Reading - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Journal #2

       A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a story like that of which I have never read before. I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. As always, Joyce’s prose is something to marvel at, but the stream of consciousness technique he employs gets a little…nauseating at times. Well, maybe not nauseating, but it can certainly get confusing. The narrator is unreliable, and he goes off on tangents about seemingly nothing. The whole story seems to be about the main character, Stephen Dedalus, and how he is just completely different from everyone else. He seems to be fascinated with words and in this way could represent Joyce’s own fascination with words. He is always sounding them out in his head, or making ditties out of them, or thinking up poems. In a way one could argue that Joyce’s writing deploys style over substance, and they might actually be right. After spending a summer reading Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, switching to James Joyce is a bit like studying Bach’s Art of Fugue and then jumping right into some sort of free-form jazz. Sure Dickens, like Bach, likes to flex his stylistic muscles in his works, but the reader is ever mindful of exactly where the story is going and although some tough vocabulary is used, it is never confusing. With Joyce however, half the time it seems the story is going nowhere and the other half you realize the story has moved quite a bit without you even noticing. However, when you read Joyce you realize that it becomes impossible to say plot is the key part of literature. The artistic element comes from all of the other aspects. This is another way Joyce has rather blown my mind. Before now, I considered the actual plot to be the be all and end all of a novel. I find myself reading slower now – really paying attention to what is being said, and although it is a very different book than what I’m used to, I think I like it.