Great Beginnings Monday: James Joyce

May 18, 9:43 PMNY Writing Careers ExaminerTad Richards

Previous Next

2 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the NY Writing Careers Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Illustration by Tad Richards

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

       O, the wild rose blossoms
       On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

       O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father.

The beginning of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

 Joyce begins with his hero, Stephen Dedalus, as a very young man indeed: maybe three years old. And he stays absolutely true to the three-year-old consciousness, which is difficult, and also rare. Generally, when we're writing, we have some distance from the character, even if we're writing from a first person point of view. Perhaps especially from a first person point of view. The narrator is always looking back, from a point of view of more knowledge and experience. Here's E. L. Doctorow, in World's Fair, writing about the same experience.

 Startled awake by the ammoniated mists, I am aroused in one instant from glutinous sleep to grieving awareness. I have done it again. My soaked thighs sting. I cry, I call mama, knowing  that I must endure her harsh reaction, get through xxthatxx, to be rescued. My crib is on the east wall of their room. Their bed is on the south wall. "Mama!" From her bed she hushes me. "Mama!" She groans, rises, advances on me in her white nightgown. Her strong hands go to work. She strips me, strips the sheets, dumps my pajamas and the sheets, and the rubber sheet under them, in a pile on the floor. Her pendulous breasts shift about in the nightgown. I hear her whispered admonitions. In seconds I am washed, powdered, clean-clothed, and brought to secret smiles in the dark. I ride, the young prince, in her arms to their bed, and am welcomed between them, in the blessed dry warmth between them. My father gives me a companionable pat and then falls back to sleep with his hand on my shoulder. Soon they are both asleep. I smell their godlike odors, male, female.

The first thing we know about this narrator is that he employs literary, even poetic, rhetoric. We know that before we have any idea what the ammoniated mists are. James Joyce's little Stephen would never talk about enduring a harsh reaction, or about pendulous breasts. Doctorow's Edgar is an adult remembering his childhood, Joyce's Stephen inhabits that childhood.

 Of course, it's a fiction. Three-year-olds don't express themselves in writing at all, which is probably why Joyce writes the scene in the third person. It's supposed to be a distancing technique, but it allows Joyce to get closer.

 He doesn't stay with three-year-old Stephen much longer than that, which is a good idea. It's not a tour de force one would want to sustain, and a three-year-old's consciousness is not all that far-ranging. But it's an unforgettable beginning.