Stephen Heroic

I waited about 47 years to read this book. I simply didn't get round to it until now. Stephen Hero is less a novel than an inventory of young James Joyce's ideas, mainly on aesthetics. Portrait of the Artist is the work of art that came out of it but this is a different thing. I could see it being heavy going for anyone not interested in Joyce's ideas about writing, poetry and art but luckily that's not me.

Like Stephen Daedalus, the book is a bit too obsessed with itself. Joyce was nothing if not precocious but he's self aware enough to present his alter ego here as such. It's not easy being told you're a bright teenager because at that age one tends to believe it and there are pitfalls involved for anyone who believes their own hype. Joyce is in on the joke, though, and ironic distance is an essential part of his art.

Ever since being lucky enough to have Portrait as an 'A' level set text, Joyce has occupied a special place among prose writers for me and he has lasted the distance. Why, only a couple of weeks ago I was maundering on at a choice literary event about 'Classical' and 'Romantic' but here it is,

The romantic temper...is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures...

The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered.

Hallelujah. That's not bad for a kid.

And, on taking part in life itself, Stephen replies to his mother's insistence that his father had hoped he would take up a sensible, worthy occupation with,

- No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.

 

We are always likely to prefer those sort of books that we think, or would like to think, we find ourselves reflected back to ourselves in and, even with Stephen's obvious self-regard factored in, there are few characters in literature I'd like to identify with more.

Joyce's essay differentiating the lyric, epic and dramatic is rehearsed  here in among his disdain for nationalism and catholicism and so one can't expect much more than that.

Monitoring the progress of my modest investments at Prestbury Park, Cheltenham, is preventing me from scorching through it in quite such rapid time but one can't do everything at once. I'm glad I caught up with this essential text eventually.