A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

So... James Joyce.  I am not shy in voicing my distain for Ulysses.  It's not the best book ever written.  To me, it seems deliberately difficult. I don't care what point you're making- there is no need to go 200 odd pages without a full stop.  But one of my housemates loves A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and so I thought I would give Joyce another go.  I have to read Finnegans Wake at some point anyway, so I might as well get this one over with.  This is Joyce's first novel and I think this might be as comprehensible as he gets.

The novel is referred to pretty much everywhere as a Bildungsroman which is essentially a wanky term for coming of age story.  That's pretty an allegory for this book; something simple made unnecessarily complicated.  It is literally just a story of a kid growing up in Ireland.

Stephen Dedalus is a boy who grows into a man.  This is the story.

Dedalus, the internet tells me, is a reference to Daedalus- Icarus's father in Greek mythology.  This is the first in a long list of references in the book that I so far didn't get that I don't even know they existed.  To steal a line off Donald Rumsfeld, "there are unknown unknowns" when it comes to the references in this book.  I assume there are more.  I pretty much stopped looking after the first one, else this blog would have descended very quickly into things that the internet tells me this book is about.

I know everything that I'm writing makes it sound like I hated the book. I didn't.  It's just okay.  The story is actually quite interesting and the development and growing complexity of the language when Stephen a child is good. It was interesting to read this book straight after Go Tell it on a Mountain, so many of themes are the same- young men struggling to grow up with the expectations of the church- and some parts about death match almost word for word.  It is fascinating that while the modes of worship are worlds apart, the core messages and fears that Christianity imposes on its young seem to be universal.

Modernism so often just seems like showing off about how much you know, about how much you've read (yes, I understand the irony of using this blog to bitch about that) and sometimes it prioritises that over narrative.  In pushing to add layers to their characters, something can be lost.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man still worked for me because there is still a story when the allusions are stripped away.  My issue with Joyce always comes back to Ulysses.  It is not just that I think the book overrated, it clouds people's judgement.  If Ulysses had not been written, I am not confident A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would be remembered.  It serves to contextualise Joyce's genius rather than to shine in its own right.

My next book is another foray into Irish religion.  It's The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien.