Taking Note

By accident have read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man again over the last couple of days. Originally I'd intended merely to check some of the notes in the edition we're using next year to teach the novel. I don't think I've ever read an edition before with notes - my most recent readings have been from the old Penguin Portable Joyce edited by Harry Levin - and whilst I don't think they are all that necessary for getting the gist of the text, they did add something to the texture of the novel for me. But the truth is that it doesn't take much to seduce me into any reading of the greatest of the Moderns, and I was more than happy to go from beginning to end.

I always seem to see something new when reading Portrait. This time round Stephen's observation of the birds flying in Chapter 5 and his semi-comic attempts to divine his future from them jumped out at me as it has never done before - especially his sense of uncertainty about that future. In fact, amongst the various 'nets' that Joyce (or Stephen, I suppose) avoids we might add a false sense of closure. Young men are notoriously unfinished, and this one had yet to meet his Nora and bloom.