James Joyce. What a classy Irish lad.
I’ll never forget reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in my senior year AP English class. That being said, all I actually remember of the book is the insane stream of consciousness and some sort of epiphany over seeing the word ‘fetus’ carved into a desk. It’s still actually a running joke between my best friend – who was in my class – and myself.
Now, if you don’t know who James Joyce is, I’ll let Wikipedia tell you. Basically he’s a very famous modern Irish writer. He’s a very interesting fellow though, so read up. Knowledge is power!
Anyway, though I don’t remember much about the book, something about JJ always stuck with me. In fact, I still remember the very first time I visited Ireland like it was yesterday.
It was the summer of 2000, right after I graduated high school, and Portrait of the bla bla was still fresh in my mind. I remember exchanging my money in Dublin for Irish punts (this was before the Euro), and finding, to my surprise, the face of this JJ on the £10 note (I still have one!). I also saw that there was a James Joyce Centre, a statue, a museum, etc. It seemed everywhere I turned, there was he was. Ireland loves this dude, and I cannot wrap my head around why – I mean, fetus? Really?!
So anyway, over the years I’ve softened my stance on JJ from “how could anybody possibly enjoy this crap” to “Wellll…I was in high school and probably just didn’t care enough.”
Since then, I’ve always thought I’d like to give James Joyce another chance. After all, if Ireland loves him so much, he must be worth a second glance. So tonight I dutifully read about him on wikipedia, skimmed through the spark notes of the book (sparknotes.com may have prevented this whole fiasco 10 years ago!), searched him in google images (I can’t help it, I’m a visual person!), and after all of that, I’ve finally figured out why after all these years I just couldn’t get past this guy. An epiphany!!
James Joyce…….
…IS A PIRATE!!!…….
…but with class. :)
So the mystery is solved, but I still think I’m gonna give this classy pirate another go. I’ve already downloaded A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Dubliners on my Kindle app. If you’ve never read James Joyce, you should give him a chance too. And he really did have a patch for his eye condition. It made for some neat writings too. Told ya he was interesting. Read up! Remember..knowledge is power [and knowing is half the battle]! ;)
I dearly hope that you’ve matured enough in the last ten years that you will understand why Joyce is a joy. As with poetry, you sometimes have to just go with the flow and let his words wash over you. Pedants can spend their lives dissecting the hidden meanings behind his words, and it helps to see a note once in a while to understand how his mind worked–but it also is fine just to sink into the mind of the character and see what he is seeing.
Sometimes it is hard to remember that when he wrote in that stream of consciousness style it was considered shocking! After all the reader was intruding in the interior thoughts of the character. How personal can you get?