Written in the form of the stream of consciousness, the text’s design lacks the conventional organization of ideas found in other literary works. In doing so, Joyce captures the cacophonic, non-structure of the human mind. Stephen is playing a game of football at one moment, and then his thoughts suddenly dive into a cascade of old childhood memories.
But is Stephen really James Joyce? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s acclaimed autobiography, yet it is not written in the first person. The author creates a pseudonym, Stephen, to act as himself. This, by default, establishes a distance between the author and his persona. Difficult enough as it is for Joyce to retrieve his past memories, he now has an additional challenge of recording those memories through the voice of a fictitious character.
The stream of consciousness prose is meant to engage readers so that they enter the minds of characters. The author wants to bridge any gaps between reader and character, and in the case of Joyce, that character is the author, as this is an autobiography. But how successful was Joyce in engaging his readers? Think about how many layers of distance there are between reader and author in this work: Joyce attempts to retrieve a memory, but disguises his voice through a representational character named Stephen. By recording his memory through this factitious character, his memory somehow loses its accuracy, and becomes something totally new and separate on its own. This factitious character’s newly formed memory is not told completely through his stream of consciousness; instead, an unidentified omniscient narrator interjects every once in a while and takes on the role of storyteller. Now the reader picks up this book and is reading the new memories of a character named Stephen, often told by a narrator. How very distant he is from the author!
I disagree with the statement that the reader is disconnected and far removed from the author. By creating a novel in the mind of the character, Joyce places the reader inside the mind of the character. The reader experiences everything as Stephen does. However, I do agree that by adding this omniscient narrator Joyce does disconnect himself from the reader.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading the novel, it was very difficult for me to read it as an autobiography. I constantly had to remind myself that although Stephen is fictitious he is in fact standing in place for the real Joyce. Because of this, I agree that there is a disconnect between reader and author. In addition, the use of stream of consciousness did not allow me to put myself in Stephen's shoes. What I mean by this is that although I did feel like I knew exactly what was going on in his head, I could not imagine myself going through his experiences. In a typical novel with a 3rd person narration, I usually find myself so caught up almost as if the story is happening to me. In this case, however, I felt removed from the story and was very aware that it was happening to this boy Stephen.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Shalvi and Natalie. The fact that Joyce's story is told through a character and at times through a narrator as well, inevitably distances the reader from the author. Also, like Natalie said, although this novel contained stream of consciousness I didn't necessarily feel more connected to Stephen because of it. This is not to say that the use of stream of consciousness doesn't have its upsides as a new literary tool. Rather, I don't know that for me it's necessarily the best way for me to get engrossed in a novel and its characters.
ReplyDeleteThe question at the heart of this post--to what extent is Stephen to be indentified with Joyce personally--is central to many contemporary critical arguments about the book. While one camp of critics sees Stephen as a transparent stand-in for the author, another school sees him as essentially fictitious, thus distancing author from character and allowing for different types of interpretation.
ReplyDeleteActually, throughout my reading of the novel, I had a very difficult type separating Joyce from his character Stephen. That said, I still felt quite disconnected from the his story, and like Emily said, had difficulties becoming engrossed in his story. It might have been the style in which it was written, but I suspect that it was actually my dislike for the character that kept me uninterested in his story.
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