The Artist's Portrayal

Having read thus far in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I can definitely see why it has received such an amount of acclaim over the years. His use of language in the work is truly awe-inspiring and I have really enjoyed having the experience to read it. As was mentioned previously in class, it would definitely appear that Joyce’s focus was placed more on his manner of representation of his story, or his use of language, rather than the actual telling of a story. His story has proven to be fairly interesting, however, nevertheless.

The artistic representation of his life which he creates transcends a mere telling of events, going even further to relay the various steps of his thought processes throughout each experience, enabling the reader to gain an even fuller and more complete understanding of his character. This method he incorporates of providing each train of thought also aids the reader in making sense of his the different decisions he makes and the overall significance of many of the seemingly ordinary things that happen to him. Many would probably agree that not too many events have occurred up to this point in the novel which would typically receive too much attention in day-to-day life. The events that do occur, however, in their entirety do make for a great read, serving as a marvelous depiction of James’s character— with its portrayal of the numerous happenings which over time accrued to form its ultimate makeup.

Joyce and Stephen's greatness

Overall, the book is enjoyable but the con is having to go back and forth to understand some things for me anyway. I like his language in the book and as I said in class it is sort of conceited but in a good way. I chose to focus on the the scene when Heron and Boland are bothering/questioning him about the greatest of poets. It is funny because Stephen is amazed at the conversation between the dunce and class idler. Stephen is like how can these two have an amazing deep intellectual conversation. Stephen does give his opinion and states Byron but somehow that is not the answer they were looking for. In the end, we read that they beat Stephen up (alludes to the stoning of Stephen in the bible). Before Ulysses was written, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was conceived to be Joyce's greatest work and others have written about his work such as in the book Exile's return by Malcolm Cowley. The whole conversation makes you either feel like Joyce knew his writings will be great and argumentative like the conversation between Heron and Boland. I believe Joyce alludes to the fact that literature is always critiqued and if it is critiqued, you would like it to be in the great category.

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.

A Strong Character

When I first started reading this novel, I assumed Stephen would be a quiet little boy who would never have the guts to stand up for himself. This was because one of the first passages in the book mentioned him being bullied into the dirty ditch. However, I later realized that my assessment of Stephen's character was wrong when I got to the scene where Stephen goe to the rector and tells him how he was wrongfully punished by the prefect of studies. When I reread this passage, I noticed that Joyce incorporates his love for repetition during this scene in the novel. In fact, on pages 53 and 54, he mentions how the punishment was "unfair and cruel" at least four times using those exact words. At this point, I found myself mentally comparing Stephen to Tambu. Joyce's description of how Stephen is fixated on the unfairness of being humiliated and beaten is what makes him different from the way Dangarembga portrays Tambu in the "Book of Not." Dangarembga shows that Tambu is upset by Dick stealing her work but does not show Tambu contemplating on how unfair it is. As we already mentioned previously, Tambu did not complain about the unfairness of it all because she had lost all hope by that point and did not think it would make a difference. Stephen, on the other hand, is young and naive. His spirit of rebellion has not yet been broken and so he thinks that standing up for himself will make a difference. I have not yet finished the novel but I hope to find that this spirit of Stephen is not broken.

Another child's perspective

I was pleased to get to read another book written from the perspective of a child. The first few sections of Portrait are narrated through the mind and eyes of young Stephen Dedalus, and I think Joyce does a most wonderful job of presenting this. We know Stephen/Joyce is a very intelligent person, but we do not really get any of the unbelievability as we did in Ake even though Wole was supposed to be very smart. Stephen's thoughts and thought patterns are in fact very believable to the reader. We are given a glimpse into this stream of conscience regarding colors, his place on the planet and again when he is sick. All of his repetitions with words ring true to most of us probably as most of us are English majors and we know that Stephen comes to have a love for writing.
Another great thing about the first portions of Portrait is that we get to see Stephen grow and change quite rapidly. He goes from a four-year-old to a pre-teen in a matter of chapters, and we are given the opportunity to see how his love for words continues and augments. We are see him learn from interactions with others, be they family or schoolmates, and from this, we see how Stephen is developing into an older, more sophisticated young man.
Of course, we also see his personal thoughts and changing views on Catholicism in a very honest, direct light. This, however, is worthy of an entire blog entry of its own.

Mind Games

Chapter three was a very interesting chapter to me because of the sermon that the preacher is preaching and the sins that Stephen has committed at the end of chapter two. He has just slept with a prostitute and seems to be ok with it until the sermon covers hell and confessing your sins.

I imagined this entire chapter as him hearing the sermon and then flashing back to his night and then tuning back into the sermon. After church and his sleepless nights, he knows that he must confess. All I kept thinking throughout this chapter was of him, as a young child, being torn between right and wrong, confessing his sins as he should, or trying to "pray them off" at the side of his bed.

I find it interesting that Stephen did end up going to confess his sins the formal way because we do know that he later strays away from Catholicism. It seems to me that he would have stuck to the bedside way of confessing since the entire novel he has appeared torn between his religion.

Religious Aspect

Upon taking a deeper look into Stephen's prayer life, in class on Wednesday, I was very intrigued by the points that were made. We spoke a small amount about Catholicism and it's structure, which made me think a great deal whether or not Stephens prayers were genuine or out of habit. Although Joyce seems to be displaying the habitual notion of Catholicism, I feel as though, at this point in the novel, how Stephen's prays is important to his view of faith. On pg. 15 when the prefect prays, Stephen knew the responses and his prayers are very eloquent and structured (pg. 15-16). But if this structure is something that is important to the Catholic faith, Stephen is right on target. He is living out his faith the way he believes is correct and righteous. However, his repetition of the same prayer on pages 15 and 17, I believe, shows his immaturity for faith in general. He does grasp the fact that he is suppose to pray and this is exactly how it is suppose to be done ("insert name here" prayer) but he struggles with really praying because he wants too. He is torn between being cold and going to hell, all because of a prayer. I find it interesting that Joyce displays Stephen's faith this way in order to lead up to Stephen leaving to begin a life of writing.