A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

[Just trying to mantain my habit to write in English around here. This review is more a writing exercise for my own sake than anything else. Here I go!]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, despite being among the first modernist works, is certainly a paragon of the literature of its era.

We can see here not only some of the themes presented in the early Joyce works, namely Dubliners, but also what would become the main traits of the Joycean prose, later developed in Ulysses and transcended by Finnegans Wake. From that point of view, it seems to me that A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man is itself a formative work in which Joyce, in pair with his literary counterpart, is also trying to find his own voice. This is more evident when we take a look at the style that characterizes the work. On the one hand, Joyce uses a lot of free indirect speech and, in that sense, the style differs partially from the stream of conscioussness expressed through interior monologues of Ulysses and the excentric prose of Finnegans Wake, that I'm still gathering the courage to conquer; on the other hand, the free indirect speech written by Joyce, so usual in the work of others, distnguishes itself by its complexity, reflecting directly the developement of the character and prefiguring somethat the hidden figure of an “arranger”.

Despite of embrionary in comparisson, the prose in A Portrait still has the very interesting dialogue between form and content that would characterize Joyce's later work. Joyce is, as always, so meticulous in the construction of its prose that the narrative shines in whatever way that he decides to develope it. Even the “less intricate prose”, written in favour of the affirmation of its content, is not even close of something meaningless in his hands - in other words, it remains both aesthetically pleasing and thematically significant.

I hate to admit it, but I felt a very personnal connection with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - a book that is almost as perverse in its awareness of the protagonist's faults as it is reluctant to explicitly judge him. I couldn't help but feel Joyce mocking my professional/intellectual ambitions and pretentiousness thoughout the book and I sincerly loved and hated to see some of my contradictions so explicitly exposed.

Unfortunately, I couldn't compare it with its contemporaries (1910-1920) because... well, I haven't read them yet. I will almost certainly revisit A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the future to try to grasp what I wasn't able to in my first reading. Absolutely amazing!