A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
To use yourself for art you need a really interesting life, or sheer expressive skill - the ability to force anything to be interesting. Neither is easy: someone like Montaigne manages easily, but e.g. Rousseau doesn't (he just got there first, to the I Am Art game, so we have to talk about him).
Joyce's life is only mildly interesting from the outside, so it falls to his evocation. I read this to find out whether to care about him, and I actually didn't until Part III, the rightly famous spiritual arc from apatheistic teenage kicks, to the ecstatic shame of submitting to the vast closed Catholic system, and through it to passionate agnosticism, anticlerical naturalism. Joyce's is the best portrait of the Church's infinite terrorism:
As a teen Stephen tries to mortify himself, to not look at women, to not eat well, to just look at the mud. But he's too bright, too worldly and too proud. I cheered at the end of Part IV, when he throws off the yoke.
The prose is port wine: lovely if sipped. It is mostly monologue but the dialogue is the best bit. He is passionate about anything, e.g. algebra -
The painful process of moving past family, nation, church, scholastic philosophy, to become yourself. Doing this in a country as maniacal about nation and church as eC20th Ireland was so much harder, and indeed he had to leave. He doesn't move past Art, and acquires a similarly monomanaical view of it -
but if my prose was as good as Joyce's maybe I couldn't have moved past it either. Like Nietzsche if he wasn't an edgelord.
That printers and governments treated Joyce and Lawrence the same is a laugh: Joyce has all of Lawrence's passion and none of the flat feet. Self-parody, odd humility, laughter at his own past dogmatism.
His memory - or his notetaking? - is amazing: scholars have spent lifetimes checking and relating everything in this to recorded history, and he's usually spot on about details (though he changes names). I don't think I could write anything as accurate, even in my surveillance society.
Fully half of my edition was taken up in footnotes and bibliophilia. (It also left Joyce's typos in, which is a bit much. In fact half the footnotes were as trivial as typos, e.g. pointing out where lines are reused from his draft Stephen Hero.)
Portrait stops before the end of uni, before his odyssey, before his wife even. And much of the last section is a surprisingly flat, academic statement of Thomist aesthetics. But by then you've heard enough to love him anyway.
Joyce's life is only mildly interesting from the outside, so it falls to his evocation. I read this to find out whether to care about him, and I actually didn't until Part III, the rightly famous spiritual arc from apatheistic teenage kicks, to the ecstatic shame of submitting to the vast closed Catholic system, and through it to passionate agnosticism, anticlerical naturalism. Joyce's is the best portrait of the Church's infinite terrorism:
remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God’s holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless.
As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail, gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils.
As a teen Stephen tries to mortify himself, to not look at women, to not eat well, to just look at the mud. But he's too bright, too worldly and too proud. I cheered at the end of Part IV, when he throws off the yoke.
The prose is port wine: lovely if sipped. It is mostly monologue but the dialogue is the best bit. He is passionate about anything, e.g. algebra -
The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.
The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the bale-fire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.
The painful process of moving past family, nation, church, scholastic philosophy, to become yourself. Doing this in a country as maniacal about nation and church as eC20th Ireland was so much harder, and indeed he had to leave. He doesn't move past Art, and acquires a similarly monomanaical view of it -
[To be an artist], a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life
but if my prose was as good as Joyce's maybe I couldn't have moved past it either. Like Nietzsche if he wasn't an edgelord.
That printers and governments treated Joyce and Lawrence the same is a laugh: Joyce has all of Lawrence's passion and none of the flat feet. Self-parody, odd humility, laughter at his own past dogmatism.
His memory - or his notetaking? - is amazing: scholars have spent lifetimes checking and relating everything in this to recorded history, and he's usually spot on about details (though he changes names). I don't think I could write anything as accurate, even in my surveillance society.
Fully half of my edition was taken up in footnotes and bibliophilia. (It also left Joyce's typos in, which is a bit much. In fact half the footnotes were as trivial as typos, e.g. pointing out where lines are reused from his draft Stephen Hero.)
Portrait stops before the end of uni, before his odyssey, before his wife even. And much of the last section is a surprisingly flat, academic statement of Thomist aesthetics. But by then you've heard enough to love him anyway.