The semi biographical story of James Joyce journey from childhood to adulthood. Having read The Dubliners and Ulysses this novel gave the background and context of Joyce’s writing development.

Stephen the main character struggles with his development from a youth into a man and to find his identity in an Ireland embroiled in conflict. He also is conflicted with his family and struggling to free himself from them intellectually and spiritually. Stephen's struggle is to find his identity in the novel. This parallels the Irish struggle for independence from England.

The novel also critiques the Irish situation and how the Irish had lost their voice from British rule. This is illustrated at the Christmas dinner party and quarrel over the failure of the Catholic Church to oppose Home rule and to support Parnell. The conflict illustrated by Mrs Riordan being anti-British but not anti-catholic, even when the Church’s position is to support the British. Parnell’s death also has a deep impact on young Stephen.

Stephen as he grows up watches his families failing fortune and descent into poverty. His father also was a bit of a card. As the eldest he is indulged and educated to a higher degree. A standout for me in the book was the hell sermon which terrifies Stephen and results in his confession. Later over time Joyce’s opinion of Parnell changed as the great man he was portrayed in this novel.

This novel showcases the literary skills of Joyce which were achieved in his later works.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

n  "Already in the preface to Richard Wagner it is asserted that art—and not morality—is the true metaphysical activity of man; several times in the book itself the provocative sentence recurs that the existence of the world is justified (gerechtfertigt) only as an aesthetic phenomenon."n–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

The moon has been sighted, the siren is sounding through the air and Eid celebrations have begun here where I sit writing. The holy month of Ramadan has ended. Sometimes, when I step out of my skin and go into what Sartre calls the “pre-reflective mode” of consciousness, I am hit and swept away by an abundance of emotion, the ambivalency of which both amuses and depresses me. Having been raised in the house of a raging anticlerical father and a devout Muslim mother, I have always had trouble forming a coherent account of religion for myself. And as time passed, a raging heretic was born under the skin of my brother whose opinions are slightly more fantastical than my father; so nowadays when I listen to both of them, I seriously have little idea about what to think. Top that all with reading excessive amounts of modernist and postmodernist fiction, and you can understand my predicament. Well, this is why I could perfectly understand Stephen’s predicament.

n  "He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment."n

How does one find place for oneself in this world? My veil misleads my relatives into assuming my piety; my interest in Western arts misleads some of my friends into assuming that I have been “led astray”; the rest of the indifferent world sees me as an oppressed female, shackled into the prisons of a religion that is, well, not looked upon kindly, at all. And yet inside I feel none of what the world or those around label me. The self seeks affirmation and finds none. In religion, one finds some sense of simplicity, some order and grounding, and yet at times one does not even know whose religion to follow. The fundamentalist’s, the liberal’s or the heretic’s? Islam or any religion for that matter is not a monolithic entity, so whose version, whose interpretation holds most currency for me?

"n  The soul is born, he said vaguely, 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."n

How does one ever escape from these nets of judgment, prejudice and intolerance?

How does one… fly?

Like Stephen, I, too, have passed through several stages of hedonism and self-denial, but I am still to find my own answers. I believe in his journey because it is a road well-trodden by many before us, and many still go down that path looking for themselves. Though at times I find myself echoing the views of my father and brother and even sometimes those of my humble little mother, they still seem alien to me. The preachers and saints in whom my friends believe in seldom manage to move me. There seems an unbridgeable distance between us, a kind of distance that Stephen might have felt between himself and the fathers and brothers of his school. I look upon them with respect and admiration but that is all.

For seekers like us who endeavor to escape and to soar above societal conditioning and familial pressures, this book seems familiar and reads like one’s own diary. We, too, finally try to seek meaning in art forms, and for most of us the world only makes sense when interpreted aesthetically. Even though I lack Stephen’s daring and fortitude and even though I might not agree with all the conclusions he came to, I still find within myself esteem for a fellow wanderer for it is a journey I recognize and understand perfectly.

But enough with the memoir, let’s get down to the literary tectonics.

A Portrait: The Beginning of a New Aesthetic

n  "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."n

Keeping authorial intentions aside, this book, if not construed as a product of its age, reflects clearly some of the anxieties that marked late 19th and early 20th century literature. In the words of Levenson, who writes in his Cambridge Companion, we’re dealing with an age that was consumed with the:

n  "... memory of an alienation, an uncanny sense of moral bottomlessness, a political anxiety. There was so much to doubt: the foundations of religion and ethics, the integrity of governments and selves, the survival of a redemptive culture."n

The times in which Joyce was writing necessitated a relearning and revaluation of values, not only those belonging to the social and moral spheres but also on the aesthetic plane. Much of modernist art concerns itself with the reappraisal of social structures, the liberation from constructed gender roles, and this renaissance of sorts reflected itself blatantly in art forms, in their construction and expression. Even if the Portrait is not as experimental as Joyce’s later works like Finnegans Wake and especially Ulysses, it was still outlandish enough to trouble publishing houses as most of them refused to publish it. To the reader of Victorian literature, Joyce’s uncanny dialogue, the lack of a “story” and his narrative choices might be unsettling if not inartistic. But we’re dealing with an age that was characterized by this very chaos and fragmentation. But then I’m not getting into modernist aesthetics AGAIN here. I’ve done that enough with the VSI and the Companion.

Cutting it short, the book’s emphasis on flight and escape could be taken as a metaphor, and Stephen’s epiphany could be likened to the epiphany that the entire modern age was experiencing and recovering from. I hate repeating myself but we are looking at an age that was painfully trying to maintain a foothold in a world that was constantly defying rational and moral norms of previous times. The discontent with dogma and tradition that we see in Stephen is not simply his own but that of the culture of which he is a representative. Thus, his epiphany in the novel is of utmost importance to understand the human predicament that he was expressing. This breaking away with the past and ushering in the new is one of the most prominent features of modernist literature, and the avant-garde expressed this fin de siècle awareness through “epiphanies” and “moments of recognition”. Levenson writes:

n  "Many, if not most, plots, and certainly those favored by the great nineteenth-century realists, turn on moments of revelation, recognition scenes, when the illusions nurtured by timidity, prejudice, or habit fall away, and a naked self confronts a naked world. These are the moments when identity is begun, renewed, or completed. French Naturalism added a different plot, in which the revelation is gradual, and of something already known, but concealed: a moral or physical flaw, an organic "lesion." Both kinds of plot favor awareness. Illusions are there to be stripped away."n

And regardless of whether the illusions be moral or political in nature. Stephen confronts both the established religious system of his time and various political views of his colleagues and tries to escape from them all. For him is the search for his own destiny, his own voice and his own opinions and this noncorformism and individualism is again a big part of modernist sensibility. As his name suggests (one must applaud Joyce for his employment of the metaphor), Stephen Dedalus desires freedom.

n  "Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the haze wrapped city. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean?"n

The fact that the plot doesn’t resolve into anything concrete is perfectly comprehensible: the human self continues evolving, always surprising itself and its past, always morphing into new forms. There is no end to self-actualization, it is a journey that only ends with the individual, and thus the narrative does not contain a well-defined dénouement or climax. This is, after all, a defining feature of the modern novel. Belonging to the genre of the Bildungsroman (which we call the coming-of-age novel) and the sub-genre of the Künstlerroman (which specifically deals with the evolution of the artist), the purpose of the book is the journey and not the destination. And we do have a journey—almost poetically presented—of an age that sought its haven and its truth, its affirmation and its anchorage in its arts and in all that is beautiful and sublime. As Nietzsche remarks, man found his true calling, amid the destruction and reconstruction of his world, he found his purpose and his meaning in the aesthetic! The fact that this book culminates into a fascinating aesthetic theory says a lot.

Anyway, this book is highly recommended to the student of modernist literature. One can see the new aesthetic in its embryonic form in Joyce’s first novel and in its grand maturation in Ulysses. The beginning and evolution of the aesthetic, like that of the artist, is very fascinating but for those who are into that sort of thing. For those who have little interest in what or what not this novel contributed to English literature, well, I don’t see how they can find this especially enjoyable.

And I also recommend this book to the seeker, and the appreciator of human courage and individualism. Those who strive to define themselves, not fearing exile or isolation, it is for those that this book could hold value. Stephen and I might end up in different places, under the shade of different havens, with different meanings and truths, but it is the same path that we take, the same road that we walk upon. The quest is endless, the journey without a destination, but as long as we keep on moving, as long as we keep seeking and striving, the human condition does not seem to me that hopeless.

n  "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!"n

In spite of my whole 'Irish lit thing' I have never once felt compelled to pick up Joyce. But then Colin Farrell went and narrated this audiobook, so that was that. And though he does a terrific job, this is, unfortunately, probably a book that I should have read in print - I'm just not an auditory person at all and there is a lot going on in this book. So I'm not going to lie and pretend that I got as much out of this as I arguably should have, and I'm sure I'll want to revisit it one day. But I ended up surprising myself with how much I did enjoy it - Joyce's language isn't as impenetrable as I had feared, and more mesmerizing than I had expected, and Stephen Dedalus's journey was occasionally, unexpectedly, thrilling. There's a lot to unpack here about religion and family and nationality, and if I ever reread this I will vow to attempt to unpack it all then.

Joyce is otherworldly. It is hard to even judge his early stuff against itself. He seems to have been born a master of language and art. Most authors would be happy to end their careers with 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' For Joyce, these are just the beginning. Anyway, I loved it all.

“You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.”

I’ve maybe read the great Portrait three or four times in my life, teaching it once or twice, and each time it’s been a terrific, albeit different experience each time, of course. I first read it at 20, when I was myself trying to decide what I might do with my life—teach? Write? Go into counseling? Play music? “Find a girl, settle down, if you want to you can marry”? (Cat Stevens)--once again at 25, when I was teaching and also trying to write fiction; again at 32, as I entered an MFA program in fiction and now at 66, (quite a long gap there!), reading it with some of my undergraduate students. I recently have re-read Dubliners, which I have read many times, and love, and I have twice read Ulysses, and was impressed by the sheer achievement of it, but I am most moved still by Portrait, the semi-autobiographical bildungsroman of a young Stephen Dedalus trying to find out who he is and what he must be.

The way I see it now, Portrait is the story of a young man trying to forge a life through a labyrinth of choices among several possible passions. His father and his father’s friends are passionate about politics, bemoaning the recent loss of their leader, Parnell, but politics do not become Stephen’s strongest passion. A passionate priest nearly seduces him (no, not in that way) into the life of the priesthood, noting the young Stephen’s facility for theological study, and he’s also tempted to academic work, as he excels there, too, and loves the world of ideas. He’s passionate about the sensual life, the life of wine, women and song. A young woman is at the heart of this sensual life leading him away from the priesthood.

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”

But it can’t only be the life of the flesh (or even call it love, which would happen with Joyce with Nora) as he finally chooses the right (vocational) passion for him, the life of the artist, one consistent with the Dedalus myth that gives Stephen his last name. His goal:

“To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom,”

and

“To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.”

And he chooses to leave Ireland, as Joyce himself als does, but it will always be with him and in him. Joyce would never for the rest of his life write about anything else.

“This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.”

“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.”

This is one great book. In this reading I was reminded of similar struggles of other young literary figures, young men wrestling between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh, such as Herman Hesse’s Demian and Chaim Potok’s young Hasidic artist in My Name is Asher Lev. I think of a similar but more comic version of the choice not to become a priest by Chicago writer James McManus, encapsulated in his story collection, The Education of a Poker Player. Or: Dylan Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Or Joseph Heller's Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.

Found myself being very interested for the first 50 or so pages, and thinking that this stuff is pretty good. It then goes on to become incredibly dull, uninteresting, and just downright boring most of the time.

The thing is, I can see why people like this: the prose is pretty amazing in many ways. However, I did not feel like there was any red thread leading me through the book, but rather it felt chaotic and jumbled. The dialogue is ridiculously over-the-top too. I simply did not care enough for this book.

There is a part of Sparrow's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) where she writes:
"This book fails to be transcendent in my opinion. By that I mean that I believe it does try to be timeless – and fails. I know the counterargument is that it is documenting a specific time and culture. I get that. So are The Iliad, Macbeth, and Pride and Prejudice, though, and they are still fun or tragic and reflective of some basic humanity. Things happen in them. A Portrait of the Artist…, if it is reflective of anything, is reflective of self-absorbed young men, and that is a culture I find it impossible to be patient with."

I am, unfortunately, very much inclined to agree. I might give it a reread at a later stage and possibly think more highly of it, as I did by no means hate the book. However, this is what I'm left with right now. I hope Dubliners will interest me more, before I move on to Ulysses -- which I definitely hope will feel more rewarding.

I don't wish to paint it all black, though: clearly people like this book. For a completely different view from mine Rakhi has written a very nice review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

(Book 736 from 1001 books) - A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man, James Joyce (1882 - 1941)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel by Irish writer James Joyce.

It traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology.

Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe.

The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «سیمای مرد هنرآفرین در جوانی»؛ «چهره مرد هنرمند در جوانی»؛ «سیمای هنرمند در جوانی»؛ «چهره یک مرد هنرمند در جوانی»؛ اثر: جیمز جویس؛ ادبیات ایرلند؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و هشتم ماه ژوئن سال 2009میلادی

عنوان: سیمای مرد هنرآفرین در جوانی؛ اثر: جیمز جویس؛ مترجم: پرویز داریوش؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، اساطیر، 1370، در 318ص؛ موضوع سرگذشتنامه، عنوان دیگر: سیمای مرد هنرآفرین در جوانی؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایرلند - سده 20م

عنوان: چهره مرد هنرمند در جوانی؛ اثر: جیمز جویس؛ مترجم: منوچهر بدیعی؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نیلوفر، 1380، در 384ص، شابک964448095؛ چاپ دوم در 466ص سال 1385؛

عنوان: سیمای هنرمند در جوانی؛ اثر: جیمز جویس؛ مترجم: اصغر جویا؛ مشخصات نشر آبادان، نشر پرسش، 1381، در 263ص؛ شابک9646629717؛

عنوان: چهره یک مرد هنرمند در جوانی؛ اثر: جیمز جویس؛ مترجم: امیر علیجانپور؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، آوای مکتوب، 1394، در 288ص؛ شابک9786007364093؛

این داستان، ماجراهای پسری را، از دو سالگی، تا بیست سالگی، بیان می‌کند، بسیار پیچیده است، و در آن، به مسائلی از «ایرلند»، «انسان»، «کودک»، «ترس» و «خدا»، پرداخته شده است؛ ناقدان آثار یا همان طوطیان شیرین گفتار پیشین، بر این باور هستند، که این داستان، مقدمه ای بر داستان «اولیس»، شاهکار «جیمز جویس» نیز هست؛ این اثر، به‌ نوعی، خودزندگی‌نامه ی «جیمز جویس» هم هست؛ نویسنده، روایت رمان را، که توسط سوم شخص مفرد، بیان شده، با ذهنیات «استیون ددالوس»، در هم آمیخته، و خوانشگر، در بخشهایی از رمان، با این ادغام «روایت»، و «ذهنیت»، روبرو می‌شود؛ نویسنده به تلاش، و نوسانات روحی «ددالوس»، برای پیروزی روحش، بر عوامل منفی دوروبری های خویش - از جمله بر رفتار نامناسب برخی از آموزگاران، و خشونتی که بین پسرهای مدرسه، رواج دارد - نیز پرداخته‌ است؛ «جویس» در شخصیت اصلی رمان، یعنی «استفان ددالوس»، «تردید» و «آشفتگی»، و «پوچ‌گرایی نسل نو» را هم، به خوانشگرش نشان داده‌ است؛ نگارنده، از تلمیح (اشاره به قصه یا شعر) هم سود برده، و با استفاده از متن کتاب مقدس، صحنه های «مرگ» و «قیامت» را نیز، در این رمان بنگاشته است

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 27/06/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 03/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce is a seminal work in modernist literature, chronicling the intellectual awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. The novel blends a coming-of-age story with profound explorations of religion, identity, and artistic expression. Joyce's experimental style and stream-of-consciousness narration are both groundbreaking and challenging.

He longed to let life stream in through the windows of his mind in all its sordid and colorful glory so that he could sift through the layers of feeling, impulse and meaning and find what his restless soul craved for - that shred of truth too primevally pristine for anyone to begrime. But the world intruded rudely upon his solemn preoccupations, planted seeds of insidious doubt wherever it could find the soft, yielding ground of inchoate perceptions. His oppressors were many and unapprehended - the cruel compulsions of academic discipline, the acts of adolescent savagery of compeers who were abysmally ill-equipped to deal with a difference of opinion, the steadily visible socioeconomic squalor of the milieu which threatened to blunt his senses and the omnipresent fear of every thought or deed of his being tantamount to execrable heresy.
n  

"He had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the waters had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole."

n
But he rebelled and won victories against the accompanying inebriety of religious indoctrination and those who demanded from him an obligatory patriotic fervor for the sake of a suffering fatherland. The relentless barrage of catechisms so forcefully dismissive of humanly considerations failed to induce him to self-loathing and guilt; he found a holiness in carnal love and an enduring beauty in the quiet surrender to mortal desire instead. The labyrinth of diverse lures could no longer throttle his ambition of escaping its narrow confines. Thus, even as friends, enemies and competitors in the arena of life busied themselves with the pursuit of social relevance and prestige, young Stephen Dedalus remained unperturbed.
n  

"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."

n
He now aspired to the fulfillment of a greater goal, having found his one true faith in the legitimacy of art and in its power to bestow sense on the perpetual chaos of existence.

__


P.S.:-This is a Künstlerroman whose author presupposes his own greatness and the conspiratorial insensitivity - villainy, even - of those who surround him. The author's ideas on women are also quite overtly simplistic and even somewhat patronizing. Thus I choose to save my 5 stars for the artist's heftier and more celebrated tomes.

__

Originally published on:- October 19, 2014

Joyce delivers again. The first pages are the best - spent as they are in Stephen's consciousness when he was a very sensitive kid. I thought Stephen would be a born rebel (the way I had imagined Joyce to be) - but he seemed to be an obedient and meek child to began with and have taken a lot of time to make up his mind on various institutions (nationalism, religion, arts etc) In fact, for the most part, he is not an artist at all - the moment of epiphany which sets him onto path of becoming a writer came much later. It is this giving up on old Irish values and adopting new ones which is the central theme of the book.

Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short.)

Joyce's 1916 autobiographical novel follows the Irish Catholic youth Stephen Dedalus, as he develops from boyhood, plans to enter the priesthood, and, as a young man who rebels against his family and his church, planning to travel to Paris where, he vows, he will "encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race," as an artist, or "priest of the eternal imagination."

The stream-of-consciousness style remains, for me still, difficult to read. Nonetheless, I liked following the Orphean odyssey of a young James Joyce.

Eadem sed aliter

'His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.'



n  Athena Revealing Ithaca to Ulysses (18th century a.D.), by Guiseppe Bottanin


In a nutshell, this autofiction offers an intimate, superb, nuanced rendition of a coming of age.

It deals with: personal growth from childhood memories to the throes of adolescence, and the nagging feelings of inadequacy and growing disaffection of young adulthood. With that inescapable feeling of being out of step with your environment, of marching to a different drum beat. With that bittersweet impression of not belonging, and how peer pressure, not-self and conflict in general drive one to try and shape themselves. Finally, it is about overcoming the crude idea, the monolithic frame, the stunted conception of the self as an inborn, essential, watertight and unsurpassable separation from the world, from others.


n  Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), by William Turnern


Memorable quotes:

'How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.'