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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A GARGANTUAN WETWIPE


The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years later wrote the stunning, beautiful masterpiece Ulysses; this is like someone playing you Chug-a-Lug, Ten Little Indians and Farmer’s Daughter by the Beach Boys and telling you that three years later they would make Pet Sounds and Smile. You would frankly think they were off their trolley. Not possible.

Jimmy Joyce must have had one of those odd head traumas that change a person’s personality because between this mournful bucket of sloshing emo and Ulysses he developed a canny sense of humour � about his pretentious younger self, for one thing.

So Portrait of the Artist as an Insufferable Plonker is the story of Stephen Dedalus up to age 17/18 and Ulysses picks up his story a few years later and skewers his previous Portrait self mercilessly :

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? �. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?

That James Joyce is a funny guy, this Portrait one you would get rats to gnaw your leg off rather than spend a train journey stuck with him in the same compartment.

Well, I am being a little harsh. The first half of this autonovel is not bad at all. There are a couple of strong dramatic scenes, a famous one being a Christmas dinner where a huge political row bursts out between the family’s governess and the loudmouth father. That was great, I was looking forward to more good stuff. But no, then it went south.

SELF-LOVE IN ALL SENSES

Portrait got in big trouble with the censors in 1916 and you can kind of see why because by page 95 young Stephen has discovered the joy of onanism, which is described in the following terms :

He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.

Well, it isn’t Henry Miller or Letters to Penthouse but you get the idea. Eventually he decides his solitary habit is not enough so he prowls the street (at this point he is 16). His horniness is described like this �

He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration.

Steady on, JJ ! Eventually he discovers the delights of Dublin’s hookers and his experiences are drowned in the same euphuistic, euphemistic flowerpot verbals. After that, he gets religion and things take a dark turn.

At his religious school each year there is a Retreat. This is not something I was familiar with. The boys all have to devote themselves to several days of nothing but religious contemplation and prayer. Cue pages of morose I-am-a-doomed-sinner, followed up by a famous hellfire sermon by a priest who has an Evil Dead 2 view of the afterlife �

In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

Plus, it smells really bad, there’s no room service and it’s really hot, and devils come and insult you.

All this drives Stephen slightly doolally :

The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

There are pages of tiresome tedious claptrap like this.

NOT JUST ME

In his short and sharp recommended introduction to Joyce, John Gross puts the boot into Stephen Dedalus as follows �

It is hard not to be repelled, or on occasion to be amused, by his posturing and his moist romanticism. He is utterly self-absorbed; his reveries are rendered in the over-exquisite accents of the House Beautiful…How exactly are we to take all this? If we assume that Joyce completely identifies himself with Stephen the final section of the book becomes an exercise in naïve self-glorification

So he says in trying to get Joyce off the hook many critics read the Portrait ironically � A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Insufferable Jerk

But hold on, Gross says

The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete.

If the Portrait was meant to be read as a hatchet job, why spend 300 pages doing it? The game is not worth the candle. The target is too mere. A short story in Dubliners would have done the job. So this makes us suspect JJ wanted us to take Stephen (=himself) seriously. It’s just not possible.

STRANGEST CAREER IN LITERATURE

He started off with the excellent short stories in Dubliners, following that with this mithering giant bore, then spent 7 years creating the magnificent Ulysses, 20th century’s greatest novel, then poured the rest of his life down the drain by taking seventeen (17) years to write the completely unreadable waste of time called Finnegans Wake. You couldn’t make it up.