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.