From the Bookshelf of Reading List Completists…

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

Start date: June 1, 2021

Finish date: June 30, 2021

Discussion: Group Reads

Why we're reading this: June 2021 Completist Selection
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What Members Thought

Feb 21, 2015 Matthew rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-more-than-once, completist-book-club, classic, required-reading-high-school, general-fiction, 2021

First read back in High School – 2 Stars

Reread as an adult – 4 Stars

This is a Bildungsroman – that is a word I always think sounds fun but I always forget what it means. I only realized this book is one because of my followup review of it on Wikipedia for extra facts. For those who are like me and think it is a fun word but can’t always place how to use it, it is “a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood . . . . in which chara ...more

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Jun 12, 2021 Sue K H rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 000-classics-grp-read, modern-library-100

The first James Joyce book I read was Ulysses. If it weren't for my classics group short story reads, I may have never have tried another. The short story we read was "The Dead" and I was completely in love with it. I later read the whole Dubliners collection and enjoyed all of the stories. I was a bit reluctant to try this Portrait because of it being described as some sort of precursor to Ulysses. When it was chosen in the Reading List Completist group, I decided to go for it.

I happened t The first James Joyce book I read was Ulysses. If it weren't for my classics group short story reads, I may have never have tried another. The short story we read was "The Dead" and I was completely in love with it. I later read the whole Dubliners collection and enjoyed all of the stories. I was a bit reluctant to try this Portrait because of it being described as some sort of precursor to Ulysses. When it was chosen in the Reading List Completist group, I decided to go for it.

I happened to read two books this year which made reading this an even better experience, though I think I'd have rated this 5 stars without them. The two books were Leo Tolstoy's critical essay style nonfiction "What is Art" and Gabriel Byrne's memoir "Walking with Ghosts".

This was nothing like Ulysses. It feels like a memoir that incorporates personal intellectualized philosophy. It shows a clear progression of how Joyce's autobiographical character, Stephen Daedelus comes to form his ideas and his career. His Irish Catholic school experience has a lot of similarities with Byrne's even though they were 70 years apart. I was raised Catholic in America after Vatican II and went to a church where it was fully embraced, which made my experiences completely different. I also didn't go to Catholic school.

What people of my generation had, even in Catholic school, was nothing like what James Joyce or Gabriel Byrne or others of their time in Ireland. Even Gabriel Byrne came of age before Vatican II when things were much more strict. It was emotionally, physically, and sometimes sexually abusive. Their country was also politically charged and divided by religious and state group identities. Both of them were great students and were recruited to be priests, likely because they also had charisma. Both Byrne's and Joyce's experiences felt totally authentic and gave me an understanding of why they felt the way they did, even though they didn't agree with my experience.

In addition to spiritual problems, Stephen is also having troubles in his family life due to his father's bad financial choices. He's also feeling alienated from Irish Nationalism at the time.

There is a long section about sin and eternal damnation that will turn many off but it's relevant to his coming of age. After the damnation part, he digs down deep making philosophical and theological arguments regarding the restraints of religion, family, and the state on art. If this turns you off, in general, or you only like it when it agrees with your philosophy or religion, then you won't like this. It didn't feel intimidating or Avante guard to me. You aren't going to get random thoughts while he's sitting on the toilet like in Ulysses. These are well-thought-out arguments expressed with his great command of language.

I found this especially interesting after having read Tolstoy's "What is Art" at the beginning of the year. They both reject the state and organized religion, but they come to very different well thought out conclusions about what Art is. Tolstoy feels that Art should work in tandem with Christianity, in a way that improves the lives of all. Joyce feels religion restricts art and that it should be aesthetic and appeal to shared pity and/or terror. I'm oversimplifying, both but the point is they are very different. My thoughts are somewhere in between the two. I don't agree with censorship but I also don't think religion, family or identifying with a group limits it. I only have to think of Graham Green's "The End of the Affair" after his Catholic conversion as one example. There are many who feel that their religion inspired their art. You don't have to be a Catholic to enjoy The End of the Affair.

I thought this was engaging the whole way through. Joyce is certainly a talented writer.   ...more

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