More like a montage. Consider this book a less artful counterpart to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Or a lumbering primogenitor. The two novels were published only four years apart (Portrait in 1916 and Paradise in 1920), but they seem to have been written on different planets or at least by different species. Whereas Fitzgerald coasted from one genre to another (prose, drama, epistle, poetry) and sometimes back again, Joyce careens through them on a trajectory that is at best jarring and at worst arbitrary.
This lack of cohesion reflects the aesthetic ideology of Portrait. The novel tries to represent experience as it’s lived: a series of sensory impressions, thoughts, and memories—sometimes flowing smoothly, sometimes knocking into one another. The readers too ricochet from thought to reality and back again until eventually they begin to ask, “What’s the difference? What is reality, after all, but a perception of it?”
This lack of cohesion reflects the aesthetic ideology of Portrait. The novel tries to represent experience as it’s lived: a series of sensory impressions, thoughts, and memories—sometimes flowing smoothly, sometimes knocking into one another. The readers too ricochet from thought to reality and back again until eventually they begin to ask, “What’s the difference? What is reality, after all, but a perception of it?”
RSS Feed
