“If we allow the novel to work on its own terms, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story, we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek.”

Some books are such classics that they come pre-bound now with a paradoxical set of expectations. Joyce’s PAYM is one of these: we hear so much about it that we look forward to imagery ringing with profundity and leaving it in a state of enlightenment and wonder, while we also know that traditional classics are burdensome and sometimes too subtle, too “crafted” for the academy to be enjoyable.

And yes, this is both of these if we’re lucky, but something else, too: an earlier work of stream of consciousness, a free style which Joyce would develop far more fully in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.  Here, at least, the number of neologisms and puzzled syntax is scarce; but the jarring and blurring movements between scenes and thoughts, dialogue and chronology, can leave us foundering.

Largely, if we allow the novel to work on its own terms, however, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story (here where our indoctrinated youth-artist finds his way free of the oppressive church and oppressive traditions of Ireland), we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek. In other words, worry less about traditional structure and separations of moment and instead allow the totality of each of its four chapters to exist as single utterances, articulations of Stephen at his different (st)ages of experience.

So if we do this, let the novel work on us as it wishes to (even the seemingly interminable series of sermons across its middle), we’ll love the book? Well, no, probably not. After all, we are talking about Ireland in the late 1800s/early 1900s, an era which doesn’t speak to most readers the same way anymore. So Stephen’s experiences–so powerful to readers closer to his era (and I confess as distant as I am from them, my pre-internet school experiences still found parallels), we can’t connect at these levels easily, either.

So at this point, why read it? Two reasons, I think. First, Joyce offers parallels to our experiences that we can appreciate, especially as creatives that the world seeks to direct. And these are powerful forces that work upon us, ones deeply rooted in history and belief; PAYM literally demonstrates those roots through its text: feeling oppressed and put-off by the sermons? Think Joyce wasn’t aware of this effect? The second reason is the work’s larger role in the Joyce canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More, both as a stylistic step away from the wonderful Dubliners and one far short from where he (and Stephen) will land next in the brilliant Ulysses. We see a writer working on craft; I think in PAYM this crafting is a bit more stretched and self-conscious than it might be; but at the same time I am intensely awed by its success. (Personally, this time through Joyce’s four prose works–I read once and set aside his poetry–I am reading them backwards from FW.) 

What results for PAYM is a character as fully developed as just about any in modern literature, and I haven’t even acknowledged its mostly autobiographical role, as well. Come on, it’s not even that long–go meet him for real, on his terms, submerged in his memories and fragmented traumas. It’s worth it.