One tiny detail that has consistently been popping up in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a young man is Stephen's heightened sense of smell. It sounds rather odd, but it's quite interesting to explore.
We can trace Stephen's affinity for smell to the beginning of the novel, on page one. To baby Stephen, the oil sheet smelled 'queer', and his mother 'had a nicer smell than his father'. Dante's slippers had a "lovely warm smell", while the chapel had a "cold night smell"- not like the smell of "old peasants who knelt at the back", but rather a "holy smell".
We can see that from a very young age, Stephen is associating places and people with a certain smell. I think, in a way, we can see Joyce reflected through Stephen's olfactory experiences.
We all subconsciously smell things- the smell of someone's house, or the smell of the air after rain. Although we notice these, we often don't dwell on these things too much. Joyce, however, places a certain emphasis on telling the reader what Stephen's nose is experiencing. The words 'vapour', 'odour' and 'smell' appear in the book over seventy times. Each time he mentions a smell, there is often an emotion paired with it- understandably so, since smell is strongly connected to emotional response.
For example, in chapter one, Stephen's old school has a "weak, sour smell". In Father Arnall's sermon, he depicts Hell as filled with the stench of rotting bodies- something Stephen takes to heart and recoils strongly at. I think these smells are one of the ways that Joyce is guiding, or even controlling Stephen's story. Joyce uses smells to tilt Stephen's emotions one way or another to certain things, and subsequently is building his unique character.
Another certain passage where I think we get a little bit of Joyce's own opinion is when the rumor was spread at school that the boys were caught drinking the scared wine. The wine on the rector's breath makes Stephen feel sickly, as Joyce notes several times. Wine is not a traditionally bad smell, like stinky socks might be, but Joyce chooses to make Stephen dislike the smell. I might be stretching this, but the fact that the sacred altar wine offends Stephen's nostrils might say something about Joyce's own attitude towards the church.
