[LISTENED TO: November through December 2010] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I initially ended this post with: “Even though this audio was unabridged, it felt a bit like hearing an abridged version. I suspect I shall have to actually read the novel again in 2011 to see what I missed.” Well, I assumed that the audio was unabridged. But now I see that there is another recording which is 7 discs as opposed to my copy’s 3 discs. Gadzooks! In tiny print on the back of the box, I see now that this is abridged. NO WONDER I felt like so much was left out of the story. It actually made me think that the story wasn’t all that coherent. As such, you can kind of disregard this post until I listen to the unabridged version (which is available free for download here).
So, back to my initial review:
I was listening to this audio book while exercising. The fact that it took me as long as it did to finish the audio book is more of a testament to my lack of exercising than the book itself. Although I will say that unlike Dubliners, I found that listening to this book (and again, perhaps it was the distance between listenings) to be somewhat unsatisfying. And of course, as with all of these Naxos CDs, the vocals are recorded so quietly (except when he starts screaming–the hellfire sermon is so loud it scared my family upstairs) that you really have to try to listen hard to hear the whispers. The final chapter–Stephen’s diary–is read so quietly it was hard to hear over the exercise machine, even with the sound up all the way.
So this is the story of Stephen Daedalus before Ulysses, when he was, as the title states, a Young Man. My favorite memory of reading this book was when I read the opening aloud to a sick friend who thought that I was messing with her:
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 baby tuckoo….
Stephen is of course, baby tuckoo, so this novel is more than just the young man days. But from this baby story, we quickly jump to Stephen at school and we see an episode that impacted his whole life: boys who were teasing him pushed him into a stagnant pool of water.
From there we see a lot of Stephen’s family and upbringing: his Catholic mother and his Irish nationalist father. Another memorable incident comes at a Christmas dinner. His father and his uncle argue loudly with his aunt and his mother. The men are on the side of Charles Stuart Parnell and the women on the side of the church (which condemned Parnell). The men continue to bait the women, essentially ruining the dinner with their loud declarations of disapproval toward the church. And we see that this fight over the church and about being an individual establish the crux of Stephen’s life.
Stephen’s family moves to Dublin and his life is very different there. He loses his virginity to a prostitute and soon he finds himself living a life of debauchery and sin. The guilt is there but he cannot resist temptation, and he continues with this lifestyle for some time.
Until he goes on a religious retreat and he hears the above-mentioned sermon. The picture of hell that the priest paints is pretty astonishing and Stephen blanches at the horrors. He vows to change his ways. While I was listening, I thought that Stephen’s debauchery lasted for years and years, so I was absolutely astonished to hear this part:
— I… committed sins of impurity, father.
The priest did not turn his head.
— With yourself, my child?
— And… with others.
— With women, my child?
— Yes, father.
— Were they married women, my child?
He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.
The priest was silent. Then he asked:
— How old are you, my child?
— Sixteen, father.
SIXTEEN! Holy crap.
After the confession, his life begins anew. He becomes exceeding pious, trying to make amends for all of his sins, fearing the devil or death at every shadow. This lasts for a time, but then one day he sees a young woman on the beach:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
— Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
It’s worth quoting to such an extent because the language is so beautiful and so evocative; it absolutely captures the power that sensual pleasures have. And Stephen vows to live life to the fullest and, as a later conversation with Cranley details, he abandons the church for good.
Once Stephen goes to college, he wants nothing so much as to think independently: To have freedom to do what he likes and to have his soul fly higher. Or, as Joyce memorably writes:
to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
The book feels very episodic to me: the stagnant pond, the broken glasses, the prostitutes, the sermon. I feel like this may have been a problem with either the audio or the fact that I wasn’t fully focused [or, duh that the disc was unabridged!]. Joyce’s language, while not quite as dense and evocative as in Ulysses has progressed quite a lot from the stories in Dubliners. In Dubliners, he was tightly focused and poetic, in Portrait, he is experimenting with the stream of consciousness style, and there are lengthy passages that are florid and descriptive. But it just felt like something was missing.
———-
So yes, big insight: abridged versions are choppy. Do I really wonder why I didn’t find the story fully compelling; I really felt like I was missing stuff. Although I’m glad I’m not crazy, I’m bummed that I’m so unobservant. Proper review of the unabridged story in a few months.
Good stuff. I’d be interested in what was abridged. One of the points to be made about Portrait that I certainly missed in college was that Stephen’s posturing is there to be mocked, almost as if Joyce is wincing a little. He seems to write the villanelle following a wet dream, for example. But the final flourish, with “in that case all that I thought I thought, and all that I felt I felt…” is magnificent.
For me the funniest bit is when Dedalus tells Cranly (sorry, may be a little inaccurate as I don’t have a text handy and am too lazy to search) that he’s given up Catholicism. Cranly (sic) asks him whether this means he’s going to become a Protestant.
–I said I had lost my faith, not my self respect, he replies (again, sic).
I had a similar conversation with my close friend last night when he told me that his own friend, a lapsed Northern Irish Catholic, feared that his son may have been turned down for a place in one or two of the local schools. He admitted he was nervous, but that he’d be much more annoyed about being turned down for a Protestant school than being denied a place in the local non-denominational one.
Same thing. The cracked lookingglass of a servant….