Words&Dirt

I’ve never been partial to James Joyce, but consider it part of my due diligence as a committed reader to get to know him. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, widely considered his most accessible work, seemed like a good place to start. Joyce wields words carefully, opening the novel with stripped down modern prose that reflects the simplicity of boyhood. The style becomes more complex as Stephen Dedalus (our protagonist, styled after Joyce himself) enters adolescence and begins to question the confines of his privileged Irish Catholic upbringing. The book left me with a bifurcated impression: these are as much the petulant whingings of a gifted misanthrope as they are records of a courageous struggle to liberate one of history’s greatest intellects.

Authors find their way into the literary canon for many different reasons. Joyce has always struck me as a writer whose induction was mandated by his impressive ability to adapt language to his purposes rather than his acumen for telling a good story. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is packed with emotional passages that enliven Dedalus’ inner experiences. Here are some of my favorites:

“Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?” (loc. 2413-20).

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory” (loc. 2495-2502).

“To speak of these things and to try to understand 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” (loc. 3035).

Such delightful, nuanced passages leave little room for doubting Joyce’s literary prowess, but they also shed light on this novel’s weaknesses.  Brilliant language notwithstanding, Joyce’s narrative fails to transcend its protagonist’s resoundingly solipsistic disposition.  Dedalus’s preference for “the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose” signifies not just the aspirations of a great talent, but also a turn away from other beings, a divestment from the humans and other living things with which Dedalus shares the world.

Joyce makes clear early on that Dedalus feels himself apart from the world: “No life or youth stirred in him…He had known neither the pleasure of companionship nor filial piety.  Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust” (loc. 1365).  The guilt stemming from Dedalus’s Catholic upbringing eventually causes him to transition from unbridled concupiscence to religious obedience.  When offered an opportunity to join the clergy, however, Dedalus chooses instead to attend University in pursuit of scholastic and aesthetic knowledge. This rejection of religious tradition must have been shocking and troubling for early 20th-century readers, but to a secular audience a century later, the journey feels neither revelatory nor particularly relevant.  Furthermore, Dedalus’s stunted interpersonal skills, which do not seem to develop accordingly as he matures, expose his disturbing failure (or perhaps incapacity) to cultivate healthy, meaningful commerce with fellow humans.  Due to some combination of innate predilections and/or early childhood traumas, Dedalus never learns to reach out to the world, and instead commits himself to the project of bringing it to heel via aesthetic synthesis.

While shifting between roles that seem radically different from one another prima facie, Dedalus never actually manages to escape social isolation. His relationships with his peers at University are steeped in theory rather than brotherly affection, and his attitudes about women reflect the oversimplified idealism that comes from a dearth of concrete, meaningful experiences with them. Similarly lacking in warmth are his interactions with his family, especially his mother, who frets over and does not understand her son’s budding intelligence.

Setting out to make his way in the world, Dedalus proclaims: “Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (loc. 3768). I won’t try to argue that Joyce himself failed to achieve this goal, at least in part, but I worry that his “smithy” depends too much on hammers and anvils of his own creation, tools that shape his “reality of experience” by way of using language to remake the world as he perceives it rather than encounter it on its own terms. This desire is a root source of Joyce’s brilliance, but also signals a mind that sees itself as master of a domain where everything beyond its own enshrined interiority is subject, malleable, and even dispensable. It is, in a sense, the ultimate form of objectification––the smouldering kernel of tragedy at the heart of Dedalus’s ostensible emancipation.

My interpretations of and resistance to Joyce’s worldview come from a 21st-century secular upbringing and my relative inexperience with self-loathing. The cultural, historical, and intellectual chasms between Joyce and myself are vast. I can’t escape my preference for writers who favor their entrenchment in personal relationships and the natural environment over a retreat into self-generated mazes of language that veil a fundamental refusal (or inability) to live comfortably with others. It’s imperialistic to suggest Joyce should have learned to better connect with the world beyond his own brain, even at the possible expense of his artistic greatness, but his failure to do so in this novel rendered it a less meaningful experience than it could have been.

Rating: 7/10