Have finally done it, I've finally started reading some James Joyce. Think I read (possibly parts of) 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' many years ago at university, but I'm not 100% sure.
Anyway, I've read the first two short stories from 'Dubliners' and the wonderful introduction to the Wordsworth Classic edition pictured above written by Laurence Davies from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Davies' introduction gives a good overview of Joyce's life and his outlook on life, focusing on such things as the Catholic schools which Joyce attended; his later antipathy towards the Catholic Church; his Balzac-type eye for minute detail; his great achievement of putting Dublin properly on the Irish literary map; and the sense of a need for escape from something/somewhere that pervades his work. Regarding the latter point, I couldn't help thinking that while D.H. Lawrence points towards the need to escape or transcend human self-consciousness; Joyce seems to focus on the need to escape a drab, boring, dirty, external environment.
In 'The Sisters', alongside a general atmosphere of dark, repressive, religious ritual, Joyce seems to paint a sympathetic picture of the snuff-taking priest who dies, of whom it is revealed that he went off the rails after accidentally damaging a chalice. In contrast, 'An Encounter' deals with the bleak adventure to be attained from playing truant from school, which may involve meeting a peculiar character away from the routine world of work/study.
Yeah, it's early days, but I'm now looking forward to reading all the other short stories in Joyce's 'Dubliners' collection.
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