A Phenomenological Reading of Joycian Narrative:Iserian Gestalt and Virtual Dimension in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The present study seeks to demonstrate a phenomenological analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in terms of Wolfgang Iser’s conception of gestalt and virtual dimension. Having renounced any objective reality external to the text, Iser argued that there was a dynamic interaction between the correlatives of a text. The ensuing dialectic and indeterminate product of this interaction was labelled virtual dimension by Iser. In the phenomenological approach, it is postulated that the act of reading is an ongoing process of dynamic anticipation and retrospection supplemented by the act of picturing which culminates in the gestalt of the text which, in turn, is the presumed consistency of the text imposed by the reader upon it. Furthermore, Iser has identified two types of literary texts: artistic and aesthetic. While the artistic text is the original creation of the author, the latter is a point at which the text and the realization of the reader converge. Likewise, Joyce depicts his protagonist’s intellectual awakening through a range of epiphanies resultant of his uninterrupted dilemmas. Joyce’s critical treatment of the core tenets and premises of the mainstream realism and his employment of modernist techniques including interior monologue and free indirect speech, in order to penetrate Stephen’s consciousness, is in close affinity to Iser’s conception of reading as an interactive procedure. Joycian ecriture thus provides several instances of gaps to the active reader in order to produce unsettled interpretations.