![]() ![]() He recreates a late-19th century Irish Catholic boyhood in a downwardly-mobile family, surrounded by political controversy over how best to resist the British Empire’s continuing dominance of the island, and subjected to the rigors of a Jesuit boarding school education. Joyce’s effects are most impressive in the opening chapter. Accordingly, we are at every moment in the novel restricted to what young Stephen Dedalus knows and the vocabulary in which he’s able to comprehend it. Like Freud, his synonymous contemporary (both names mean “joy”), Joyce wants a technique to bring to light all that is repressed in the shaping of a personality and like the European theorists that will follow him-Lacan, Foucault, Althusser-he believes that language is the medium in which the psyche grows. ![]() To accomplish this end, Joyce uses the technique that had been ripening throughout the 19th century from Austen to Flaubert to Chekhov: free indirect style, in which a third-person narrator’s language blends intimately with the inner monologue of the viewpoint character to create an objective representation of subjective states. Instead, Joyce dramatizes the development, from infancy to college graduation, of the languages in which the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, understands himself and his world the novel, therefore, begins in babytalk and ends in aesthetic philosophy. His 1916 autobiographical Künstlerroman, a decade in the making and much revised and condensed from a longer, and more conventional draft, doesn’t narrate his hero’s coming of age either in the historical third person (like Tom Jones) or the retrospective first person (like David Copperfield). Once the initial surprise passes, though, Joyce’s gambit-more uncharitably, his gimmick-becomes clear. Hannah, “What the hell?” Later, my friend and I-he was budding painter and musician, I an aspiring writer, and we edited the school’s literature and art magazine together-agreed that this was the ideal reaction to the opening of a novel, that novelists should do their best to provoke it. looked up from the book puzzled, and one finally exclaimed to Mrs. 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…. A few students read the back cover or paged through the volume or skipped to the end to see how many pages they were obligated to read but the ones who sampled the novel’s first lines. Hannah distributed Perma-Bound school copies of the Signet Classics edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I still treasure the memory: a sunny spring afternoon in the year 2000, the last class of the school day, AP English. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce ![]()
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