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chris_chester 's review for:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
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.