A Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man

Rating:
Summary: A Complex Read, Yet Excellent
Review: Joyce's portrayal of turn of the century Ireland with all of its complex social and political problems is an excellent backdrop for this story, and he vividly describes Stephen Dedalus' role in a complex story. First, I enjoy Joyce's writing style and his ability to develop Stephen's character. It is easy to relate to Stephen's development of thoughts.
I enjoyed how Joyce starts the story with Stephen as a boy, because this shows his vulnerability and dependence upon his parents for his political, religious, and social views. His interaction among the boys at Clongowes brought back my own memories from elementary school and my own interactions with students. He wants to be accepted by his peers, and Joyce shows this by his embarrassments and fears in taking a stand. Stephen is small in stature and in his confidence, but his triumph when he talks to the rector is an excellent scene because it shows Stephen developing his own independent thoughts and being able to stand up for them.
I enjoy Joyce's vivid descriptions because they include the physical realm as well as Stephen's thoughts. This is shown throughout the book - one scene in particular is when Stephen goes to Belvedere College and he has an encounter with Heron, Boland, and Nash. The four are walking on a country road, discussing their favorite authors, when Stephen states that his is Lord Byron. The boys laugh, claiming that Tennyson is the obvious choice. They pin him down and try to get him to revoke the statement, and he refuse to do so. I admire Stephen's strength in his own opinions, this example shows that he has developed his own ideas and will stand for them. Joyce's imagery makes the scenes, including Stephen's emotions, come alive. He writes, "At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His tormentors set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, half blinded with tears, stumbled on, clenching his fists madly and sobbing" (57). Stephen's emotions come alive; I can relate to the hot, angry tears he feels.
I also appreciate Joyce's writings concerning the political and religious situation in Ireland. Somewhat unaware of the problems surging in Ireland at this time, Joyce describes indirectly these problems, which fills in the reader as to the political, religious, and social context behind Stephen's life and development. One scene which made these problems clear to me was the Christmas dinner squabble between Dante and Mr. Dedalus. Stephen quietly sits back and soaks in his relatives' opinions in amazement at the scene. This scene is one of those that is when a child realizes that life has problems and the world is not in order, as he hopes. I recognize this mark of change in Stephen's confidence in his family and country.
Stephen's development is one of the greatest aspects of this book. Joyce causes Stephen's thoughts to evolve - he starts with childlike, unconnected thoughts to more complex, opinionated ones. His own desires and opinions are made known as he matures, and his own unrest becomes increasingly apparent. Furthermore, the style of this book is complex - one must read between the lines and have some kind of concept of Irish conflicts and culture in order to truly understand the full meaning behind this book. It is sometimes hard to follow Joyce's jumpy style - there is no full plot structure. This is not the best book if you are looking for a fast, easy romance novel, but it is rewarding in that it causes one to think about its themes and Stephen's development of the independence of his own soul.

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: 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.

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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: Word drunk
Review: Wordplay is immediately brought to the reader's attention. It is hard to think of a more word drunk person than James Joyce.

Even at Christmas Stephen Dedalus's family argued about Parnell. At school Stephen was accused by the English master of uttering heresy in his essay. He was tormented by other boys when he claimed Byron was a better poet than Tennyson.

James Joyce casts this story of his exquisitely sensitive, exquisitely gifted younger self into a tale of schooling under the Jesuits, being subject to the whims of everyone about him. It is said of the character that at Belvedere, one of the schools he attended, he had battled the squalor around him and the riot of his mind.

At the college everyone makes a retreat for the feast of St. Francis Xavier. Stephen sought to bring his senses under rigorous discipline for spiritual reasons. He tried to mortify sight, hearing, taste, smell. At the end of the restraint and piety he was still easily subject to imperfection to his surprise. His soul had a sensation of desolation, spiritual dryness. A priest asked Stephen if had had a call to the vocation. Stephen was destined not to be in an order, but to be on the outside and to have to make his way.

Finally Stephen is a university student. His mother has to wash him he is so dirty. He searches for the essence of beauty. He talks of Aquinas with the other students. He says he has lost his faith, but not his self-respect. There is beauty. There are women.

Speaking of faith, it seems blasphemous to attempt a review of this masterpiece.

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.

Stephan 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.