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In May, we will be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, who once said:Please post your thoughts and questions on the book in this thread.Quote:
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.
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Yah, my first book club thingymajig ever! I’ll start first thing… tomorrow :D Tonight is dedicated to the all-new episodes of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy (that hasn’t happened in a while) :nod:
Even though I voted for Finnegan's, I'm glad this one won the vote. It's shorter, I have it, and after reading some excerpts from Finnegan's I got quite intimidated, and figured I'd need way more than a month to read it.
I picked my copy up from my school library today. I won't be able to get a serious start on it until after Wed.; I'm in the middle of finals week at university. I'm looking forward to it though, the copy I got includes several critical essays on the novel.
I've the read the first part of chapter one, and I thoroughly confused. Just to get this straight, Dante is a family friend (???) who owns a printing press. Are Michael Davitt and Parnell politicians? Dante doesn’t like Parnell, right? Is Stephan in college, or does that mean something else, cause I know it means middle school in French… but I’m just unsure :confused: LOL… sorry :D I’m enjoying the books so far, though :)
Edit: Ignore this. I should have finished reading chapter one, first :D I get it now ;)
Clongowes Wood College is not a college in today's sense but a boarding school for children. Joyce himself attended the same school when he was young.Quote:
Originally Posted by WaxDoll
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jjoyce.htm
Thanks for the explanation, Scheherazade!Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
Dante is actually a woman? Joyce's naming choices throughout the book are very important, I hear. His own name, Stephen Dedalus, is a combination of both the first Christian martyr and a pagan myth hero. Female characters also get interesting treatment.Quote:
I've the read the first part of chapter one, and I thoroughly confused. Just to get this straight, Dante is a family friend (???) who owns a printing press. Are Michael Davitt and Parnell politicians? Dante doesn’t like Parnell, right?
You're right about Davitt and Parnell. Parnell was a true Irish hero, but was successfully slandered and dethroned after it was revealed that he had an adulterous affair earlier in his career, resulting in a child. Dante takes the side of the priests who are attacking him. I think.
"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." - Stephen
Thanks for clarifying ShoutGrace :DQuote:
Originally Posted by ShoutGrace
Did anyone else find it odd that Stephan dreams of falling in love with "Mercedes," and yet he dreams of refusing her, too.
"...towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying:
-- Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes."
It makes you wonder about what Stephan sees love as. Maybe a way to dominate, or to prove superior? I dunno… just my ramblings :D
The schoolmates are largely real attendees of Joyce's school, I believe, with their names mainly preserved by the author. Uncle Charles and Dante actually were two live-ins of the Joyce family in his childhood, although the uncle was named William O'Connell and the "aunt" Hearn Conway.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShoutGrace
I haven't gotten very far, so I'm going to go read.
I think Stephen sees love only as a romantic endeavour; something he yearns for but his religious upbringing and romantic nature do not let him enjoy it either so as much as he wants to be in love and daydreams about it, he puts it a stop by adding the refusal scene as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by WaxDoll
I ve started it (under sufferance as it were) and can I just say----- moocow???!!!
Some of the motifs and my impressions of the first chapter:
(1) Questions. The little Stephan is frequently asking questions; attempting to understand the world.
(2) Religion: Jesuit learning, sin (sexual learning)
(3) Family: Father especially as influencial person
(4) Irish Politics especially in the way it defines people
(5) Language: Stephan is learning meanings and sounds of words.
(6) School friends: Stephan seems to be the outsider mostly.
I just read ( is that how its spelt IM having a bad day??) the first chapter I think it bares reading a second time at least. But first off its very touchy-feelly discriptions and there were a few bits where I thought yes a child thinks exactly lie that but what I want to know is how much of the story is autobiographical Becaus e the notes at the end of the book seem to cover alsorts of minior things like the grave stones. And then there is that politians death and how exact that pins the date down by.
I think quite a bit is autobiographiocal. I will say, even though I've read this before, I'm finding it boring. What exactly is so special about Stephan?
I have just gotten past the place where Stephen loses his virginity in a cathouse. He has already taken part in that play, and I guess the woman that he failed to kiss (the mysterious E.C. - Emma Clery), was there. It seems to be a pretty straightforward autobiographical account. He has started to get into some heavy Irish Catholicism stuff, and it is kind of bogging me down. But these were the things that effected Joyce most truly as a young man, I suppose.
Virgil, I think that your 5th point, language, encompasses names. I have found the naming very intriguing. Joyce goes out of his way to name streets, buildings, places etc. in ways that to me seem sort of distinct from everything else. There is also that strange part where he says "My name is Stephen Dedalus. I am walking with my father Simon Dedalus. We are going (this specific place). . . " and so on.
A character doesn't have to be special IMHO - it's about truth and resonance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
i can't wait to begin. Unfortunately my schedule cannot bend this month, so I hope that I will be able to join in June's selection. However, i am still enjoying your conversations.
enjoy the rest of the book everyone! I thought it was a good book my first time.
Yeah, but the novel must be interesting. Otherwise why read it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Bandini
Yes, the development of language is really the only thing I find all that interesting. Now I know the rest of the novel, and I know it gets better. The internal conflicts are evident. But must we go through 60 pages before we actually get a conflict? Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but not by much.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shoutgrace
Oh, couldn't get through it. Not my cup of tea. I read first two pages and then stopped...
Two pages??? Actually I got to the sermon scene, which I believe to be a turning point in itself, but had to pause in order to read other things (I had a good reason for this, something involving a misprinted edtion I had.)
oh, I finally started it, I'm just so relieved that it has complete sentences that I can actually follow, after the Faulkner.
I'm about 50 pages in, I'm finding it readable, I think Stephen is an okay character, but he's mainly there in order to show us the others.
My only problem with it is having to keep flipping to the notes, and the particular version I've got (penguin) loves to explain every last detail, I'm sure they are all very important and all, but it's getting tiring.
Oh hi there Riesa. I haven't seen you around in a bit. Or at least not at the same time I'm on. I'm glad you're reading along too. Actually Stephen becomes the only character. At the beginning he's mostly an observer, but the novel becomes more and more "self centered", and by that I mean it's almost all Stephen's consciousness. Those first fifty pages or so, he's relatively young, but the novel to me really is about the development of his mind/consciousness/self.
aha, so has he become more interesting to you then?
I've read it before, so I know. But it's been a long time. I was surprised at how bored I felt in the first chapter. Stephen is actually very cute and charming in this chapter. He does become more arrogant as the novel progresses, and that's consciously done by Joyce.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riesa
Im confused , just read chapter 2 and who is "she"? I know the one he doesnt kiss is EC, is this elieen from the first page? and is she the same she who comes to the play?Or is he just going to call everywoman she?
And who is willie and whats a red light district and why should he mix that up with the jewish district ???
And another thing whats stephen hero? Was this Joyces second atte,mpt at the same story?
:confused:
Joyce first wrote a small essay of sorts (that is terribly dense to read through), then expanded in Stephen Hero (was this finished?) and then wrote APOTAAAYM. (I believe)
A red-light district is an area housing brothels. The red light was to signify that a willing woman was on the inside back in the day. Willie I don't remember, and I don't know who Eilene is.
On the first page he saysbut lookng back a it I think her last name was Vance.Quote:
When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen
APOTAAAYM?? Surley easier to say a portrait this is like TLTWATW for the lion etc
I must say I really loved the second chapter. Not boring at all. Check this from the first page of the second chapter:
The outhouse as a "sounding-box"! That is so typical Joyce, the bringing together of the high with the low, the singing with the sounds of an outhouse, the arbor with a toilet.Quote:
Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat. While he smoked the brim of his tall hat and the bowl of his pipe were just visible beyond the jambs of the outhouse door. His arbour, as he called the reeking outhouse which he shared with the cat and the garden tools, served him also as a sounding-box: and every morning he hummed contentedly one of his favourite songs: O, twine me a bower or Blue Eyes and Golden Hair or The Groves of Blarney while the grey and blue coils of smoke rose slowly from his pipe and vanished in the pure air.
Also from the second chapter:
Again the re-iteration of the theme: family, Religion, nation as they conflict with his individuality. How great it is that he puts them in the form of "voices".Quote:
While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father's fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.
There are five chapters, five iterations of the theme, each time further developed.
One other thing too. Notice how Stephen is triumphant at the end of each chapter. What a master craftsman Joyce is in structuring this novel.
Unfortunately I found the third chapter tedious and not as interesting. The sermon goes on forever, and there isn't any originality here. Joyce could have easily found some published sermon and put the words in the priest's mouth.
Night, I think 'Willie' is a general term used by the prostitutes to address their 'dates' for the evening'.
Imagine getting your hands on these letters? they'd bring a fortune on ebay. :lol:Quote:
...the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly.
There are some beautiful passages. I like the passages you chose to quote, Virgil.
I've been reading and reading all day and I am impatient with it and can not wait to finish this book and be done with it forever.
I think you'll like what I consider to be the climax. Stephen formulates a poem.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riesa
Well, perhaps. so the beginning and the end are worth reading but the entire middle is long and drawn out and verbose? :D
Eileen is a girl who lives next door to Steven's family. He likes her but his family doesn't approve of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightshade
The middle section of the novel is rather tedious; the sermon goes on forever but I believe it is important not because of the Priest's exact words but the effect they have on Stephen. He becomes a changed person.The last chapter is my favorite because Stephen starts to recognise who he is and in a way finds his own voice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riesa
So far I think chapter 3 is my favouirte actually.
And I loved the sermon I guess it was the only thing so far that I could personally see hear tase and almost smell.
And I especially liked the way he wentt through the last 4 things to be born again with a new chance.
BUt my absaloute favouirte part was at the begining but I dont have a copy on me right now to quote from.
:D
I found chapter 4 interesting. Not overwhelmingly exciting, but interesting. Lucky Joyce kept it short or it could have been boring. In a way it is a masterpiece of a psychological change in a character. Stephen goes from a dedicated potential priest to someone who will free himself for art, all dramatized within Stephen's mind. Here check these quotes:
At the beginning of the chapter:
Then towards the middle of the chapter:Quote:
His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer, since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted by way of suffrage for the agonizing souls; and fearful lest in the midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from the infernal only in that it was not everlasting, his penance might avail no more than a drop of moisture, he drove his soul daily through an increasing circle of works of supererogation.
And later:Quote:
A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it. In that dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various priests. He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant Ite missa est. If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the pictures of the mass in his child's massbook, in a church without worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare altar, and served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality; and it was partly the absence of an appointed rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had allowed silence to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an embrace he longed to give.
And toward the end of the chapter:Quote:
Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with his prayers against the fainting sickness of his stomach. He saw himself sitting at dinner with the community of a college. What, then, had become of that deep-rooted shyness of his which had made him loth to eat or drink under a strange roof? What had come of the pride of his spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?
He goes from a deligent preistly acolyte to someone who begins to question whether this is what his true calling is, to one who hears the inner voice of that true callin. Nice touch on Joyce's part to have that voice calling in Greek.Quote:
-- Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!
Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped City. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?
so thats what its about Im afraid that chapter tottally went over my head I unnderstood nothing really,
The thing I am liking though is the way each chapter could almost stand alone as its own story.
A bit like Samuel Hopkins Adams's Average jones ( he only example I can think of) the way each chapter is a story but all the stories are part of onr big story. :D
Chapter 5 is one of the all time great pieces of literature. It was worth the price of the show, as they say. The originality of each section, and therefore the whole, is absolutely stunning.
It's divided into four parts. There is very little narrative movement. Stephen has essentially made up his mind to leave Ireland and by the end of the chapter Stephen hasn't quite left but is at the verge of going. So what makes this such a great piece of writing? Well let's look at the four sections:
1. A day in Stephen's life, where he bristles against his family, then off to college, has a discussion with the Dean, science class, and then puts out his theory of aesthetics to his class mates.
2. Composes a villanelle poem.
3. Meets up with his friends and has a confessorial conversation with Cranly.
4. Diary of his last few weeks in Ireland.
What Joyce presents are all the themes that have been going on in the novel completed and tied together with them all forming the foundation of Stephen's individuality.
He rejects his family:
He rejects Irish nationalism by rejecting Davin and what he stands for.Quote:
His father's whistle, his mother's mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth. He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration; but, as he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning light falling about him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries.
He rejects his religion by rejecting the Dean, the Dean as a representative of what Stephen might develop to if he became a Jesuit.Quote:
Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant.
-- 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.
And he develops an personal philosophy of aesthitcs, with all his learning throughout the novel of words (language) and beauty coming together.Quote:
A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean's candle butts and fused itself in Stephen's consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest's voice, too, had a hard jingling tone. Stephen's mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest's face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?
andQuote:
Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing slightly, he laid his hand on Lynch's thick tweed sleeve.
--We are right, he said, 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.
And then to show his maturity he composes a villanelle, a complex formulation of sound and rhythm for an aesthetic end. It's worth presenting the entire poem:Quote:
Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension?
Then the confession section with Cranly has Stephen personally articulate his rebellion and transfiguration into a mature young man:Quote:
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
And finally the diary section, which completes the intrusion into Stephen's consciousness. What has been in third person has now become first person. To shift into first person monlogue at the end of the novel would have been aesthetically jarring and wrong. But a diary is not. And so we know Stephan from the inside. The novel started from his father's voice (Stephen being too young to understand language) and ends with Stephen in first person articulating his independence and individuality:Quote:
His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening, excited Stephen's brain, over which its fumes seemed to brood.
-- Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning.
Interestingly, he leaves Ireland on my wife's birthday! :DQuote:
April 26. ... So be it. 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.
April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
I read it once uptil he explained he 'theory of aesthetics' to Lynch and I got bogged down over there. Did not understand it. I was confused at some other points too but then I read background Irish history online, and now I am starting it all over again. Going to find translations online for the Latin in the book. Hope its an engrossing read second time.