A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - One of the best books ever!!

 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce


One of the best books ever!!

 

This novel has been listed at number three on the Modern Library Top 100 best novels list, after Ulysses and The Great Gatsby.

It is one of the best books that I had the chance to read and it opens almost all the important subjects: religion, politics, beauty, works of art.

This fabulous novel reveals the Truth about art, beauty, young men, philosophy and more. Much more

And like in many of the other works of James Joyce that I have read, A Portrait of the Artist for instance, there is a strong element of nationalism:

The problem I have reading through some of Joyce’s prose, also encountered in A Portrait of the Artist, is that I often have no idea what the characters are talking about. They mention some heroes of the Irish fight (I sometimes presume) against the British, but I can only guess and be wrong at times. Michael Collins is familiar from the film of the same name, some others have been present in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but otherwise I have not read Irish history.

Parnell comes about in the heated debates taking place at Steven’s house, between his father uncle and other participants in political conversations surrounding dinner

 

Speaks for itself in fabulous dialogues, and I put them down as various lines have attracted my attention. They cover definitions of beauty, art, but they also deal on religion and politics

 

-          Three cheers for Collins…

-          Ireland is the old sow that eats its fowl

-          We are all animals, I am also an animal

 

-          Let’s have a legitimate Jesus

-          Do you believe in Jesus?

-          I believe in man!

-          I am a believer in the power of man!

 

 

-          The desire and loathing exited by esthetic means are not esthetic emotions, not only because they are kinetic in character but because they are not more than physical.

-          In the same way, your flesh responds to the stimulus of a naked statue…a reflex reaction of the nerves

-          Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic Or a sensation which is purely physical

 

-          The tragic emotion is static

-          The feelings exited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing

-          Desire urges us to posses, to go to something

-          Loathing urges us to abandon to go from something

-          The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactical are therefore improper

-          The esthetic emotions therefore static- the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing

-          You say that art must not excite desire…

Then there are wonderful psychological insights:

-          Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by purely reflex of the nervous system-our eyelid closes before we are aware of the fly that enters our eye

-          Not always…

Beauty

-          Beauty expressed by the art is cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic

-          Or a sensation which is purely physical

-          It awakens or ought to awake, or induces or ought to induce an

-          Esthetic stasis

-          An ideal pity ordeal terror

-          A stasis called forth, prolonged and at last resolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty…

-          Rhythm is the first form of esthetic relation of part to part, or of an esthetic whole to its parts…or of any part to the esthetic whole

Art:

-          To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and having understood it

-          To try slowly and humbly to express, to press out again from the earth or what it brings forth

-          From sound and shape and color which are the prison gates of our soul

-          An image of the beauty we have come to understand

-          That is art!

And again about art

-          But you have not answered my question…what is art?

-          Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end

Quotes from Aquinas

-          That is beautiful – the aprehension of which pleases

-          Pulcra sunt qua visa placent. ... Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance

-          He uses the word visato cover estethic aprehensions of all kinds

-          Whether through sight, or hearing or any other means

-          A word which keeps away what excites desire and loathing

-          It means stasis not kinesis

Then Joyce moves on to Plato:

-          Plato said „Beauty is the splendor of Truth”

-          The true and the beautiful are akin

-          Truth is beheld by the intellect

-          Which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible

-          Beauty is beheld by the imagination

-          Which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible

-          The first step in the direction of the truth is to understand the frame and the scope of

-          The intellect itself

And yet another definition of beauty

-          Let us take a woman

-          Let us take her...

-          The greek, the turk, the chinese, the hotentot all admire a different type of female beauty

-          One hypothesis- every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the propagation of the species...it leads to eugenics, rather than esthetic ...

-          There is another way out ... the same object may not seem beautiful to all people

-          All people that admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations that satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of estethic aprehension

And more on the workings of the human mind

Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consomantia claritas

-          Look at that basket...in order to see that basket your mind separates it from the rest of the universe which is not the basket

-           The first phase aprehension ...an estethic is presented either in space or in time

-          You aprhend the wholeness and that is integritas (in the quote from Aquinas)

-          Then you feel the rythm of its structure

-          Having first felt that it is one thing, you feel now that it is a thing

-          You comprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible

-          That is integritas

-           The instant where that supreme quality of beauty

-          The clear radiance of the estethic imageis aprehended luminously

-          By the mind which had been arrested by its wholeness and

-          Fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of

-          Estethic pleasure a spiritual state

-          Very like that cardiac condition called the

-          Enchantment of the heart

 

 

And you can read it online, legally at:

http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/

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