what i got out of a portrait of the artist

I finally finished reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was hard for me to get through. It took me forever. The book spent a lot of time serving as a mouse pad instead of as a font of truth and beauty. There are all kinds of reasons that this was hard for me to get through, but they are not terribly interesting.

Here is what the main point was to me. I could be totally off, and projecting myself into the book (as usual). Maybe that's the point. Anyways, Stephen, particularly almost-adult Stephen, wants to know true stuff about himself: what he actually feels, wants, and believes. Not only does he want to know, but he wants to be able to express this truth, and he's pretty sure that this expression is art. (Recursion: he may not know everything he wants, but he knows that he wants to know and express truth.)

The anecdotes from his life that make up the book can be viewed through this lens. Every idea that is communicated to him by his family, teachers, church, peers, etc. is somewhere between an outright lie and a half-truth. All of these ideas are foisted upon him as fact by people who are somewhere on the spectrum of stupid to self-delusional to lying for personal gain. His father, uncle, and Dante spit politics around him, but these philosophies are not the result of honest thought, but instead of choosing a side and then blindly advocating your team's position. The church inundates his mind (and scares the bejesus out of him) with religious myths and rules. They give him a linear scale on which to judge the worth of his soul: something like [number of church-sanctioned acts of piety] + [number of self-denials] - ([number of sins] - [number of confessions]). He sees hypocrisy in the priests advocating this criterion, as at least earthly rewards in the church are based on an entirely different, less righteous scale. This doesn't seem to cause the personal revelation that a life of piety is not for him; instead, he is repelled by the idea of devoting his life to following rules and ignoring the less rigid, natural beauty of the world. Eventually, this repulsion evolves from not wanting to enter the priesthood to denying his faith. His father, who is slowly losing his standing in society and living more and more in his past, serves as Stephen's window into the dangers of self-delusion. Stephen realizes that he is confused as crap as to how to put together his experiences and feelings with the ideas flying at him from blind politics, ardent religion, or academic esoterica. As an artist, he has moments of inspiration in which he can see through this veil of confusion and doubt. And he has a direction, namely understanding himself and the world. This somehow connects to art -- I don't know if it is that he thinks he can obtain truth by absorbing others' art, or that he can learn by expressing himself through art, or that by exploring the world he will meet similar souls with whom he can carry on some kind of art-conversation. But, art is somehow key to truth.

So, yeah, there are parts of the book that I can identify with, i.e. the confusion and self-doubt. But Stephen, that smug little artist, has flashes of clear understanding, and a direction to go in at the end, while I have nothing of the sort. Then, there are the anecdotes themselves. The book is from another time, and I was not raised religious, nor an observer of vicious political discourse, so each individual anecdote in the book did not resonate with me. But, having finished the book, and being able to draw together (at least what I think) are the main themes of the book, I can make parallels with my own life. I was not raised on religion, but I was raised on television, movies, Nancy Drew books, fairy tales, etc., all full of artificial and identical characters. I was also raised with some rather linear scale of the value of one's self -- some combination of one's popularity with one's peers (sum of the worth of people who like you times amount that they like you), the prestige of one's job (a weighted average of salary, fame, and number of vacation days per year), the superficial characteristics of one's spouse and children, and one's physical appearance. And yeah, I am goddamn confused about what I feel and what I want, and what the point of all this is. Of course, I already knew I was confused, but I suppose I try not to think about it too much and this book brought the fact to the forefront of my thoughts, occasionally, anyways. And maybe from reading this book I got more insight as to where all the confusing factors are coming from -- seeing the confusing factors in Stephen's life, and seeing the parallels in my own. It is also nice to see that things were just as confusing in the early 19, late 1800's, when really people didn't have as much time to sit around and think while machines process our food and daily necessities for us. I'd say to some extent the supposed beauty of Joyce's writing is lost on me, as I often struggled to understand what he was saying, and that really breaks the mood, I think.

So, in conclusion, maybe I got something out of the book. I suppose it will just be incorporated into the entity that is my knowledge of the world, and either evaporate into the ether, or somehow influence my life. Who can say? One thing I can say is I didn't have a lot of fun reading the book. I didn't find it that interesting, at least on a page-by-page level. Yeah, I don't think I'm smart enough to read Joyce, and I will not be making a crack at Ulysses anytime soon.

[Image: Eastern European book cover, courtesy of Dan Meth, via A Journey Around My Skull]