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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Audiobook8 hours

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Written by James Joyce

Narrated by Drew Dillon

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

The first novel by James Joyce, this semi-autobiographical narrative depicts the life of Stephen Dedalus, a character created as an allusion to Daedalus, a craftsman in Greek mythology.

Beginning by depicting the early stages of Stephen's life, the language of the novel grows with the main character as he awakens sexually and rebels against religion. When he realizes that Ireland is restricting him, he commits to a self-imposed exile and travels elsewhere to grow as an artist—but not before declaring Ireland his homeland.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 28, 2019
ISBN9781974937561
Author

James Joyce

James Joyce (1882–1941) is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the twentieth century. After graduating from University College Dublin, Joyce went to Paris. During World War One, Joyce and Barnacle, and their two children, Giorgio and Lucia, moved to Zurich where Joyce began Ulysses. He returned to Paris for two decades, and his reputation as an avant-garde writer grew. Joyce’s works include the short story collection Dubliners (1914); novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939); two poetry collections Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927); and one play, Exiles (1918). Every year on 16 June, Joyceans across the globe celebrate Bloomsday, the day on which the action of Ulysses took place, proving Joyce’s importance to literature.

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Rating: 3.7119641400952648 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Despite having been a professor of literature, I haven't read much by James Joyce. I loved his story collection, Dubliners, but I've never tackled what are considered his great novels--and I'm not really sure that I want to. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a short novel that showcases Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style in an accessible way. It's the story of his later hero, Stephen Daedalus, from childhood through his university years. I would agree with those who say that it's tied to a particular time and place (Ireland in the early 20th century); note, for example, Stephen's idolization of Parnell and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church. Yet many of the struggles young Stephen goes through, such as breaking out from under his parents' wings and finding his own place in the world, are still prevalent for the youth of today. There's a lot of humor in the novel that helps it to rise above the usual coming of age story.I listened to the book on audio, wonderfully read by Colin Farrell, an actor of whom I'm not usually fond. One rather funny note: When I originally downloaded the book, the cover title appears as 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman"! I see that someone must have reported the error and a correction has been made. I usually delete books once I've read them, but this one will stay on my iTunes for the novelty factor.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have never read James Joyce before and I had heard that A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man is considered to be his most accessible work so I decided this was where I would start with this author. In this book we follow the early years of Irishman Stephen Dedalus, starting from his boyhood and taking us through to the end of his university years. It is apparent immediately that James Joyce is a master wordsmith. His writing paints vivid pictures but I disagree with those who call this book timeless. I felt it was quite dated and specific to it’s time and place. It is a barely concealed autobiographical piece and takes the main character through his adolescence while he searches for his own identity. His views on family, religion and the very essence of being Irish clearly date this piece as early 20th century writing. Joyce is brilliant but I struggled through this short and quite readable book so I am not reassured that I will appreciate his more complex works and I expect they will be pushed to the bottom of the 1,001 pile.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In Portrait, James Joyce dramatises incidents and periods from his own childhood and adolescence, and I don’t really know what to feel about this book. Parts of this were brilliant: the writing, the rhythm, the selection of words and images. This book is excellent at expressing the unscratchable ache that is growing pains: the death of a child’s naïve belief in Justice when unfair punishment is handed out; the intensity of adolescent frustrations, both sexual and religious; and the search for fundamental meaning in life. On the other hand, well, there were numerous occasions where I felt like rolling my eyes at the text, because I’ve read too many books about sensitive, intelligent, precious little main characters who struggle mightily against their schoolboy tormentors and an understimulating environment. I know that I can’t really hold that against this book -- the century of intervening literature that makes this kind of story feel so trite is not this book’s fault. But still: the story feels so trite in many places.This book left me feeling very ambiguous. For example: a very large section of this book is taken up by a series of fire-and-brimstone sermons delivered by a Jesuit hell-bent on frightening children into good old Catholic obedience through extensive and lascivious descriptions of torture. I can appreciate what Joyce was going for here, and it’s well done indeed: I can really taste the hunger for power, the emotional manipulation, the all-encompassing prison that this kind of mentality wants to enforce. But these sermons take up 12% of the text. 12%! That is way, way too long, and spoils the effect. Then there are later bits, where the main character expounds his views on beauty and art which serve as a replacement for his earlier religiosity, and which are intellectually impressive, but they are shoehorned in in the clumsiest of ways. Again, the effect is spoiled.Both of these -- the fire-and-brimstone, and the intellectualizing theories -- overstay their welcome and tip the balance from “Impressive, well done” into “Man, Joyce really loves hearing himself talk”. And self-important smugness is a sin I find hard to forgive. So yeah. Three stars?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An autobiographical novel, it is very conventional compared to where he was going for the rest of his life. He chooses his framework characters, the male parts of the Daedalus family, and thyeir relationships to the growing Stephen.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    (Original Review, 1981-02-16)"April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."How much I love/hate Joyce when I read about him...how could he have denied his mother on her deathbed? That act disturbed me - he did not even kneel when she died.I am not speaking of hypocrisy here just thinking of a young poseur who was thinking of himself above all - as you do at that age - especially if you are the ''favourite'. How much are the writings of Joyce autobiographical? Is the 'real 'Stephen Dedalus - AKA Joyce - a 'self-obsessed arsehole' - and did Joyce realise that about himself during his writing? As regards the Portrait Joyce changed the original title from ‘Stephen Hero’ - why did he do that? When did Stephen stop being a Hero?Read it again recently - skipped loads of 'the sermon because being brought up a Catholic have kind of heard it all before but have never been on a Retreat where apparently, in the olden days, you would receive the hell-fire message in spades. I found it interesting in the book that Stephen had to find an anonymous confessor to his 'sins'. He seemed too proud or ashamed to confess to a priest at the school who may have recognised his voice.I think one of the best things I learned from The Portrait was how much Joyce loved his jovial, irascible Father. The last chapter in The Portrait seems a bit of a 'cop-out' with its diary entries...a bit rushed-but maybe that was all meant.The last entry is particularly poignant (vide quote above)The bits that stick in my mind aside from the obvious passages (Hell Fire Sermon ) are the childhood passages, Dedalus remembering his uncles' tobacco smoke, listening to and trying to make sense of the adults arguing about current affairs as a bystander, the bewilderment of starting a new and strange school and trying to understand and navigate the adult rules and language of the constitution chimed with my own memories of childhood. The child is the father of the man, I think Joyce says we cannot shake off these experiences, they form who we are. You are always going to be an exile from them even if you leave physically and geographically.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In youth, Stephen begins to experience doubts about god and the church, as well as his faith in the way he perceives the world. Finally as a young man, he solidifies his beliefs in the world and moves toward creating his life as an artist. There is some really beautiful writing in this book, and I most enjoyed those sequences when he's walking through whatever town he's living in at that time and his emotions are fluctuating as he experiences the world around him. However, there are also long bouts of sermonizing and lecturing, discussing things in a purely theoretical manor, which really dragged on the story. I lost a lot of interest through those passages. While I definitely can't claim that this is a great book, I saw enough beauty throughout much of it to make it through to the end.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I started this book in June and just finished it. I was really hoping to love this book. I don't know why, but ever since middle school I believed that James Joyce would become one of my all time favorite authors. I felt an unexplainable pull towards him, but I decided to wait until I was in college to read him because I heard that he was difficult. Boy, is he ever! I enjoyed a few of the passages in this book, particularly the priest's sermon on Hell (which will haunt me until my dying day) and Stephen's monologue on beauty and aesthetics. So much of the novel just went straight over my head, though. The interaction between the boys completely eluded me. At times, Cranly came off as bipolar to me. I couldn't understand their extreme reactions to things and how they would pick a fight over nothing (Cranly being the worst of all of them about this), but I guess that's how boys are? I also didn't like how they would always use Latin in their everyday conversation. It made them seem very pretentious. Perhaps that was the point of it. I have to take some blame for not enjoying this book that much. I turned my reading of it into work rather than pleasure. Since I didn't have an annotated copy, I had to look up all the Irish slang and Latin phrases. I made sure that I always had a pen and highlighter with me, and for the first half of the book I always had to have my laptop available too until I decided to print out the glossary I was constantly referring to.I put so much effort into it because I knew that I would reread it one day, and I wanted to make sure that I would be able to focus on the story rather than the academics of it. I'm a bit too turned off from it right now to begin rereading it right away, but maybe after a few months I can prepare myself to pick it up again. And hopefully I'll enjoy it much more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After having read "Ulysses" when i was 13, i read this book at 16 and found it a bit disappointing, since it was so much more conventional. This is not to say this is not a worthwhile read. And i realized it was written before "Ulysses", and some of the same characters make there appearance in that later book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    James Joyce’s autobiographical story of growing up and struggling with religion, politics, sexuality, poverty, and what it meant to be Irish in the late 19th century. Told in the stream of consciousness style he pioneered and which had a huge impact on literature has its great moments, but as in Ulysses he takes it to an extreme, and it is often difficult to understand what the hell he’s talking about. Moreover, while I have a feeling his descriptions of Catholicism are accurate, they are lengthy and weren’t very interesting, and there was a heaviness to this book that I didn’t like.Quotes:On Ireland:“- … 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.Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.- Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a man’s country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or mystic after.- Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”On solitude, and sadness in youth:“His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul incapable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.”Lastly, I loved the feeling of this one, cricket in the evening:“The fellows were practicing long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.”
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    All I can say is: Thank goodness that's over!! I'm sure I really didn't understand it, but it doesn't make me even halfway interested in trying to understand it. At least I know what it's about, and I can mark it off the list!1 like
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This work shows Joyce's talent. It is well written, easy to follow and portrays characters that the reader can easily like. Man, did Joyce ever change when ego set in.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I would consider this novel a semi-autographical account of Joyce’s teen years. As Stephen Dedalus he struggles with becoming a man and questioning all that has been taught to him by his father and teachers regarding love, beauty and religion. Their voices telling him to be a good Catholic and a gentleman have become hollow sounds in his ears. In thought and deed, women have become his main source of sin and though the thought of eternal damnation frightens him, it is so difficult to walk a straight and narrow path.Other than my favorite line in the story, ”To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!”, I found the book contained only brief moments of brilliance. At times I could not follow Joyce’s train of thought and his peculiar way of changing scenes was unsettling. Perhaps a reread is necessary to fully appreciate this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent wording and so well written it is scary.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Sorry everybody. I know that Joyce is one of the quintessential authors of the twentieth century, but I just couldn't stand this book. And it's not that I don't like stream-of-consciousness...it's just the story--rather pathetic and rambling.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't much care for the later parts in the book, but the beginning--Stephen's childhood--is, in my opinion, one of the greatest and most beautiful bits of words ever put to paper. That alone is reason to pick this up, and as a sort of "gateway" book between the easy-to-read Dubliners and the notoriously difficult Ulysses, it works beautifully.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Joyce uses beautifully poetic language, and his portrayal of Catholic guilt was magnificent. However, the frequent jumps between the present and the thoughts in Dedalus's head made this a frustrating read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's a great novel about all aspects of the Christian life...........................The part where he stops being deathly afraid of sin is actually really necessary. (“Supererogation”). Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to Suffering Jesus, and on Saturday he went to the jazz club with Thomas Merton. It doesn’t mean.... I don’t know. “Father forgive me; it’s been a day since my last confession, and I looked at Eva Cassidy the jazz singer for twenty seconds.”“Father forgive me; it’s been eight months since my last confession, and I’ve been really whoring it up the whole time.” There’s a difference. ...............................Really, by the last part, when he was “disillusioned with church and society”, or whatever, it could very well be, “A Portrait of the Scholastic as a Young Man”. If he was annoyed with the rowdy students, it was because they couldn’t follow all his quotes of Aquinas in Latin. As he was once a rowdy student himself, it’s quite the transformation. And yet he was not weighed down with a sense of sin, but carried with him a certain satisfaction. ...................................The closest any of them come to sinning, if you will, (excluding, for some reason, “I’ll be the death of that fellow one time”), in the end is questioning various doctrines, which is not a sin. It’s only a “nationalist” church which would curse that, and it’s not a nationalist book, or, more to the point, a nationalist *reality*. .... He just doesn’t sound like a cursing cynic to me. [reposted 2/3/18].
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is as far as my Joyce adventure will go, I think. I've looked at "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake", and I doubt I will make it any further. "A Portrait..." was interesting, if not exactly world-changing; perhaps I approached it in the wrong frame of mind, and wasn't open to the possibilities it suggests and has suggested in others.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Beginning biographically, the novel orbits a young Stephen Daedalus, born to one Simon Daedalus, baptized in Christ, and a son of Ireland no less. Stephen is not only a one-time product of these institutions, but finds himself constantly immersed in the imperialist miasma of their expectations and responsibilities. As he comes of age and begins to ponder his identity, he precociously questions the dramatic effects that these parental, political, religious, sexual, and literary internalizations have had on its (his) construction. As he finds his own voice (non serviam), the form of the book changes with it and the once narrated Stephen becomes the narrator Stephen.“The soul 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.”Stephen’s transcendence comes in the form of a psychological revolution, a mutilation of the old self and a willful, deliberate creation of the new. Asserting that man is (or at least can be) his own creation, he struggles to create his own father, supplanting his biological father (and other fathers) for a spiritual father of his own formation - what can be read as a miraculous self-begetting.For Ireland, Stephen’s story holds the key to spiritual freedom. With their victimization and oppression a national legacy, the Irish identity became strongly conflated with their role as victims. It became their destiny to be slaves, a people grown to love their enslavement and to fear freedom and its responsibilities, a people whose tradition had unconsciously become oppressing themselves.In Ulysses, Joyce later wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” In contrast to most schools of thought which presume that the wisdom needed today can be found in the past, Joyce confronts the dangers that come with its blind inheritance and concession to the conventional life that it creates and encourages.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel took me three times as long to read as it might have. A third of my time I spent reading it, a third reading about it, and another third lost in daydreaming and memories as time after time Joyce hit something from my experience so squarely on the nose that it sent me reeling.It didn't begin at all well. A title that reads like a subtitle, an opening line about a moocow, a stream-of-consciousness narrative with glimpses of scenes in fits and starts ... I feared the whole novel would be like this, until I understood it was a child's apprehension of the world. Confusion swiftly gave way to respect. James Joyce had a great talent for recapturing not only the events of childhood but also the much more difficult to remember perceptions, how a young boy takes in and processes what he learns about the world. I would never have recalled it quite this way, and yet it echoes with truth. The boy ages and the same truth shines from the page with each passing year and event, as how he perceives and what he perceives alter with time. He discovers the world is not black-and-white, that not all arguments have tidy resolutions, that the opposite sex is only human too, that religion cannot provide definitive answers, that destiny calls from within. He's still got his blind spots, though: he's stubborn about letting the world in, about taking responsibility for anyone or caring about his roots, and he's far too full of himself and his accumulated learning. But what's an artist without a surfeit of pride?I took the title to be self-referential to Joyce, but it's meant more generically; this is the development of a fictional artist's mind from childhood to self-identity as such, although with biographical elements borrowed from Joyce's own life. Surprisingly accessible (if not so much as "Dubliners"), the only sticking part for me were the big long diatribes about hell and damnation which don't really get examined but pull no punches as an example of what was being knocked into Catholic Irish boys' heads, and maybe still are in some dark corners of the world. I'm bound to deeply admire this book, one I'm stunned by for how well it got inside my head and toured me through episodes from my own life, like a tourist guide who remembers me better than I do.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    et ignotas animum dimittit in artesOvid, metamorphoses, viii, 18
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A debut novel by Irish author, James Joyce, it is considered to be a Künstlerroman (artist growth to maturity) in a modernist style and is told in third person and free indirect speech. The subject matter addresses intellectual, religio-philosophical growth of Stephen Dedalus who eventually rebels against Catholic and Irish conventions. In this novel, the author uses the techniques that he more fully uses in Ulysses and Finnigans Wake. Stephen attends a Jesuit run school where he is bullied by the other students. His father's debts interrupt his education but then he attends college on scholarship. Stephen’s name and character represents James Joyce the author and Daedalus from Greek mythology. Overall the story was okay. It was quick, I didn’t mind the style but it didn’t make me anymore eager to tackle Ulysses and Finnigans Wake. The narrator spoke with an Irish accent and did a good job with the reading of the story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Definitely a disappointment, after the glowing reports I'd gotten from reviews and from friends' recommendations who've read the book. There were some inspiring passages that I really resonated with, like Stephen Dedaelus's conversion experience, eventually disinherited.. or his walk along the coast where he describes the scene in such detail that you know James Joyce is speaking out of personal experience... But if you don't identify with the author at any point, how can you even want to suffer through it? In general, this book is a rambling exercise in pointless intellectual thoughts, which is anticlimactic enough to feel entirely purposeless. What IS the story, anyway? Ok, a boy grows up... and fantasizes about girls and sex a lot. Where's the story there? I've rarely been this hard on a proven "classic" before, but I'll make an exception. Note to editors: please don't put footnotes in your novels, it's incredible annoying no matter how much you might think it illuminates the text. Repeatedly suggesting that the reader isn't understanding something in a book SO vague that, clearly, NOTHING should be understood, and then only citing irrelevant history, dates & all, behind the song or the building or the person just mentioned, is infuriating. I mean, I take all this trouble to page ALL the way to the back of the book for an explanation that may somehow transform this whole tiresome reading experience for me, and you're giving me a 3-paragraph long HISTORY LESSON? How about making your first and only footnote about the elusive point of this book?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first read this novel during my participation in the Four-year Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago. I have since read and reread this classic work by James Joyce. It is a portrait in words of the coming-of-age of a young boy in Ireland. As a portrait its words resonate with the ideas of Aristotle and the faith of Roman Catholicism and the spirit of music. Music, especially singing, appears repeatedly throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen's appreciation of music is closely tied to his love for the sounds of language. I remember being told by a close friend that Father Arnall’s sermon on Hell was the same sermon she heard while a youth in a catholic neighborhood in Chicago more than fifty years later. Stephen is attracted to the church for a brief period but ultimately rejects austere Catholicism because he feels that it does not permit him the full experience of being human. From the opening lines, “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”, Stephen grows in awareness and towards his artistic destiny through the words that delineate the world around him. Joyce's use of stream of consciousness makes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a story of the development of Stephen's mind through words as he grows through experience. Stephen's development gives us insight into the development of a literary genius. Stephen's experiences hint at the influences that transformed Joyce himself into the great writer he is considered today. Stephen's obsession with language; his strained relations with religion, family, and culture; and his dedication to forging an aesthetic of his own mirror the ways in which Joyce related to the various tensions in his life during his formative years. In the final moment when he goes "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience" of his race he raises a banner that seems emblematic of the life of the author of this inspiring novel.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Totally worthless.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Impossibly good (as is all Joyce). For weeks after finishing this one, I wished that I were an Irish Catholic schoolboy, and I threw myself into a fit of reading Byron.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read this in preparation for a Joyce class I will start next week, focusing on Ulysses. I am very glad I did, because this book has inventive style, a gripping storyline and a representation of social issues not unlike Quebec's in the 50's and 60's - and is a good introduction to the kind of experiments Joyce makes in Ulysses.The development of an artistic mind striving for freedom is fascinating when put in Joyce's lyricism and grand eloquence. I was scared by Joyce at first but now I feel more confident than ever that I can enjoy and appreciate his work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel like I don't really get Joyce and why he's so admired.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Overweening bastard that he is, Stephen Dedalus goes to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. And I think: Wow, now I finally understand what Ulysses was all about. It was Joyce's great thesis and his canticle of canticles, his attempt to speak of Irish ghosts in their own language. And Portrait needs to come first, set the scene. Ye Artificer his Remarkable Historie.

    But it's so much more. It's an incredible invocation of the fears and fancies of childhood in a dark and brutal island off the coast of civilization, for we scattered generations of the Commonwealth a shivering memory of the disciplinary yoke of the imperial world-system out of which we came, its origin on another small cold island and its combination, in enchanted Ireland, with an ancient tyranny of soulmongers--Church and Charter, Christ and King. Joyce teases out the stunted schoolboy resistance that persists furtively under that hideous weight and, in the first section, makes it stand tall and proud and relate one small victory in a way that makes it an exemplar, a rebel ballad which will echo and shift, with none of the unavoidable self-neutering fascism of Another Brick in the Wall. When the dean offers to chastise the priest that paddled young Stephen, I want to throw my cap in the air, clutch my rock candy and shout "Haroo!"

    It is also, and here I see how Riddley Walker is the Dedalus of his culture, an ecstatic linguistic myth. Stephen languishes in phantasmagoria, transfixed by the Church's imagery even as its language leads him down scholastic and aesthetic rabbit holes. No site of resistance in thee, O Lord. He breaks free, but languishes too in sex and jealousy and a sense of his sex as sin that keeps him yoked to Sweet Baby Jay as much as he was when he thought he had a vocation--more, since there is now no intellectual tradition for him to inhabit and hone to a rapier point. And like Wittgenstein, this is what brings him back to language--the emptiness of any Irish emancipatory project that is not reflexive, that doesn't come to terms with rape and pillage of a people's speech and culture. The fact that the ghosts of Eire are now strangers, hostile and hungry ghosts. English priests will come and run your parish schools and be rebelled 'gainst in a mummer's show, but there ain't no English firbolg. The fact that the working and peasant classes are as estranged, slouched low inside the Celtic soul, and Stephen/young Joyce is so transfixed and compromised as to attack the people on one side with the class attitudes of the oppressor while still grasping after the deep insights and magic words with which the house Irish or say the native boy can convincingly and with the heart of a believer--one that no matter how effete and Anglified, hates righteously the foreign muck that encrusts him--can fight back as comfortable in his weapons as the car-bomber or the Gaelic association athlete or the balladeer. "Oh tell me Sean O'Farrell" is an anti-colonial weapon too, no doubt about it, but it's not the right one for Joyce/Dedalus, the freaky eyepatch, the adept who feels and the aesthete who believes and the fart-sniffing genius who moves away to Paris and unsettles the whole non-Celtic and imperial world with the queerness of his offerings.

    Meaning: Joyce's Sean O'Farrell is "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". Dedalus's pikes hidden under haystacks and gleaming together at the rising of the moooooon are "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea" and "Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job" and "If others have their will Ann hath a way" and perhaps even "End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs". Speaking English like a foreign language, like not only your Irish politics and desires and fears but indeed your Irish lips and mouth and brain are different. The extraordinary final third of Portrait of the Artist is where a callow young smartass engages intensively with others of his ilk in words, words, words, leavened with occasional fists; learns to quit yammering about what needs to be done and think about how to just maybe start to do it; and understand that the first step for the poor tongueless Irishman is to make words strange. This book reveals Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as, at least in part, a great project of national liberation. It is their prospectus and methodology.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A portrait differs from an autobiography in that it is a subjective impression of the character from a certain point of view, and distorted to some degree through the use of a specific style. Whereas biography is more objective.Though the work is predominantly autobiographical in its source material, it is more a self portrait in its presentation, dressed up as a novel on the childhood and young adulthood of "Stephen Daedalus" who later takes a role in Joyce's Ulysses. Two things make this book interesting: the style in which it is written, and the subject matter. Though far more accessible and plainly-written than either Ulysses, or the even more formiddable Finnegan's wake, there are embryonic hints here of his characteristic style that would develop more fully in his later works.Joyce had an atypical childhood both from the modern viewpoint, and to a lesser degree for his time. He was initially educated in a Jesuit college in Ireland, before moving to another one due to his father's financial difficulties.This education seemed to encourage his propensity toward a religious disposition, which he showed for many of his earlier years, before a lapse into temptation and "pleasures of the flesh". Toward the end of the book he goes on to think about aesthetic theory, inspiring discussion with his peers at university. This would be a good introduction to reading Joyce, both because it gives the reader an understanding of Joyce's experiences, and because it is less challenging than his later works.