A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)

When Stephen is a baby, you get only what comes in through the five senses. When he is a young boy, you get the experience refracted through a prism of many things: his illness (for those who've read Ulysses, here is the beginning of Stephen's hydrophobia - "How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum."), his poor eyesight, the radically mixed signals he's been given about religion and politics (the Christmas meal), his unfair punishment, and maybe most important of all, his father's unusual expressions (growing up with phrases like, "There's more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack foxes" how could this kid become anything but a writer?)

It is crucial to understand that Stephen's experiences are being given a certain inflection in this way when you come to the middle of the book and the sermon. You have to remember that Stephen has been far from a good Catholic boy. Among other things, he's been visting the brothels! The sermon hits him with a special intensity, so much so that it changes his life forever. Before it he's completely absorbed in the physical: food, sex, etc. After it he becomes just as absorbed in the spiritual/aesthetic world. It's the sermon that really puts him on the track to becoming an artist. One reviewer called the sermon overwrought. Well, of course it's overwrought. That's the whole point. Read it with your sense of humor turned on and keep in mind that you're getting the sermon the way you get everything else in the book: through Stephen.

After Stephen decides he doesn't want to be a priest, the idea of becoming an artist really starts to take hold. And when he sees the girl on the beach, his life is set for good. That scene has to be one of the most beautiful in all of literature. After that, Stephen develops his theory of esthetics with the help of Aristotle and Aquinas and we find ourselves moving from one conversation to another not unlike in Plato (each conversation with the appropriate inflection of college boy pomposity). In the end, Stephen asks his "father" to support him as he goes into the real world to create something. I like to think that this is an echo of the very first line in the book. The father, in one of many senses, is the moocow story. The story gave birth to Stephen's imagination and now it's the son's turn to create.

This is such a rich and beautiful book. I suppose it's possible for people to "get it" and still not like it, but I really think if you read and re-read, and maybe do a little research, the book will open up to you the way it did to me.


One of the milestones of 20th century literature   July 25, 2005
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful

One of the great changes in literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the birth of autobiographical literature. Even at the end of the 19th century, it was very unusual for any writer to make one's own life the basis for a purely literary work. To be sure, Dickens had put much of the London he knew in his youth into his novels, but there is no Dickens novel that can be described as purely autobiographical. Mark Twain had written memoirs that employed novelistic techniques and Samuel Butler put much of his own life into THE WAY OF ALL FLESH (a novel written in the early 1870s but not published until 1903), but it was only with such works as D. H. Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS (1913) and James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN in the English-speaking world and Marcel Proust slightly earlier in Paris that authors began taking their own lives as material for works of fiction. In Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS, a host of real life characters and actual life experiences became characters and scenes in novels. Likewise, most of the events of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST were based on actual events. It isn't quite autobiography, but neither is it pure fiction. Because the genre of fictionalized autobiography has become such a common literary form in the century that has followed Proust, Lawrence, and Joyce's work, the importance of this work can hardly be overestimated.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST is important also for the innovations Joyce made in narrative. While the events in the story occur along a time line, Joyce is not particularly concerned with most of the details in the timeline. The narrator is not concerned to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but instead wants to present a series of prose snapshots from various periods in the life of Stephen Daedalus, who is transparently based on Joyce himself. The narrator lays out the events, but he isn't concerned with explaining them or making them clear. There is, in fact, little or no interaction with the reader. Most narration presupposes the presence of the reader, but PORTRAIT ignores any reader. This leads to a certain coolness in the prose that some find discomfiting.

What cannot be denied is the brilliance and the genius of the prose. It is a prose that alters and matures gradually with the central figure of the tale. The first pages border on baby talk, while the final pages are as mature as Daedalus at the same age. In terms of form and execution, this is easily one of the most brilliant works of fiction of the past century. Moreover, it is a remarkably accessible work. For those who first come to Joyce through the agony of reading some of the more stressful sections of ULYSSES or, worse, FINNEGAN'S WAKE, read PORTRAIT will come as something of a shock. Compared to ULYSSES, this is remarkably easy going.

The complaint that I hear some make of the book is that nothing happens. That is true, if by "happens" one means an interesting and unusual plot. The "story" if there is one is that of a young man growing up, gradually gaining consciousness of the world in which he lives, and eventually rejecting the Catholic vocation urged upon him to become a writer. The book is stuffed with details from Joyce's own life, from the political preoccupations of his family (though Joyce himself was amazingly unconcerned with politics) to the family obsession with singing (both Joyce and his father possessed a near-operatic quality singing voice).

I would urge those who do not care for the book because "nothing happens" to at least entertain the possibility that there is more than one way for a novel to be brilliant. If one can see the ways that PORTRAIT expanded and developed the possibilities for prose, it will be easy to appreciate it for the work of genius that it is.


Painfully Long Philosophical Meandering   January 15, 2003
Mark Thornburg (Washington, DC)
18 out of 32 found this review helpful

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road." Such an engaging beginning! Such a crushingly dull book!

James Joyce was something of a philosopher who chose to crouch his thoughts in novel form. As such, this book is more or less a long series of ongoing inner monologues (and occasionally dialogues) on life, the Church, family, and a few other topics. Plot is nonexistant, or in those rare cases where it peeks through it's brushed aside and covered by long discussions on religion, or dad, or (yawn). I could find no incentive to keep reading, except to claim that I'd finished it so I could truly lambast it with authority.

From time to time you'll meet madmen who claim to really like Joyce and his prose style. They're either lying or insane.

By the end of the novel I was gasping for breath and praying for it to end. I don't know how I dragged myself through it. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of those books that some people are forced to read by sadistic teachers; everyone else should avoid it, unless they have a serious masochism streak and a penchant for dry, dry literature.