A portrait of the artist as a young man Review
In PAAYM we have the artist-hero,given a mythical name,Dedalus.There is really only one character,Stephen himself, and we see the world through his consciousness, other characters only impinge upon his mind. The girl,E.C., whom Stephen watches on the beach provides him with the epiphany that determines him to be an artist..There is an arrogance to the title,the mythicisation,the ambition:"to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race".But this is accepted by the reader who has been taken through the developing stages of his consciousness.Stephen becomes Daedalus,the master-craftsman who in his daring and ambition partook of the Promethean.
Joyce gives a precise portrait of the artist as a young man,with the tension between his ambition and what,in the novel,he has actually achieved:the novel as dramatic poem.Like the `God of creation',Joyce is quite outside this and`remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his finger-nails.'There is a struggle against forces-family,Church and state-that threaten to stifle his development.Concomitant with the movement outward from Ireland,is the movement downward into myth.On a superficial level Stephen is dissociating himself;on a deeper level he is becoming a creature of myth.This decision-systemization-led onto Ulysses.Stephen Daly became Stephen Dedalus.Joyce was determined to emerge from the groove of previous literature.
He gives the picture of infant consciousness,with tastes,touches and smells all distinct if not yet understood.The narrative is not sequential but a hodgepodge of memories due to Stephen's fever,early schooldays,holidays at home, rendered discontinuously and with intensity.The great injustice inflicted by Father Dolan makes Stephen a victim, who becomes heroic,whose protest against unjust pandying at a Jesuit school is a prelude to larger protests against Church and State.Joyce makes his (and modernism's) 1st employment of interior monologue,the stream-of-consciousness technique,moving through a range of more complex styles,which chronicle the development of his consciousness and culminates in meditations on the aesthetics of Aristotle and Aquinas and a commitment to an art based on`silence,exile and cunning'.The novel becomes a manifesto for the task of Ulysses.
The novel brings out well that his rebellion against Irish life and R/C religion did not stop their deep influence,substituting art for religion;and turning ideas of mass and substantiation into the `epiphany' of literature,everyday life into art:'the spiritual eye seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus'.Passionate intellectual argumentation has remarkable emotional force.He renders the'luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure..the supreme quality of beauty,the clear radiance of the aesthetic image..arrested by its wholeness..fascinated by its harmony..the enchantment of the heart'.That Joyce lived out the conclusion of the novel's `non serviam' vow increases his achievement of the non-juring exile of extreme self sufficiency in his encounter with `the reality of experience'.Because he is dealing with the prurient Victorian world of his adolescence the preoccupation with guilt and fear and growing sexuality play a major part:a sermon on hell,a visit to a prostitute,masturbation.
Joyce's poems are like songs,he had an auditory imagination,he was a singer:Joyce lived in a world of words,words as sounds,divorced that is from meaning,using verbal association.There is the hypnotic use of repetition,chains of association are built up,words of sensory significance deliberately used to work on our subconscious minds.The relationship develops between author and object rather than author and reader.This equates the prose with the experience or replaces the experience with the prose.This makes the work self-conscious,deliberate,stylistically akin to Flaubert.He captures subjective experience through language rather than the actual experience through prose narrative(Cf.Stephen Hero).I prefer this and Dubliners to Ulysses.
A portrait of the artist as a young man Overview
Published in 1916, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man follows the progress of Stephen Dedalus from infancy to early manhood. The richness of the language and Joyce's mastery of literary style as he describes the Dedalus family, young Stephen's education by the Jesuits, his sexual awakening, his intellectual development and his eventual revolt against the religion in which he has been raised have ensured the novel's place as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.
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Customer Reviews
If you don't like this book, you don't like reading. - R. Gifford -
Joyce's prose is the closest thing to a hybrid of narration and poetry that I've experienced. I read this when I was in my twenties and have never fully recovered. Bliss.
Absolutely terrible. - J.G. - New Orleans, USA
First of all, this is not really a stream of consciousness novel. Ulysses is. This is a semi-autobiographical novel detailing the rather uninteresting youth of a turn of the century Irish boy. Perhaps if I had lived at that time this book would be more meaningful, but in 2010 there is nothing controversial about doubting the infallibility of the Catholic church or the existence of God. This question is one of the main themes of the book, as well as a sort of semi-existentialist quest for the boy to define himself as an artist or whatever. Well, the existentialist debate has been better offered by superior authors from Dostoevsky to Camus, and Joyce falls flat here. The other main subject which Joyce attempts to invoke is some of the political divisions in Ireland. He uses a few characters to try and personify the rivaling political factions of the nation at that time. However, this attempt is short-lived, and it also falls flat.
The one gimmick Joyce used which I found mildly interesting was the use of different language as the boy grows older. So the book starts off with some laughable dribble about a "moocow" and a "nicens little boy named baby tuckoo," and ends with Joyce trying to parody the "Hail Mary" (again, the played-out religious themes).
Did I mention how boring this book is? Nothing of interest happens. Terrible book. Avoid at all costs. Read Nabokov instead.
Pure Joyce - Mark Vigore -
No worries. It's not Ulysses. No footnotes needed. Read it the way Nature (assuming Nature were a profane Irish genius with lousy eyesight) intended.
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