A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- by James Joyce
As I prepare the Salon on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I am amazed at how purely pleasurable it is re-reading the book. Once one lets go of the need for linear narrative and a traditional plot, the imagistic world that Joyce evokes is utterly emotionally resonant. His descriptions of young Stephen Dedalus away at school for the first time, alone and reduced, reach out of the precise context of turn of the century Jesuit private school to connect with each of us in that moment of pushing out from the parental shores, then finding ourselves adrift in the unsympathetic world. His description of the highly charged holiday dinner shimmers in front of us- recalling our own long meals of relatives misbehaving and the world as it was presented to a child’s sharp emotional comprehension.
Chester Anderson, in the Editor’s Preface in the Viking Critical Edition, describes the experience of resonance this way:
“The pages of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are, as Stephen Dedalus says of those in his second-hand copy of Horace, “human pages.” They tell the story of the growth of a human soul from early childhood to young manhood- his revolt against his “nice mother” and the mother Church; his attempts to distance through comic formulation his improvident father; his real and phantasmal movements of love toward immaculate virgins and prostitutes; his encounter with sin, injustice and cruelty and hypocrisy and a million other faces of the “reality of experience,”as he goes forth from the Eden of his childhood.
But it is also the story of the growth of the artist trying to “see” his life as “that thing which it is and no other thing”; trying to find the words, the individuating rhythms, the shapes of sentences, the mythy paradigms to give that flowering growth the “wholeness, harmony, and radiance” which writer and then reader rejoice to see and to understand.”
Joyce seeks to use language in a way not seen before- bending it to his purposes (some might say breaking it) to contain all the exquisite and awkward emotions of living. Portrait is his treading new ground- his tentative experimentation before he lets loose completely in Ulysses. Both texts, I submit, can only be truly enjoyed read in good company. This is what the Salon proposes to do.
Continuing Conversations on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man