Voices: A Very Snobby Awakening: 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

This you must know before I tell you about my reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce: I'm a bit of a snob. I like snobby drinks, snobby restaurants, and, as evidenced by this blog, snobby books. I like the challenge of reading books that are difficult, full of hard to ascertain themes. I love the big words that I gleam from reading these books and the intimate knowledge of places that I've never been. But this book, that is ALL about the spiritual + intellectual awakening of Stephen Dedalus, is snobby, even for my taste. As one character puts it in chapter 5, "You're a born sneerer, Stevie," meaning, Stephen's as snobby as the day is long.

I'm a big fan of coming-of-age stories (see The Wonder Spot and The Bell Jar, two of my favs), but a coming-of-age story that, in my opinion, lacks any real connection to the main character is a hard pill to swallow.

Here's a re-cap: the book's hero, Stephen, is a smart, sensitive young Irishman. We find him first as the youngest student at an all-boys boarding school, being bullied and literally thrown into a cesspool by his peers. We follow him to another boarding school, where his heroism is evidenced by his willingness to stand up to the religious clergy that run the school for unfair treatment. He then attends yet another school and finally a University before making a decision to leave Ireland. In the midst of this we learn that his father is not well-off and kind of a traitor to the Roman Catholic church. Stephen is deeply conflicted (and deeply conflicted in a very academic, boring way, mind you) about religion, his sexual relationship with a young woman that he believes will send him straight to hell (and there's nearly an entire chapter devoted to the hellishness of hell) and about his country, which at the time is deeply conflicted about its relationship with Britain.

I am a lover of James Joyce's short stories (I read many from Dubliners as an English minor in school), but I don't love the lack of a real story in this book. I never felt like I was rooting for Stephen, nor that I really knew him. Consequently, the "portrait," that I was promised was more like a lightly sketched drawing...in black and white. You know how movies based on Shakespeare's plays are always translated into modern language? I'd love to see that happen with this book. I feel, unfortunately, that so much of the beauty is lost on my modern mind. As one in A Portrait said: "Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused."

Join us as we four read through the undeniable classics of the Collegeboard's 101 Great Books List. We'll also be reading contemporary classics and writing our own list of Uptown Literatti Contemporary Great Books.

Our next book will be something more recent, so stay tuned!

With bibliophilic love,
Whitney