Experiments, Epiphanies, and Inserting Yourself In Your Writing

Close Study: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Because this novel is in the public domain, you can find the full text at Gutenberg here.

I finished Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man earlier this year. When I told people I was reading it, the typical response was, “but isn’t Joyce impossible to read?” Yes, but I went to college for line breaks and metaphors, so it’s too late to question my decision making skills.

Portrait is Joyce’s first novel, and certainly his easiest to read. Nonetheless, it employs a lot of experiments in prose style, particularly stream-of-consciousness. When you learn how to read Joyce’s prose, you get swept up in the beauty of each word he uses, which feels so tightly curated and expresses something essential about the experience of life.

All writers, especially fiction writers, can learn a lot simply by reading and studying his work. I’ll point out a few things that I enjoyed myself: 

• The novel’s evolving experiments in prose.
• How extreme moments of beauty can be glimpsed within monotony.
• The relationship between word choice and experience itself.

Portrait had a rather long history to publication. Joyce spent 3 years writing the novel as a 63-chapter work, before abandoning the project and rethinking his approach to the story itself. He set out to tell his story in a realist style, but refashioned the work into a 5-chapter Künstlerroman that makes use of stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse—both of which illuminate the psyche of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, as he comes to discover his calling as an artist.

To briefly define some terms:

• Stream-of-consciousness: a prose technique in which a character’s thoughts and experiences are transcribed uninterrupted and as they actually occur.
• Free indirect discourse: another prose technique in which a third-person character’s thoughts and actions are written with the intimacy of first-person narration.
• Künstlerroman: a coming-of-age story specific to artists.

The novel was eventually serialized by T. S. Eliot before it was finally published a a book in 1916, 12 years after Joyce began the project. In between conception and publication were plenty of setbacks, including Joyce’s attempt to burn the manuscript in 1911, and plenty of publishers who found Joyce’s experiments in prose difficult to contend with.

And what of those experiments? Joyce sought to transcribe his protagonist’s experiences of reality as they actually occurred. Moreover, those experiences are contextualized in Stephen’s age and place. Take the novel’s opening passage:

On a first read, this passage is a bit bewildering (it certainly was for me). What is going on here? It takes a few more pages of reading, but then you get it—the prose is written in the context of baby Stephen’s experiences. The language is simple but scattered, with word choice that is occasionally infantile, and scattered memories stitched into that thin pleasant blanket we call childhood.

Equally beguiling is when the scene changes without warning. Here’s an example, also from the first chapter, which starts in Stephen’s boarding school dormitory:

What’s happening? Are we still in the dormitory, or is it really winter break now? No—it is simply a dream playing in Stephen’s mind, which we know because suddenly the other dormitory boys start leaving their beds in the morning. This is stream-of-consciousness at play, and it can be beguiling at first, but once you understand these decisions are being made in the text, it gets easier to understand over time.

Joyce’s prose style evolves as Stephen matures. By the time he’s in college, the novel feels much more erudite, with references to scholars and abstract ideas and philosophical questions, as well as dialogue in Latin (a big “thank you” to footnote translations).

As Stephen matures, he stumbles into several epiphanies that guide him towards who he wants to be as an artist. This is another quality of Joyce’s writing: the sudden epiphanies that emerge in everyday life. In Chapter 4, Stephen is in quiet search of beauty, of his motivation to be an artist. At the end of the chapter, we get this excerpt (emphasis mine):

In Chapter 5, Stephen labors over philosophies of aesthetic beauty, motivated in part by this epiphanic moment. Of course, there is beauty to be found in most of Joyce’s sentences. Here are some of my favorites:

• He pressed his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street. Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life.
• He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
• He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.
• He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children: and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it.

In each of these sentences, a strange tension pulls the reader forward, oscillating between mundanity and beauty, and finding a thousand quiet epiphanies along the way.

Finally, what are some things that we can learn from this as fiction writers? Here are a few thoughts:

• It is inevitable that we insert our own selves and personalities into our writing. Some novelists try to resist this, but they shouldn’t, as it’s our own uniqueness that makes our stories valuable.
• Prose style can accomplish valuable work in a story. By controlling the mood, pacing, tone, and musicality of language, we can convey to our readers exactly what we want them to feel without ever stating the emotion.
• Writing should be an act of discovery. If you already know the message of your work, your writing will fall flat. Allow yourself to experiment, to be surprised, and to have epiphanies.

For more on the topic of prose style, check out our article: What is Style in Writing?

Craft Perspective: “Twisting My Life Into a Story Sacrificed My Ability to Live It” by Jessica L Pavia

Read it here, in Electric Lit.

In this lovely essay about orchids and autobiography, Pavia gets into the psychology of writing one’s life on the page. What happens when we turn our narratives into literature, whether memoir or fiction? What are the challenges? How can we do this successfully?

Pavia identifies a mindset that any writer will recognize intimately if they’ve been at their craft for a while:

I’ve already begun to recognize this pattern in myself. Where my decision-making process for attending an event, confronting old friends—really anything—has been reduced to asking myself: “Would I be able to write about this?” Often, it feels like lying. Like falsifying the impulse behind memoir and art. My end goal has switched from gaining a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me to calculating how much I can produce, publish, craft.

This is a feeling I know all too well. Since I’ve decided to call myself a professional writer, I’ve found the need to mine my life, my experiences, and perhaps even others’ experiences for stories. How can I turn this into a poem? Where does it belong in a novel? What meaning can I extract from this simple event, and how can I amplify that meaning for readers?

I’ve been writing long enough now to know that this habit isn’t useful. When I look for meaning in something, particularly before I’ve even written it, I end up inventing something that isn’t true to life or surprising in any way. Perhaps this constant search for stories comes from our culture’s incessant need for more content, more literature, more work; perhaps I’m also trying to validate myself as a professional writer, because the more publication credits I have, the more confidently I can say that this is my calling.

As further evidence that this isn’t a healthy writing habit, Pavia writes it best:

My first essays were purer. I didn’t know what they were going to become as I wrote them: the decaying deer carcass I found in the woods; the extra pigmentation that made itself at home on my face; my need for validation that morphed into inappropriate bonds with English teachers. I lived my experiences as they happened, and only later twisted them into something charged. Those stories feel more real and palpable than anything I’ve since forced into existence. They have heart and complexity, overlapping themes and invisible threads that I later wrangled apart and put back together again. That doesn’t happen when you decide what a story will become before it happens.

This mental habit doesn’t produce good work. Acknowledging that is easy; unlearning it is much harder. Pavia asks an important question: “What if I stopped fabricating intention and metaphor where there is neither?”

I think Joyce did this successfully. He might fabricate, as all good storytellers do, and his metaphors and images can come off as dramatic, overly-heightened. Even so, they’re true to his experiences. The writing is high when his feelings are high; existential when his questions are existential; childish when the protagonist is literally a child. Whether your writing is autobiographical or entirely distinct from your life, an experience can be just an experience; a doorway into new work; a question, not an answer.

Here are some other thoughts on the topic:

• Writing Autobiographical Fiction
• Fiction vs. Nonfiction
• Experimenting in Fiction
• On Living the Questions (an article for poets, but certainly relevant to these topics within fiction writing)