A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
By James Joyce
Two Stars
Read April 2014
I was indifferent to Portrait when I read it as a lit major, but a few years later I loved Ulysses, so after finally reading Dubliners, I decided to reread Joyce’s first novel to see what difference 40 years might make to that initial judgment. Turns out not much at all. What accounts for this bookworm’s indifference to an acclaimed novel by one of the greatest novelists in human history? Preferences, pure and simple. By the time I reached my late teens, I’d lost whatever taste I ever had for coming-of-age stories, and as Joyce’s title clearly states, that’s the whole point of this story. Although I loved the hyperbole of Stephen Dedalus’s determination “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” which clearly should have been the last line of the book, his journey from infancy to manhood simply didn’t engage my head or my heart, and there was no one else to care for. For women, Joyce’s madonna/whore complex made ciphers of his long-suffering mother and the gilded object of his desire, which left me feeling decidedly alienated from the story. Also contributing to that sense of alienation was the infamous sermon on the eternity of hell that leads Stephen to renounce his wicked ways. From the vantage of 2014, I find it hard to understand how any intelligent being could actually believe in hellfire and damnation, and nothing in the novel up to that point made me believe that Stephen actually did. That combination of preferences, lack of engagement, and overall alienation from the story is what accounts for my indifference. Although Joyce’s first novel may be masterful sentence by sentence, as a whole it didn’t work for me because it failed to engender the fictional dream that is the hallmark of a memorable reading experience. Times change, and as they do, only a handful of towering literary immortals will be able to always capture the imagination of contemporary readers. Almost 100 years after it appeared, Portrait doesn’t strike me as one of the immortals.