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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
Nice story with some very poetic or vivid moments (the end of chapter 2 especially hit me like a ton of bricks) but I can't see myself really reading Ulysses if this is the default style.
It was kind of slow to get through, which has its benefits but at times it felt drawn out or verbose for its sake and not because it developed its themes of characters or, well, anything. I freely admit there's certain passages or reference I won't get due to my lack of understanding Irish history, not to mention Catholic history.
Not to mention the times it was (purposefully?) unclear whether we were in Stephen's imagination or memory vs. what was occurring in reality at the present. In some ways I like this style of telling a story or portraying a person but I'm not a fan of the way Joyce frames these sections nor the fact that they often make me feel like he skipped over something important that should have been there earlier in the book - the story is vignettes, like a novel made out of short stories that strongly connect but lack a true through line. The irony here is that there is a through line, due to the semi-autobiographical nature of the book, but Joyce won't give it to you neatly. I'm sure scholars have figured out why Joyce included the specific sections he did and omitted everything else, but I myself am not smart enough to get it.
Then there's Stephen Daedelus' thesis on what esthetic beauty is. At one point he mentions a beautiful work of art should have it so there's the same emotional distance between the artist as there is to the viewer, and the artist should just be "behind" the work so-to-speak. Why, then, did he publish a novel about his life? Does he consider this a beautiful work? If so, did he change his mind as to what makes something beautiful? In my opinion, you can't write your life, change the names of people, and consider the emotional gravity to have been shifted away from yourself far enough to be close enough to us, the consumers of the artwork. It just isn't possible. I wouldn't doubt that he was aware of this irony and published it anyway. At the end, he and Cranly talk briefly about how people are hypocrites, and that is something to simply accept about human nature. Perhaps he was just accepting of that.
I liked reading it despite it taking a while for its size, but I probably won't read it again.
It was kind of slow to get through, which has its benefits but at times it felt drawn out or verbose for its sake and not because it developed its themes of characters or, well, anything. I freely admit there's certain passages or reference I won't get due to my lack of understanding Irish history, not to mention Catholic history.
Not to mention the times it was (purposefully?) unclear whether we were in Stephen's imagination or memory vs. what was occurring in reality at the present. In some ways I like this style of telling a story or portraying a person but I'm not a fan of the way Joyce frames these sections nor the fact that they often make me feel like he skipped over something important that should have been there earlier in the book - the story is vignettes, like a novel made out of short stories that strongly connect but lack a true through line. The irony here is that there is a through line, due to the semi-autobiographical nature of the book, but Joyce won't give it to you neatly. I'm sure scholars have figured out why Joyce included the specific sections he did and omitted everything else, but I myself am not smart enough to get it.
Then there's Stephen Daedelus' thesis on what esthetic beauty is. At one point he mentions a beautiful work of art should have it so there's the same emotional distance between the artist as there is to the viewer, and the artist should just be "behind" the work so-to-speak. Why, then, did he publish a novel about his life? Does he consider this a beautiful work? If so, did he change his mind as to what makes something beautiful? In my opinion, you can't write your life, change the names of people, and consider the emotional gravity to have been shifted away from yourself far enough to be close enough to us, the consumers of the artwork. It just isn't possible. I wouldn't doubt that he was aware of this irony and published it anyway. At the end, he and Cranly talk briefly about how people are hypocrites, and that is something to simply accept about human nature. Perhaps he was just accepting of that.
I liked reading it despite it taking a while for its size, but I probably won't read it again.
The book is somewhat episodic in feel, depicting Stephen at a few different stages of childhood and early adulthood. As he himself notes late in the novel, he is basically different people at these different stages of his life. The novel is similarly disjointed in style and tone, intentionally I think.
In the early stages focused on Stephen’s childhood, I really enjoyed Joyce’s evocative descriptions of Stephen’s home and school. Here, we get memorable and straightforwardly depicted scenes like the Christmas dinner fight about Catholicism and Irish nationalism.
In the middle stages, Stephen goes through crises of sexuality and faith. I enjoyed this part the least. It is dominated by a lengthy section of religious sermons that I found as dull a reading experience as any description of whales in Moby-Dick.
In the latter stages, we see young adult Stephen moving toward his artistic liberation rooted in a denial of family, nationality, and religion.
Throughout the novel, we get observations from Joyce that are worth underlining, savoring, and re-reading — from the famous “non serviam” to Stephen’s musings on language as both descriptor and transformer of reality, the gulf between ideal forms and realities of things, the definitions of art and beauty, etc. The book is clearly the work of a remarkably learned and subtle mind, and the meta nature of the story adds another layer of fascination to it all.
In the early stages focused on Stephen’s childhood, I really enjoyed Joyce’s evocative descriptions of Stephen’s home and school. Here, we get memorable and straightforwardly depicted scenes like the Christmas dinner fight about Catholicism and Irish nationalism.
In the middle stages, Stephen goes through crises of sexuality and faith. I enjoyed this part the least. It is dominated by a lengthy section of religious sermons that I found as dull a reading experience as any description of whales in Moby-Dick.
In the latter stages, we see young adult Stephen moving toward his artistic liberation rooted in a denial of family, nationality, and religion.
Throughout the novel, we get observations from Joyce that are worth underlining, savoring, and re-reading — from the famous “non serviam” to Stephen’s musings on language as both descriptor and transformer of reality, the gulf between ideal forms and realities of things, the definitions of art and beauty, etc. The book is clearly the work of a remarkably learned and subtle mind, and the meta nature of the story adds another layer of fascination to it all.
“The soul is born--[...]--first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion, I shall try to fly by those nets--”
I've always felt a little inadequate about having not read Joyce, a brief unsuccessful flirtation with Ulysses notwithstanding. So I started to remedy that early this year by biting off Dubliners, which was a nice portal into his prose, and now taking on Portrait.
There was a lot about the book I related to from when I was a younger man: the sense of placelessness on the grounds of a grade school, the powerful sense of dissonance between the moral lessons I was taught and my lived reality, and maybe more than anything else, those wonderful, terrible moments when you can FEEL your possible lives diverging in a decisive moment.
A lot about the book I could not relate to. Reading those extended rants from the priests about the moral and material nature of hell made for a strange and atonal beach read.
And I don't know whether college-educated people then were just so much more educated than students today, but Stephen Dedalus' monologues about truth, beauty, and the nature of art just sound so impossibly pretentious to the modern ear. I suppose his contemporaries in the book were just chewing on figs and egging him on too, but one begins to lose sympathy for him after a while, even after highlighting his passages.
"Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."
Right.
Well, he is an artist after all. And a young man. I guess I can forgive him that.
There was a lot about the book I related to from when I was a younger man: the sense of placelessness on the grounds of a grade school, the powerful sense of dissonance between the moral lessons I was taught and my lived reality, and maybe more than anything else, those wonderful, terrible moments when you can FEEL your possible lives diverging in a decisive moment.
A lot about the book I could not relate to. Reading those extended rants from the priests about the moral and material nature of hell made for a strange and atonal beach read.
And I don't know whether college-educated people then were just so much more educated than students today, but Stephen Dedalus' monologues about truth, beauty, and the nature of art just sound so impossibly pretentious to the modern ear. I suppose his contemporaries in the book were just chewing on figs and egging him on too, but one begins to lose sympathy for him after a while, even after highlighting his passages.
"Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."
Right.
Well, he is an artist after all. And a young man. I guess I can forgive him that.
Obviously a great writer but so dull. Joyce isn’t for me.
Definitivamente me reconcilio con Joyce. En esta ocasión, un poco al estilo de Dublineses, el autor nos acerca con maestría a una sociedad que conoce bien y nos retrata a sus personajes de manera profunda. Esta suerte de autobiografía, densa pero interesante nos lleva a terrenos hoy bastante denostados, como el sentimiento religioso que el autor plantea desde un profundo conocimiento personal.
“In the particular is contained the universal.”
Thus quoth James Joyce, and this principle is all too obviously the guiding light of his literary ethic. While I appreciate the sentiment and mainly agree with it, the cracks are obvious with the increase of time and distance. Joyce remains so vague about his circumstances on the majority that it is hard to follow the train of any thought behind Dedalus's emotional responses.
A Portrait is an uncomfortably intimate book. It's revolutionary in its style and in its willingness to focus almost entirely on embarrassingly personal reflections and subconscious urges, upon the deep desire for religious moorings and the rebellion of the intellect against all outside forces. In it, Stephen Dedalus recounts the earliest memories of his childhood and moves smoothly from scene to scene throughout adolescence. He is a small boy with childish thoughts in grammar school, a youth having his first sexual longings, a boy with an old soul hanging out with his down-and-out father and his party pals. He is eagerly groomed Jesuit priest-in-the-making who rebels against his moral instincts in favor of the intellectual freedoms that come with an authority-free lifestyle. In every stage of life he remains aloof, thoughtful, indignant, brooding, witty and morose.
Joyce and Dedalus fall in the same category as Hermann Hess and Harry Haller for me. Characters and authors alike are so introspective and solipsistic that they are self-defeating. They are both super relatable for any overthinking intellectual or pseudo-intellectual while also being disengaging in their total self-obsession. When I read this type of book, I suddenly feel super self-conscious about how my inner thoughts would appear to anyone else. It helps me to take myself a little less seriously.
Another thing I have never loved is the idea that dark, brooding intellectualism is a sign of great genius or artistic integrity. Similar to the Hemmingway-Fitzgerald alcoholic artist myth, the idea that being super smart or super emotional or super thoughtful is somehow the key to making excellent and moving high-brow artwork is anathema to me. While works like this will always feel familiar to my own mental processes and leave me with a lot to contemplate, Stephen King and Indiana Jones and Agatha Christie and Tintin ultimately do more to evoke wonder, inspire delight, and engage my mind. My ultimate preference is Vonnegut or Flann O'Brien, someone who somehow manages to straddle the gap and include engaging plotting and characters with metaphysical and philosophical gymnastics.
A Portrait, like many other super literary novels I have read, is one which is a frustrating trudge the first time. It took me three weeks to finish it and I already like it more than I did in the middle of the second week. In a month I might give it 4 1/2 stars. As of now, I don't think my own emotional and intellectual problems are relevant enough to everyone else to legitimize so much outpouring.
The particular is universal, but it doesn't seem like much of an enlightenment.
Thus quoth James Joyce, and this principle is all too obviously the guiding light of his literary ethic. While I appreciate the sentiment and mainly agree with it, the cracks are obvious with the increase of time and distance. Joyce remains so vague about his circumstances on the majority that it is hard to follow the train of any thought behind Dedalus's emotional responses.
A Portrait is an uncomfortably intimate book. It's revolutionary in its style and in its willingness to focus almost entirely on embarrassingly personal reflections and subconscious urges, upon the deep desire for religious moorings and the rebellion of the intellect against all outside forces. In it, Stephen Dedalus recounts the earliest memories of his childhood and moves smoothly from scene to scene throughout adolescence. He is a small boy with childish thoughts in grammar school, a youth having his first sexual longings, a boy with an old soul hanging out with his down-and-out father and his party pals. He is eagerly groomed Jesuit priest-in-the-making who rebels against his moral instincts in favor of the intellectual freedoms that come with an authority-free lifestyle. In every stage of life he remains aloof, thoughtful, indignant, brooding, witty and morose.
Joyce and Dedalus fall in the same category as Hermann Hess and Harry Haller for me. Characters and authors alike are so introspective and solipsistic that they are self-defeating. They are both super relatable for any overthinking intellectual or pseudo-intellectual while also being disengaging in their total self-obsession. When I read this type of book, I suddenly feel super self-conscious about how my inner thoughts would appear to anyone else. It helps me to take myself a little less seriously.
Another thing I have never loved is the idea that dark, brooding intellectualism is a sign of great genius or artistic integrity. Similar to the Hemmingway-Fitzgerald alcoholic artist myth, the idea that being super smart or super emotional or super thoughtful is somehow the key to making excellent and moving high-brow artwork is anathema to me. While works like this will always feel familiar to my own mental processes and leave me with a lot to contemplate, Stephen King and Indiana Jones and Agatha Christie and Tintin ultimately do more to evoke wonder, inspire delight, and engage my mind. My ultimate preference is Vonnegut or Flann O'Brien, someone who somehow manages to straddle the gap and include engaging plotting and characters with metaphysical and philosophical gymnastics.
A Portrait, like many other super literary novels I have read, is one which is a frustrating trudge the first time. It took me three weeks to finish it and I already like it more than I did in the middle of the second week. In a month I might give it 4 1/2 stars. As of now, I don't think my own emotional and intellectual problems are relevant enough to everyone else to legitimize so much outpouring.
The particular is universal, but it doesn't seem like much of an enlightenment.
A tough, stream-of-consciousness read that gets better with each re-read (except the priest sermon in the middle, Lord Almighty I felt like I was in hellfires of boredom but perhaps that's the point).
I tried... I really, really tried... but it was like reading a book in a language you just got through studying your sophomore year in high school; slow and headachy. Joyce kind of skipped around - or perhaps he didn't but the way he wrote threw me off so much that it just felt to me like he was skipping around. The dated language was ultimately what killed my appetite for the book and made me give up about half way through. For example, he would talk about going to what we would call the "Principal's office," but it would come out something like this: "The quad rule of student habit called Stephen to attach his good intention to the callus understanding of the statement." Me: "Goddamnit! What the HELL is he TALKING about?!" From what little I could understand of the introduction to the book Joyce's writing style was shocking and apparently new and flashy at the time he wrote it, which maybe why it was thought of as a classic. But I just think of it as frustrating.