Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
@book @james-joyce
Initial thoughts
Just based on where I annotated on first reading
29/01/23 15:11:42
- Right, so this is a bit of a painful book. Especially towards the end.
- I enjoyed the first half.
I don’t think I can relate to Stephen at all. I found it very difficult to live in his mind. Actually, that’s wrong, I find it hard to relate to Stephen in his relationship to the catholic church, which just seems alien to me. The hold it has over him is hard to believe. But it’s his experience.
A large portion of the back end of the book went over my head. Largely because of the lack of space. It’s hard to discern who’s talking to who, where they are, why they’re there.
There’s some ambition that Stephen has in his sole. He thinks about the simple life, of becoming a milkman with gingernuts in his pockets but says that:
“the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which made him glance with mistrust at his trainer’s flabby stubble-covered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future."
"He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.”
p. 76,77
The voices that make him do things, he kind of becomes immune to
”These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and then the movement towards national revival had vegun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him to be true to his country and help to raise up here fallen language and tradition."
"it was the din of all these hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms.”
p.101
He says this but then procedes to act out a part for a girl he likes. He then storms of afterward, ashamed of himself.
”Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clear and cold again.”
At the end of chapter 2 theres a sense that he can’t stop the tide of his desires, and why should he (after he realises his father did the same stuff so frowned upon). He doesn’t feel in touch with his family (says he feels a foster child).
The notion of Mercedes in this white washed house kind of represents that submission to the simple life, just relaxing into it. He refuses it again and again but keeps it there as some sort of comfort.