May/Joyce Book: 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

[Riesa]

Night, I think 'Willie' is a general term used by the prostitutes to address their 'dates' for the evening'.

...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.

Imagine getting your hands on these letters? they'd bring a fortune on ebay.

There are some beautiful passages. I like the passages you chose to quote, Virgil.

[Riesa]

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.

[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.

[Riesa]

Well, perhaps. so the beginning and the end are worth reading but the entire middle is long and drawn out and verbose?

[Scheherazade]

On the first page he says but lookng back a it I think her last name was Vance.

Eileen is a girl who lives next door to Steven's family. He likes her but his family doesn't approve of it.

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.

Well, perhaps. so the beginning and the end are worth reading but the entire middle is long and drawn out and verbose?

The last chapter is my favorite because Stephen starts to recognise who he is and in a way finds his own voice.

[Nightshade]

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.

[Virgil]

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:

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.

Then towards the middle of the chapter:

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 later:

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?

And toward the end of the chapter:

-- 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?

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.

[Nightshade]

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.

[Virgil]

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:

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 Irish nationalism by rejecting Davin and what he stands for.

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.

He rejects his religion by rejecting the Dean, the Dean as a representative of what Stephen might develop to if he became a Jesuit.

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?

And he develops an personal philosophy of aesthitcs, with all his learning throughout the novel of words (language) and beauty coming together.

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

Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension?

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:

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.

Then the confession section with Cranly has Stephen personally articulate his rebellion and transfiguration into a mature young man:

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.

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:

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.

Interestingly, he leaves Ireland on my wife's birthday!

[Hira]

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.

[Virgil]

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.

Yes, that is a hard part of the novel. I had trouble with that too when I was in college. But when I read it for the book club in this read, I found that fascinating and perfect for the novel. Of course this was my third time reading it.

[Hira]

I am sure I am gonna need double that time to completely understand it. It went completely over my head, that part. I am sure I would have left reading the book if I hadn't search a bit of background and analysis of the themes on the internet and in this thread. I do like the first page now, this stream of consciousness of Stephen as a little child. The first time I read it, I was like ... huh? I also read the origin of Stephen's name and I find that fascinating.

By the way, I can't find the translations of those Latin paragraphs. Do you know of a link or something where I can find them?

[Hira]

Could someone please, please, please explain this part, just a bit. Don't get it at all!

Stephen went on:

-- Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

-- Repeat, said Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

-- A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.

-- The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

[Hira]

Oh, people don't come to this thread!! I did get a bit of it, after reading 3-4 times or so. But any help would be appreciated, lol.

[natasssha]

where can i find this book online plz§