'Portrait of the Artist' was a set text for ICSE English back in 1977 when I attended St. Columba's School in New Delhi. I was 14 and took the thing at face value. Perhaps there was some sort of aesthetic religion in which, if you kept your head down and passed the relevant exams, one could qualify as a Pope or Cardinal and thus get to live large. The important thing was to keep away from whores by focusing your mind on Hell fire.
Sadly, I was wrong. Three years later, at the LSE, I tried to read 'Ulysses'. It drove me to drink which in turn, since, back in 1980, London pub crawls tended to end at a Curry House, drove me to blow-your-arse-off Phal curry. Clearly, I was destined to be some sort of crapulous Accountant in the City. Since Money is nothing but Credit, that is Faith, Atheism was off the table but, thankfully, so was aestheticized theism.
Speaking of shit, 120 years ago, the young James Joyce wrote in a single day the following prose poem which is considered the embryo of his own portrait of a prig who was the opposite of George Moore who had been an actual art student in Paris.
The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait
Yes they are. Adolescents spend a lot of time being very babyish with those they sometimes end up making babies with. Middle class Ireland, spurning a Malthusian fate, may have been different. Still, Joyce got himself as good a macushla as Fredrich Engels. Both changed their world because they had a working class Irish life-partner whose pulse was their own - that's the Gaelic meaning of mo chuisle- but it was a pulse in a rhythm so contrapuntal as to weave a St. Matthew Passion whose God was Houdini- the Daily Mail's celebrity de jour back in 1904. Interestingly, Joyce's Norah's surname, in Irish, meant 'wild goose' not a clinging barnacle.
Ibsen's 'Wild Duck' was about how, for Norway to become independent, its wives and mothers would have to become....some boring shite or the other. Joyce & Norah, quite naturally preferred the older, more aristocratic, flight of wild geese from what would become Da Valera's dismal Republic.
for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect.
Only if that is our current caprice. But we don't need to remain constant to it. It can go fucking shoot itself in the attic for some complicated Ibsenite reason.
Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents,
Not Ibsen's. Not Engel's. Not Ireland's whose present is a tuirgen succession of incompossible pasts- at least when of suitably strong fluids taken.
the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.
Joyce linked Aristotelian entelechy to Haeckel's notion of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. As I said, Joyce was the sort of bloke who could have stood first in the Civil Service examination and gone on to really fuck up Monetary policy.
Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individualising rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts.
I suppose, he wanted Irish independence to be less boring than Norway's- which was bloodlessly achieved in 1905. Where Joyce disagreed with Yeats was that whereas the latter thought it was sufficient to update the traditional Irish jig, Joyce was more visionary. He advocated a type of Aquinian calisthenics we currently term twerking. Sadly, Subhas Chandra Bose didn't teach, his pal, Eamon Da Valera the dance stylings of Josephine Baker. Also, that cunt ate all the bananas.
But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.
My booty shake is highly individualistic and identificative. Sadly the emotion it inspires is repugnance.
Use of reason is by popular judgment antedated by some seven years and so it is not easy to set down the exact age at which the natural sensibility of the subject of this portrait awoke to the ideas of eternal damnation, the necessity of penitence and the efficacy of prayer.
As I said, Joyce could have topped the list of the Indian Civil.
His training had early developed a very lively sense of spiritual obligations at the expense of what is called ‘common sense.’
Which is cool if you want to become a Cardinal. Them guys pull down big bucks.
He ran through his measure like a spendthrift saint,
as opposed to the miserly sort who tell you to feck off if you ask them to pray for your dying grandmother.
astonishing many by ejaculatory fervours,
he jizzed all over the place? No. Catholic 'ejaculations' involve things like the Fatima prayer.
offending many by airs of the cloister. One day in a wood near Malahide a labourer had marvelled to see a boy of fifteen praying in an ecstasy of Oriental posture.
as opposed to one involving fervent ejaculations
It was indeed a long time before this boy understood the nature of that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without ordering one’s life in accordance with them.
To be fair, he could have become a priest or, if celibacy was a problem, a Professor of Theology at a Catholic University. He may not have had enough 'chaos in him to create a world' but he had great descriptive and analytical abilities.
The digestive value of religion he never appreciated
because sin was individuating. Inventing a truly original Sin turned one into an Adam self-expelled from one's own imaginal Eden.
and he chose, as more fitting his case, those poorer humbler orders in which a confessor did not seem anxious to reveal himself, in theory at least, a man of the world.
i.e. stick to talk of wanking and whoring when in the confession box.
In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards, he was still soothed by devotional exercises when he entered the University.
Vaginas were more soothing. Shame access to them was rationed by the market. Joyce did propose a purely sexual relationship to some Sinn Fein bluestocking. He was lucky his head wasn't kicked in by her rugby playing brothers.
About this period the enigma of a manner was put up to all comers to protect the crisis.
You don't have to be Scooby Do to see through undergraduate poseurs. I wasn't really a Secret Agent, licensed to kill, married to Mary Poppins. during my time at the LSE. It was suggested to me that I should pretend to be a Naxalite revolutionary instead. That might get me laid.
He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic.
Undergraduate poseurs are seldom curious about each other.
It was part of that ineradicable egoism of which he was afterward redeemer that he imagined converging to him the deeds and thoughts of the microcosm.
Which are microscopic. Even I had such deeds and thoughts. That's why Mum took me to the Doctor. Sadly, laziness isn't a medical condition.
Is the mind of boyhood medieval that it is so divining of intrigue?
That's Haeckel again. But boys like me who went to a Christian Brothers school (and thus were taught by Paddy Stink and Micky Mud) weren't divining of intrigue at all. If we couldn't eat it or punch it or throw and catch it, we were not fucking interested.
Field sports (or their correspondents in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure, but for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic hunt was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage.
Our headmaster had had a headmaster who was at school with Joyce. He tried to convince us that the lad was a rugby player rather than, as the text of 'Portrait' revealed, the sort of chap who haunts the GB road.
But behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered: Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to the highlands after their game. There was his ground and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.
They shot him for those antlers. Being a stag may have its moments but, in the end, Chartered Accountancy is a better choice of career.
There was evident self-flattery in the image
horny lad thinks he has magnificent antlers. Then his g.f says 'is in in yet?'
but a danger of complacence too.
My magnificent horniness will attract a g.f sooner or later.
Wherefore, neglecting the wheezier bayings in that chorus which no leagues of distance could make musical,
a line worthy of Wodehouse
he began loftily diagnosing the younglings.
Joyce was Psmith.
His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural.
All to no avail because he wasn't taking it up the arse. Back then, the only reason people put up with elegant epigrammatists was because they could picture them being soulfully sodomized by longshoremen.
These young men saw in the sudden death of a dull French novelist
Zola
the hand of Emmanuel God with us;
he probably was murdered. A chimney sweep was paid to plug the dude's chimney so he would die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
they admired Gladstone, physical science, and the tragedies of Shakespeare;
all at the same time. This can be quite fun if you are smoking a lot of dope.
and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs,
wanking?
in the Church diplomatic.
Definitely wanking. Fair enough. If only the Kaiser had tossed off the Tzar all that unpleasantness at Ypres could have been avoided.
In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed [207] a nervous and (wherever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism.
If Protestant, sure. Moore was of Protestant descent.
He remarked half-admiring, half-reproving demeanour of a class, implicitly pledged to abstinences towards others among whom (the fame went) wild living was not unknown.
When young, we admire those who know their way around a vagina. Then we discover that if you don't pay for it, you pay very dearly for it.
Though the union of faith and fatherland was ever sacred in that world of easily inflammable enthusiams a couplet from Davis,
he wrote a poem about the Geraldines. I suppose they were the medieval version of the Nolan sisters.
accusing the least docile of tempers, never failed of its applause and the memory of McManus was hardly less revered than that of Cardinal Cullen.
I suppose they were the big porn stars of the day.
They had many reasons to respect authority; and even if a student were forbidden to go to Othello (“There are some coarse expressions in it”
like 'big black cock' which the dude would constantly display.
he was told) what a little cross was that?
it was a ginormous cock. Still, it would weigh less than the type of cross the Romans used for punitive purposes.
Was it not rather an evidence of watchful care and interest, and were they not assured that in their future lives this care would continue, this interest be maintained?
Also, if you are a good Catholic, your kids are assured of a good Catholic education unless, obviously, they keep knifing nuns.
The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never. Who therefore readier than these young men to acknowledge gratefully the sallies of some genial professor or the surliness of some door-porter, who more solicitous to cherish in every way and to advance in person the honour of Alma Mater?
Catholic Ireland rose and rose through Education.
For his part he was at the difficult age, dispossessed and necessitous, sensible of all that was ignoble in such manners who, in revery at least, had been acquainted with nobility. An earnest Jesuit had prescribed a clerkship in Guinness’s:
apparently, Joyce got out of this by registering as a medical student.
and doubtless the clerk-designate of a brewery would not have had scorn and pity only for an admirable community had it not been that he desired (in the language of the schoolmen) an arduous good.
Becoming a surgeon is arduous. Fucking whores and writing poems- not so much.
It was impossible that he should find solace in societies for the encouragement of thought among laymen or any other than bodily comfort in the warm sodality amid so many foolish or grotesque virginities.
Sodality doesn't mean what you think it means. It is a Roman Catholic association or fraternity. Oh. It does mean what you think it means.
Moreover, it was impossible that a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy
wouldn't be totes gay. Had Joyce been either a bender or a Vegetarian Socialist, he wouldn't have remained as poor as fuck.
should submit to acquiesce, that a soul should decree servitude for its portion over which the image of beauty had fallen as a mantle.
Why? Fuckers who keep trembling towards ecstasy can acquiesce in any meaningless shite same as dudes who make ecstasy their bitch.
One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library, he said to his friend “I have left the Church.”
Which isn't as bad as 'I have left the Church and it is pregnant with my child- which is going to be totes awkward for her coz I iz bleck and her Dad is as racist as fuck.'
And as they walked home through the streets arm-in-arm
as opposed to cheek-to-cheek
he told, in words that seemed an echo of their closing, how he had left it through the gates of Assisi.
riding his sister- the donkey- while being shat upon by his cousin- the pigeon.
Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies, Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him.
The fucker hadn't heard of Darwin or Geology.
He descended among the hells of Swedenborg
which aren't scary at all.
and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross.
because studying Biology or Geology makes your head hurt. Also, you don't get to claim that you were traumatized by the theory of tectonic plates which is why you now can't get a job or can't stop fucking whores.
His heaven was suddenly illuminated by a horde of stars,
Astronomy paid off big time by confirming Einstein's theory
the signatures of all nature,
Fuck off! Stars are about Physics and Chemistry. For Biology we must confine ourselves to earth.
the soul remembering ancient days.
when it didn't have to get up five times a night to pee.
Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork,
Did you know, if you jizz in your eye you could go blind? Also hair will grow on your palms.
bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross.
Jizz in the eye is pretty fucking gross. Mary Poppins thinks its totes not supercallifragilsticexpialodocious. I used to be married to her, you know.
For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things.
Unless their work sold- in which case money was the paramount thing.
And was it any wonder that out of this marvelous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience, laboured and despaired, he came forth at last with a single purpose - to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality.
The children of the body want nice things to eat. On the other hand, conceiving them is pleasurable and, if it is the sort of thing you are good at, people may want to hear you talk about it.
A thousand eternities were to be reaffirmed,
cause just one or two would never do
divine knowledge was to be re-established.
and God would be told politely but firmly to fuck the fuck off.
Alas for fatuity! as easily might he have summoned a regiment of the winds.
or just got his mates to fart simultaneously.
They pleaded their natural pieties - social limitations, inherited apathy of race, an adoring mother, the Christian fable. Their treasons were venial only.
They might fart but didn't follow through and shit themselves thoroughly.
Wherever the social monster permitted they would hazard the extremes of heterodoxy, reason of an imaginative determinant in ethics, of anarchy (the folk), of blue triangles, of the fish-gods, proclaiming in a fervent moment the necessity for action. His revenge was a phrase and insolation. He lumped the emancipates together - Venomous Butter - and set away from the sloppy neighbourhood.
Joyce was smart. He knew he had to get to Paris. The alternative would be to learn Gaelic and write about starving peasants.
Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy
Wanking?
but traditional and individual revelations were at that time pressing their claims and self-communion had been but shyly welcomed.
Definitely wanking.
But in the intervals of friendships (for he had outridden three) he had known the sisterhood of meditative hours
sisters tend to be inventive of chores for brothers to perform
and now the hope began to grow up within him of finding among them that serene emotion, that certitude which among men he had not found.
Poor fellow, he thought he was doing higher Math.
An impulse had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees; and as he had passed there amid the subduing night, in the secret fall of leaves, the fragrant rain, the mesh of vapours moon-transpierced, he had imagined an admonition of the frailty of all things.
If the moon can transpierce you, you must be pretty fucking frail.
In summer it had led him seaward.
He turned into a fish.
Wandering over the arid, grassy hills or along the strand, avowedly in quest of shellfish, he had grown almost impatient of the day. Waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered - even they had not fascinated.
It's okay to find girls fascinating. Kids- not so much.
But as day had waned it had been pleasant to watch the far last figures islanded in distant pools; and as evening deepened the grey glow above the sea he had gone out, out among the shallow waters, the holy joys of solitude uplifting him, singing passionately to the tide.
My passionate singing might indeed turn the tide. Joyce had a good voice. Still, even the sea can only take so much.
Sceptically, cynically, mystically, he had sought for an absolute satisfaction and now little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal conditions.In other words, he remembered that, like St. Augustine, his Latin was okay but he was shit at Greek. As his pal, Gogarty, kept saying- to be taken seriously as an aesthete you need to be able to πες στη Σαπφώ να σταματήσει το δάχτυλο του Πίνδαρου- tell Sappho to stop finger-banging Pindar.
He remembered a sentence in Augustine
whose ignorance of Greek led him to double down on predestination
- “It was manifested unto me that those things be good which yet are corrupted;
they are just less good than they were before being corrupted. Only 'sublunary' stuff was corruptible according to the Scholastic theory.
which neither if they were supremely good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted:
Nonsense! We have no reason to believe that elementary particles or forces can be corrupted. Indeed, people who gas on about corruption are a bit of a nuisance. We want them to fuck the fuck off.
for had they been supremely good they would have been incorruptible
Nope. Some stuff just aint subject to change or decay. So what?
but if they were not good there would be nothing in them which could be corrupted.”
That does not follow. Augustine wasn't real bright.
A philosophy of reconcilement […] possible […] as eve […] The […] of the […] at lef […] ber […] lit up with dolphin lights
I think this is a reference to the electrical lights on the Thames embankment
but the lights in the chambers of the heart were unextinguished, nay, burning as for espousal.
Consummation. Espousal happens in public. Mummy and Daddy will be there. Best keep it in your pants.
Dearest of mortals! In spite of tributary verses and of the comedy of meetings here and in the foolish society of sleep the fountain of being (it seemed) had been interfused.
My jizz got interfused with my Socioproctological ambitions. But it was my flatulence which caused the g.f to leave me which was odd because it is my best feature.
Years before, in boyhood, the energy of sin opening a world before him, he had been made aware of thee. The yellow gaslamps arising in his troubled vision, against an autumnal sky, gleaming mysteriously there before that violent altar - the groups gathered at the doorways arranged as for some rite - the glimpses of revel and fantasmal mirth - the vague face of some welcomer seeming to awaken from a slumber of centuries under his gaze - the blind confusion (iniquity! iniquity!) suddenly overtaking him - in all that ardent adventure of lust didst thou not even then communicate?
Thou might at least have liked me on Instagram.
Beneficent one! (the shrewdness of love was in the title) thou camest timely, as a witch to the agony of the self-devourer, an envoy from the fair courts of life. How could he thank thee for that enrichment of soul by thee consummated? Mastery of art had been achieved in irony; asceticism of intellect had been a mood of indignant pride: but who had revealed him to himself but thou alone?
Thou shoulds't top thyself. Nobody would blame thee. It's not dudes praying for a bigger dick who get God down. It's fuckers like Tagore.
In ways of tenderness, simple, intuitive tenderness, thy love had made to arise in him the central torrents of life.
God really isn't that interested in your jizzing.
Thou hadst put thine arms about him
Thou hadst been better off slapping the cunt
and, intimately prisoned as thou hadst been, in the soft stir of thy bosom,
Oh. The dude is speaking of the Holy Virgin. Dudes- even Divine ones- ought not to have jiggly man-boobs.
the raptures of silence, the murmured words, thy heart had spoken to his heart.
and told his heart to get a feckin' job!
Thy disposition could refine and direct his passion, holding mere beauty at the cunningest angle. Thou wert sacramental, imprinting thine indelible mark, of very visible grace. A litany must honour thee; Lady of the Apple Trees, Kind Wisdom, Sweet Flower of Dusk. In another phase it had been not uncommon to devise dinners in white and purple upon the actuality of stirabout but here, surely, is sturdy or delicate food to hand; no need for devising.
Actually, the Catholics have a sensible doctrine of 'latria' and 'dulia' which can check annoying excesses of this sort.
His way (abrupt creature!) lies out now to the measurable world and the broad expanses of activity. The blood hurries to gallop in his veins; his nerves accumulate an electric force; he is footed with flame.
This is what happens when you reach for a wank mag and end up reading St. Augustine.
A kiss: and they leap together, indivisible, upwards, radiant lips and eyes, bodies, sounding with the triumph of harps! Again, beloved! Again, thou bride! Again, ere life is ours!
It's nice to be young. Still, if Joyce thought harps were cool he'd have fucking lost his mind over the electric guitar.
In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude to the new crowning era in a season of melancholy and unrest.
He knew he was being a twat.
He made up his tale of losses - a dispiriting tale enough even were there no comments.
Fortunately, Joyce realized he was, in himself, a boring twat. For 'Dubliners' he would need to look outside himself.
The air of false Christ was manifestly the mask of a physical decrepitude,
This was before the Americans reinvented Christ as a surfer dude with rock hard abs.
itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours;
like wanting to get a good job and to marry a nice girl
whence ingenuousness, forbearance, sweet amiability and the whole tribe of domestic virtues.
Back then this included wife beating. Christendom's decline wasn't inevitable you know.
Sadly mindful of the worst, the vision of his dead,
It was the vision of Norah's dead boyfriends which redeemed him.
the vision (far more pitiful) of congenital lives shuffling onwards between yawn and howl, starvelings in mind and body, visions of which came as temporary failure of his olden, sustained manner, darkly beset him.
If you are being darkly beset you know you really ought to switch your major to a STEM subject. Fuck that. Just go to Biz Skool. Better yet pretend to have been to Biz Skool till you have made enough money to make fun of people who did.
The cloud of difficulties about him allowed only peeps of light; even his rhetoric proclaimed transition. He could convict himself at least of a natural inability to prove everything at once and certain random attempts emboldened him to say to a patron of the fine arts “What advance upon spiritual goods?”
If people think you have them, they might buy your ghastly poetry. Look at Tagore.
and to a capitalist “I need two thousand pounds for a project.”
Joyce did try to become a cinema promoter.
He had interpreted for orthodox Greek scholarship
i.e. guys who actually knew lots of ancient Greek
the living doctrine of the Poetics and, out of the burning bushes of excess,
crabs can certainly cause a burning sensation in your bush.
had declaimed to a night policeman on the true status of public women:
which was cool. The big mistake would have been to declaim on the true status of rent boys.
but there was no budge of those mountains,
Good. Landslides or avalanches aren't cool.
no perilous cerebration. In a moment of frenzy he called for the elves.
Elves are okay. It's when you start calling for trampolining dwarfs that you know you have a problem.
Many in our day, it would appear, cannot avoid a choice between sensitiveness and dulness;
i.e. either be a sensitive right wing nutter or a boring as shit Socialist
they recommend themselves by proofs of culture to a like-minded minority or dominate the huger world as lean of meat.
Still better than Shavian nut cutlets.
But he saw between camps his ground of vantage, opportunities for the mocking devil in an isle twice removed from the mainland, under joint government of Their Intensities and Their Bullockships.
Stephen himself was termed the bullock befriending bard. Bloomsday is when Joyce first bunked up with Norah.
His Nego, therefore, written amid a chorus of peddling Jews’ gibberish
Joyce's Italian sojourn appears to have cured of the fashionable anti-Semitism of his time.
and Gentile clamour,
Gentile means 'Nations'- e.g. the Nationalism of the 'Cyclops' episode.
was drawn up valiantly while true believers prophesied fried atheism and was hurled against the obscene hells of our Holy Mother: but, that outburst over, it was urbanity in warfare.
Joyce's instincts, regarding warfare, were sound enough. Run the fuck away.
Perhaps his state would pension off old tyranny - a mercy no longer hopelessly remote - in virtue of that mature civilization to which (let all allow) it had in some way contributed.
Sadly, it was the Church which turned out to be the King Emperor's residuary legatee.
Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world, already the generous idea had emerged from a thirty years’ war in Germany
No generous idea emerged from there. Boring ideas- sure. Evil ideas- you betcha. Lies, yes, but none were noble.
and was directing the councils of the Latins.
Nothing directs their councils unless it be the Holy Spirit or topless newscasters employed by Berlusconi. Italian nipples are bewitching.
To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightning of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.
Norah's decision to fuck the lad saved him from becoming a cross between Tagore and Trotsky. Irish vaginas must be really special. Indeed, all vaginas are. I suppose, at the end of long, utterly useless life, it was to arrive at this epiphany that I too, in Eden, ate of the apple.
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