Continuing my series of book reviews for writers, I finished reading James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
My critique here is not about the craft of the writer. It is a good book, but I think I disagree with some of what Joyce believes. The harshness of the Catholic vision of hell struck me. Young Stephen Dedalus attends a ‘retreat’ and for pages and pages there is an ongoing lecture on the horrors of hell, the fire and brimstone, the torture, the pain and ugliness. That the Catholic church conjures up such a vision for its believers must be one reason Stephen and Joyce reject the church. There is little or nothing of the loving Jesus I was raised with.
Stephen is offered a place in the Jesuit order which plays to his ego. But when he declines, he also feels the need to reject all the church, his family, his community and his country.
As happens with some young men, he is in love with a woman he doesn’t know, and holds her to an impossibly high standard. That a friend makes a move on her when Stephen is frozen with feet of clay should be a lesson, but he misses it.
It is that rejection of reality and community that most bothers me in this book. The church can be stifling in its pious habits and exert pressures that work against progress. Witness the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo, Lawrence and Joyce himself. Yet I feel he so rejects the community to become a worldly vagabond. But the book ends at that point.
I am interested in this because I am writing a novel about a young man, who is also seeking what is good and right. Like young Stephen, my character is brought up attending church, but is never immersed in a religious school.
My worse experience with a Baptist church elder was in my last year of high school. I had always loved books and reading, although my academic strength was math and science. My last term of high school, we read and studied DH Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’. It is a hard book for a young man. I read it closely trying to understand. I can still recite the setting, the characters, the plot. But there was something going on in that book I did not understand. I was genuinely interested in knowing what I instinctively knew I was missing. I innocently raised my hand to ask a question. The teacher, Mister D, answered me by savaging me in front of the class. I must be slow, or didn’t really read it. He belittled me. It was a slap in the face unlike any I had ever experienced at school. I was shocked, rocked backward, embarrassed. My cheeks stung.
I decided then and there I hated literature, books, Mister D, and the Baptist church. It took almost ten years before I came back to literature while studying for a degree at night at UBC. When my love of literature was rekindled, I wondered why I had given up reading. And I remembered.
What could have caused a pious man like Mister D to react so violently? I knew him from a Baptist youth group I had attended, Sentinels. But we had had no run-ins, I remembered. I had stopped attending when my mother stopped going to that church. Was there something of that involved?
Or, was it the book itself? High school teachers don’t get to choose the syllabus or the curriculum. And Lawrence could have raised some concerns with a pious community. Did Mister D hate having to teach this book? Did I just happen to walk between the teacher and what he reviled?
At any rate, I have forgiven Mister D, and my religious roots were never that deep. I haven’t felt the need to renounce church and community. I feel that family, community, and society, which can be stifling and restrictive, are also bedrock values that can help a person find roots, belonging, purpose, and self-fulfillment.
Writers shouldn’t use cliches, but I feel like Joyce tosses out the baby with the bath water. Something I almost did myself.
September 21, 2024 at 9:54 AM
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Review of James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
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