On "The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce *****

At one time, I considered this my favorite book. When I look back at when that was so, I realize that I likely had lots of favorite books, rotating as I got to work after work--Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, various books by John Steinbeck (To a God Unknown, Tortilla Flat, and The Winter of Our Discontent come to mind), McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, Kerouac’s On the Road. Somehow, though, I put this Joyce novel at the top of the list for quite some time. Today I don’t know what book I’d put atop that list, let alone what novel at the top of the best novel list. (Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End may qualify as the best novel I’ve read in the past couple of decades, but how could I really say that it tops The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises or whatever other great novels are out there.) The issue is generally that no one book fits every occasion, mood, or use. Of great short story collections/books, I’d rank Jesus’ Son as one of my favorites, but I certainly am not always in the mood to read about heroin addicts. Sometimes one wants a good plot, sometimes lyrical language, sometimes deep thoughts, sometimes new techniques or a very particular technique. As a much more widely read reader at age fifty than at age twenty, I find fewer techniques seem truly novel and so am often less easily impressed. The fact that some classic books still stand out to me may be a sign of how great those books are or of how the “first” book I read that did X or Y or Z continues, because of its personal connection to me, to hold sway over more recently read work.

Coming to Portrait twenty-five years since its last reading, I can easily see what I found so impressive about it when I was younger. It features a lot of classy technical virtuosity. The stream-of-consciousness works here without seeming too difficult to understand, and as Stephen Dedalus grows up, so too does the language used. The technique and language are something hard for me not to enjoy, even on the third or fourth pass all the way through the book (and innumerable passes through various passages). The book also gets into a lot of aesthetic discussions about art (and its relation to religion) that I would have found intriguing at the time.

Reading it now at an older age, however, I found myself having a hard time taking young Stephan terribly seriously. He seems so earnest in his thinking. The idea that art could replace religion, outside of giving one something to do with one’s life, seems silly. I found myself thinking that any such work I’d write now would make such points ironically, would poke fun at such notions--or really at nearly any serious notion at all. And I wonder how much I should actually identify Dedalus’s views with Joyce’s--could Joyce really be serious? Such is the cynicism of age and of our age.

I was also surprised by the brevity of the chapter (3) on awfulness of hell that had once seemed very long to me and somewhat less enjoyable. And I was surprised by the manner in which, in some ways, the book is slow and slow to develop. It is high modernism to be sure, and something I liked when younger. I still enjoy these modernist manifestos, but as a novel, Portrait seemed to me to be a bit too intellectually focused to be truly enjoyable to most folks looking for a good read, including these days to an extent even myself.