Portrait Of The Artist

[poliphilo]

I'm treading on eggshells here because I know some of you love it, but I'm halfway through Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Man and I'm disappointed. Does it get all modernist and raw in the second half or what?

It's overflowing with catholic priests, so where's the child abuse?

Thus far it's a typically genteel, middlebrow literary memoir. Stephen Dedalus is so fuckin' sensitive I want to fuckin' shoot him. David Copperfield is edgier than this.

Joyce writes like the late Victorian aesthete he is.  The prose purls along between flowery meads. This guy  a Lord of language? Really? 

I guess I was expecting it to be the literary equivalent of Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon- and it ain't.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Prompted by your comment I've just been reading pomes penyeach.

Oh my God, but they're bad!

Worse than the worst stuff in the Georgian anthologies.

They sort of confirm what I've been feeling about Joyce's sensitivity to language- that actually he didn't possess any.

Re: "I wrote Chamber Music as a protest against myself"

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you for these. They are awesome....

I can't get over how Victorian Joyce is. He's much more Victorian than all those early 20th century writers who get pigeonholed as "traditionalists"- like Wells, Shaw, Kipling, even Chesterton. I feel like I've been sold a pup.