I can still hear bagpipes...

To my own surprise, I did not find the novel itself all that difficult. The plot, major themes and symbols (or maybe they are motifs…I should consult a dictionary) are really easy to identify. That is, of course, assuming I didn’t completely overlook something…

For anyone unfamiliar with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, here is as brief a summary as I can provide…
Stephen Dedalus is the oldest son in a strict Catholic family in Ireland at the turn of the century. Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, either doesn’t make any money or can’t properly handle it because the family is constantly moving to slummier and slummier places and Stephen must attend progressively less prestigious (and eventually free) schools. Throughout the novel, Stephen becomes more and more alienated from his family and struggles with his religious beliefs. While living in Dublin, Stephen loses his virginity to a hooker. While immediately guilt-stricken, Stephen chooses to ignore this guilt and goes on a sin bender which lasts until he attends a three day religious retreat during which he hears sermons on judgment and the torments of hell. These sermons scare Stephen back into not just a pious life, but one of such extreme devotion that he is offered a career in the priesthood. While considering this option, Stephen is checking out some girl who’s chillin on the beach and has an epiphany. He decides to devote his life to art and the pursuit of beauty. Disregarding religion and his family’s wishes, Stephen attends a university where he forms his ideas of art and aesthetics. While at school, he has a seriously long conversation about aesthetics with a friend of his; there were a lot of propositions and I couldn’t follow. Desirous of a life completely free from the constraints of society, Stephen ultimately decides he will leave Ireland to pursue his life as an artist.

After a friend of mine suffered some recent author backlash I’m a little nervous to continue…but I doubt James Joyce will come back from the dead to tell me I’m an idiot so here come my issues…

• Stream of consciousness. I’m not going to be able to accurately explain my problem, but I have one. And I know it will continue to rear its ugly head because I still have to read Ulysses and more Virginia Woolf and a craptastic (don’t stone me) bunch of Faulkner, so hopefully I can get it all out now. I guess I just have a really hard time buying it. I do understand that Portrait is largely Joyce’s autobiography and he is the only one who can authentically narrate Stephen’s inner monologue. So maybe it is the third person narration. I know I bring my own mistrust of the narrator to any story I read, so perhaps that is what causes my dislike of stream of consciousness. Hell if I know.

• Is it just me, or is this novel way too easy to figure out? Theme: The Downfalls Religious Extremism. Stephen’s upbringing leads him to go from a sin binge to religious fanaticism, neither of which stick. Theme: Irish Sovereignty. Or rather, the need for it. Near the end of the novel Stephen discusses how English is a borrowed language; he refuses to accept the position of his ancestors and realizes he must leave Ireland in order to find his/Ireland’s true identity and voice. Theme: Evolution of Individual Perspective. I’m not sure that’s a correct name, but Stephen spends the novel developing his own mind/thoughts/beliefs/individuality. As Stephen develops and matures, so does the language of the novel. Theme: The Function of the Artist. To become a true artist Stephen must leave everything behind and form his own artistic voice. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with these themes; as far as fundamental ideas of a novel go, these are some great ones. But they are so obvious that I was left searching for some deeper meaning.

• Reading Portrait is exhausting! Part of that has to do with the style in which it is written. Stream of consciousness narration is designed to be confusing and difficult to understand. The reader must piece apart the internal monologue of the character in order to stay abreast of the action in the novel. That takes work and concentration that I just don’t often have. Also, several years pass during the course of the novel and it is left to the reader to determine the time lapses. I don’t like working that hard for my literature.


On the subject of things I did enjoy…

• I appreciate the significance of Stephen’s name. His full name, Stephen Dedalus, is a play on the two sides of him. Several times throughout the novel Stephen repeats his name as if searching for his identity. This too is incredibly obvious but I can dig it.

• The language progression of the novel. As Stephen matures, so does the writing. Because Joyce employed stream of consciousness, it seems obvious that Stephen’s inner monologue and descriptions would progress as he does, but this must have been an incredible task for Joyce. I appreciate it.


Reading Portrait now, out of a college atmosphere and with the time to absorb and consider what I was reading, I definitely liked the novel more that I remember. Sadly, that’s not saying a whole lot. I feel like throwing up my hands and saying, “I don’t get it!” Except that I do. I definitely do. It’s not that difficult to get. What I don’t get is the awesomeness of it. I don’t think it’s awesome. I think it’s tiresome. On the upside, I know where to go for a fantastic description of the fiery torments of hell. And everyone needs a good hellfire sermon every now and then.


Slaughterhouse Five, anyone?

In other bloggy news...

My friend Jenny seems to have pissed off an ultra-sensitive author.  Recently, she had this to say regarding the linguistic difficulty of the title of a new television show, Rizzoli and Isles.  Notice how near the end she realises the show was first a book series, which only serves to underline her point about the pronunciation of the main characters' names. 

Tess Gerritsen, the author of the series, clearly has a google alert set up for herself because Jenny's blog IMMEDIATELY popped up on her radar.  (An author with nothing better to do than google herself should probably find a hobby, but that is neither here nor there.)  Without bothering to read Jenny's blog, Gerritsen included it in her own blog about how tragically difficult it is to be a writer and deal with the criticism of strangers. 

Please take a moment to dry your sympathetic tears. 

And the winner is...

So I finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man an hour ago.  Literally.  (Get it, Jennybrown? I'm so damn punny!)  I'll be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what was happening near the end so I might have to revisit later tonight.  Plus, I need some time alone with my thoughts before I can actually talk about it. 

In the meantime, however, it's time to pick the next novel!  Using a very high-tech text message system, I have narrowed the choices down to the following:
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
rabbit, run by John Updike

What should it be?

"Nothing could have survived our love"

I am utterly fascinated with the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  The drama, passion, and devotion of their relationship rivals any story, real or fictional.  Theirs was a great romance.  Though challenged by alcoholism and mental illness, infidelity and separation, career ambitions and debt, their intense love for and devotion to each other never wavered.  In the end, they were the downfall of their own love.  For anyone interested in more information about their lives together, there are several great books out there.  My favorite is Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  It follows their relationship from its beginning to the final letter F. Scott wrote to Zelda just two days before his death.  The things they say to each other are, for lack of better words, tragically beautiful...

Thanks again for saving me.  Someday I'll save you too.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance.

I love you anyway - even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life - I love you.

Nothing could have survived our love.

No matter what happens I have always loved you so.  This is the way we feel about us; other emotions may be super-imposed, even accident may contribute another quality to our emotions, but this is our love and nothing can change it.  For that is true.  And I love you still.

Forget the past - what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever - even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you - turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.

Happily, happily foreverafterwards - the best we could.

The Great Gatsby

"He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly.  It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in love.  It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.  It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

As I have said before, I am a sucker for the sad kind of love story that never quite works out in the end. Reading The Great Gatsby again indulged me not only in the tragedy and passion of the novel, but also of the novel’s author. There is something to be said for having everything you want – all your life’s happiness – just out of reach. (Or, in the case of the Fitzgeralds, having it all and watching it fall apart knowing you are powerless to fix it...I’ll get into them later). This may or may not reflect on me personally…that’s something to look into…



I am not at all interested in discussing or defending Gatsby as The Great American Novel. For my part, I have never been presented with an adequate rival, so my opinion appears to remain as of yet unchallenged. But I welcome submissions. And I’m not going to go into a whole plot description because everyone should have already read this book. And if you haven’t, DO IT! Seriously. I think instead I want to focus on the biggest difference I noticed in my reading of Gatsby this time around.


In learning to approach and digest literature, I often had (and still do) a hard time with narrators. This is particularly problematic when entire novels are in the third person because I have no idea who is telling me the story. While not the case with Gatsby, I recognized a whole new scope of narrative issues in my recent reading. From the outset, Nick Carraway appears to me a rare literary find: a narrator we can trust. Nick is merely an observer; several times throughout the story he is literally just along for the ride. Nick’s actions are of little consequence to the others. Even when it falls to Nick alone to plan and execute Gatsby’s funeral, no one attends. I think this speaks both to Gatsby’s hollow popularity and to Nick’s virtual invisibility to the other characters. It kind of sucks to be Nick, but it always seemed to me that it was a pretty lucky break for us. We as the reader get a virtually unbiased account of the events of the story. Sure Nick is related to Daisy and spends a lot of time with Gatsby, but he doesn’t like any of these people. He’s a reliable witness. Maybe.


This time through I noticed some glaring problems in the timeline. There are huge chronological issues that the reader is forced to sort through. Nick is telling the story in an extended flashback, but it is not clear how long ago this all happened. Everything is supposed to occur over 3 months, but more events than possible are crammed into one month. Does this point to the unreliability of Nick as story-teller or the flaw of Fitzgerald as story-writer? There are also a number of incorrect geographical references. Is Nick remembering incorrectly? Is Gatsby being vague about his past? Is Fitzgerald being inaccurate in his writing? I don’t know the answers to any of these. If this is truly the Great American Novel, then we have to assume that all inconsistencies, chronological or otherwise, are intentional and meant to add somehow to the novel. And if they are unintentional, does that affect how we see The Great Gatsby?


I’m not entirely sure if I care. My love affair with Fitzgerald's language hasn't (and probably will never) changed. The way he describes Daisy just makes me smile…

“I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth – but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”

Holden Caulfield Can Kiss My Ass

I tried.  I mean I really really tried. Here's what I can pinpoint was already working against me:

• I am not, nor was I ever a 16 year old boy.  I didn't understand them when I was a 16 year old girl and I most certainly do not understand them now.
• I appear to have stolen my copy from my 10th grade English class.  That class was a terrible experience.  Worse than you could possibly imagine.  So perhaps I was jinxed by the physical reminder of that shitty year.
• Because I was reading my 10th grade copy, the pages were covered with pencil markings.  My teacher had the class make a People, Places, and Things list for every book we read.  It's exactly what it sounds like: a list in three parts of every single person, place, or thing that is introduced throughout the course of the novel.  I can't even talk about how much I hated this.  Anyway, that was really distracting.
• My copy is missing a page.  And looking back on my reading experience of the past few days, that page held the key to understanding the entire novel. 

Now, I know what I'm about to say probably won’t be popular.  I’m ok with that...

I have one major overlying issue.  The novel’s title, the one thing Holden can picture himself doing and being for the rest of his life, is incorrect.  It comes from Holden not correctly remembering a poem.  Perhaps that is supposed to be part of an overlying theme but I don’t see it.

Ok, on to Holden.  First of all, he spends the entire novel whining.  Everything and everyone is phony.  Nobody is interesting enough to hold his attention.  There is something wrong with everything.  And don't think I missed the underlying issue, because I didn't.  I get that Holden is at the precipice of adulthood and that terrifies him.  I understand that he feels adulthood corrupts people and takes away their innocence.  Holden is terrified of becoming one of the same phonies he is so quick to judge.  I get it.  I'm just so over him whining about his terrible existence. Puh-leeeez.

Secondly, and connected to my first problem, is that we as the reader have to endure his endless diatribe on adult society all for nothing.  There’s no payout in the end.  The novel ends and he is no closer to understanding his own world-view as he was in the beginning.  Holden is so far from understanding what’s going on in his own head that he’s in a mental institution in California!  I don’t know what to do with this novel, where to place it.  It is clearly not a coming-of-age story because Holden does not overcome anything in the end.  Instead he has a breakdown.  Again, I feel like I read the entire novel all for nothing.

            Also, Holden has a serious problem with follow-through.  He gets an idea to do something then suddenly isn’t in the mood anymore.  It ultimately becomes too predictable as a characteristic to be anything but frustrating.  He lacks conviction.  Either that or he is not only a terrific liar to everyone else, he is also great at lying to himself.  If that is the case, which it very easily could be, then Holden has thrown away the last shred of credibility he has with the reader.  We already have to call into question his motives, his sanity, and his tendency to exaggerate; the only thing he has left is that we as the reader assume he would at least tell himself the truth.  But then again, maybe not.

          One last, strictly personal, issue.  Holden hated A Farewell to Arms.  Not only hated it, but completely misunderstood it.  And by the way, it is not a difficult story to understand.  It’s as simple as they come.

Here’s some stuff I did like…

Somewhere near the middle of the story, Holden goes into the Natural History Museum.  He discusses at length how much he always loved going there as a child because nothing inside ever changed.  The exhibits were always the same; it is the visitor who has changed.  As I was reading that passage I remember being struck as a teenager at the sentences describing the various ways a person could be different that day.  Holden says something to the effect of, maybe you’d just seen one of those puddles in the street with a gasoline rainbow in it.  And seeing that alone changes you when you enter the museum and view the never-changing exhibits.  As an adult I can relate to his desire that certain things in our lives should remain exactly as they are; that we should be able to encase them like the exhibits in a museum. 

This quote: “If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world.  It’s impossible.”

I especially appreciate Holden’s ambiguous future.  He has yet to succumb to adulthood, but seems to understand that he cannot remain a child.  He is supposed to attend school in the fall, but because he has yet to accept the adult world, it is unclear if he will be any more successful at this school than at the previous.  So here’s what I think… Near the end of the flashback, Holden has an extended fantasy of going west; of hitch-hiking completely across the country.  I would like to think he checks out of the sanitarium and hitches a ride north to San Francisco where he meets up with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.  I would like to think Holden found a way to stay removed from the materialism and conformity he despises so much.  I would like to think of Holden as a beat.  At least that way we are at peace.

Next up, The Great Gatsby!