Summary
James Joyce: Portrait of an artist in his youth
Why does this superpersonal, extraordinarily carefully shaped, but not sensational history - because despite everything it is history - still touch and impress us? The portrait of the artist in his youth is the history of a youthful rebellion, the snatching of an original personality from the environment that gave birth to him and that seeks conformity. This Bildungsroman about the formation of a young artist ready to step into the world, to face the reality of experience for the millionth time, as he says himself, and to forge the still unrealized conscience of my people in the forge of my soul - in its general form, it is a novel of every youthful rebellion. But how could it be, when the intention of the writer was the opposite: when he aspired to strictly individualize his subject with all his linguistic thoughtfulness? Precisely by this, we would say according to Stephen's theory, that he tried to see his object as a whole, completely, to understand it in its internal conflict, as "complex, multiple, divisible, separable, composed of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum", and to feel its completely unique, unrepeatable clarity that radiates "the soul of the most ordinary object"
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.