A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.”

SALON DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers and Paul Caviston, London Literary Salon Director
• Five-week virtual study, Tuesdays, 4-6.00pm GMT
• 9 November – 7 December 2021
• Recommended edition: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780141182667 or (if you can find it) the Viking Critical Library Edition (1968). Don Gifford’s Joyce Annotated will be a useful resource.
• Cost: £130 (includes notes and resources).

A Portrait … attempts to enter in to the consciousness of a boy growing to young adulthood with an acute sense of the world around him. In the narrative, the writer aims to collapse the boundary between reader and character consciousness: there is no authorial presence or exterior perspective and each section is written as though it springs directly from the thoughts of the boy at the time. This is why the opening feels first like a nursery rhyme, then broken thought – but each image has weight and purpose. In fact, some (Hugh Kenner, for example) have argued that the opening page contains the entire meaning of the rest of the book. But you have to read the whole thing for the layers to come through.

In this early work, as in all his writings, Joyce interrogates the form of fiction as biography: using the details of his own life and writings, he created a novel that is autobiographical while ironically commenting on his own ambition and aesthetic philosophy. The reader often wonders about the distance between artist and their art – in the Portrait, Joyce uses the texture of his life to explore the creation of a particular identity – giving himself just enough space between character and creator to show how artistry opens up the surface of the self.

Registration is open for the Ulysses Special Centenary Study in 2022. For all who are potentially interested in participating, reading Joyce’s earlier (and shorter and easier) work is incredibly useful.