This is the first novel I've read by James Joyce (1882-1941), and -- confession time -- I read it purely because we were visiting Trieste, a city with which the author had connections from 1904 to 1920. (Our Joyce-related Trieste trails can be found here and here.)


Trieste, just last week: The flat on Via Donato Bramante where so much Joycean creativity happened

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is reckoned to be the best way in to Joyce's work (which has the reputation of being "difficult"). It was published in 1916, but the text concludes with two other dates. According to Colm Toibin, "As soon as Ezra Pound saw the first chapter of A Portrait in January 1914, he set about organising the book’s serialisation. Joyce continued to work on the book into 1915, but since he liked the idea of a book taking a decade to make, he ended it with: 'Dublin, 1904.' And then, below that, the place to which he had fled: 'Trieste, 1914.' Ulysses, on which he would now embark, would take three years less to write."

When Joyce arrived in Trieste, he had already written part of a novel called Stephen Hero. He began to rewrite this to become A Portrait. It took a long while, however, and Joyce was so frustrated at one point that he threw the manuscript on the fire... Luckily, there was a sensible sister present, who rescued it. That was 1911. So it took almost another three years before Pound's enthusiasm really set the book on the road to completion.

My audio-version was narrated by Colin Farrell, and it really is a great book to listen to. There's lots of dialogue, which Joyce is very good at. There's a cracking sermon which runs over pages and pages, and just HAS to be read out by an Irish voice.

Plus, there's a rolling, cumulative quality to the description that lends itself to listening. Example: "He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air."



A Portrait is a classic example of a Bildungsroman, in which we follow a young Irish man, Stephen Dedalus, from childhood to university, and finally watch him prepare to depart for pastures new.

It's vivid, there's no doubt about that. The descriptions of boarding school, complete with bullying and unjust punishments; the repeated references to cold water and cold sea (there are 68 instances of the word "cold" in all); the rendering of working-class family life, with all its arguments and house moves and other shifts that have been made inevitable by poverty... Then there's that terrifying sermon, pages and pages of it, in which the young schoolboys are told in graphic detail about the terrors of hell that await those who do not repent.

Karl Ove Knausgaard remarks: "Even now, 27 years after I first read the book, its moods come back to me."


Trieste and its moods are thought to have influenced James enormously

There's certainly an enduring resonance about much of it. Toibin remarks, "When I read the hellfire sermon in A Portrait, I had heard some of those very words, even though I was born 40 years after the book came out. The Christmas dinner scene, with the bitter argument about [Charles Stewart] Parnell between Stephen’s father and his aunt, could easily have come from many Irish tables in the 1970s and 80s as families rowed over what was happening in Northern Ireland... The later sections of A Portrait, which move between the National Library in Kildare Street and the halls of University College Dublin, could easily have taken place in the early 70s when I was a student there."

And you don't have to be Irish, of course, to have experienced awkward family relationships, dinner-table political quarrels, and hellfire sermons... Many of us can relate.



The language is fascinating. The book opens like this: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt."

So you're thinking to yourself, OK...; this is going to be interesting... The first section continues to give us lots of language play and onomatopoeia. The point is, though, that the language changes to reflect Stephen's age and experience. By the time you're at the end, what you're hearing is rarefied student discussion about aesthetics. (Nasrullah Mambrol, whose detailed analysis/summary offers some helpful pointers to those of us who ended up a little perplexed, comments, "This is a section full of the self-importance and sententiousness that can at times dominate Stephen’s nature. Wisely, the narrative punctuates Stephen’s pedantic and humorless disquisition with [fellow-student Vincent] Lynch’s interjection of his sardonic views and his complaints of the hangover that plagues him.")



It's a jerky book, and this quality takes a bit of getting used to. You're somewhere -- and then you're somewhere else, an undisclosed period of time later. The fractured nature of the narrative means that the reader is required to fill in lots of gaps for him/herself. Ambiguity is key. Mambrol again: "Joyce self-consciously sustains a range of interpretive options within his discourse by allowing the reader to resolve or complete such moments in the narrative." These "moments" might be unexplained incidents or characters (the mysterious girl, for example, who pops up from time to time -- Mambrol says she's Emma Clery: "She seems to appear throughout the novel both as Stephen’s idealized vision of Irish womanhood and as a representation of the Irish society’s stereotypical attitudes of and toward women against which Stephen rebels.")

In its details, therefore, it is a slightly disconcerting, disorienting novel.

As a whole, though, its key thrust is crystal clear. Stephen progressively moves away from the central institutions that define the society he is born into -- the church, the family, and the nationalist movement -- and towards the calling of an artist.

Inevitably, it seems, he will need to leave Ireland. He says to a friend: "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... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too."


The pastry shop where Joyce reportedly bought his breakfast

The novel concludes with a series of diary entries. These give an even more fragmented flavour to the narrative, but there are some extraordinarily beautiful passages: "The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone -- come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth."

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was initially not that well received. But it soon gained an honoured place in the canon. Toibin quotes Irish poet John Montague as commenting: -"No one could overestimate the effects of [the book] on later Irish writers … Or on the national psyche: many young Irishmen came to painful consciousness reading those corrosive pages."

I felt somewhat inexpert reading it. I came to it cold, with little experience of its modernist context. But I found it enjoyable. And I definitely intend to read some more