On James Joyce and pretention; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This is one of the most thoroughly written books I've ever really read. In that though, in my own thoughts and in the ideas of several articles, Joyce is serving up a plate of elitism.

His ego, and the ego of Stephen Dedalus are fascinating, let there be no doubt, but it is almost too complete to be respected. While it allows Stephen a route for maturation, Joyce's writing is too self serving and nondepreciating to be taken seriously.

This is the first post where I won't write about structure. This is how the book is. It is an awesome transformation from child to student to adult, and the book ends with Stephen just as confused as he is at the beginning. Is this supposed to be indicative of life's great paradox? Joyce is too balanced and witty to let his reader assume that. There must be something else, and we're just only scratching the surface of his profundity. We're so cute when we try this hard.

I did like this book. Really, I did. Don't get the impression that I found it to be a waste of my time, or that I thought the writing was sub-par or derivative. None of the above. I just feel for the reader who takes the work too seriously, on top of taking themselves too seriously, whom, it has been noted frequently, Joyce writes himself towards.

Stephen Dedalus has a little bits of the average that makes us relatively unified as a species. We identify with his thoughts, his confusion, his awe, because we feel we should, and because we may actually see what he sees. The latter is maybe a little less likely, the earlier a more obtuse generalization.

I can make a tie to my other posts by saying that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is indicative of a select society clinging to it's exclusivity. This is not really a horrible thing. Writers like Joyce, we must remember, enjoy their inside jokes. Except, I realize, that inside jokes reside entirely within the writer. We just pretend to be a part of it. Our author can smile and turn over in his grave: Stephen Dedalus is way more interesting than the non-artist that is James Joyce.

On Vonnegut and Funny Loneliness.

I love Kurt Vonnegut. I love everything I've read which he has penned, no exceptions.

I picked up his novel Slapstick to read for an independent study of a book, with a pretty open ended direction - identify a concrete motif and theme, and explain it's significance to the work as a whole.

So, I picked the very prevalent theme of loneliness, and the main character's gag reflex to laugh at his misfortunes. Looking back, the novel fits my blog well. Really well. In fact, the entire piece is essentially a falling apart story. The US is now a series of nation states, and the last president has issued an initiative to make a dwindling population more unified. The solution? Assign a middle name and number to every citizen. This way, he reasons, people will help each other on the basis of family. It works fantastically, so much that people risk their lives for the wellbeing of others. Nonetheless, it turns out, the continent is in decline. Humans begin clinging to what they know. They know a leader is imperative. And, that's about it. President Swain becomes the King of Manhattan, who begins negotiations with Dukes of Michigan and the like. He lives with his closest kin, who happen to be his granddaughter, an aspiring slave, and her lover. They are 19 years old each.

In this, Vonnegut paints a dreary picture. At the same time, however, he writes his characters into hilarious situations. What else can one do, he asks, but laugh at the ultimate absurdities in life and death?

His grasp of this concept is what made Slapstick so enjoyable and interesting. Structure may coax us in a direction that allows us to progress, he indicates. But the crumbling of such is what makes a life worth examining.

On Playboy of the Western World

I'm would find it a bit redundant now to keep reiterating on the same point I've been making. That is, human life is defined by it's boundary and structure, and dissolves along side it. Somehow, the titles that we read in class do a remarkable job of continuing to make my point; JM Synge's comedy Playboy of the Western World is no exception.


The citizen's of the small Irish village in which the antagonist Christy stumbles into are essentially driven by gossip. So boring is their existence is that they will almost literally drop everything in order to get involved in the latest scandal. In this, they are so dependent on a new source of interest that they become completely entranced when there is one, and destitute when there is not. Christy, it becomes apparent, is just another one of the many dramatic instances to which the townsfolk gravitate towards, but is nonetheless a huge part of the two days he spends in total with the locals. In this, he becomes the structure to their lives. Their everything, even for that very abbreviated amount of time. His story is unimportant, actually. It matters not that he claims to have killed his father. He could have crashed his fishing vessel 30 miles down the shore, and he would still be infatuationalized. This is the elemental gravitation. This is human life.