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io8 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 
beautiful seabird'; later, while he watches the swallows, to the original
symbolic meaning are added those of loneliness and departure. But it is mechanical
criticism to link these images with every bird or suggestion of a bird mentioned
— the eye-pulling eagles, the football ' like a heavy bird', the birdlike
name and face of Heron. The eagles are symbolic agents of divine punishment
but in a completely different frame of reference; the ' heavy bird' is a
simple visual image; and the bird-face is both a visual and psychological
image for Heron's appearance and manner, as the ' hooded reptile' is for
Lynch's. Swallows, hawks, seabirds, eagles and herons are all birds, but
connotatively and symbolically they have very little in common.5' 
 Too much criticism, not only of Joyce, seems to work on the assumption that
it does an author credit to show that whenever he uses a given word or image
it is always within a consistent symbolic or archetypal scheme, and critics
have worked out the most tortuous explanations in order to foist such schemes
on various works of art. Fortunately the art of the writer is a much more
subtle business, able to use words ' symbolizing' physical objects with or
without figurative significance, and able to charge them with a wide range
of such significances as and when these are relevant to his purposes. What
Joyce is creating is not a symbolic design but a Portrait 
— an ' esthetic image' in a verbal medium — and the quidditas
of the image is not contained in a symbol or a group of symbols but in the
total verbal construct. Yet since words are both sensible and intelligible,
the image they form is apprehended by the imagination and comprehended by
the intellect, and recognized as a creation of the human imagination and
intellect out of ' the daily bread of experience'. Experience has been transmuted
into ' the radiant body of everliving life'. The artist-priest has apprehended
and understood in life more than the layman and has embodied this in words
so that the reader can partially enter this vision of truth and beauty, and
experience ' the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure'. 
 Words, then, in all their uses and all their interrelationships, create
the claritas of the Portrait, the claritas of an image of the young Stephen
Dedalus as he was and as in the mind of the mature artist he is seen to have
been: ' So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit
here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be' (U 183/249).
The mature artist could not exclude (nor had any desire to exclude) his understanding
of the young man's occasional foolishness, fanaticism, and mistakes, and
his knowledge that it was as Icarus, not Daedalus, that Stephen flew from
Dublin, yet, on the other hand, he did not pretend that this young man was
an object of scorn, a deluded aesthete. As Stephen says in Ulysses, ' A man
of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals
of discovery' (U 179/243). Indeed the whole concept of his vocation as it
is first revealed to him is of a call, ' To live, to err, to fall, to triumph,
to recreate life out of life!' (P 176), and in the last conversation with
Cranly he again recognizes that the willingness to make a mistake is 
 "Joyce's distrust of systematic symbolism is suggested by his attitude towards
psychoanalysis: ' Joyce brushed it aside as absurd, saying its symbolism
was mechanical, a house being a womb, a fire a phallus' (Ellman-JJ, 393).