tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post117095030888125249..comments2024-02-23T03:28:33.435-05:00Comments on Culture Industry: DitherMark Scrogginshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1171377157930591502007-02-13T09:32:00.000-05:002007-02-13T09:32:00.000-05:00Wasn't it Hugh Kenner, "The Portrait in Perspectiv...Wasn't it Hugh Kenner, "The Portrait in Perspective," who first advanced the claim that Stephen is not to be taken all that seriously, especially as an artist? And isn't part of the problem how we relate the depiction of Stephen in Ulysses to that in Portrait. Is it proper to judge a character in one book by his actions in another, later work? Besides, there is the whole problem of whether irony inheres in a text or whether it is brought to the text by the reader. (On which topic, see S Fish, "Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1171037956119423422007-02-09T11:19:00.000-05:002007-02-09T11:19:00.000-05:00Fellow Bourgeois Poet,When I first read Portrait, ...Fellow Bourgeois Poet,<BR/><BR/>When I first read Portrait, I totally identified with Stephen Dedalus (I was an artsy provincial with unwarranted ego problemsm so what else could you expect, really?). But since then I've come to read him with some distance, especially in that final section you mention, where we read his diary. There, we finally seeStephen become, full-on, the subject as well as the object of narration: but he's kind of an asinine narrator, and you can question his reliability. Remember how he recounts the conversation with Cranly (was it Cranly? One of his college peeps, anyway...)? He talks about being suave, while his buddy "had his grand manner on." Are we to take this at face value? And then there's the juxtaposition of high and low, all the packing-of-luggage business combined with his dreams of becoming the voice of his people, which undermines our sense of heroism by breaking with the decorum of the heroic convention (Achilles never has to pack socks or Q-Tips). So I read Stephen with a bit of distance. He's kind of a pimply Icarus, I think -- or more that than he is an ascending angel of poetry.<BR/><BR/>You know how the language of narration tends to mimic Stephen's stage of development? Baby talk at the start, some simple declaratives when he's a schoolboy, and all that -- "free indirect discourse," as the narratologists used to say? I think that gives us a clue as to how to read the book: we can watch how Stephen talks (and how the narrator talks about him) and think of what that says about Stephen's maturity and the like, and do so all the way through the book. I mean, when he's a university student Stephen is kind of insufferably pretentious (if at times witty) -- his explanation of his aesthetics is needlessly complex, in the manner, say, or an American grad student circa 1990 talking Derrida.<BR/><BR/>I guess that's a three-coffees-and-in-a-hurry way of saying I've got a strong sense that there are lots of textual cues urging us to distance ourselves from Stephen. Not that I caught those cues when I was 18, and certain I was about to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of the Fort Richmond Collegiate graduating class of 1986...<BR/><BR/>BobArchambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.com