Prayer - Joyce

Over and over again, and over and over again, Joyce uses repetition. At first this construct had me horribly annoyed. It seemed Joyce was only using a few words to introduce his readers to a complex main character and leaving a lot for interpretation. But, as I drudged on, I found myself, right around his nighttime prayers, relax and enjoy the use of language. What made me turn was predictability in a chaotic environment –although, compared with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Joyce is, and always has been, nirvana – I began to enjoy the new meanings of words Joyce was fixated on, for instance, “turf.” Explained in class as a peat-like organic, this word is used freely to describe many different situations that Stephen examines, but in all cases the consistency of the word in spelling is the same, the only difference is context. This is what I’m finding I really like about the book, and in the case of prayer there lies a vague similarity. I could do without the ‘brimstone and fire, I’m going to Hell’ shtick, but here too, I enjoyed a commonality found with religion and youth – an understanding of adult emulation serving the purpose of divine conversation for Stephen. He uses what seems to be rote and memorized prayer to guard against him going to Hell before bed, but he seems to have an indescribable connection to the words he’s speaking, words learned to serve a necessity, but words that have a searching, passionate quality to them. I’m not sure how best to examine or describe this to be fully understood, but his inclusion of his family, the order which they’re presented, gives the reader insight into Stephen’s most personal or private mind, a feature that develops this character, for me, far more than any other we’ve seen. Also, the prayer preceding his “spare them to me” episode, the one which begins “Visit, we beseech Thee…” spurs more intrigue into Stephen’s thought process, causing me to ask, in what terms would we see this again, is this prayer only one he uses in times of fear, as we see later, or otherwise? To me, prayer is something extremely personal, one where our deepest inhibitions can be relaxed and our passions, our fears, and our desires all have equal bounds. To have Stephen pray, even if it is rote, illustrates vulnerability that before this I had not connected with any other character of our class – this is why I overlook the repetition and find joy in other aspects of Joyce’s writing, the best book we’ve been assigned all semester.