Exploring James Joyce's Literary Masterpieces

James Joyce will forever be known for his sprawling epic ulysses with all these crazy things and illusions that happen through it. Yeah, and I mean one thing is is that we're trying to experience life and what does it mean to be a person and your personal identity and the experience that you have as a reader impacts this story tremendously. Coming up next, Codex Cantina. So serious. All right, welcome to the Codex Cantina where I am Una. And I am an old artist. And today we are going to be going into heavy, heavy detail of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. If you are starting here, you are in the wrong spot. Please make sure you check out Before You Read series, which talks about all the things that you're going to need. And we're going to assume that you've watched that. Today we're just going to hit the ground running. Hopefully you've watched Noah and Lucas's videos. They've been covering these chapters in depth. So this is going to be more about a wrap up. And while they're going to be looking at it in depth in each chapter, Crypto had a really good quote from our first Before You Read series where he talked about this book being a woven tapestry, where there's elements that just kind of come and go and play throughout this whole thing, where if you're just looking at each individual chapter, you might miss the overall flow of something that's kind of happening to that book. And we're hoping to bring that out today. If you're down for that sort of thing and looking for more literary discussions, please consider subscribing. to come join us on the journey. One disclaimer I think that we should start off here is that if you hate the book, that's fine. Move on. Great. Go read Dubliners again. Go read one of his short stories. But I think that you should know that you have to get into it, I think, multiple times and use those notes to really help you get this. Yeah, it's those layers and themes that you use to kind of pry open meaning and pry open that you really do start to like it more. But if you're just like, I don't really like it and move on. Okay, that's great. That's fine, too. But for those that want to dig in, let's do this. Let's jump into chapter one. Holy cow. First memories, ages somewhere between three and six. I'm not quite sure. But the writing technique here is so unique where we get this evolution of language and not just the complexity, but the stylistic way that the language is brought into you in this book. And it's so subtle that you could very much miss it. And as we talked about, there are specific words that he uses to try to reiterate that this is supposed to be the younger part. of your life and i love that it's delivered almost as a lullaby once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moo cow coming down like this is this reads a lot like a lullaby and even just the way he describes his father with the hair on his face and looking through the glass which his father had a monocle is really what it is you really not only experience it through words like nicens and stuff like that as like a little boy would but it's delivered in the little boy format of a lullaby as well. Like this whole book, in terms of being a woven tapestry, we're going to really experience this literary journey through this. Yeah, it's like he started writing it when he was a kid and didn't finish it until, you know, he was a young artist in his 20s, which is kind of cool, right? If you took all of your writings from your whole life and put them together in a story. You would see the evolution of your own life and writing within that life. And that's just, that's genius to me. Oh yeah, for sure. And then as a kid, everything's good or bad, right or wrong, right? There's no gray area. And we see that with how Steven kind of explores this at a young life. But my favorite thing was one of the points that Crypto here brought up. He was driving and he texted me because at the time he did not have a Kindle and I did. And he said, Una, I need you to look this up. How many times? is queer used in this book. And I'll give you the hit count. It's a total of 19, 15 of the usages in chapter one, 15 of the 19 times in chapter one, and the other four in chapter five with nothing in between. Very specifically by design when we look at his journey of when does he experience weird stuff, right? Yeah, so in the writing, he goes through these opposites of hot and cold, maroon and green. light and dark. And so he's using very specific words in this specific chapter. And you see he wanes off of them throughout the book as well. And what was the other word that I texted you also? Slimy. Slimy. Yeah. Six of seven usages of slimy were in chapter one. I don't know, that word just makes me laugh. It's a funny word. Well, and it's important for interpreting these, we're going to go through three key events from chapter one. One is when he kind of goes to the Jesuit boarding school. where he's pushed into the cesspool. He starts to see bigger instant, you know, when the bigger kid pushes the littler kid, that's bigger institutions picking on little institutions. When the kids start to kind of make fun of him, like, do you kiss your mother with that mouth? And whether he says yes or no, they make fun of him either way. He starts to realize that no matter what happens in life, you're going to get ridiculed. And he's starting to realize that right and wrong. There's some gray area, and sometimes there's just wrong, wrong. It doesn't matter what you do. Yeah, that's tough. These are some heavy life lessons that Joyce is doing a good job, I think, putting pen to paper. And I think we've all been there for the second point, which is the Christmas dinner. We've all been the little kid sitting at the big kid table kind of experience. What do big people talk about at dinner? What's the secret that happens here? And he sees them talking about things that little kids don't talk about. in terms of the politics, in terms of the nationalism, and then the Catholic Church stuff that if you've watched our before video, you'll understand some of the thematic plays there. And he sees even characters like Dante, who is for home rule, who is a nationalist, Irish nationalist, but also supports Catholicism, which is opposed to that. He starts to see that she is being torn apart, and the world, to the earlier point, is not just right and wrong. There's a lot more thematic elements at play here, and people are being torn apart. by these questions and these categorizations that you can kind of choose. Yeah, this was, I think, one of the most important scenes in the entire book. And my wife and I discussed a lot of this because she said, oh, I totally resonated with this happening and saw how it was tearing a family apart and on a larger scale what it could do to an entire country. Oh, yeah. Yeah, my favorite part actually was the little girl, Eileen, because it is autobiographical, which is interesting, about you can't play with her because she's Protestant, right? Like, you know. hawk's gonna come rip your eyes out like you do have those thoughts as a little kid like when you're told certain things like we'll get more into it when we get to the section three let's jump to the third main event of chapter one and that's father dolan where he loses his glasses and he tells that at first he's kind of excused and he kind of had this good bad with father arnell and dolan but he's punished eventually for having you know they think he's playing tricks right and he's like this isn't what i was doing at all this isn't fair you And he goes to tell, you know, Father Kanmi the truth of, you know, hey, I was told I could be excused from my studies. He's starting to see also even just religion failing from the perspective of they're not always right, right? In terms of right versus wrong, sometimes you have these mistakes that are happening here. He sees worldly punishment being applied incorrectly. Yeah, and I know that from a personal experience when I was talking to a priest for the very first time when he said, well, maybe evolution is correct. We don't know. Like, what? I thought the church knew everything. The church is always right. The church is infallible. It's, you know, and you realize, wait a minute. And that's pretty big realization by Stephen here at such a young age. And he sees the church being competitive to like Jesuit schools are known for being competitive. So a lot of language put on them, a lot of structures put on them, a lot of things being not necessarily just right or wrong. Stephen's finally kind of being like, oh, what have I gotten myself into with chapter one, right? And I like how it evolves slowly from being, you know. kind of simple to a little bit more complex by the end. And he's just getting a taste of real life by the end of chapter one. All right, so let's jump into chapter two. So as Noah points out, you know, very, very well in his video, these are a bunch of vignettes, right? The organization might feel weird. But if you look at the tapestry of this book, we start on a low note, right? This guy that's training him is fat and overweight. His father's losing money. Right. You start on a low note in each chapter. works up to a high so we just came from the high of like well i told father con me that you know and they're all cheering for him yeah yeah yeah each chapter you're gonna see this climb yeah it's like you get slapped in the face oh no i love you slap no i love you back and forth so i would say this is the beginning of steven's disenchantment okay he starts to realize the good and bad now he's starting to realize what actually is bad in his life you see him using words like salubrious in the beginning of this chapter so you see the language evolving in this book Along with Steven, which is actually quite brilliant. And now we're entering more prose as opposed to kind of the playful lullaby approach from chapter one. And I think you can miss that because I know that the first time I had to start looking words up, I got a little bit irritated and mad about that because I didn't know some of these words. And you could miss the fact that he's doing that on purpose. He's not just, you know, hey, look at my big brain. I have all these fancy words I know. And that can piss off, I think, some readers. I got annotation fatigue. Around the end of four into five, I was like, I don't know how many more of these I can look up. But I think it starts here. I think you could get through chapter one without that. But now as you're getting into chapter two, you're going to have to start doing some digging. Next we have, I want to talk about this play. And Noah reached out to me to bring up this point. But I had written down that. He was asked to play the part of a role in the play, right? He's becoming a model, actor, writer, poet. You see the creative side of Stephen coming out. So how does he realize that? And he's like, I don't know if I could play this part. So we have Stephen kind of struggling with this part. And his friend's like, why don't you just do a caricature? Just, you know, just ham it up, play it up, I thought. What Noah was going to point out to you is that James Joyce actually did perform the part, while Stephen did not. Yeah. So you see that this is starting kind of like the fictionalized part. of his autobiography of what kind of a character did I or should I have been or who could I have been had I played my life out differently. And it's interesting too that during this play when Stephen looks out at the audience and you know there's this girl that he's kind of fawning over and he starts to just realize what did I have to become to make this girl interested, right? I had to play a role. I had to put on this fake persona in this play. in order for this girl to like me and that's not who i am and i think he's starting to butt heads of the reality of he's been reading this monte cristo this this fantasy of real life and living out sword plays with his friends and when he realized that he's trying to do this fantasy thing in real life he realizes how depressing and how disjointed that is from reality i think this is the first time in the story we start to see joyce write in regret a little bit and he's realizing that steven and joyce are both realizing how What society wants us to be is very different from sometimes what we want to be. And we're seeing that very obvious with the play and with his relationship with the girl. It goes even deeper, too, because this next section with the dad, when they go to kind of like sell land because they're they're breaking, they're losing money. And they go to visit his old was at med school. And he sees like, like fetus, I think written in Latin, I think it was written on the wall. Fotes or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And he sees like his dad starting to talk about. questionable activities with women if you will when on top of playing a role for others okay now steven's starting to realize i've had all of these sexual thoughts as a young boy and it's not just me and here's my dad and other people that in a in you know in these schools and highly intellectual intelligent people putting on these roles when they also have these these lecherous desirous thoughts If you will, like Stephen's starting to realize he's not alone in this. There's something in me that I'm kind of hiding from the outside world. My dad is a horn dog and I can be too. Well, yeah, why not? Let's go to the shadowy dark part of town and go sleep with a prostitute. End chapter two, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's where I think that's where like the church thing really starts to come into play, where if you aren't familiar with that, like Una and I are, you're going to miss it. the super significance of that in this story because that's going to become a huge plot point later so let's let's jump into three let's jump into three but it's worth pointing out too that this brothel district if you look at the word choice in terms of using dark shadowy like joyce is very good good he's he's amazing with language and and putting in these subtle things that like it's mind-blowing how many layers he stacks into each paragraph it's really impressive it would be nice if he could write our scripts right so chapter three we're gonna start on the low note right he and i actually like chapter three the most to be honest no three is my favorite three is my absolute favorite okay so we agree on that no it's just the feel the tone right yeah he he wakes up in pinnacle of feelings it's he wakes up and his stomach is calling out for food his feet lead him on this journey Stephen's not in control of his body at this point. The way that James Joyce writes this, Stephen is not in control. Yeah, and I think that any young teenage boy can attest to this. I think you and I might have had similar upbringings with how Catholicism was taught to us. Not every Catholic person is going to have the same experience that you and I were. Yeah, it might not resonate with everybody, but... But books can be doors, mirrors, and windows, okay? They're doors to invite you to change your life. They're windows to see the life of someone else. And in this case, this is a mirror for me, where I see myself in this book. I connected deeply with how religion impacts one's personal morality and the questioning that you go through, particularly as a teenage boy, how often you thought about women and probably in very unholy ways, and you start to think, oh my gosh. I am never going to be able to avoid hell in this world. Yeah, definitely. That is my almost identical experience of as I'm going through, you know, puberty and the church and everything. And it's, you know, if you look at a woman, that's a sin. You're going to hell. If you masturbate, you're going to hell. It's just. Over and over again, these things that I'm conflicted of internally, and then the church is telling me something different. And my wife said almost the exact same thing verbatim. She goes, yeah, I'm having these thoughts and these urges, and I'm wanting to do these things, but I'm being told no, no, no over and over again by this institution that says I'm going to be damned to hell if I do or act on those urges or thoughts. Well, and as a young kid. Child, for me, maybe you were brilliant and you had no problem with this. Someone out there I'm sure is like, I was 16 and got this perfectly. Cool. Good for you. Not us. This is a mirror into our life, okay? Yeah. The difference between desire and lust is defined. But as a child and a young teenager, I had no freaking clue what the difference was. Agreed. Yeah. From the Wikipedia, lust is considered by Catholicism. to be disordered desire for sexual pleasure, where sexual pleasure is sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes. In Catholicism, sexual desire in itself is good and is considered part of God's plan for humanity. That part was left out in my training. However, when sexual desire is separated from God's love, it becomes disordered and self-syncing. This is called lust. And that's the part that's really hard to, I feel like, maybe even local parishioners and churchgoers don't totally understand this, but Stephen has sinned multiple times. The mortal sin, the violent sin of sexual intercourse outside of wedlock, which is the only sin, the only one the Bible says to run away from. Like, according to the Bible, murder, not as bad as sexual intercourse out of wedlock. right yeah that's crazy it's okay we might be exaggerating a little bit and that if you aren't super into church i don't think you quite understand this but from first corinthians 6 18 through 20 run from sexual sin no other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does for sexual immorality is a sin against your own body and this literally is i believe the only sin that the bible says to run from and and so much of the bible is about this depending on how you interpret the bible you know it sounds like with the way that lucas was raised lutheran they did and what i've seen from christianity it really isn't as intense the way that it was presented to me as a young boy from a catholic catholic perspective i remember it as a young boy them using the word pollutant and that it would pollute your soul and you would have a hard time getting into heaven as a result and that's pretty mortifying as a young teenage boy or i think a teenage boy girl straight gay whatever you know i think that anybody would struggle with that we have this quote from steven from the evil seat of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth pride in himself and contempt of others covetousness of others in using money for the purchases of unlawful pleasure envy of those whose vices we could not reach to I think this is probably the most important quote of chapter three and arguably the book. Well, and this is clearly what Stephen is going through because he's The idea that sexual sin leads to the other seven deadly sins, the fact that you start here and it's all downhill from here, this is what we're really exploring with this book. The difference between the types of sins that one can experience in terms of violent sins, this is what this book is all about in nuancing out that you must have the patience to go through to really understand this is, this almost doesn't even feel like an exaggeration, like this is reality for a lot of young Catholic children. Not all Catholic children are presented it this way. I'm telling you, it was for me. Yeah, when I read this, what I was thinking the whole time of, yeah, this is totally presented to me as a kid that my sexuality is a gateway to the other seven deadly sins. It's like a gateway drug. Like, if I do this, I'm going to do all the others, and I'm going to become this, this horrible, this horrible. I'm going to be all those. And it's interesting the way James Joyce approaches it here, because he brings up the document of restitution. The idea that if I steal a dollar and make millions off of it, do I pay the repayment, the restitution of it on the one dollar I stole or the million dollars I made, right? What is the restitution for having committed the sins, committed multiple sins of the most-Yeah, the most vile there can be. Right. Is the redemption. And I think that that's one thing that Stephen's struggling with is like, man, I've done the worst possible thing there is. Can I be redeemed? Well, okay. So let's take a step back. Because also I think the writing of this chapter is really important too, because you did not have annotations going through this. I did. And this part kind of frustrated me because it's like almost every third sentence was a biblical passage. And I'm sure you picked up on that. And I'm sitting here reading that and I'm like, I know this is a quote from the Bible. Don't look at the annotation. I can't. I have to read all the annotations because crypto is not reading them. I flip it to the back. Matthew 19, 13. Damn it, I knew it! Yeah, the whole time I was like, oh, that sounds familiar. Oh, that sounds familiar. There's so many allusions to specific passages. But what's interesting about that, going back to how chapter one was the lullaby, two, we start to see more prose and just writing about the nationalistic and almost kind of like newspaper headlines is kind of how chapter two read with the portraits, right? Chapter three, he's applying the structure of the church. through church passages and church wording. Stephen's not his own individual yet. He is spitting out these institutions'words into how he thinks in this chapter, which is so brilliant. It's not just, hey, I made a fun lot of references to the Bible. He is thinking through and realizing the word through the Bible standards of what's right and wrong. I think that's what a lot of us do is as we become indoctrinated. We use what we know to try to interpret our own inner monologues. And that's what Stephen has done here as referencing all of the Bible verses. Now, have you ever been on like a Catholic retreat like what Stephen was in this chapter? No. It's interesting because critics will point out that it is accurate, like in terms of what's happening here, but it's not complete. We are seeing only the parts that he is fixated on. There's lots of other stuff that happens at these retreats, but we don't experiencing that as the reader. Why? Because through Stephen, he is laser focused on the guilt and regret of these activities during this retreat that he's in a haze and we don't even experience the other parts of the retreat. Yeah, I didn't really kind of think about that way. That's that's a unique thing. I guess I never did that. I mean, I went to like Bible church school thingies in the summer, but nothing like this to this extent. Oh yeah, I mean, I had like CCD and we had, there's like a retreat weekend and stuff. It's interesting. But, um. Ask my wife if she did, because maybe she did. One last point I want to bring up in this chapter before we go into our next big point that's going to lead us through the rest of this book is, um, this quote. I suppose he rubbed it into you well. You bet he did. He put us all into a blue funk. That's what you fellows want, and plenty of it to make you work. And blue funk, if you didn't know, is a big state of fear. If you didn't know, that's like one of the annotations. But what I like about this little exchange here is this is very clearly welcoming fear to the holy action of your actions instead of the desire and want to live out the will of God. It's the I don't want to go to hell. Yeah, that's tough because that is the ideal of managing from fear and not love. Because this is what I feel as Stephen is interpreting it as, correct? Right, right. I think you said it right there. I want to make sure we're not saying. Catholicism wrong or I'm just saying this this is an experience depending on how things are presented to a very individualistic experience of how you experience life this can happen this feeling and I wrote down sometimes we are driven by not the goal but by the failure the consequences are what we fear and drive us in our actions at times oh that's good yeah I agree with that Yeah, fear can be a very powerful motivator. All right, now we obviously were very passionate about that chapter. We spent a really long time on it. All right, let me wrap this up with Dante and the Divine Comedy. If you haven't read that, it's been 10 years since I've read it. So luckily, I've reached out in the Voxer chat to Noah and Lucas, and they're going to hopefully be covering that in a lot more detail. Like I said, this is coming out before their Chapter 5 realization. But... Dante's comedy, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Specifically, this is the Inferno here, with chapter 4 being the Purgatorio and chapter 5 being Paradiso. We have comments like, innocence lost, we have a character literally named Dante in this book, and there's the constant biblical allusion and double meanings and words here. But it fits the narrative of these chapters, so let's kind of follow through that here as we go into chapter 4. So in terms of the flow, again, we're going to start on a low note. Yeah, up and down, up and down. Again, it's all over. And Stevens kind of offered the opportunity to pursue priesthood as a vocation, right? Which is kind of like, what? Like, I've been sleeping with prostitutes. Like, I can just say I'm sorry, pray to Mary, which again, commentary on Protestantism with the intermediary of the confession priest and Mary being the idolatry of praying to her as opposed to Jesus or God, right? Yeah, do these Hail Marys, smack yourself around and... You get to go be a priest now. Right. So Dante's Inferno is all about that, that journey to heaven and making the right choices, payments for your sins, stuff like that. It's been so long and they're going to go into more details. So that's why it seems weird to just kind of scratch the surface on here. But there's seven terraces in Purgatorio, if you didn't know. Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice. Gluttony and you know what the last one is? I don't remember. I just knew that there were the different levels. Well, yeah, you said it's been a long time. Lust. 20 years. Lust. Yeah. Okay. How convenient that as he sits here and ponders through the seven deadly sins and ponders through a lot of these elements and Noah went into some detail in his video for chapter four. Go watch it. How convenient that lust, the time when he at the end of this chapter four is when he has his epiphany. right, when he sees the girl on the beach. And first of all, I don't even want to try to recreate that or quote that section because it is so gorgeous that that, what, page and a half, two pages, whatever it is. Even if you don't read this book, I think you should, just given the background, if you're like, hey, I'm never going to read this book, you should read those two pages just for how James Joyce writes an epiphany. It's incredible literature. Yeah, that's probably the best writing in the book. I think the other quote was the most important quote, but that's definitely his... best writing up there with the other things that we've talked about so virgil and beatrice were the guides for dante to salvation if you remember correctly right and they enlighten him and show him like the eternal punishment from chapter three uh to the rewards of virtue that you kind of see here in chapter four a little bit and what does steven see as his rewards for virtue with this and i think it's interesting because because joyce takes it the opposite way instead of reaching you spiritual enlightenment with paradise his his coming of age his individual expression is the becoming of the artist right instead of going the the priest way he splits from the church and realizes his epiphany is taking him to being his own man by throwing off all these structure he's not going to be bogged down with this nationalistic war that's happening he's not going to be bogged down with this religious net that is just strangling what he views the people of Ireland. And he's not going to be held back by these familial ties of money and these issues. He's going to become his own freedom and express life his own way. He's expressed it through lullabies, through prose, through the biblical term, and now through this burning. It's in chapter 5 now that we're going to see this transition to a literary exposition that's really, really interesting. Oh, and two, on top of the prose, we have the play writing too. Yeah, I think this is where he finally comes into his own and decides what he's going to do. And I definitely can relate to that as well as I became more educated of what choices I was going to make as, you know, a young adult. And I think there's a, I don't see many people talking about this, but I felt a very autobiographical element of this with his wife, with Nora Barnacle. because he always called her, according to the biography, Richard Ullman, see her before video, he always referred to her as his muse. She saved him. And in a sense, I think he viewed her as his own personal Beatrice. Beatrice was the guide to divine grace. And I think that's what Nora Barnacle and what this epiphany scene is, is it's leading James Joyce, it's leading Stephen Dedalus to the epiphany and saving grace as a human being, an individual of stepping into his artistry. boots, if you will. This is his love letter to her. This is his thank you. You did this for me. But isn't it also a love letter to Dublin? This is his escape from the labyrinth and the drudge and downfall of his people. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I could see that. I think we all have that point in our lives, right? Where maybe it was that one moment or that one person that broke it for you. All right, now chapter five, we've been going on for a long time. I really apologize. But this is the discourse chapter. right the writing here is so different because it's almost it's almost like an essay but it's wrapped up in a fictional blanket which allows james joyce to present a one-sided argument right like if this were an attempt at a legitimate essay an article on beauty and in his philosophical treatise he doesn't present the other sides well he doesn't actually try to attack a bunch of different arguments He is romanticizing his own ideals. Yeah, that's why I thought when the book was done that you would enjoy five the most. I feel like this is the now maybe I'm projecting again the romantic inside me that is you. Okay. But I really thought you would like five the most. No, three was my favorite, but I did like five. But as opposed to what we've talked about sometimes is really good ways of interpreting or expressing philosophy. You can see that James Joyce specifically had no intention at any form of defense or counter-argument. He was really just romanticizing his own views, which is kind of interesting. And we saw with Lucas, it did not go over well for him, right? Yeah, I think that it comes back to, I think, three and five are so linked together. And for five, it is that philosophical approach and one-sided approach. And I think that it's hard to appreciate that. So I can understand his frustration. there's lots of even just little subtle literary nods. My favorite one from this, I was curious if you picked up on this. There's that guy that he was talking to that was constantly chewing on a fig seed. Yeah, yeah. Did you kind of get what that was going for, I think? No, I didn't pick that up. Learn me. School me good. So then he makes a reference during talking to this guy where he says, I suffer little children to come unto me. You know what that is? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's a quote from the Bible. Mark 10, 14, which is said by Glenn. Okay, it was Glenn that was saying it. That was the idea that children can go to church, they can learn, that sort of thing. Do you know what the fig tree was in the Bible when Jesus curses the fig tree? That's the, come on. It's real simple and kind of weird, but basically Jesus sees a fig tree with no figs on it, but it's in bloom, he curses it. Kind of weird for most people, but it's usually interpreted as lacking something. Right. The figs should be there, but they're not. And I think a lot of scholars have interpreted that to be the lack of spiritual energy in this town. Like he just kind of cleansed this temple from beggars and stealers. I believe it was. There was there was a lack of Christmas spirit, if you will. I was trying to go for something like that. Think about think about this way. Who was the wizard that didn't have any magical powers in Harry Potter? Okay. Mrs. Figg. That makes sense. Mrs. Figg. She didn't blossom, right? Right. Yeah. So there's just lots of little references that where they do use a lot of like little biblical allusions that that really add to the flavor of this chapter, which I really did like chapter five. Yeah, it was it was my second favorite. I just felt like it was the unfolding. Finally, of this story, it coalesced together. Right. My second favorite chapter. He's like the Bruce Almighty when he like rips all of his clothes off. This is this this is Stephen Dedalus just ripping off all the chains. Yes, of society. But what I like about it from like a writing evolution perspective, like I said, we had chapter one with the baby nursery rhymes and learning language and kind of playing with it. Chapter two, we saw him kind of questioning like some things using bigger words like the word salubrious and he begins to use plays in his writing at that point in time. Chapter three, he expresses himself through biblical passages. Chapter four, we have the coming of age and individuality of Stephen. And here in five, you'll notice that this is his love letter to literature, I feel like. where we have him as an artist writing poetry. He has them discussing major literary artists and creatives and in terms of strengths and weaknesses. You've got that personal expression of this through the diary. And you have tons of references where there's just entire sentences written in Latin, where if you don't have the annotations, that's got to be frustrating as hell to not know what people are saying. Really recommend the annotations for this. Yeah, you got to have the annotations to really enjoy five to its fullest. And thankfully, you know, I was able to get the book eventually and do that. And through your help as well, get a lot out of five. So yeah, I can understand the frustration. But this is very introspective and meta almost. Yeah, yeah. Because. Because this is the chapter he's finally free. He's no longer a paralyzed Dubliner, the way he views everyone else in this. And he expresses that through all these other different modes of literature and ways of writing. Yeah, this is the escape. Well, this is the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. This is he's reached heaven. This is him finally awakening and becoming his own individual, which from the James Joyce view doesn't go the spiritual route. but goes the artistic artisanal route which again going back to the opening epigraph he is making the wings to escape the labyrinth the labyrinth of dublin he is making his escape through his artistry just just like it it said he would in the opening line of the book yeah we've come full circle and i i don't know i guess i i really enjoyed the end because it feels like a happy ending almost it's totally a happy ending name name one other book known as classical literature ends on a high note like this especially all the tragedy that we felt like we've gone through with steven over this and i want to point out too and reiterate i don't like steven but you do feel for him and you can empathize with him and by the end you're like yeah that's kind of me i get it you know i i kind of broke free of those shackles and i'm my own person now or i get to make my own choices no i agree i'm not the biggest fan of steven but i felt this journey and i felt this journey the more i dug into it If I just was like, eh, and moved on, I don't think I would really enjoy this book. It's only through a deeper look at this and looking at all the woven pieces and allusions that I really started to get a lot of value out of this. Yeah, if you're reading this just for pure pleasure, I think that it could be very daunting, as we've said, and I think that you might not enjoy it. But reading it, you know, from an analytical standpoint, without the annotations, you're not going to enjoy it either. So this is a very niche. book to be able to enjoy, I think, as much as we have. Yeah, I think the public domain version that I have, like particularly for like entire sentences and exchanges that are in Latin, if I didn't have the annotations, that just pissed me off. Yeah. And I think lastly, too, is that this is a book that has so much resonance with somebody's personal experience in life. And you can use that to teach people when you may not have the same experiences in your life. And that's really important because, as we said, books are a way to change yourself. And even if it's not a change, it can be a window into what we saw with certain parts of this book. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, guys, I know we went on for a long time. I think we felt very passionate. I felt very passionate about this book. This is something that rose, right? Just like each chapter, how it kind of started on a low note and went up. I think that's my experience with this book, too. is the more I thought about it and I was just like, oh wait, there's all these different literary techniques in terms of the lullabies, the poetry, and the plays through this, in terms of all the allusions to the Bible and the way he expresses himself through these structures. I just really got closer and really got more into the book. I hope, I hope we were able to kind of maybe share some of that passion, maybe share some of our experience and what we've realized from it. And maybe you've thought of different things, right? Like this isn't everything in these books. This is the surface level experience with it. There's only deeper ways that you can go from here. So please, by no means, take this as the definitive source of this by any, by any sort of matter. I think that it's going to take a few goes. I mean, I listened to it twice and had to have all these talks and chats. And to get into that depth is only when I started to enjoy it. And then making the videos and researching and going back to some of my roots, did I finally get a lot of pleasure out of this? This is definitely a book. Now that I've seen it, going back to our before video with how hyper realized this is in a life, how accurate it is for a lot of Catholic upbringing, that nationalist idea, like I really get why they're like, look, you may not like this book. I get why it's important. I guess that's the key right there. Oona out. Agreed. So guys, if you like literature discussion like we do, we're obviously very passionate about this. I apologize for being very into this. Stop apologizing. You don't apologize. I like this book and you can screw yourself if you're like, why do you like this book? Just let me have this moment, have this mirror in my life, okay? Just let me have this, all right? I like this book. So guys, please subscribe to join us on discussions and finding other moments of passion in books. We hope you guys enjoyed this and got more out of this book through this discussion just now. If not, we still appreciate your time and maybe just, maybe hopefully give you a little bit of a glimpse of like, yeah, okay, I can see why that book is for some people. Una out. Peace.

So serious. All right, welcome to the Codex Cantina where I am Una. And I am an old artist.

And today we are going to be going into heavy, heavy detail of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. If you are starting here, you are in the wrong spot. Please make sure you check out Before You Read series, which talks about all the things that you're going to need.

And we're going to assume that you've watched that. Today we're just going to hit the ground running. Hopefully you've watched Noah and Lucas's videos.

They've been covering these chapters in depth. So this is going to be more about a wrap up. And while they're going to be looking at it in depth in each chapter, Crypto had a really good quote from our first Before You Read series where he talked about this book being a woven tapestry, where there's elements that just kind of come and go and play throughout this whole thing, where if you're just looking at each individual chapter, you might miss the overall flow of something that's kind of happening to that book. And we're hoping to bring that out today. If you're down for that sort of thing and looking for more literary discussions, please consider subscribing.

to come join us on the journey. One disclaimer I think that we should start off here is that if you hate the book, that's fine. Move on.

Great. Go read Dubliners again. Go read one of his short stories.

But I think that you should know that you have to get into it, I think, multiple times and use those notes to really help you get this. Yeah, it's those layers and themes that you use to kind of pry open meaning and pry open that you really do start to like it more. But if you're just like, I don't really like it and move on. Okay, that's great. That's fine, too.

But for those that want to dig in, let's do this. Let's jump into chapter one. Holy cow. First memories, ages somewhere between three and six. I'm not quite sure.

But the writing technique here is so unique where we get this evolution of language and not just the complexity, but the stylistic way that the language is brought into you in this book. And it's so subtle that you could very much miss it. And as we talked about, there are specific words that he uses to try to reiterate that this is supposed to be the younger part.

of your life and i love that it's delivered almost as a lullaby once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moo cow coming down like this is this reads a lot like a lullaby and even just the way he describes his father with the hair on his face and looking through the glass which his father had a monocle is really what it is you really not only experience it through words like nicens and stuff like that as like a little boy would but it's delivered in the little boy format of a lullaby as well. Like this whole book, in terms of being a woven tapestry, we're going to really experience this literary journey through this. Yeah, it's like he started writing it when he was a kid and didn't finish it until, you know, he was a young artist in his 20s, which is kind of cool, right? If you took all of your writings from your whole life and put them together in a story.

You would see the evolution of your own life and writing within that life. And that's just, that's genius to me. Oh yeah, for sure. And then as a kid, everything's good or bad, right or wrong, right? There's no gray area.

And we see that with how Steven kind of explores this at a young life. But my favorite thing was one of the points that Crypto here brought up. He was driving and he texted me because at the time he did not have a Kindle and I did.

And he said, Una, I need you to look this up. How many times? is queer used in this book.

And I'll give you the hit count. It's a total of 19, 15 of the usages in chapter one, 15 of the 19 times in chapter one, and the other four in chapter five with nothing in between. Very specifically by design when we look at his journey of when does he experience weird stuff, right?

Yeah, so in the writing, he goes through these opposites of hot and cold, maroon and green. light and dark. And so he's using very specific words in this specific chapter. And you see he wanes off of them throughout the book as well.

And what was the other word that I texted you also? Slimy. Slimy.

Yeah. Six of seven usages of slimy were in chapter one. I don't know, that word just makes me laugh. It's a funny word.

Well, and it's important for interpreting these, we're going to go through three key events from chapter one. One is when he kind of goes to the Jesuit boarding school. where he's pushed into the cesspool. He starts to see bigger instant, you know, when the bigger kid pushes the littler kid, that's bigger institutions picking on little institutions. When the kids start to kind of make fun of him, like, do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

And whether he says yes or no, they make fun of him either way. He starts to realize that no matter what happens in life, you're going to get ridiculed. And he's starting to realize that right and wrong.

There's some gray area, and sometimes there's just wrong, wrong. It doesn't matter what you do. Yeah, that's tough.

These are some heavy life lessons that Joyce is doing a good job, I think, putting pen to paper. And I think we've all been there for the second point, which is the Christmas dinner. We've all been the little kid sitting at the big kid table kind of experience.

What do big people talk about at dinner? What's the secret that happens here? And he sees them talking about things that little kids don't talk about. in terms of the politics, in terms of the nationalism, and then the Catholic Church stuff that if you've watched our before video, you'll understand some of the thematic plays there. And he sees even characters like Dante, who is for home rule, who is a nationalist, Irish nationalist, but also supports Catholicism, which is opposed to that.

He starts to see that she is being torn apart, and the world, to the earlier point, is not just right and wrong. There's a lot more thematic elements at play here, and people are being torn apart. by these questions and these categorizations that you can kind of choose.

Yeah, this was, I think, one of the most important scenes in the entire book. And my wife and I discussed a lot of this because she said, oh, I totally resonated with this happening and saw how it was tearing a family apart and on a larger scale what it could do to an entire country. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, my favorite part actually was the little girl, Eileen, because it is autobiographical, which is interesting, about you can't play with her because she's Protestant, right? Like, you know. hawk's gonna come rip your eyes out like you do have those thoughts as a little kid like when you're told certain things like we'll get more into it when we get to the section three let's jump to the third main event of chapter one and that's father dolan where he loses his glasses and he tells that at first he's kind of excused and he kind of had this good bad with father arnell and dolan but he's punished eventually for having you know they think he's playing tricks right and he's like this isn't what i was doing at all this isn't fair you And he goes to tell, you know, Father Kanmi the truth of, you know, hey, I was told I could be excused from my studies. He's starting to see also even just religion failing from the perspective of they're not always right, right? In terms of right versus wrong, sometimes you have these mistakes that are happening here.

He sees worldly punishment being applied incorrectly. Yeah, and I know that from a personal experience when I was talking to a priest for the very first time when he said, well, maybe evolution is correct. We don't know.

Like, what? I thought the church knew everything. The church is always right.

The church is infallible. It's, you know, and you realize, wait a minute. And that's pretty big realization by Stephen here at such a young age. And he sees the church being competitive to like Jesuit schools are known for being competitive. So a lot of language put on them, a lot of structures put on them, a lot of things being not necessarily just right or wrong.

Stephen's finally kind of being like, oh, what have I gotten myself into with chapter one, right? And I like how it evolves slowly from being, you know. kind of simple to a little bit more complex by the end.

And he's just getting a taste of real life by the end of chapter one. All right, so let's jump into chapter two. So as Noah points out, you know, very, very well in his video, these are a bunch of vignettes, right? The organization might feel weird. But if you look at the tapestry of this book, we start on a low note, right?

This guy that's training him is fat and overweight. His father's losing money. Right.

You start on a low note in each chapter. works up to a high so we just came from the high of like well i told father con me that you know and they're all cheering for him yeah yeah yeah each chapter you're gonna see this climb yeah it's like you get slapped in the face oh no i love you slap no i love you back and forth so i would say this is the beginning of steven's disenchantment okay he starts to realize the good and bad now he's starting to realize what actually is bad in his life you see him using words like salubrious in the beginning of this chapter so you see the language evolving in this book Along with Steven, which is actually quite brilliant. And now we're entering more prose as opposed to kind of the playful lullaby approach from chapter one. And I think you can miss that because I know that the first time I had to start looking words up, I got a little bit irritated and mad about that because I didn't know some of these words.

And you could miss the fact that he's doing that on purpose. He's not just, you know, hey, look at my big brain. I have all these fancy words I know. And that can piss off, I think, some readers.

I got annotation fatigue. Around the end of four into five, I was like, I don't know how many more of these I can look up. But I think it starts here. I think you could get through chapter one without that. But now as you're getting into chapter two, you're going to have to start doing some digging.

Next we have, I want to talk about this play. And Noah reached out to me to bring up this point. But I had written down that. He was asked to play the part of a role in the play, right?

He's becoming a model, actor, writer, poet. You see the creative side of Stephen coming out. So how does he realize that?

And he's like, I don't know if I could play this part. So we have Stephen kind of struggling with this part. And his friend's like, why don't you just do a caricature?

Just, you know, just ham it up, play it up, I thought. What Noah was going to point out to you is that James Joyce actually did perform the part, while Stephen did not. Yeah. So you see that this is starting kind of like the fictionalized part.

of his autobiography of what kind of a character did I or should I have been or who could I have been had I played my life out differently. And it's interesting too that during this play when Stephen looks out at the audience and you know there's this girl that he's kind of fawning over and he starts to just realize what did I have to become to make this girl interested, right? I had to play a role. I had to put on this fake persona in this play.

in order for this girl to like me and that's not who i am and i think he's starting to butt heads of the reality of he's been reading this monte cristo this this fantasy of real life and living out sword plays with his friends and when he realized that he's trying to do this fantasy thing in real life he realizes how depressing and how disjointed that is from reality i think this is the first time in the story we start to see joyce write in regret a little bit and he's realizing that steven and joyce are both realizing how What society wants us to be is very different from sometimes what we want to be. And we're seeing that very obvious with the play and with his relationship with the girl. It goes even deeper, too, because this next section with the dad, when they go to kind of like sell land because they're they're breaking, they're losing money.

And they go to visit his old was at med school. And he sees like, like fetus, I think written in Latin, I think it was written on the wall. Fotes or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. And he sees like his dad starting to talk about. questionable activities with women if you will when on top of playing a role for others okay now steven's starting to realize i've had all of these sexual thoughts as a young boy and it's not just me and here's my dad and other people that in a in you know in these schools and highly intellectual intelligent people putting on these roles when they also have these these lecherous desirous thoughts If you will, like Stephen's starting to realize he's not alone in this. There's something in me that I'm kind of hiding from the outside world.

My dad is a horn dog and I can be too. Well, yeah, why not? Let's go to the shadowy dark part of town and go sleep with a prostitute.

End chapter two, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And that's where I think that's where like the church thing really starts to come into play, where if you aren't familiar with that, like Una and I are, you're going to miss it. the super significance of that in this story because that's going to become a huge plot point later so let's let's jump into three let's jump into three but it's worth pointing out too that this brothel district if you look at the word choice in terms of using dark shadowy like joyce is very good good he's he's amazing with language and and putting in these subtle things that like it's mind-blowing how many layers he stacks into each paragraph it's really impressive it would be nice if he could write our scripts right so chapter three we're gonna start on the low note right he and i actually like chapter three the most to be honest no three is my favorite three is my absolute favorite okay so we agree on that no it's just the feel the tone right yeah he he wakes up in pinnacle of feelings it's he wakes up and his stomach is calling out for food his feet lead him on this journey Stephen's not in control of his body at this point. The way that James Joyce writes this, Stephen is not in control.

Yeah, and I think that any young teenage boy can attest to this. I think you and I might have had similar upbringings with how Catholicism was taught to us. Not every Catholic person is going to have the same experience that you and I were.

Yeah, it might not resonate with everybody, but... But books can be doors, mirrors, and windows, okay? They're doors to invite you to change your life. They're windows to see the life of someone else. And in this case, this is a mirror for me, where I see myself in this book.

I connected deeply with how religion impacts one's personal morality and the questioning that you go through, particularly as a teenage boy, how often you thought about women and probably in very unholy ways, and you start to think, oh my gosh. I am never going to be able to avoid hell in this world. Yeah, definitely. That is my almost identical experience of as I'm going through, you know, puberty and the church and everything.

And it's, you know, if you look at a woman, that's a sin. You're going to hell. If you masturbate, you're going to hell. It's just. Over and over again, these things that I'm conflicted of internally, and then the church is telling me something different.

And my wife said almost the exact same thing verbatim. She goes, yeah, I'm having these thoughts and these urges, and I'm wanting to do these things, but I'm being told no, no, no over and over again by this institution that says I'm going to be damned to hell if I do or act on those urges or thoughts. Well, and as a young kid. Child, for me, maybe you were brilliant and you had no problem with this.

Someone out there I'm sure is like, I was 16 and got this perfectly. Cool. Good for you. Not us.

This is a mirror into our life, okay? Yeah. The difference between desire and lust is defined.

But as a child and a young teenager, I had no freaking clue what the difference was. Agreed. Yeah. From the Wikipedia, lust is considered by Catholicism. to be disordered desire for sexual pleasure, where sexual pleasure is sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.

In Catholicism, sexual desire in itself is good and is considered part of God's plan for humanity. That part was left out in my training. However, when sexual desire is separated from God's love, it becomes disordered and self-syncing.

This is called lust. And that's the part that's really hard to, I feel like, maybe even local parishioners and churchgoers don't totally understand this, but Stephen has sinned multiple times. The mortal sin, the violent sin of sexual intercourse outside of wedlock, which is the only sin, the only one the Bible says to run away from.

Like, according to the Bible, murder, not as bad as sexual intercourse out of wedlock. right yeah that's crazy it's okay we might be exaggerating a little bit and that if you aren't super into church i don't think you quite understand this but from first corinthians 6 18 through 20 run from sexual sin no other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does for sexual immorality is a sin against your own body and this literally is i believe the only sin that the bible says to run from and and so much of the bible is about this depending on how you interpret the bible you know it sounds like with the way that lucas was raised lutheran they did and what i've seen from christianity it really isn't as intense the way that it was presented to me as a young boy from a catholic catholic perspective i remember it as a young boy them using the word pollutant and that it would pollute your soul and you would have a hard time getting into heaven as a result and that's pretty mortifying as a young teenage boy or i think a teenage boy girl straight gay whatever you know i think that anybody would struggle with that we have this quote from steven from the evil seat of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth pride in himself and contempt of others covetousness of others in using money for the purchases of unlawful pleasure envy of those whose vices we could not reach to I think this is probably the most important quote of chapter three and arguably the book. Well, and this is clearly what Stephen is going through because he's The idea that sexual sin leads to the other seven deadly sins, the fact that you start here and it's all downhill from here, this is what we're really exploring with this book. The difference between the types of sins that one can experience in terms of violent sins, this is what this book is all about in nuancing out that you must have the patience to go through to really understand this is, this almost doesn't even feel like an exaggeration, like this is reality for a lot of young Catholic children.

Not all Catholic children are presented it this way. I'm telling you, it was for me. Yeah, when I read this, what I was thinking the whole time of, yeah, this is totally presented to me as a kid that my sexuality is a gateway to the other seven deadly sins.

It's like a gateway drug. Like, if I do this, I'm going to do all the others, and I'm going to become this, this horrible, this horrible. I'm going to be all those. And it's interesting the way James Joyce approaches it here, because he brings up the document of restitution.

The idea that if I steal a dollar and make millions off of it, do I pay the repayment, the restitution of it on the one dollar I stole or the million dollars I made, right? What is the restitution for having committed the sins, committed multiple sins of the most-Yeah, the most vile there can be. Right. Is the redemption.

And I think that that's one thing that Stephen's struggling with is like, man, I've done the worst possible thing there is. Can I be redeemed? Well, okay.

So let's take a step back. Because also I think the writing of this chapter is really important too, because you did not have annotations going through this. I did.

And this part kind of frustrated me because it's like almost every third sentence was a biblical passage. And I'm sure you picked up on that. And I'm sitting here reading that and I'm like, I know this is a quote from the Bible.

Don't look at the annotation. I can't. I have to read all the annotations because crypto is not reading them.

I flip it to the back. Matthew 19, 13. Damn it, I knew it! Yeah, the whole time I was like, oh, that sounds familiar. Oh, that sounds familiar.

There's so many allusions to specific passages. But what's interesting about that, going back to how chapter one was the lullaby, two, we start to see more prose and just writing about the nationalistic and almost kind of like newspaper headlines is kind of how chapter two read with the portraits, right? Chapter three, he's applying the structure of the church.

through church passages and church wording. Stephen's not his own individual yet. He is spitting out these institutions'words into how he thinks in this chapter, which is so brilliant. It's not just, hey, I made a fun lot of references to the Bible.

He is thinking through and realizing the word through the Bible standards of what's right and wrong. I think that's what a lot of us do is as we become indoctrinated. We use what we know to try to interpret our own inner monologues.

And that's what Stephen has done here as referencing all of the Bible verses. Now, have you ever been on like a Catholic retreat like what Stephen was in this chapter? No. It's interesting because critics will point out that it is accurate, like in terms of what's happening here, but it's not complete. We are seeing only the parts that he is fixated on.

There's lots of other stuff that happens at these retreats, but we don't experiencing that as the reader. Why? Because through Stephen, he is laser focused on the guilt and regret of these activities during this retreat that he's in a haze and we don't even experience the other parts of the retreat. Yeah, I didn't really kind of think about that way.

That's that's a unique thing. I guess I never did that. I mean, I went to like Bible church school thingies in the summer, but nothing like this to this extent. Oh yeah, I mean, I had like CCD and we had, there's like a retreat weekend and stuff.

It's interesting. But, um. Ask my wife if she did, because maybe she did. One last point I want to bring up in this chapter before we go into our next big point that's going to lead us through the rest of this book is, um, this quote. I suppose he rubbed it into you well.

You bet he did. He put us all into a blue funk. That's what you fellows want, and plenty of it to make you work. And blue funk, if you didn't know, is a big state of fear. If you didn't know, that's like one of the annotations.

But what I like about this little exchange here is this is very clearly welcoming fear to the holy action of your actions instead of the desire and want to live out the will of God. It's the I don't want to go to hell. Yeah, that's tough because that is the ideal of managing from fear and not love.

Because this is what I feel as Stephen is interpreting it as, correct? Right, right. I think you said it right there. I want to make sure we're not saying. Catholicism wrong or I'm just saying this this is an experience depending on how things are presented to a very individualistic experience of how you experience life this can happen this feeling and I wrote down sometimes we are driven by not the goal but by the failure the consequences are what we fear and drive us in our actions at times oh that's good yeah I agree with that Yeah, fear can be a very powerful motivator.

All right, now we obviously were very passionate about that chapter. We spent a really long time on it. All right, let me wrap this up with Dante and the Divine Comedy. If you haven't read that, it's been 10 years since I've read it.

So luckily, I've reached out in the Voxer chat to Noah and Lucas, and they're going to hopefully be covering that in a lot more detail. Like I said, this is coming out before their Chapter 5 realization. But... Dante's comedy, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Specifically, this is the Inferno here, with chapter 4 being the Purgatorio and chapter 5 being Paradiso. We have comments like, innocence lost, we have a character literally named Dante in this book, and there's the constant biblical allusion and double meanings and words here. But it fits the narrative of these chapters, so let's kind of follow through that here as we go into chapter 4. So in terms of the flow, again, we're going to start on a low note. Yeah, up and down, up and down. Again, it's all over.

And Stevens kind of offered the opportunity to pursue priesthood as a vocation, right? Which is kind of like, what? Like, I've been sleeping with prostitutes. Like, I can just say I'm sorry, pray to Mary, which again, commentary on Protestantism with the intermediary of the confession priest and Mary being the idolatry of praying to her as opposed to Jesus or God, right?

Yeah, do these Hail Marys, smack yourself around and... You get to go be a priest now. Right.

So Dante's Inferno is all about that, that journey to heaven and making the right choices, payments for your sins, stuff like that. It's been so long and they're going to go into more details. So that's why it seems weird to just kind of scratch the surface on here.

But there's seven terraces in Purgatorio, if you didn't know. Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice. Gluttony and you know what the last one is?

I don't remember. I just knew that there were the different levels. Well, yeah, you said it's been a long time. Lust.

20 years. Lust. Yeah. Okay. How convenient that as he sits here and ponders through the seven deadly sins and ponders through a lot of these elements and Noah went into some detail in his video for chapter four.

Go watch it. How convenient that lust, the time when he at the end of this chapter four is when he has his epiphany. right, when he sees the girl on the beach. And first of all, I don't even want to try to recreate that or quote that section because it is so gorgeous that that, what, page and a half, two pages, whatever it is. Even if you don't read this book, I think you should, just given the background, if you're like, hey, I'm never going to read this book, you should read those two pages just for how James Joyce writes an epiphany.

It's incredible literature. Yeah, that's probably the best writing in the book. I think the other quote was the most important quote, but that's definitely his... best writing up there with the other things that we've talked about so virgil and beatrice were the guides for dante to salvation if you remember correctly right and they enlighten him and show him like the eternal punishment from chapter three uh to the rewards of virtue that you kind of see here in chapter four a little bit and what does steven see as his rewards for virtue with this and i think it's interesting because because joyce takes it the opposite way instead of reaching you spiritual enlightenment with paradise his his coming of age his individual expression is the becoming of the artist right instead of going the the priest way he splits from the church and realizes his epiphany is taking him to being his own man by throwing off all these structure he's not going to be bogged down with this nationalistic war that's happening he's not going to be bogged down with this religious net that is just strangling what he views the people of Ireland.

And he's not going to be held back by these familial ties of money and these issues. He's going to become his own freedom and express life his own way. He's expressed it through lullabies, through prose, through the biblical term, and now through this burning. It's in chapter 5 now that we're going to see this transition to a literary exposition that's really, really interesting. Oh, and two, on top of the prose, we have the play writing too.

Yeah, I think this is where he finally comes into his own and decides what he's going to do. And I definitely can relate to that as well as I became more educated of what choices I was going to make as, you know, a young adult. And I think there's a, I don't see many people talking about this, but I felt a very autobiographical element of this with his wife, with Nora Barnacle.

because he always called her, according to the biography, Richard Ullman, see her before video, he always referred to her as his muse. She saved him. And in a sense, I think he viewed her as his own personal Beatrice.

Beatrice was the guide to divine grace. And I think that's what Nora Barnacle and what this epiphany scene is, is it's leading James Joyce, it's leading Stephen Dedalus to the epiphany and saving grace as a human being, an individual of stepping into his artistry. boots, if you will. This is his love letter to her. This is his thank you.

You did this for me. But isn't it also a love letter to Dublin? This is his escape from the labyrinth and the drudge and downfall of his people. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I could see that.

I think we all have that point in our lives, right? Where maybe it was that one moment or that one person that broke it for you. All right, now chapter five, we've been going on for a long time. I really apologize.

But this is the discourse chapter. right the writing here is so different because it's almost it's almost like an essay but it's wrapped up in a fictional blanket which allows james joyce to present a one-sided argument right like if this were an attempt at a legitimate essay an article on beauty and in his philosophical treatise he doesn't present the other sides well he doesn't actually try to attack a bunch of different arguments He is romanticizing his own ideals. Yeah, that's why I thought when the book was done that you would enjoy five the most.

I feel like this is the now maybe I'm projecting again the romantic inside me that is you. Okay. But I really thought you would like five the most. No, three was my favorite, but I did like five. But as opposed to what we've talked about sometimes is really good ways of interpreting or expressing philosophy.

You can see that James Joyce specifically had no intention at any form of defense or counter-argument. He was really just romanticizing his own views, which is kind of interesting. And we saw with Lucas, it did not go over well for him, right?

Yeah, I think that it comes back to, I think, three and five are so linked together. And for five, it is that philosophical approach and one-sided approach. And I think that it's hard to appreciate that.

So I can understand his frustration. there's lots of even just little subtle literary nods. My favorite one from this, I was curious if you picked up on this. There's that guy that he was talking to that was constantly chewing on a fig seed. Yeah, yeah.

Did you kind of get what that was going for, I think? No, I didn't pick that up. Learn me.

School me good. So then he makes a reference during talking to this guy where he says, I suffer little children to come unto me. You know what that is?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's a quote from the Bible. Mark 10, 14, which is said by Glenn. Okay, it was Glenn that was saying it. That was the idea that children can go to church, they can learn, that sort of thing.

Do you know what the fig tree was in the Bible when Jesus curses the fig tree? That's the, come on. It's real simple and kind of weird, but basically Jesus sees a fig tree with no figs on it, but it's in bloom, he curses it.

Kind of weird for most people, but it's usually interpreted as lacking something. Right. The figs should be there, but they're not.

And I think a lot of scholars have interpreted that to be the lack of spiritual energy in this town. Like he just kind of cleansed this temple from beggars and stealers. I believe it was.

There was there was a lack of Christmas spirit, if you will. I was trying to go for something like that. Think about think about this way.

Who was the wizard that didn't have any magical powers in Harry Potter? Okay. Mrs. Figg.

That makes sense. Mrs. Figg. She didn't blossom, right?

Right. Yeah. So there's just lots of little references that where they do use a lot of like little biblical allusions that that really add to the flavor of this chapter, which I really did like chapter five. Yeah, it was it was my second favorite.

I just felt like it was the unfolding. Finally, of this story, it coalesced together. Right. My second favorite chapter. He's like the Bruce Almighty when he like rips all of his clothes off.

This is this this is Stephen Dedalus just ripping off all the chains. Yes, of society. But what I like about it from like a writing evolution perspective, like I said, we had chapter one with the baby nursery rhymes and learning language and kind of playing with it. Chapter two, we saw him kind of questioning like some things using bigger words like the word salubrious and he begins to use plays in his writing at that point in time.

Chapter three, he expresses himself through biblical passages. Chapter four, we have the coming of age and individuality of Stephen. And here in five, you'll notice that this is his love letter to literature, I feel like.

where we have him as an artist writing poetry. He has them discussing major literary artists and creatives and in terms of strengths and weaknesses. You've got that personal expression of this through the diary.

And you have tons of references where there's just entire sentences written in Latin, where if you don't have the annotations, that's got to be frustrating as hell to not know what people are saying. Really recommend the annotations for this. Yeah, you got to have the annotations to really enjoy five to its fullest. And thankfully, you know, I was able to get the book eventually and do that.

And through your help as well, get a lot out of five. So yeah, I can understand the frustration. But this is very introspective and meta almost.

Yeah, yeah. Because. Because this is the chapter he's finally free. He's no longer a paralyzed Dubliner, the way he views everyone else in this. And he expresses that through all these other different modes of literature and ways of writing.

Yeah, this is the escape. Well, this is the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy. This is he's reached heaven.

This is him finally awakening and becoming his own individual, which from the James Joyce view doesn't go the spiritual route. but goes the artistic artisanal route which again going back to the opening epigraph he is making the wings to escape the labyrinth the labyrinth of dublin he is making his escape through his artistry just just like it it said he would in the opening line of the book yeah we've come full circle and i i don't know i guess i i really enjoyed the end because it feels like a happy ending almost it's totally a happy ending name name one other book known as classical literature ends on a high note like this especially all the tragedy that we felt like we've gone through with steven over this and i want to point out too and reiterate i don't like steven but you do feel for him and you can empathize with him and by the end you're like yeah that's kind of me i get it you know i i kind of broke free of those shackles and i'm my own person now or i get to make my own choices no i agree i'm not the biggest fan of steven but i felt this journey and i felt this journey the more i dug into it If I just was like, eh, and moved on, I don't think I would really enjoy this book. It's only through a deeper look at this and looking at all the woven pieces and allusions that I really started to get a lot of value out of this. Yeah, if you're reading this just for pure pleasure, I think that it could be very daunting, as we've said, and I think that you might not enjoy it. But reading it, you know, from an analytical standpoint, without the annotations, you're not going to enjoy it either.

So this is a very niche. book to be able to enjoy, I think, as much as we have. Yeah, I think the public domain version that I have, like particularly for like entire sentences and exchanges that are in Latin, if I didn't have the annotations, that just pissed me off. Yeah. And I think lastly, too, is that this is a book that has so much resonance with somebody's personal experience in life.

And you can use that to teach people when you may not have the same experiences in your life. And that's really important because, as we said, books are a way to change yourself. And even if it's not a change, it can be a window into what we saw with certain parts of this book. Exactly.

Yeah. Okay, guys, I know we went on for a long time. I think we felt very passionate.

I felt very passionate about this book. This is something that rose, right? Just like each chapter, how it kind of started on a low note and went up.

I think that's my experience with this book, too. is the more I thought about it and I was just like, oh wait, there's all these different literary techniques in terms of the lullabies, the poetry, and the plays through this, in terms of all the allusions to the Bible and the way he expresses himself through these structures. I just really got closer and really got more into the book. I hope, I hope we were able to kind of maybe share some of that passion, maybe share some of our experience and what we've realized from it. And maybe you've thought of different things, right?

Like this isn't everything in these books. This is the surface level experience with it. There's only deeper ways that you can go from here. So please, by no means, take this as the definitive source of this by any, by any sort of matter. I think that it's going to take a few goes.

I mean, I listened to it twice and had to have all these talks and chats. And to get into that depth is only when I started to enjoy it. And then making the videos and researching and going back to some of my roots, did I finally get a lot of pleasure out of this? This is definitely a book.

Now that I've seen it, going back to our before video with how hyper realized this is in a life, how accurate it is for a lot of Catholic upbringing, that nationalist idea, like I really get why they're like, look, you may not like this book. I get why it's important. I guess that's the key right there. Oona out.

Agreed. So guys, if you like literature discussion like we do, we're obviously very passionate about this. I apologize for being very into this. Stop apologizing. You don't apologize.

I like this book and you can screw yourself if you're like, why do you like this book? Just let me have this moment, have this mirror in my life, okay? Just let me have this, all right? I like this book.

So guys, please subscribe to join us on discussions and finding other moments of passion in books. We hope you guys enjoyed this and got more out of this book through this discussion just now. If not, we still appreciate your time and maybe just, maybe hopefully give you a little bit of a glimpse of like, yeah, okay, I can see why that book is for some people.

Una out. Peace.

Transcript for:Exploring James Joyce's Literary Masterpieces

Transcript for:
Exploring James Joyce's Literary Masterpieces