"Cliff Notes - Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

works. Both these writers drew, as Joyce would, on all parts of
life--the beautiful, the sordid, and the commonplace.

But realism wasn't the only influence on the young Joyce. The subtle
and suggestive poetic imagery of French poets like Stephane Mallarme
and Arthur Rimbaud, who used symbols to convey shades of meaning,
appealed to his love for the musicality of words and for the power of
words to evoke unexpected psychological associations. Their example,
too, is followed in Portrait of the Artist.

Before Joyce had left the university he had already written several
essays--one of them on Ibsen--and he had formulated the core of his
own theory of art, a theory similar to Stephen's in Chapter Five.
The renowned Irish poet William Butler Yeats was impressed by the
unkempt but precocious youth, and tried to draw Joyce into the ranks
of Irish intellectuals. But once again the arrogant newcomer
rejected his homeland, choosing to stay aloof because he felt Yeats
and his group viewed the Irish past too romantically and viewed its
present with too much nationalism.

Instead, at the age of twenty, Joyce did what Stephen Dedalus is
about to do at the novel's end, and turned away from his family, his
country, and his church. He ran off to the continent. In 1903 he
returned to Ireland to visit his dying mother, but soon after her
death (1904) he was again bound for Europe, accompanied by the
chambermaid with whom he had fallen in love, Nora Barnacle. The
uneducated, sensual Nora seemed an unlikely mate for Joyce, but she
proved (despite Joyce's cranky suspicions of her) to be a loyal,
lifetime companion.

In Trieste (then a cosmopolitan city of Austria-Hungary), Joyce wrote
incessantly and eked out a living teaching English. He put together
Dubliners, a group of stories based on brief experiences he called
"epiphanies." For Joyce, who believed in "the significance of trivial
things," an epiphany was a moment of spiritual revelation sparked by
a seemingly insignificant detail. A chance word, a particular
gesture or situation could suddenly reveal a significant truth about
an entire life.

He also continued work on a novel he had started in Ireland. The
first, brief version of what we know as A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man had been curtly rejected in 1904, before Joyce left
Ireland. "I can't print what I can't understand," wrote the British
editor who refused it. Undaunted, Joyce expanded the story to nearly
one thousand pages. It now bore the title Stephen Hero, and was a
conventional Bildungsroman--a novel about a young man's moral and
psychological development. Other examples of such novels might
include D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) or Samuel Butler's
The Way of All Flesh (1903). (Some critics would be more specific
and call Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist