“It is a curious thing, do you know, … how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.”

To look back on your life is to find two things: fond nostalgia and cringing disgust. The beauty of aging is that the two start to resemble each other more and more as you put years and metaphors between you and the events you remember. This book is Joyce’s beautiful attempt to create himself through that process of literary remembrance. In the process he damns himself to the heretical exile that would become his legacy.

Dedalus, the cunning artificer, is fated to do nothing but fly from his self-designed prison. Stephen, the first martyr, is fated to die in service to the burgeoning new religion that’s brought him into the world. This is a world of duality, and that duality allows this world to be more than a simple piece of art.

Joyce ostensibly spends his entire novel following himself trying to craft an aesthetic system. He defines that system for us based on Aquinas and Lessing’s definitions for the work of art. Namely, the foremost rule for a piece of art is that it must be bounded in space and time and differentiated from the rest of space and time as a distinct and unique artifact. Two lines of the book highlight the silliness of this young man who’s the subject of a “portrait”:

Dublin 1904
Trieste 1914

Literature breaks us from the laws that trap our art and inhibit pure freeform expression of the soul. It is Joyce’s job to show us the bars of our prisons as he discovers them himself. Ireland has its jailers: England, Catholicism, its own nostalgia for a half-remembered past. It is his consistent mission to fly by those nets and evade their subtle capture.

Perhaps most importantly, he crafts a hero who escapes these prisons for us. There must be some avatar for us to see break the fetters. Some martyr must descend through Edenic Dublin and be crucified on the inverted cross of St. Stephen’s Green. He gifts himself for the role and builds a first-person from a reality of the third-person. He refuses to sublimate into the milieu of the world and instead chooses to become an individual staunchly in the face of that temptation.

What a beautiful message for those who find themselves disassociating when they look back on a life lived in the passenger seat. What a beautiful message in a world that becomes more third-person everyday in the wake of artificers who disdain the individual’s voice.