When I first stumbled upon this delight, I intended to swallow the book in one sitting. Joyce is not light reading material meant for a Sunday afternoon or Saturday night. It is a JOY to read, but a workout for your reading muscles. I look forward to uncovering Joyce’s poetry because the language sings in a way that I haven’t experienced since Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, but with Joyce, I could follow the story, while with Woolf, I thought of as gibberish. And Gibberish this book is! But well written adolescent linear poetry at its finest.
Margret Atwood suggests that poetry and literature come from two entirely separate parts of the brain. I believe poetry comes from the area that has to do introspection, while literature has to do with speech and dialect. There is extensive introspection in this autobiographical-fiction that only a young Irish Catholic himself could elucidate.
Now, I will admit, having this book read to me aloud would either be a godsend or a migraine. It is poetry, designed for the page, with words popping out at you and sentences that demand to be reread ten to fifteen times just to get the surface of what they intend to mean. It has all sorts of hidden doors, ghosts in the closets, and secrets hiding within the juicy loins of this commendable work of art. He finished the first draft in 1904 (or 06) I believe, and it was published in 1914. Considering his famous opus, Ulysses which took him only 7 years to finish, this I believe was a passion project. A writer’s right of passage.
“Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.” – D.H Lawrence.For some reason, I never felt that the human conflict of a young boy that Joyce was uncovering in his debut novel that was at all vulgar pulp. In fact, though he tittles with onanism, it is done with elegant wordplay that only made me want to imagine how he would have written about sex. Perhaps at the time, it was taboo topics but even when I felt uncomfortable, I loved it. I was more concerned by what time of the day it was in the book, or the hour of the character’s little discussions took place rather than the year it took place. The language is occasionally dated, but the theme and content are the same as today’s pubescent struggles.
I felt as though I moved from a soldier to an artist in the same hero’s journey as Stephen Dedalus. The story follows Stephen through his childhood, through his teens in seminary or church, and then at college. None of the other characters are even close to as fleshed out as Stephen, but I could picture them all because I felt like I knew each one of them growing up. There is DEEP character development in this book. Stephen struggles with childhood right-and-wrong, religious piety, love, and the arts.
Joyce’s cogent ideas and intellect will get the better of you more than once in this coming-of-age squib. It is a perfect example of why books are better than movies. You can not film these words. However, I just recently saw Citizen Kane, and the character development is just as effective and can leave the audience just as conflicted as this story.
83/100
Ben Bonkoske 