nishes it and reaches the ‘Reality’ of her
self-knowledge” (14). Lily is able to freeze a moment of me, get at the truth, and reveal it
through her portrait. Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan, in “The Polics of Gender in Virginia Woolf's To the
Lighthouse and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Arst as a Young Man,”states:
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At the end of the novel Lily, led by a sudden creave impulse, nishes her
painng. In this, she is similar to Stephen; she has also given herself an arsc birth, she
has reached an epiphany. Her act of nishing her painng can therefore be seen as a
moment of self-realizaon and a teleological ending of the arsc narrave. (15)
Like Stephen, who felt that in order to create art one must be free of constraints and then
distances himself from family, class, language, religion, naonality, Lily realizes that “distance
had an extraordinary power” (Woolf, 144) and she is able to create art only by distance: of
naonality, of gender, and nally of me.
We can see how through Stephen and Lily, Joyce and Woolf are concerned with how
art revealed truth of life and the role of the arst was to collect the truth and
reveal/communicate it to praise or crique society. Their perspecves on the role of art and
the arst may be truthful and relevant in their me period, where war shook the idealisc
foundaons of government and religion, where their technology emerged as not only a helper
of mankind but also a threat, where the modern era forced a need to express in a new way,
but how does their perspecve hold up in today’s global society? To understand their
aesthecs now, let us make a brief examinaon of today’s technological impact and how it has
changed society, both socially and economically.
Over the last two decades, rapid technology development has changed how we
interact with each other. Today, instantaneous messaging and communicaon have made our
vast world smaller where an individual in London can be an acve friend with someone living
in Hong Kong. Wireless devices have made their way into everyday life in how we learn, in how
we receive and give informaon, in how we interact with our environment, in how we
perceive the world, bringing us closer, not as cizens of a physical country, but as members of
a virtual community/naon where everyone is allowed to have a voice. No longer are the elite
or the intellectuals or those in power only allowed to propagate their ideas and informaon,
but now the masses have a means to contribute in a leveled playing eld. But what does this
do to art and the arst?
The level playing eld created for the masses and the ease of reproducon using
technology threatens the principles of the individualism and uniqueness in art. Takeo
Kuwabara, a Japanese art cric at the University of Kyoto, examines the modern landscape of
Japanese art in his arcle, “Art in Today’s Society.” He believes that “[s]ince 1868, Japan has
been modernized at an accelerated pace; its economy has experienced a prodigious
development following the two world wars, which has created favorable condions for the
growth of a consumer society” (42). Kuwabara states that modern art which was a “unique
object becomes the mulple object through dierent reproducon techniques. And so arsc
value is confused with the number of reproducons, successful arsts being those whose work
has the greatest number of buyers” (40). Advances in the methods of reproducon made it
almost impossible to “disnguish the original work from its copies” (40) giving rise to “the new
art [which] is stripped of its original, it exists completely in its reproducons” (40).
With Japan’s accelerated rate of modernizaon and with mass reproducon
technologies, art types can be examined and disnguished. In the arcle, Kuwabara states that
art can be “pure” (high quality) in which the work of an arst has a specic audience for the
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work produced. Art can also be disnguished as “popular” (lower quality) in which the work is
from a professional arst working with an industrialist for the general public. Kuwabara,
focusing on literature, states that “a characterisc of…popular art is that it is the product of
the collaboraon between an arst…and a business man” (42). In Japan, popular literature
connued to develop as pure literature declined. The decline is evident in “advanced countries
where the consumer society reigns, [and] literature…has become a veritable sector of
industrial acvity” (42). Kuwabara believes that “mass producon of standardized works
brought to our knowledge by the mass media has changed the image which we had of the
work of art which is now nothing more than a consumer product” (40) and that “art is from
now on in the hands of industrialists who cannot allow themselves the slightest nancial risk”
(42). Popular literature, which was arscally poor, was on the rise while pure literature (much
higher quality) was declining. But popular literature’s growth led to its own improvement in
quality:
The great master of [literature] also went to work wring novels desned for the
masses. And this to such an extent that aer World War II the quality of popular
literature noceably improved, to the point that from then on it was dicult to
disnguish it from pure literature. (42-43)
It seemed that technological advances and industrializaon beneted the masses, and that
pure art was being le behind because of its diminishing audience. It also seemed that the
pure arst with his uniqueness and individual truths were being removed through mass
reproducon. But the truth was that the pure arst was able to survive in a newer medium
with the help of the industrialist. His collecon of truth was no longer for his local community
but for a wider audience.
Kuwabara points out that with advanced communicaons and technologies, Japan has
seen an emergence of “marginal” art, a form in which amateur arsts create work for an
uniniated audience. “This is a form…where the creator does not seek so much to take the
spotlight as to play the modest role of symbol, lost as he is in the heart of society” (44).
Marginal art’s goal is similar to Joyce’s goal with his aesthecs. Both have a desire to create a
reality of experience (truth) and “forge in the smithy of [their] soul the uncreated conscience
of [their] race [\community]” (Joyce, 280). But unlike Joyce’s aesthecs, marginal art seeks the
arst to disappear into the community, to disappear into the collecve for which the art was
created. Marginal art seems to be a threat to an arst’s need for individualism and a threat to
his voice, but, according to Kuwabar, is the trend for countries advancing in technology.
Paul Ruen is an independent researcher and advisor to Roerdam University of
Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. In his arcle, “Art, Creavity and the Economy,” Ruen
examines the economic impact on art and the arst. He discusses the rise of “creave
industries” which is similar to Kuwabara’s marginal art but is encompassed in a commercial
system. He believes that art “can contribute to reformulang certain underlying principles
which govern the economy” (3). Ruen states that during prosperous economic periods, art is
sought aer and aorded by many, but not so during periods of economic hardship:
[T]he dominant economic discourse, parcularly among policy makers, tends to
see the arts as an expenditure, a liability, a leak in the economy…Any posive external
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eects of investments in art and culture are simply not taken into consideraon, beyond
some kind of ‘luxury you can aord’. Public spending on art and culture is seen as icing
on the cake, which can be permied in mes of prosperity but not in mes of economic
downturn. The underlying implicaon is that cung down on such useless luxuries…can
only bring posive economic eects. (3)
Ruen states that the belief in cung arts for posive economic eects is a false one. But
measuring the eects of art investment is dicult. It is true that art needs an audience. The
arst seeks an audience even if he creates art for art’s sake, otherwise, art is desned to be,
according to Lily, “hung in the acs…be rolled up and ung under a sofa” (Woolf, 137). Cut-
backs during economic downturn can not only be seen at the governmental and public level,
but is also reected in educaonal systems in their evaluaon of arts and humanies, which
ulmately negates the value of art in society.
Though an extensive examinaon of the emergence of “creave industries” and its
eect as an economical force as well as the impact of art educaon in society’s value of art is
beyond the scope of this paper, it is interesng to note that Harvard president Drew Faust, in a
speech to the Royal Irish Academy at Trinity College, Dublin, sll echoes the ideas behind
Joyce’s and Woolf’s aesthec, that art reveals the truth of life and the role of the arst is to
communicate it to society. She addresses the growing trend of government and educaon
cung down on spending for arts and humanies, arguing that art and art educaon is vital in
a growing global economy. She states that “[t]he intensely compeve global economy has
driven governments, everywhere crical partners to higher educaon, to demand more
immediate, tangible returns on their investments” and that “[t]oo oen such an emphasis on
the short term can mean especially painful cuts for disciplines whose value, though harder to
measure, is no less real” (Faust, 5). She believes that arts and humanies is as important as
science, technology, engineering, math (S.T.E.M subjects). Faust states that:
[We] have a disncve obligaon to nurture and fulll the deep human desire to
understand ourselves and the world we inhabit and inherit, from the smallest
elementary parcle to the sweep of the galaxies-even when there is no praccal
applicaon close in view and even as we rightly accelerate our eorts to harvest new
technologies from knowledge in its most basic form. It is worth remembering that the
most transformavely useful of scienc discoveries oen trace their origins to
research born of sheer curiosity about who we are and how we can fathom the most
intriguing mysteries of the natural world. (6).
Faust bases her argument that what lies beneath all our eorts, our searches, our
technological advances, is our aempts to get at our fundamental truths, to understand our
roles as individuals and as communies within our environment, whether local or global. It is
these same fundamental truths that an arst creates and reveals in his art. Faust echoes the
same concepts that are Joyce’s and Woolf’s perspecves on the role of art and the arst, an
aesthec which is sll true and relevant today.
In Joyce’s novel, Stephen, longs to y, to soar in the air, to be free of his nets in order to
create something of beauty (truth). But the very air that provides Stephen ight also produces
resistance, turbulence, and alters his direcon. Joyce, in the same way, understands that
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though he ees his nets (family, class, language, religion, naonality) in order to create art, the
nets are also responsible for shaping who he is as an arst. Lily also must ee her nets (gender
roles, Mrs. Ramsay’s inuence) but understands that it is only through Mrs. Ramsay’s inuence
(the dinner party) that she is inspired to nish her art. Today, there are newer forces that will
constraint the arst from creang truth: technological advances, globalizaon,
marginalizaon, economic pressures, industrializaon, decline of art educaon and value. But
the arst must also recognize that the new nets he escapes also shapes him as an arst and
shapes his art.
Though Joyce and Woolf’s aesthecs of art and the role of arst seem simple
compared to today’s world made complex through advancements in communicaons and
technology, their ideas and concepts sll resonates within the complexity: art reveals truth of
life, collected and communicated by the arst.
Varghese, My Place in This World - 10
Copyright 2016. All Rights Reserved.
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