A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Unabridged)

Rating:
Summary: Splendid First Novel from James Joyce
Review: "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man" is a fictionalized account of James Joyce's early life. But more importantly, it was a bold, radical departure from previous novels, since it possessed such a richly lyrical prose describing the artist's self reflection and maturation during his adolescence; perhaps it was the first important novel on self consciousness and realization published in the 20th Century. Its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus - whom we will encounter again in "Ulysses" - is none other than Joyce himself, striving to reconcile himself with the demands of his family, his faith and desire for artistic freedom. Ultimately it will be artistic freedom which wins out, as evidenced by the radical transformation of Joyce's initial, simplistic prose, to one which is truly poetic by the novel's conclusion. Set approximately around the time of the great Irish politician Parnell's death, Joyce offers fascinating insights into his early education, his relationship with the Catholic Church and his emerging sense of Irish nationalism, fueled by his admiration for Parnell. While this is not Joyce's best work of novel-length fiction, it certainly foreshadows his subsequent literary triumphs such as "Ulysses".

Rating:
Summary: A Portrait of 20th Century Literature as a Young Form
Review: James Joyce is the single most important writer of the 20th century. Simply put, the form of the novel exists in two stages - pre-Joyce and post-Joyce; no other novelist approaches the impact on the literary landscape that Joyce acheived in perfecting his style. The story behind the actual writing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (originally entitled Stephen Hero) is that Joyce began writing basically a semi-autobiographical account of his childhood up through his early adulthood. He then decided that he wanted to convey the events of his life in a form other than direct disclosure. The rest, as they say, is history. Enter stream of consciousness. Enter free association. Enter Freud, Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Bible, Catholicism, the complexity of man, the simplicity of man, social class,and Irish lifestyle (to name a tiny portion of what this novel presents) without ever having to mention many of these influences by name. What it really boils down to is that this novel began a revolution in the way literature is read and written. Sounds over the top I know, but think about it. What Joyce experimented with here he later advanced in Ulysses (which is even better than A Portrait) and totally submitted to in Finnegan's Wake (of which I didn't understand a single word). His direct influence ranges from Faulkner to Proust to Nabokov. For those who are just getting into literature and may not know those names, those three are heavy hitters. Like sumo-wrestler heavy.
The content of the novel itself reveals the inner character of Stephen Dedalus and, in turn, of James Joyce himself. As I said before, this novel is both largely biographical as well as psychological, perhaps more important in what it says about the human mind in general than what it says about the Irish mind of early 1900s Dublin. And frankly its just beatifully written. This is not Joyce's finest work (that would be Ulysses), but it is certainly one of the foundations upon which modern literature stands. And for that reason, even if you don't like Joyce's work (which is your loss to say the least) you have to respect it. To respect it is to at least read it. It's a tough style, but it's worth it. Trust me.

Rating:
Summary: Stephen Hero
Review: Portrait of the artist is a vitally important novel for anyone interested in writing, writers, genius, repression, Catholicism, intellectualism versus dogmatism, the life and mind of James Joyce and novels as an art form. The writing style mutates and develops throughout the story, reflecting the different ages of Stephen Dedalus, from the baby talk and visceral imagery of his parents, governess Dante and Uncle Charles in his early childhood, through his schooldays as he wrestles with his intellect, his faith, his sexual awakening and his guilt to the advanced articulate and experimental style he invokes in his late adolescence, including an experimental journal at the end of the novel.

The themes in Portrait of the Artist cover the whole spectrum of growing up, but the principal drama surrounds the intellectual development of Stephen. He is a formidable mind, a free thinker. But his faith impells him throughout towards the narrow minded dogmatism of the Catholic Church. At times, the church holds the upper hand, as Stephen is terrified into confessing his sins with prostitutes in the face of Father Arnall's legendary, sensual, brutal 'Hellfire' sermon on the fate of sinners who don't repent before god. But Stephen wrestles with such demons, and grows, and fights, and ultimately prevails. He sees the image of the rotting cabbages in in the kitchen gardens and considers the disordered symbolism of this as more appealing to his natural essence than the neat tidiness of the shrine to Mary.

Stephen realises he must leave this claustrophobic restrictive life behind. The end of the novel chronicles his last days in Dublin before leaving Ireland. His conversation with Cranley forces home the realisation that Stephen is growing up, his childhood is behind him, and, most importantly, he is prepared to err and make mistakes, even if this means damnation. He is able, as he says 'To discover the mode of life or art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom'.

Stephen, with all his passionate intellectual talent, is ready to hit the world, and the forces such as Father Arnall who seem ready to stamp on such independence with vitriolic counter ideological pamphleteering cannot stop him. Thank God for that. The original title of the book, Stephen Hero, is apt indeed.

Rating:
Summary: Young genius takes flight
Review: Portrait of the Artist is Joyce's Kunstleroman about the growth of sensibility in a young genius. The novel is luminous and because it is early Joyce, it's accessible as the writing style is straight ahead narrative modified to reflect the writer's age in various stages of his youth. It is easy to witness the writer's sensibility heighten as he matures: his sense of protest, his growing perspective of his life, church and nation. Proust and Joyce wrote at about the same time but met only once briefly in an awkward exchange and Joyce lived for years in self-imposed creative exile in Paris. In the later chapters there are stylistic similarities between early Joyce and Proust, whose style and narrative voice are consistent throughout the 4300 pages of La Recherche du Temps Perdu. However, Joyce's narrative technique changed radically as he grew as a novelist from Portrait to Ulysses and finally to Finnegan's Wake. In Joyce's willingness to experiment unfettered by style, voice, syntax, genre and diction he changed the English language: he left it better than he found it. Chapters 4 and 5 are brilliant and take flight like Daedalus, the inventive hawkman. If you seek an entry point into Joyce's work, this relatively simple, straightforward novel is your window. "To speak of these things and to try to undestand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand -- that is art." I can't encourage you more strongly to explore Joyce -- he was the most luminous genius who ever wrote a novel.

Rating:
Summary: The substance is in the self analysis
Review: A previous reviewer states that this book doesn't focus on substance, and that the substance (for him) is in the story. While I don't disrespect this view, it does seem unnecessarily limiting for oneself as a reader.

In my opinion this is an innovative book because it focuses on internal response rather than external action--the internal is the substance of Portrait. Of course being innovative doesn't make it good--it's the fact that it does this introspection very well, completely, and unapologetically that makes the book a successful endeavor. One of my favorite moments is the first full paragraph of 254, which starts "A louse crawled over the nape of his neck...".

I can understand that to some, this endless recording of introverted response might seem self-indulgent in its excess, but I think that the length and dramatic language is needed to express the depth that is inside, not just little Stevie Dedalus, but all of us.

Isn't this one of the prime purposes of art? To force us to look at ourselves in a way that we haven't before? Of course, if we don't give the piece of art a fair chance, it can never succeed.

Unlike other reviewers--I'm not reviewing based on whether or not I agree with the main character's conclusions (and therefore James's conclusions), but on whether or not the artist achieved his aims.

Incomprehensible? It's only incomprehensible if you expect to read a clear and informative essay. That's not the purpose, it's to convey the innermost thoughts of one individual--and these thoughts/feelings/responses are not always perfectly clear--in fact, they rarely are, in any of us.

Why a 4 instead of a 5? Because Portrait feels more to me like a series of stories that only happen to occur chronologically, rather than a bonified novel. I don't feel like I've gone from point A to B when I'm done. Maybe this aspect is unavoidable given the true goal of the book, as I've interpreted it, but I'm just being honest.

Rating:
Summary: The Artificer
Review: _A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man_ by James Joyce marks the conception of one of the most famous characters in literature. Furthermore, it is the first of three novels that James Joyce published.

Simply put, this is: pure art. Nothing is written on a whim. It is obvious that every word has been carefully constructed to reach Joyce's ultimate purpose of drawing a portrait of a young man on the brink of artistic genius. Joyce succeeds with flying colors.

Stephen Daedalus has been an outsider all of his life. As Stephen listens to his father recall his own memories from childhood he finds that he is incapable of living out his youth with the same fervor and zest that his father was able to. His church cannot satisfy his unrest, and he refuses to serve "that in which [he] no longer believes." He reaches the bottom of the abyss and he then has an epiphany that gives his life direction. He will "forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race."

The prose throughout the novel is beautiful. Joyce is truly the greatest writer of English prose I have ever read. His characters are wonderfully conceived and executed. While some readers might scream "overkill," I found the discussions of art to be some of the most interesting, though a bit didactic, passages in the novel.

This is the second time that I have read this novel, and as is always the case with great literature it was better this go around. It is not nearly as good as _Ulysses_; however, it would seem to me that one should read this before jumping into that labyrinth.


Rating:
Summary: On the Nature of Beauty and Life
Review: The perennial work of the great master of the 20th century, James Joyce, beginning his revolution in the form of how a story is told. The book shows us the adventure in growing to think for oneself, avoiding the snares of the culture one is raised in, discovering the very nature of beauty and it's relationship to the meaning of life. It gives a rememberance of sin and experience as well as the purpose of art not to provide an escape from life, but as a means for the honest expression of it.

Some people will never like this book and think it too ponderous, but for those of us who love this book, we hold it all the more dearly in our hearts.

Rating:
Summary: The smithy of the soul of the master artificer Daedalus
Review: This spiritual autobiography contains within it the themes which Joyce would expand and elaborate in his masterwork ' Ulysses'. But this work too is a masterpiece which gives us a portrait of an artist in development , and a picture of the society, the church, the family he would go into exile from . Joyce's center is in his consciousness of language, and his creation and recreation of it. He begins the autobiography in the baby language of beginning, and throughout adjusts styles to the situation and level of life he happens to be in. But the fundamental portrait is of the young artist in development, a development of his knowledge and artistic skills but also a development toward knowledge and estrangement from the world which he comes from. He will leave his family, and his native land and his church not so much for the exile of Trieste or Zurich or Paris or any place in particular but for that situation in which he can be wholly alone to shape in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Joyce master of ironies sees perhaps the vanity of his own vaunted ambition but nonetheless is true to it to the end. This work is filled with remarkable and beautiful passages, interesting meetings and in a way memorable characters. It opens us to a new world the world of a great artist whose epiphanies on oval leaves will tell of the great transformation and development of his life- in which the spiritual realm is no longer the Catholic and conventionally religious but is usurpred by the great truth telling and beauty- creating realm of Literature. This work is in parts difficult to read, but even if with the help of some kind of crib it should be ventured . For it is a great work indeed.

Rating:
Summary: An autobiographic novel
Review: Although the hero of James Joyce's novel is called Stephen Dedalus, the events and characters depicted in it parallel the author's own experiences. In his early childhood, at the very beginning of the 20th century, Stephen was sent to Clongowes, a Jesuit boarding school near Dublin. He disliked the place because his classmates bullied him, because he was taught religion in a dogmatic way and because he was flogged unjustly by his prefect of studies. After that he spent a summer with his uncle Charles in Dublin. Stephen was then sent to Belvedere college, which he disliked as much as Clongowes. The spirit of quarrelsome comradeship couldn't turn him away from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the agitation and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship, which he felt was an awful anticipation of adulthood.
Stephen was by then aware that he didn't belong. He also felt more and more estranged from his father after having accompanied him once to Cork and witnessed his drinking habits, a journey which ended in Stephen's first experience in love making - a sordid one.
More disappointment followed as Stephen went to university, thus becoming a disillusioned young man - a disillusionment caused by academicism, love and sex, his parents, religion and perhaps also his own country, Ireland...