A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man wasn't a particularly difficult book to read, but I'm finding it hard to review. It is, no doubt, important, and I suppose people should read it, but I can't tell if I really enjoyed it. Or even if I was supposed to. I don't have enough experience with literature from the turn of the twentieth century to put this book in its proper context, so I've been looking into what the experts have had to say. Knowing now that it took James Joyce around 10 years to write Portrait, and that it was ground-breaking in its use of stream-of-consciousness and narrative voice and epiphany, it certainly deserves to be on any list of the greatest works of literature, but does it hold up to the modern reader? I found the beginning to be completely charming:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
Even while reading, I appreciated that the difficulty of the prose and the sharpness of perceptions grew as Stephen Dedalus grew older, but my experience was uneven. What I didn't like: I understood the importance of Father Arnall's sermons about the nature of hell, and how every word of it seemed to be spoken straight to Stephen's guilt-stained soul, but it was far too long, taking up about 10% of the book. And some of Stephen's later philosophical discussions were more dull to me than enlightening:
The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
I did recognise while reading that passage that Joyce was telling the reader what was ultimately the structure of Portrait but I found it pedantic and boring. I suppose a reader will ultimately enjoy this book to the degree that that quote is enjoyed -- if you find that to be genius, then the whole thing is genius. What I did like: I relished the snapshot of the time and place in Irish history, from the dinner table arguments about politics and religion to the life of a boarding school student. And there were many, many examples of beautiful and lyrical passages:
He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.
The cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.
Repeatedly, Joyce captures real truth and beauty, and even considering it's semi-autobiographical, the plot is interesting and touching; especially where it captures the fear and insecurity of youth (I cringed when Stephen's father reveals that he had had a good laugh with the Prefect of studies who had given his son a pandybatting). But reading Portrait was a bit like taking a spin in a Model T: I could understand why this would have been exciting when it first rolled off the line, but I'd rather go driving in a modern car with air conditioning and cruise control, knowing perfectly well that I couldn't enjoy what I have if the other hadn't come before.
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.
There's a youthful arrogance to assuming the conscience of his race had yet to be created, but Portrait is certainly a work of art created in the smithy of its author's soul. My instinct is to give this book 3 stars based on my subjective enjoyment of it but my objective mind says, "Who am I to give a classic less than 5?" In the end, I will settle on 4.
