A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
Written: Mar 11 '00 (Updated Jul 11 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Enlightening, original concepts, much to mull
Cons: Sometimes preoccupied with religious debate
The Bottom Line: Autobiographical, read A Portrait first to gain insight into the mind that eventually produced the monumental modern Irish Odyssey.
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| Stloraine's Full Review: Joyce James |
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, unabridged version, Recorded Books, narrated by Donal Donally, 11.5 hours, eight cassettes.
Born on February 2, 1882, the eldest of fifteen, ten of which survived, in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce's writings all centered around his home town. Yet, when twenty-two he left with Nora, his wife whom he met on June 10, 1904, for the Continent, to never return again except for three brief visits in 1909 and 1912.
Portrait is autobiographical, telling the story of Joyce's young years at a prestigious Catholic boy's school as the fictional Stephen Dedalus. When his father, John Stanislaus Joyce lost his good civil service job, James, eleven, was sent to another less prestigious school, Belvedere. He must have felt suddenly dislocated from his friends because the tone of his writing changes and he seems to develop a shell and to retreat inward. While journeying with his father to the new school environs, they stop at a local pub:
"Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the past. An abyss of fortune or temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs. It shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets, like the moon upon a younger earth."
He wrote his first poem at age nine, entering competitions and winning prizes during his teen years, and, at eighteen, deciding on an author's vocation. He received his BA degree from Dublin University in 1902. In 1914 Dubliners was published, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began serialization, and work begun on Ulysses. Portrait was the outcome of ten years' work, having originally been an essay written in 1904 and rejected. And Ulysses, originally to be a short story in Dubliners, began its seven year Odyssey through censorship and timid publishers, finally seeing publication in 1922, after almost fourteen years of work.
Stephen Dedalus, main character of Portrait, and, later, hero of Ulysses,
explains his life, our lives in simplest terms during his discourse on an artist's relationship to his life and his viewers, yet somehow the world's populace looks on without seeing it. Joyce states, through Stephen, that the three phases of an artist's creating are lyrical, in which he formulates his ideas, masters and creates within himself. The next phase is the epic, in which the artist now brings the viewer, the audience, into relation between the art and the artist. The dramatic phase is when the artist releases the art from himself, it is refined out of existence, indifferent.
And then I understood that was what Joyce did with his books, why people were confused, because most of them are living their life in the dramatic phase, and the epic. The lyrical was lost to them as they grew out of childhood. I wanted Ulysses to end, I thought I had reached my absorptive limits. But, then, as I listened to Dubliners, I found I missed the flowing, rhythmic nonlinear descriptions.
In Portrait, I finally understood Joyce. He was the young, bright, acclaimed, university graduate, writing as a proper writer should in Dubliners. He was expressing himself as he lived, in the dramatic, which all are forced to become from societal pressure. As he grew more confident and thought back over his life and delved within his childhood memories, he brought out more free thought, originality and communicated it with his readers epically.
As he became more and more in contact with his inner self, he became his original lyrical self, he found the self that he had lost. A tsunami of the unconscious flowed out, like the wave that carries the sand, the starfish, the shells, the seaweed, the urchins, and we are the gatherers who sift through and take what we want and throw away what we don't want.
He had to put to sleep his psychic censor, because if he were to reject some, he could not have expressed all. It all had to flow, as the wave carries, unrejecting, everything with it. We have to assume the role of his psychic censor, his editor.
Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage and the men and women but actors." He perceived the state of humanity at large, living their lives in the dramatic sense. Joyce perceived the same
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Stloraine
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Location: Star Town, Milky Way Galaxy
Reviews written: 158
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About Me:
Writer, pianist, mystic. Pisces. Love to see movies, swim, study paleontology, astronomy and ancient history.
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