joyce the portrait of an artist as a young man

The Christmas dinner scene, with the bitter argument about Parnell between Stephen’s father and his aunt, could easily have come from many Irish tables in the 1970s and 80s as families rowed over what was happening in Northern Ireland. The artist as a young man … Joyce aged 22. Aged eight or nine, once a week, in Enniscorthy Cathedral, with the lights dimmed, we heard the priest intone: “Death comes soon and judgment will follow, so now, dear children, examine your consciences and find out your sins.” When I read the hellfire sermon in A Portrait, I had heard some of those very words, even though I was born 40 years after the book came out. “Little failed saints,” Montague wrote, “we knew eternity too early.” Almost every section of Joyce’s book belonged to common Irish Catholic experience. The Dublin of my student days was strewn with versions of Stephen Dedalus, including myself, though I wonder what the women thought of it!”

In an essay written in 1982 to mark the centenary of Joyce’s birth, the Irish poet John Montague, who died earlier this month, a writer who had also mined his own childhood, wrote of the influence of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “No one could overestimate the effects of on later Irish writers … Or on the national psyche: many young Irishmen came to painful consciousness reading those corrosive pages. When I read the hell fire sermon, I had heard some of those words, though I was born 40 years after the book came out For many Irish male writers who came after Joyce, from Frank O’Connor to John McGahern to Seamus Heaney, the sifting of early memory, the detailed description of parents, domestic space, school, religious belief, came with the matching account of the young artist’s effort to navigate these through solitude and reading, through knowledge and language.

Joyce the portrait of an artist as a young man