I had a strange mood today and started and finished this in one 10 hour sitting. It was excellent, but simultaneously not as excellent as I had hoped. I enjoyed lots of the short stories in Dubliners more, I think. The “avant garde” structure often felt superfluous - although not always. The color symbolism was interesting, but I felt it fell away in the second half of the book. In fact, the entire middle portion (those gigantic sermons, my god!) was a bit rough to get through. But I do appreciate that it really evoked the sensation of being in a washed out, weary, hypnosis sort of state - and it did leave a psychological impression in the following sections, like you really “remembered” that part of Stephen’s life. The discussion on Stephen’s philosophy of art was the highlight for me, along with a bunch of tiny little fragments of test that felt like beautiful lucid clear thoughts. It did evoke the feeling of going through life in a largely automatic blur, with a few powerful moments sticking out. I especially enjoyed that the powerful moments were often completely mundane events made powerful only via Stephen’s feelings in the moment. His struggles with expressing and capturing this elusive sensation were beautifully portrayed. And the switch to first-person at the end felt delightful in its regressive irony (according to Stephen’s point of view), as it represented the “lyrical form” in some rough sense.
Anyways, curious if anyone else has thoughts on it to share. I couldn’t find any discussion online about the red/white color symbolism. I interpreted it as a representation of cold lifeless religiosity vs hot vivacious “mundanity”. But I’m not sure if the York/Lancaster origination of the symbols is meant to lend more to it, etc., or if maybe I’ve missed that entirely. The green and maroon were clearly political and I found lots of discussion on that. I’d love to hear what anyone else’s favorite/least favorite aspects were.
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I love Ulysses (originally parts of it were called “Stephen Hero”) and Finnegans Wake but Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man dives to deep into the intensity of catholicism as a suffocating force that I didn’t have to endure so it felt hard to connect with at points, but I also was very strangely moved by Dubliners.
You owe it to yourself to check out the chapters of Ulysses from Stephen’s perspective, they are in many ways an extension of the best parts of Portrait Of The Artist.
Episode 3 Proteus in particular is a trip especially the Irish Radioplay Version.
https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook-Merged
Ulysses is also where Stephen Daedalus says his most remembered literary quote of all time “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Yeah I love James Joyce, I find his writing obtuse, annoying, challenging and never easy to summarize but his writing has changed how I see the world in a way no other artist has and it isn’t even close. James Joyce is still too radical of a writer for our time and it has been ~100 years since Ulysses.
Yeah I think the difficulty of relating to the religious side is what made that portion of the book tough for me, especially since I really related with child Stephen. I even remember writing down my name, city, country, “the world”, “the universe” on one of my assignments once in elementary school, and doing the thing of covering and uncovering my ears, so it just felt unbelievably similar up until he went all religious. Of course he became more relatable again afterwards. My favorite quote from Portrait was “he wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld”. Not only relatable, but wonderfully and succinctly put.
I’ve been anxiously awaiting a good time to read Ulysses, probably will wait until I finish my current book with my reading buddy and go into it together with them. I only know it’s famous difficulty, I had no idea that Stephen would be in it. I’ve always wanted to write something esoteric and convention-breaking myself, but I don’t think I really have the chops for it - from what little I know of Ulysses, I suspect it may be very close to some of these fantasy projects I’ve envisioned, and I look forward to it for that. I read a smidge of Finnegan’s Wake and that one I expect to be more of just a pure puzzle, maybe academically interesting, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it is also artistically stirring. From Stephen’s dialogue about art, I have no doubt now that that was Joyce’s intent, at least.
I think with Dubliners it was the incredible minimalism of the stories. They felt so ultra perfectly condensed, like no word was superfluous. And then even with that right compression, or maybe because of it, they convey much clearer and more powerful emotions than many short stories. But I do think the traditionality of them isn’t as exciting as Portrait was. They feel a lot more “pale”, ha ha.
I think with Dubliners it was the incredible minimalism of the stories.
Comparing Dubliners with Finnegans Wake is astounding, it is like tracking the first rocket launch humanity ever made to outside the atmosphere of the known novel starting from the very center of a Hemingway like minimalism in the deployment of language to tell a story (that still largely suffocates the imaginative potential of words as a vehicle for storytelling to this day 100 years later) and blasting off to the most rich and creative use of language a human being has ever committed to paper.
In Dubliners James Joyce restricts his extraordinary creativity and playfulness entirely to the use of absences (of plot, of direction, of heroic resolve) and it is stunningly beautiful in a polar opposite way to Finnegans Wake.
Don’t miss the political motivations of his evolution of writing style either. JJ never had any issue with directly talking about the shitty parts of life, of speaking truth to power, hence the US Supreme Court case.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses
The growing thicket of tangled meanings James Joyce deployed was at its heart a defense against Victorianism dissecting everything into dead categories seperated by industry and strict social norms, directly and profitably compatible with fascist annihilatory artificial divisions of reality. Understand the mess of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as an embrace of life and a battlecry against fascism.
https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/sylvia-beach-the-bookseller-who-defied-the-nazis/
In December 1941, the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company closed its doors. The legend is that the shop closed after its founder Sylvia Beach refused to sell the last copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. When the officer threatened to confiscate her entire inventory, Beach quickly hid her books in an upstairs apartment. Soon after, she was detained and interned at Vittel for six months until her release in early 1942. Although Ernest Hemingway ‘personally liberated’ the shop when Paris was freed from Nazi rule in 1944, the beloved prewar bookshop had gone forever. It was reopened under new ownership in a new location in 1951.
