Reading List: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to read an author I have not encountered since I attempted to read his master work over a decade ago, James Joyce and his 1916 first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

A novel about the beauty of the creation of art and the struggle to escape Catholic teachings, this book touches on many themes that would be important to Joyce over his career. This was also a challenging and difficult read, mainly due to Joyce’s dense use of language and thematic elements, including liberal use of the Latin language that Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus is forced to learn at his Catholic school. In the first chapter we witness Stephen watching his father entertain an argument about Irish politics. Then we see in another early scene that Stephen gets his glasses broken by another student and is walloped for it by a professor. He then goes to the rector of the school to ask if the punishment can be rescinded. The family then moves to Dublin for financial reasons. Later we see Stephen struggle with temptations of the flesh and his wondering if he should confess such sins. Then we get a long chapter of what was familiar to me, a sermon cataloging hell and its discontents that leads Stephen to decide to confess to a priest. But this is the last bit of the church to stick to his soul as he is born to be an artist. When he is at university he has a long conversation with a colleague / friend about beauty and the nature of art (one of the best parts of the book, in my opinion) which helps Stephen lean into the creative life instead of the religious one. We see at the end in diary entries Stephen’s commitment to this life.

This was a very interesting book for several reasons, not least of which its themes dramatically spoke to me when it comes to living an artistic life. As someone who has also struggled to leave a church and break out on my own artistically, that theme definitely resonated with me. But this was also an attempt by me to read one of the great masters of the form since abandoning the maddening Ulysses (1922) about a quarter of the way through years ago. Joyce is a master when it comes to the use of language and allusion, and this early story (first published serially by Ezra Pound) really shows it. These are realms he would of course go to extremes within Ulysses, and I hope to someday return to and understand that work.

I would recommend A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to anyone who is looking for an interesting take on the artistic life and what it takes to commit to it, but be aware that the language is often times impermeable and the themes tend to override (which is not necessarily a bad thing but one of modernism, the tradition in which Joyce was writing). Thanks as always for joining me on this reading adventure.​