Is selfishness an obligation of genius? If so then Stephen Dedalus, the focus of James Joyce’s brilliant semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man meets his responsibilities in full.
The book follows Stephen as he grows from a young child to a sin-and-salvation obsessed teenager to an ambitious university student preparing to leave his home, country, and religion, and forge his own soul as a free artist.
Portrait deserves its acclaim as one of the founding works of modernism. Joyce uses his famous stream of consciousness technique to convincingly render Stephen’s inner voice, which he interweaves with dialogue, descriptions, sermons, and diary entries. The story is built on thematically linked episodes, rather than conventional plot and conflict, and rewards the attention required from readers to follow it.
Joyce regards Stephen Dedalus as the model of what a writer should be (an early draft of the novel was called “Stephen Hero”) but it is his character’s spectacular self-concern that stands out as much as the spectacular potential of his talent.
Stephen Dedalus thinks about no one but himself. He is indifferent to the poverty of his parents and younger siblings, while carelessly neglecting the university classes they struggle to afford. He values his friends largely as sounding boards for his ideas. And he refuses his pious mother the comfort of attending a service for a religion in which he no longer believes, holding his fine scruples higher than her single request.
Perhaps great artists need to ruthlessly commit themselves solely to the creation of their art. Perhaps this is an obligation of genius. But it is not a pretty one.
Related Content on James Joyce
You’ll find my review of Finnegan’s Wake (actually totaling 100 words) as part of this post.
Here is an interesting article on Finnegan’s Wake by Michael Chabon. Aside from trying a little too hard to out-Joyce Joyce, I like Michael’s thoughts quite a bit.
It was one of my favorite reads and causes me to think and debate the “obligation of genius” often. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the comment. A sorta related story is about Melville, who wasn’t feeling well, so he bought a bag of oranges, in November, in New York, in the 19th century, took them home, and ate them all in front of his children. Wow. Seems like a high price to pay for “Moby Dick”.
HA! Seriously? I had never heard that anecdote before. Wow.
It has been so long that I can’t remember the original source, but I’m pretty confident about the details, because every time I say the name Melville, my wife mutters “those oranges!”
I think Joyce had a serious personality disorder. I like the sound of your wife 🙂
I haven’t read any Joyce biographies, so I don’t have an idea one way or the other. However, if Joyce was trying to make himself look good, I don’t think he succeeded. As for my wife, after she mutters “those oranges” she says, “do anything like that and it will be the last thing you do”. She’s kidding, but only because she’s pretty sure I won’t.
🙂
Your review makes Portrait sound very tantalising, but as someone who is still struggling with Ulysses I shall have to curb my habitual literary enthusiasm and at least for now give it a miss. I’ll just keep on butting my head against Ulysses like a lunatic refusing to realise that enough is enough.
Portrait is much easier, I think, and shorter. It retains quite a bit of the astonishing clarity of Dubliners, which I think contains such perfectly written short stories that it is no wonder Joyce turned to innovation. Ulysses isn’t too bad if you have someone providing a few helpful hints for each chapter; I had a college professor for my first go ’round. For example, he’d say, “Don’t forget Bloom is Jewish” which was pretty unusual and conspicuous in 1904 Catholic Dublin, and that made it easier to understand some of the ways people treated him, unhappily not well, and also explained some Blooms behavior … like at the funeral.
Hi, your post makes this book sound interesting. My husband has been recommending Portrait as a good introduction to Joyce, since I have never read any. I do have Ulysses, Dubliners, and Finnegan’s Wake as well on my e-reader so I will eventually get to them but Portrait does look like a good start.
I’ve read them all except “Wake” and I’ve come to the conclusion, after studying the matter for a while, and reading a fair number of critical essays, that I won’t read “Wake”. My 8 “bad” books post explains why, sorta humorously (maybe) but seriously at the same time. Thanks for stopping by. I like the combo of English and French on your blog. I was interested to see that my not very good college French was still good enough to read some of each post. I won’t try to comment in French however. P.