Joyce's Portrait

My summer is over--classes start today. It was a good summer even though I had to say goodbye to my sister, my friend moved away, and I worked in retail. Going to Argentina was a great experience, but that's all I have to say about that--let's talk about books.

I read this summer, and some of them were seriously amazing books. James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was one of those seriously amazing reads.

Joyce's novel starts with him as a young boy listening to his father and friends of his father fight about politics.  Joyce is, of course, from Ireland; he begins to become disillusioned about the state of his country and his parents religion. He attends a Catholic boy's school. He begins to listen to the sermons. Almost 40 pages of the book was devoted to one sermon. Joyce is convicted of his unworthiness and sin, and he repents. He decides to become a Catholic priest until he is bothered by a comment one priest makes which convinces Joyce the priest is ungodly. He then breaks free from all bonds--in a rather intense scene--and sacrifices himself to art knowing that no calling is as worthy as that of an artist. That's not the bitter end, but you should read that for yourself.

I think I was expecting more of an essay than the well-crafted novel I received. The beginning felt so much like a story that I momentarily forgot that this was, in essence, a manifesto. I was surprised by the length and the in-depth nature of the sermon; Joyce clearly knew his religion.The book has five chapters only, but still is around 250 pages. Joyce relies on paragraph markings to change the subject more often than a chapter. Joyce is known for his well-written prose, so that was no surprise. Even though I knew that, I was still caught several times, by how enjoyable his prose was; his words flowed smoothly together and he used marvelous metaphors.

Joyce asks the questions that we are still struggling to answer: what is art, what is beauty, is beauty subjective, what is the difference between sublime and beautiful, what holds back art, what questions should artists be answering, should artists depict the world the way they see it or the way they wish to see it, is one more valid than another? I'm interested in the answers to these questions, or at least, what Joyce thought the answers were.

By the time Joyce finished writing this novel, he was an expatriate, an atheist, and a stranger to most of his family. He succeeded in casting off what he perceived was holding him back (country, religion, and family). According to himself, he succeeded in devoting himself solely to art and not allowing anyone or anything to distract him.

Interesting quotes:

Joyce answering a friend's question of subjective beauty:
"Though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension.These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty."

Joyce deciding to follow art:
"His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and comingled with the element of the spirit. . . This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain."

Joyce explaining the birth of an artist's soul:
"The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
 
Joyce summing things up:
"We are right, and the others are wrong. 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"