O Life!

Re-reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I’m teaching a course on the novel right now, and I tried to fill my syllabus full of books that moved me when I was twenty years old, with the hope that my students will also be moved by them. And so to represent the era of literary modernism I have assigned James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book that I read when I was twenty and which I primarily remembered for two things: first, a lengthy sermon on Hell, delivered by a Jesuit schoolmaster, that scared the pants off of me despite my professed smart-twenty-year-old atheism; second, a fleeting image, perfectly drawn, of a girl with seaweed on her leg.

a portrait of the blogger as a young man

The novel tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, an Irish boy who grows into a young man and who, rebelling against his church, country, and family, resolves to leave Ireland, become a poet, and create a form of literature that’s genuinely new. (Spoiler alert, I suppose, but the novel really is something you have to read for yourself, not something that can be spoiled.) As a twenty-year-old young man, aspiring vaguely to create some sort of art myself, I identified with the figure of Stephen Dedalus. He is sensitive, vulnerable, and quietly vicious. He never quite fits in with the people around him, and he concludes that it’s because he is too smart and cool, not because there’s something off-putting about himself. He is obsessed with a girl, Emma, who he does not have the courage to kiss. He is consumed with, shall we say, base appetites, but is also consumed with intellectual discovery and idealism, and he struggles to reconcile his animal and intellectual natures. In his baseless pride and overconfidence and his troubled earnestness, Dedalus makes Portrait one of the most uncomfortably psychologically accurate depictions of young manhood I’ve ever read.¹

After suffering through the stultification of religious teaching, tedious schoolwork, and what he sees as a dull, provincial Irish culture, teenaged Stephen wants nothing more than complete freedom. He tells a friend: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” Freedom: what could be better than, unfettered by ties that bind, to fly? The kind of freedom Stephen craves can only be had alone, and so it’s hard but invigorating—like a breath of cold air in the lungs. As a young man, I, too, craved it. And Stephen does it! By the end of the book, he decides to leave home, to see the wide world, to go on the adventure of a lifetime: “Welcome, O life!” he writes in the novel’s conclusion. “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.” Inspiring—that’s how I saw it at twenty years old.

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Fast forward almost fifteen years. What I see now is no longer inspirational but wistfully satirical. I see Stephen’s moral and artistic mediocrity. He fashions himself a poet and develops an aesthetic theory before he even really writes a poem, and the poem he writes is self-important and turgid (and, of course, about Emma, the girl he could not kiss). Think back to the poems you wrote when sixteen, dear reader; Stephen writes that. He manages, in the classic young-man way, to be self-hating and guilt-ridden while also being pretentious and superior to everyone around him. Family, faith—he disdains such things, regarding them as intellectual peasant’s fare. He’s an intelligent fool, an object of satire.

But the book isn’t mere satire. What made the book so absorbing was the strain of affection, even pity, for Stephen that runs through the book. At one point, Stephen visits a prostitute. Afterward, he is so terrified and disgusted by his own sexuality that he seems to disassociate from his own body, watching his own desires with a detached disgust and fascination. Wracked with guilt, Stephen attempts to be a perfect Catholic, renouncing the world and its pleasures and diving into arcane theology.

Still, the beauty of the world can’t help but assert itself to Stephen, who has an ecstatic encounter with the raw beauty of life on a walk to the beach. This epiphany is narrated with such care and precision—in such a loving manner—that it is impossible not to rejoice with him. He glimpses a girl at the seaside, who gazes boldly back at him: “Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” Yes, I want to say, yes! Life!! As humiliating as it is, as embarrassing and dangerous as it is, life!

If mockery is all about standing outside of someone—standing back and observing and judging—the power of Joyce’s free indirect style places his work definitively outside of mere satire. When you are inhabiting the point of view of a self-serious person in such an intense way, you can’t help but feel alongside them.

When, at the end of the novel, we read Stephen’s diary, he comes across again as pathetic. He meets the girl he’s been pining after, who has chosen him for another man. He “talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us. She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said.”

Oof. In this moment, we can glimpse Stephen as Emma might glimpse him: a shabby, unaccomplished, self-important poet—a dodged bullet, in other words. Which is exactly what he is, in one sense. This self-deprecating realization was what being a young man felt like for me: oceanic and strange and idealistic emotions that clash absurdly with the drabness and inconsequence of one’s own actual existence. The things I felt were so real to me. Things really do matter that much. Youth is this intense inrushing of life and the sense of being painfully, embarrassingly alive. “Welcome, O life!” Welcome, indeed.

I didn’t care for a lot of Joyce’s poetry, but I thought this ending couplet from one of his poems, “Alone,” was apt: “All my soul is a delight,/A swoon of shame.” All at once: a delight, a swoon, a shame.

As an adult, I can see Stephen’s ridiculousness. And at the same time, through the power of Joyce’s prose, I can feel what it was like to be alive then: to be awake to possibility, to crave more life, to want to ingest the whole world and to feel everything. I’m older now, and although I feel just as alive, my sense of the world is less giddy. One of the wonders of reading: that it can bathe me once again in this sense of what it is like to be frantically, stupidly, adolescently alive.

O life!

O, O, O!

1. Perhaps this claim says more about me at age twenty than it does about “young manhood” broadly speaking.