And there he was following the alleys, away from his original filial shell, searching where the way would take him, and there were icons on the walls. Icons of guilt, icons of duty. Some promised a reality beyond those grey walls announcing that there would be more light – but still imagined. Some pretended a glorious past and a glorious and heroic future for the community -- an imaginary polity.

Captivating nets of restricting nationalism, coined discourses and gelled devotions.

He took the turn of one of those alleys and enjoyed the walk but it left nothing but pleasureless pleasure in his soul. They were dancing paths that entangled him more and more. He took a side turn, again after that promising light. But he was just getting into darker caves of fear, where guilt there always was: the Minotaur of sin lurking on each of those barren and sordid alleyways. The Order, the militant Order. Fleeing and escaping, not yet flying, but led by the force of hope, a dizzy hope.

He met other ghosts in those alleys but they were not more real than the icons.

Some white shone. Pearl white. A feather as small as a word. The fascination led him to other feathers that seemed to mark the way out of the trapping Labyrinth of stilted ideas. But one has to be careful with words. They can embody banality. Or emptiness. He knew the words of prayer, the words of nationalism. Words had also brought sorrow to that first martyr, Stephanos, the saint from the classical lands of ancient Greece. He was punished for his speech, his utterances. Words exchanged for stones: evil stones, words of evil and stones of god. Words of god.

But those feathers, did the sweet Guardian Angel drop them? Or was it the heroic Attican figure with Apollonian wings?

For those feathers of beauty grouped into systems of calming order. They formed an ordered and powerful structure - the syntax of thought. They led the way, clustering into meshes that winged the thoughts. Inventions could now fly. The wings of text, wings of writing, wings of beauty could help the soul glide away.

Diving upward dropping the weight of morality into eternal Stasis.

In free pursuit of liberating aesthetics, in all its splendour: with Integritas, Consonantia and Claritas – Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance.






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Added 5th August, 2014.

I am now rereading the Odyssey in preparation for Ulysses... and the expression "winged words" springs up in Homer's text... so suitable for Daedalus and the young Joyce.... Words are also compared to arrows in Homer's

Here's three reasons you might like this book -

1. You read 'clever' books, so that you seem cultured and intelligent "Oh yes I like to read James Joyce in my spare time,for fun"

2. You have problems sleeping at night and need something more powerful than sleeping pills.

3. You're the sort of person that thinks mountains are there to be climbed and books are there to be read, in which case it's one to tick off the list.

It wasn't all bad...but I won't be rushing to try Ulysses just yet.

Unlike Ulysses, which I have tried to read too many times to count (the furthest I made it was halfway), I have read Portrait twice: once in my twenties, and again a few years ago. Although I found the religious sections a bit tedious, I was pleased to discover that my appreciation for the rest of Joyce's portrayal has increased considerably over the years.

Words, art, life...
Life, art, words...

BEAUTIFUL!

James Joyce,... what a masterful writer!!
This book is insightful, poetic, artistic and profound.
It is , if I may say so, a tour de force of wisdom and language.

I will try to make this review not ridiculously long, but as you can imagine, when a book is this good, there is no way you can write a short review and be satisfied. So let's take a look at Joyce's brilliance,

1. Language - Joyce's language is fresh and unique, his techniques and style a touch of sheer genius.
The sentences, especially descriptive ones, are so expressive and vivid, so that the images and scenes are felt so strongly and clearly, oozing out of the pages.

"The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers; and amid peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with his heart."

"The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noicelessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sand-built turrets of children."

these are a few examples of the sweet poetic beauty of the writing. So colourful and soothing...!!

2. Profoundness, Wisdom and Knowledge -

"The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?"

"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!"

"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 body."

"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause."

"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 beyound or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."
"I imagine , Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear."
"The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future."

Makes me think of this quote, - "Word after a word after a word is power." !
- - - - - - - - - -

"These questions are very profound, Mr. Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again."

This is, the birth, growth, and rebirth of a fascinating soul. An artist's soul, desperately in want of freedom to express itself wholely and freely, its journey, its waking.
Stephen Dedalus, goes down into the dark, bottomless depths of his soul's secrets, his hidden and silent conciousness in repose, his true being, and like his ancient father, the old brilliant artificer, Daedalus, he uses the mighty wings of language and imagination and reason, to emerge anew, a surging new life, an ARTIST !!

"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."

Man!!!

It's hard to sum up my feelings about James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . This in large part is the reason why it has taken me so long to write a review. At various junctures during and post-reading this novel I have contemplated changing my rating of this renowned opus from Joyce. Sometimes I have felt that it deserves a higher rating than 3 stars, however, I find myself returning to the fact that while reading this book (for the first time) I struggled through many parts. That is to say, it was not an easy read at all. At various points I even briefly contemplated DNFing since the narrative seemed to drone on aimlessly like a meandering river to nowhere. Yet there were undeniable moments of brilliant literary finesse that by and large almost redeemed the story. For instance, I enjoyed Joyce's very emphatic and beautifuly utopian ideas about art:

"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, havung 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."

Many times I was left speechless by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man while at the same time dumbfounded by the almost banal drudgery of the story. So in summary I would recommend this novel from Joyce, however, only to true aficiandos of his work who have the mental fortitude to persevere to the end of the narrative. You will be rewarded for your efforts!

Portrait of the Artist (1916) reads like the story of a missed priestly vocation and the dawn of a literary calling. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was” — introducing Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego, to be reencountered in Ulysses. The novel follows Stephen through his learning years, back in late 19th-century BE-colonised Ireland: episodic scenes about his family, divided between their orthodox Catholicism and the Irish nationalist movement, his upbringing at Clongowes Wood boarding school and the indoctrination imparted by the Jesuits, and finally the years at University College Dublin, and his decision to become a poet. In a way, this is as much a Künstlerroman (fancy for artist-coming-of-age) as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (mod length and content): Stephen becomes Joyce, just like Marcel becomes Proust.

The brutal, prison-like atmosphere and the teaching methods inside Clongowes Catholic school form a bewildering picture: the bullying among boys, the corporal punishments sadistically administered at every turn, the constant conscience-pricking, the thorough brainwashing with holy water. The series of formidable Father Arnall mindfucking sermons in ch. 3 about Death, Judgement and the roster of multi-layered torments of Hell are particularly enthralling. Even Dante doesn’t get quite as graphic in his descriptions of flames, darkness, stench and the outrageous and endless throes that the damned souls must endure for the smallest of lapses during their lifetime (e.g. giving oneself a hand). But, contrary to Dante, the sermons in Portrait of the Artist are ironic and slightly blasphemous pastiches, similar to Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine, with subtle undertones of Hieronymus Bosch and the “divin” Marquis.

On the whole, and even though Stephen Dedalus eventually loses faith, it is pretty evident that his outlook on art and literature is super-saturated with Christian doctrine. Latin quotations abound, philosophical ideas refer almost entirely to medieval theology — Augustine, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle (the Doctor Angelicus’s bedside reading). Joyce demonstrates a scrupulous erudition regarding Aristotle’s Poetics and Aquinas’s philosophy, particularly concerning aesthetics: during one of the many dialogues between Stephen and his friend Cranly (Everyman’s Library, pp. 265-267), the attributes of beauty established by Aquinas — integritas, consonantia and claritas — are laid out with surprising precision. The same is true of the condensed lecture on lyrical/epical/dramatic forms (pp. 268-269). Moreover, how these dialogues unfold is redolent of the philosophical disputationes found in medieval scholastic texts such as the Summa Theologica or the works of William of Ockham.

Joyce blends all this in with the local colour of Irish daily life, stout and drisheens, and some bursts of poetic flourish. Still, underneath all the philosophical discourse, and precisely within these effusive eruptions in Joyce’s prose and the haphazard composition of the novel we are reading, another disruptive form of aesthetics or poetry, musical, sensual and rhythmical, knocking Aristotle and the English language around, is germinating.

Speaking of which, Umberto Eco’s appreciation for the works of James Joyce is noteworthy here. Both Joyce and Eco received a strict Catholic education. Like Joyce’s writings, Eco peppered his essays and novels with Latin quotes and references to the Church Fathers — in the same way, say, David Foster Wallace makes constant reference to tennis. Eco’s thesis, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, is nothing else than an extended version of the micro-lectures mentioned above between Dedalus and Cranly. In short, Joyce and Eco (and Tolkien and Borges) are modern authors with medieval souls.

Further still and finally, the whole of Portrait of the Artist could be construed as an inverted image of St Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine expressed his gratitude to God for turning him away from his dissolute and lustful youth and converting him to asceticism and religion. Meanwhile, Joyce describes Stephen Dedalus’s youth as a time of moral torment, sporadic debauchery, romantic encounters and brief glimpses of joy (the epiphany at Dollymount Strand). But, in the end, Dedalus decides to follow the call of the wading bird-girl, emerge beneath the Church’s authority, divert himself away from his family and homeland, and flee into “silence, exile and cunning” (p. 310).

To be continued, then, in Ulysses.

We can read A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man as a prequel to Ulyssess but if we reject for a while first associations then what's left ? An intimate, inner portrait of a young man who attempts to define himself as a man and an artist. If we read it this way - then it is simply an universal story about the torments of adolescence and search for his own identity, his own voice.

Stephen Dedalus, overwhelmed by Irish God-and-Homeland tradition, is suffocating by provincionalism of late 19th-century Ireland. Ireland, living in the shadow of England, faced with poverty, also and perhaps above all else, poverty and narrowness of mind.

Stephen, shown from an early age, in the family home, a Jesuit school, in college, is trying to get rid of all the historical baggage. All these precepts to be a good son, student, to love God and country.

But a man’s country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie.You can be a poet or or a mystic after.

Stephen, layer by layer throws out inhibiting him bonds of family, religion and nation, aware that sometimes would fall, painstakingly forges his self. Chooses loneliness and voluntarily condemns himself to exile, to find that kind of life, knowledge or art, which would allow him to express himself most fully.

I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too .

"Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes”(And he sets his mind to unknown arts.)
-tOvid
Metamorphoses

The above mentioned quote from Ovid, which appears at the start of the work, best describes the conclusion of a journey of an artist through his self, trying to come up with things that matter most, while still trying to discern his place in this world.

I still remember the day, when as a teenager, ready to explore the world around me, I, once looked up in the sky, which was sunny and inspiring, and said “I wish I could fly so high in the sky that it could take me in its arms!!” That was a wishful fancy. My class group laughed at me, one even expressing her contempt at such a childish sham. That was a moment of revelation for me, a moment when I realized how important it was to set one’s mind free. I was disheartened, because it became apparent that they were not receptive, not receptive to life itself.

The reading of “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” made me remember that instant; that instant, which I recall as one of the most memorable moments of my life. This work by Joyce has taken me down a memory lane, like Proust did :), but unlike Proust, it has made me remember and define those moments which have considerably influenced my thoughts and ideas. Those moments which have, over a time, asked me to break away from the well accepted conventions, if not to live the life of an artist, but then, to be a being that is conscious and hence, living.

This work, which is considered to be semi-autobiographical, captures the mind of Stephen Dedalus effectively and renders the “Portrait” strikingly, without any transition. As Langdon Hammer, in the introduction, said, “Over its decade long composition, the creator of Portrait refined almost out of existence, a key device of novelistic convention: the narrator.” This comes from the theory; Joyce gives at the end of the work:

“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, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

So, what we get, as a result is the revelation of characters’ inner stream of thoughts, without us going through the narrative translation. This style of stream of consciousness, as employed by the author, has made me a Joyce fan. I was astonished to behold the expressions of Stephen, his thoughts, his anxiety, his moment of epiphany. It wasn’t as he experienced them; it was like I myself was going through those moments of reflection. Specifically, where he questioned his faith and religion, his duties and responsibilities as a Christian, more so when offered an entrance into the service of altar.

Starting from his childhood, there were many beautiful expressions which reflected the development of his consciousness; the expressions, which held you captive for their simple representation. But the most enrapturing ones came toward the end of the work, when Stephen attained a more rational approach. I am only going to quote a couple of my favorites:

“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.”

His moment of epiphany:

“Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. 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 ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on.”

It is here that Stephan comes to acknowledge that it is not a sin to appreciate beauty. That it is beautiful to live, to err, to triumph and to fall even. That it is beautiful indeed to be a human being, to live in consciousness and to acknowledge yourself for who you are.

اوایل دبیرستان بودم که طی یه حرکت انتحاری به پیشنهاد دوستی استاکر تارکوفسکی رو دیدم. الان ده سال گذشته ولی من هنوز سه ساعت کرختی، سردرد و هیچی نفهمیدنِ اون روز رو یادم میاد. امروز که این کتاب تموم شده دقیقا همون حسو دارم با این تفاوت که به جای سه ساعت من بیشتر از یک سال که دارم با این کتاب زندگی میکنم. دلم میخواد از نبوغ جویس بگم از این که چطور با یه پاراگراف چنان دست می‌گذاشت رو حساس ترین بخش زندگیم که دلم برای خودم و استیون و همه ی عالم و آدم به درد میومد و بعدش که میخواستم با همون حال ادامه بدم با پاراگراف بعدی دوباره با اقیانوس کلماتی ک هیچی از کنارهم قرار گرفتنشون و حتی از معنی تک تکشون هم نمی‌فهمیدم روبرو میشدم بگم ولی دریغ که من یک درصد از این اقیانوسو تو خودم نمیبینم.
اگه بخوام کل کتابو تو چند جمله توضیح بدم فکر کنم تعریف زیر که از یه ریویو تو یوتیوب برداشتم کامل باشه.
"Portrait of the artist as a young man is the metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus from a frightened confused young man into a character strong enough to trust himself and face the unknown, face the immense risks and challenges of life. It's about not being afraid to face the threat of hell while acting in a manner you believe is true"
خلاصه که خوندن از جویس برای من تو این زمان اشتباه بود. این متن رو نوشتم که اگه مثل من خیلی کتاب خون نیستین و میخواین یهویی با کتابای بزرگ روبرو بشین پیشنهاد میکنم این کتابو دور بزنین بذارین برای زمان درست تری وگرنه تبدیل میشه به سخت ترین کتابی که تاحالا خوندین:)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book of ripening, a story of the complicated and excruciating spiritual struggle.
A boy in the world of adults: he finds out that there is injustice, that there are such things as perfidy and hypocrisy…

It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel and unfair.

Indoctrination passes as an education: God is above all and there is no free will but only the will of God and everything that is done against the will of God is sin… So eventually, God turns into a frightful monstrosity.

That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and overcloud his conscience, assailing him at the gates of the cowardly and sin corrupted flesh: and, praying God timidly to forgive him his weakness, he crawled up on to the bed and, wrapping the blankets closely about him, covered his face again with his hands. He had sinned. He had sinned so deeply against heaven and before God that he was not worthy to be called God’s child.

But boy is growing up – he acquires knowledge, he obtains some life experience so his childish and adolescent fears are left behind… Thus a boy becomes a youth full of poetical visions and artistic hopes… Now Stephen Dedalus is capable of doing daedal deeds…

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

To become a true artist one must break the chains of all dogmas.

In high school I was assigned this book. I may have been the only one in the class to get through it. I remember I liked it very much, though it is unlikely I had much to say about it. Being from an Irish Catholic family myself, I have a vague memory of thinking it amazing that Joyce thought to write down what he was thinking when in school interacting with the priests. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, though of course many of the terrors he imagined were mine as well. I would not have considered its role in the history of modern literature, though now I see so many places it may have been a precursor to later works (e.g., n  Skippy Diesn), not the least of which was Joyce’s own Ulysses.

I did not set out intentionally to locate and read this book, but having recently enjoyed n  The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulyssesn in which I learned more about Joyce’s history writing and publishing Ulysses, when I came upon this at the library I decided to have a little listen. The audio is surprisingly wonderful and comprehensible. The edition I listened to is published by Naxos, the same company that produces inexpensive discs of classical music. I particularly loved the accents of the priests, either the dotty old Jesuits or the fire-breathing sermonizer, who, by his very vehemence recalled to me the hell, damnation, and bloody fear of god taught me in my own youth.

Joyce began a precursor to this novel featuring Stephen Hero when he was twenty-two but had it rejected until it was reworked and serialized in a magazine. It was finally published in book form when Joyce was thirty-four. In the book we see the themes that will occupy Joyce for the rest of his life and work: the shift in attention from one idea to another, the pressure of a budding consciousness of sex, the insistence on describing all the sensations of body and mind, the application of convoluted philosophical (Jesuitical?) thought to everyday needs and future plans, his lovingly crafted “voices” of those contemporaneous figures which surrounded him.

I no longer feel the constraints of Catholicism and can revel now in his satirical and critical look at its precepts and how they warp one’s senses and consciousness. I’m glad he got free.

“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 calls 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 defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ~~  James Joyce



This novel ... this fucking, brilliant novel ... I don't even know where to start ... once more, I was awed by James Joyce.

James Joyce’s  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man starts with the buoyancy, simplicity and purity of a tale told to a young boy and ends on a note that is tentative, apprehensive, and off kilter. Between the two points we meet our hero Stephen Dedalus, as he navigates the snares of ethnicity, Catholicism, nationalism and clan as they attempt to trap his poet’s soul and destroy Stephen's beautiful dreams.

Joyce’s 1916 novel is a cornerstone of literary modernism. Upon reading the final words, it’s easy to see how Joyce upended the literary world with  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Every page drips with brilliance.

The story tells the tale of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego, as we follow him along his path to personal and artistic growth. This prose is extremely modern for 1916. The character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are portrayed in a continuous flow and interrupt the linear plot of events and dialogue in the tale of Stephen's life. The story starts with the young Stephen reciting a nursery rhyme about a moo-cow.



One of the most brilliant traits of  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is evolving with Stephen as the tale develops, not just chronologically and philosophically, but also on a narrative and linguistic level. Young Stephen is deeply impacted by the Jesuits and the education he receives from them. Stephen grows to become a complex and deeply reflective young man who fiercely confronts challenging theoretical encounters about art, sex, language, religion, and nationality.

As the story matures, so too does Stephen’s intellectual development which expresses itself in his developing vocabulary and grammatical style throughout his stream of consciousness monologues. As Stephen’s tale unfolds, his language becomes more poetic, especially after his rejection of religion.

I can relate to Stephen on so many levels ~~ most notably a spiritually ~~ regarding his early relationship with the church and God. I was as devout and God fearing as was the young Stephen, and like the young Stephen, I had my break with the church, and when it was final, it was final. Like Stephen, I had trouble sleeping I could not escape my fear of death and hell. Chapter III ~~ one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I have ever read ~~ features a long sermon about the infinite suffering inherent to hell delivered by a Jesuit who scares the bejesus out of our young hero.

Finally, I believe Stephen to be the most relateable character Joyce has ever created. He is written perfectly ~~ the artist, Stephen is developed brilliantly. In the end, Stephen overcomes every powerful influence that tries to claim his soul as he becomes the artist he was born to be. He abandons all he was anchored to ~~ family, country, and church to pursue his personal illumination. Stephen is brave, strong, and determined to reach the artistic heights he has set for himself. My only regret is that I hadn’t read this in my teens, as I find Stephen to be extremely inspirational. Taking this journey with Stephen can help the reader uncover something wonderful about who they are, and that is what makes this novel a modern masterpiece.