A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce

 


A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce

I picked this one up from the library on a recommendation from my friend Jay, and it was just as interesting as he said it would be. Portrait follows the early life of an aspiring poet, Stephen Dedalus, in a semi-autobiographical parallel to Joyce’s own childhood growing up in Dublin, Ireland.

Joyce’s writing style evolves with the character and really captures the way the mind works and develops from childhood through adolescence - especially the mind of someone as solitary and introspective as Stephen. I was fascinated at just how accurately Joyce channels the quirks of a young kid’s thought process into writing - the fixations on random ideas and the apparent lack of logic or coherence behind what a child accepts or questions, fancies or shies away from. And this cognitive accuracy carries into Stephen’s teenage years, too, where his over-sensitive, over-emotional inner monologue is translated into long, rambling, tense passages, building single ideas into a deluge of anxiety, or fear, or joy. And finally, the writing in Portrait transitions into a heavily critical light, as Stephen’s college days imbue him with the cynically philosophical mindset of a young adult questioning institutions and coming to terms with their place in the world.

Stephen’s place in the world, or more specifically his identity relative to himself and his surroundings, is a troubled aspect of his own perception throughout the whole novel. Stephen has a habit of dissociation that spans his early years. As a kid, he imagines his own death with an unaffected degree of removal when he falls ill at boarding school. As a teenager, there are times where he struggles just to stay grounded in reality at all - repeating his own name and location in an effort to keep from losing his grip on the concrete world around him. Yet as a young adult he starts to embrace this lack of presence - namely in his poetry, positing that the author of real art ceases to be part of it. This sentiment spills beyond Stephen’s artistic aspirations, though, as he ceases to be a part of the people and places that molded him as well. And for reasons beyond the scope of the storyline itself…

I didn’t quite pick up on the political themes of Portrait until I dove into the introduction of the “Penguin Classics” edition I was reading, which analyzed the story’s underlying commentary on nationalism. Joyce voices his discontent with Ireland’s brand of nationalistic upheaval through Stephen, who rejects Ireland’s so-called identity as a borrowed culture - both from their Roman religion and their English customs. This commentary comes to a head with Stephen’s questionable decision to leave everything he knows in pursuit of his art. He takes an agnostic stance against the Catholic doctrine that shaped his morality, he runs from Dublin, which more or less comprised the entire scope of his physical upbringing, and he breaks ties with his family and friends, as social connections never seemed to hold firmly with his transient nature to begin with. It’s a melancholy end to a troubled narrative, which parallels the Irish plight of securing their own identity. But it’s not without a glimmer of hope - that in running away, Stephen (and his country) can realize a more genuine, revised appreciation for their faith, their relationships, their place, and their art.

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