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 down along the road met a nicens little boy named... Nyet?**************************
Friend and fellow blogger Katherine had this line in the middle of a post not too long ago:
One thing that struck me while watching American Gangster and Body of Lies is that both movies suffer from some of the same problems that Blade Runner has. Mainly, the occasional plot jump or a setting change that is disconcerting to the viewer. The viewer has to spend a moment considering what they seem to have missed instead of paying attention to what is going on. That's a big problem in Blade Runner and that's why the voice over is sometimes necessary. (emphasis mine)Oddly enough, this little snippet ran through my head throughout the entirety of Joyce's APotAaaYM. Because there is no voice-over in this book - there's less than normal dialogue, actually - and there is no doubt that there are plenty plot jumps and setting changes that are disconcerting to the "viewer." The book is difficult to read*, and several passages require slowing down, rereading, and running note-taking to get the full effect of the text (a casual familiarity with late 19th century Irish politics and a working knowledge of Latin help, too) (I have neither). The question, natch, is whether this is summarily a "problem." Not picking on Katen here - you have to define "problem" on a context-basis (there are no problems in a vacuum?), and seeing as Blade Runner plugged in a voice-over as a purported solution, it seems relatively clear that the confusing elements of BR were at least considered a problem for a mass audience (I might argue that a voice-over can be a bigger problem than the original confusion). But disorientation in the text shouldn't be considered an a-contextual problem - it may be a problem to a certain purpose (easy reading)**, but it 's not categorically problematic. In this book, the plot jumps and the disorientation engendered *are* the style, integral to the experience of the book and the vicarious experience of the titular Artist's development as experienced by the Artist. The whole point was capturing the youth-and-young-manhood-as-experienced, stream-of-consciousness style, and such streams are by nature ill-confined and cloudily structured. I get disoriented looking into my own head, let alone someone else's. So this is no problem, even if it did cause me "problems," if that even begins to make sense.
* - This is actually the second time I've read APotAaaYM. The first was my freshman year at Rice - I had to study for two tests, write a short paper and read this book on a Thursday night, and I chose to leave Portrait for the 3 to 6 AM time slot. Big mistake - I finished the final 120 pages in those three hours, woke up the next morning and remembered precisely ZERO of what I had read. This speaks both to the nontransparency of the text and the death of memory via sleep deprivation. I figured out bits and pieces in class discussion that day, but really never got a good grasp of the back half of the novel until now.
** - The main notion that I'm trying to capture here is that a problem has to be defined relative to purpose, and given a liberal notion of artistic interpretation that allows for opacity as a legitimate artistic endeavor - and that grants that effort to penetrate a difficult text can have intrinsic value - it's difficult to label confusing, disorienting texts as fundamentally problematic. I'm trying to put this in a value-neutral sense - I like dense, opaque texts AND easy, clear communication, too - but I find enough value in the act of penetrating the inaccessible that I hesitate to damn a text just for confusing me. Of course, you have to be careful, because this sort of attitude causes one to look at a plothole-laden piece of ridiculousness like the new Transformers movie and think, "Hey - ART FILM!"
I multiplied these problems by taking my sweet time reading the book - I started reading in early May and just finished now. Ugh - a lot of academia and academic books got in my way, it seems. So a bit of a disjointed text got extra-textually disjointed by my reading it in two page spurts before bedtime. Less than ideal, especially since every night I had to flip back and reorient as to what the hey was going on. Okay, I think I've effectively made the point that the book is somewhat difficult to follow - but why?
APotAaaYM is Joyce's first foray into his (at the time) experimental technique of stream-of-consciousness writing, and he plants the entirety of the text - even though it is in third person - in the developing mind of the protagonist / hero, Stephen Dedalus. The biggest consequence of writing in a style that mirrors a development is that the style changes through the course of the novel - the initial lines of the book are mired in the mind of a toddler, so things open with weird sentiments of moocows and sing song rhymes around "apologize." The hesitant school boy acts in halting prose; the distractable adolescent allows scenes to jump from the present to memories and back again. The isolated, forlorn zealot hyper-concerned for his soul walks in a desolate text devoid of adjectives, the florid poet walks amongst detailed hillsides and beautiful seabathers; the confident academic speaks slang in Latin; and finally, the confident, independent artist wrests control from the narrator and ends the novel in first-person journal entries. It really is a jarring effect of dynamic style, and part of the difficulty of reading is keeping up with the manner in which the prose changes faces. Throughout, the narrator hits the ground running and only notes the setting when it naturally comes up; again, your average inner dialogue does not contain constant reminders (now I am in my kitchen, now I am in Phoenix, etc.), so to deliver the plot as experienced, the narrator does not always draw clear lines and indicate precisely where / when events are occurring. In one famous scene, Stephen jumps from worrying about his performance in a play to a girl attending to an instance of being accused of heresy to a schoolyard debate back to the play with nary a stage direction to be found.
So all of that is bewildering, but it is simply breath-takingly effective in miring the reader in transformation: it's not just that Stephen's attitude changes as he ages or as the book progresses, it's that everything about the book changes. The textual style mirrors the text's content, and it's a striking modernist move that makes the reading more experience than information capsule. And it's fluid, too - though some of the changes surrounding epiphanies (and the jump from third to first person) are abrupt, the changes are not distracting and mesh nicely as an adjunct to the narrative experience. While the gist is simple - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pretty much captures the idea that the novel traces an artists' bildungsroman - the experience of reading it is key. This is no concept vehicle, no act of communication. It's - ha - art.
I won't bother with a plot rehash (more than I already have); suffice it that it traces Stephen's childhood and adulthood as an Irishman in British schools and chronicles his path from schoolboy to would-be-priest to collegiate to fiercely independent aesthetician, and the thrust of the joy of the bildungsroman is its stylistic accomplishment and its unique take on the hero. For one, Stephen is no hero is a classic sense; he is desperately unsure of himself and starkly confused about many things, most especially women, quite unlike your average swash-buckling damsel-grabber. I think reading this out of the original literary experience puts quite a different spin on it - we are used to the heroic nerd, so to speak, the valiant emo-kid in today's popular narratives, but sensitive, unsure, non-action-taking Stephen was largely Joyce's invention. (I might even go so far as to suggest that Kevin Arnold and his Wonder Years, or any of the Freaks and/or Geeks have their roots in Stephen Dedalus). Two, Stephen's development is remarkably sophisticated: he does not reject piety for sin, nor does he reject his background for independence. Rather, he strives to develop himself in full light of his experiences, background and heritage, and notes their inevitability and the difficulty of his goals but presses on. He finds real grounds instead of false dichotomies or falser middle grounds. The picture is intimate and wholly convincing, and captures in fiction an inspirational account of Joyce's artistic mentality. Three, in another act of blurring the non/fiction divide, Joyce forces a lived-in experience of an Irish Catholic upbringing upon you, complete with family dinner arguments, priestly accounts of hell and an invitation to join the clergy. Sure, it's culled from Joyce's *real* life, but the fictional account and rendered style make it, um, realer.
The non-original literary context in which I read this does have its problems - the book is littered with references to the debate over Irish independence and its intersection with religion at the time, and unless you've got a pretty firm understanding of the historical context, these scenes drop lines that further confuse. The other odd contextual elements that interfered with my enjoyment of the book were the scenes at the university - students insulting one another in Latin, debating the finer points of Aquinas in casual conversation, having confrontations in the hall over whether fellow students were overly abstract or sufficiently concerned with human affairs and politics - eh? This could not be farther from the university life I experienced (shockingly, the book did not feature "Beer Bike" rendered in Latin). So I find it bizarre that the university setting has so transformed in 100 years - Stephen seriously chats up a buddy about his aesthetic theories for pages on end. Not that this is unrealistic or that it was ineffective (though it did have a little of a Randian trial speech to it), just that I could hardly read it for thinking "really? twenty year olds, talking like this?" And I can't tell whether I would have loved living in such a setting or would have desperately said, "Enough about Platonic conceptions of beauty; how about that local professional cricket association?" That was, actually, the most distracting feature of the book.
It should be clear that I struggled with but enjoyed / appreciated this novel, all immensely, and that I (really go out on a limb when I) highly recommend this lauded classic. I'm very tempted to draw this to a close with some grand self-to-Dedalus comparisons, but I think I'll spare the interwebs such a self-indulgent act (he said in his blog). Stephen does serve as an archetype for many of us, even those of us well out of the "young man" phase, and I can't pretend I wasn't touched personally by his struggle and sentiments. I'll leave with a couple of passages that I thoroughly enjoyed - though these were not the only ones (the epiphany with the beauty of the girl on the beach is also stellar, and there are several others). The first is an alternative to simple-minded ideas about humans and evolution, while the second (some of the famous closing lines) is a nice encapsulation of the struggling, striving way of life to which I suppose I aspire. Here goes, and thanks for reading:
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The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours... This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty.----------------------------------------
APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
APRIL 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
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