Meanderings, upon the of completion of reading Joyce's "The Portrait of the Artiste as a young man"

1- Review of the Book
***1/2

"Stephen Dedalus is my name - Ireland is my Nation -

 Clongrowes is my dwelling place - and heaven, my

 expectation" - so wrote Fleming, in Stephen's book.

 I chose this verse as a point of initiation, since it mentions

 persons, places etc. on which the book is based.  The

 book is largely  the maturity of Stephen Dedalus from the time of
 his  late infancy ("when the Moo-cow which comes down along  the road met, baby tuckoo"), via his school days, and  University days to ideological maturity. In between we  are  shown how he is influenced by the ever present politics of  Ireland - the debate between religion and patriotism ; how  he shows a streak of independence, when he speaks up for  himself, when punished on an unjust account. We are shown   how the better times of the Dadeluses' turn to more harder ones, and how it effects  Stephen.  Possibly the best part of the book is Stephens' university days. There is  many  a debate in that part about what comprises beauty, about Nationalism, Religion, Heresy  etc. It appears that the book was written in an era that Ireland was trying to find herself  through a phase of soul-searching. Stephen appears to have been the "sore thumb" that  stuck up in a climate of speaking "Irish", patriotism, being partial to the church etc. The  following part is telling, as it reveals the frame of mind of  Stephen Dedalus ( thought   largely to be Joyce himself )  :

" --My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said.

They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am

going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

--For our freedom, said Davin.

--No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his

life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of

Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled

him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd

see you damned first."
(Joyce doesn't employ the use of inverted commas throughout the book)

At sixteen, Stephen falls prey to his carnal desires as he pursuits prostitutes. Then during a week or so of religious contemplation at his high school the priest's elaboration of hell, and the eternity in hell, appears to have awakened him from his slumber and sloth of carnal excesses. He confesses and becomes a youth in repentance.  Yet when the opportunity comes his way, he has matured enough to understand that Catholic Priesthood is not his aim in life, but a road along which he errs, corrects himself, betters himself with the ultimate aim of discovering himself, educating himself in the process.

All in all this is a book that has to be read, re-read and dwelt upon - preferably at 19 or 20, and not at 39. It has no plot what so ever, but the reader doesn't miss the lack of one. Not always an easy read, it is considered the most accessible of Joyce's work - kind of telling what kind of challenge Ulysis must be ( my brand new copy has been left untouched for the last 4-5 years ). To digress, I first tried to "read" it through an audio book ( I may have listened to it twice - some parts register, while others don't as is the case with our untamed ears). I was not quite satisfied with the outcome, complimented by the feeling that this book is philosophically and politically rich to warrant a closer reading. Hence a third reading through the e-reader. I feel that a book like this warrants at least two readings to appreciate it.

2- Our Hell and their Hell

Reading the description of hell found in the book, I couldn't help noticing the finer details described therein - about the fire without light, about the inability to remove the worm gnawing at the eye, the stench, the accounts given by various saints about hell etc. I couldn't help noticing that a creative and an imaginative mind has been at work in describing these details. There was a description of eternity too - how unfathomable it is - and how once damned, one has to spend an eternity in hell.

To quote certain extracts " --Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can,

 the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called

 into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a

strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost

souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house

is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by

His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty

of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the

gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the

great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their

awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles

thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a

blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they

are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

--They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives

forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian

furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the

fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns

eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark

flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are

heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the

plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague

alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we

give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone

but for all eternity?

--The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful

stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the

world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the

terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The

brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all

hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned

themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure

says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The

very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and

unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be

the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse

that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass

of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured

by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of

nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening

stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the

millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the

reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this,

and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

--But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical

torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the

greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow

creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and

you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God

for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to

help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another

quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant

sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according

as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that

human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations

to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which

burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for

ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire

destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is

the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property,

that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with

incredible intensity, it rages for ever."

 And this got me thinking about the various descriptions of hell as per our (Buddhist) tradition - let me be clear about one thing at onset - I do believe that there are other realms - realms with more comforts than that of the human world that of various devas, brahmas etc, and those that are  inferior to us. My question is whether these inferior ones in particular are as precise as they have been described in commentaries to the Thripitaka. In the book this ghastly description of hell makes the adolescent Stephen Dedalus, change his way of living his life for the sloth of carnal pleasures. Traditionally our villages to are said to be a lot who knows their 6 & 4 (හය - හතර දන්න උදවිය ). This knowledge and fear of the lesser worlds had kept our masses under a certain set of ethics.  As a recent phenomenon, modernism and education has got them questioning the existence of the them, but the same education has not made them live up to a minimum set of ethics that most of those in the developed world adhere to. Hence I feel that we have fallen between two stools - our traditional belief system had us being dismayed or shocked throughout seven neighbouring villages on the mere mention of a killing, raping etc. Now it has become almost an everyday occurrence and no one is shocked. Possibly the developed western countries, once in the mires of the dark ages have over the years realised that the social fabric is upheld by each and everyone following a minimum code of conduct - they appear to have not got bogged down in the belief that we (as an exception ) can get away, while the others will be accountable. And in Sri Lanka all of us believe that we are an exception - and we have folk tales which inform us as to what happens when each and everyone of us think of ourselves as being an exception, (ආඬි හත්දෙනාගේ කැඳ හැළිය ). And it got me thinking that maybe the knowledge of their 6 & 4 was a much more desirable form of limited knowledge than one which believes that we can get away with it, while the others cannot. This digress is the result of the description of hell I came across in this book, and my suspicion that these descriptive "hells" are the work of imaginative individuals added to the respective religions over centuries, be it in the Christian tradition or the Buddhist tradition. Again I stress that to me, other realms of beings outside of  humans/ animals are acceptable, but the rather far fetched , precisely descriptive ones which sound very hollow, and appear to have been devised to instill fear (and over the years have served their purpose ).

3- a digress into the review by H.G. Wells of Joyce's work.

It is my habit to skim through a review or two, upon completing especially difficult books,  and "The Portrait..." was no exception. It was then that I stumbled upon a review of this  book by H.G. Wells written in 1916. I will not dwell on the rather complimentary review,  but a certain "observation" of his.

He says thus " And a second thing of immense significance is the fact that everyone in

 this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in

 nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no

 discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable

 number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right

 with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any

 notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between

 North and South."

As a non-affected (in this context, but not impartial, for I think the Brits made the world   a lesser peaceful place to live in ) third party, I did not feel in anyway that Joyce inferred  "that the English are to be hated". The Irish are a people who appear to have 
been  rediscovering themselves during this phase - and the undertone of the overall 
book is  about whether Irish needs to be re-vitalized, the death of Parnell, Irish nationalism etc.

 And we have seen that Stephen Dadelus has been questioning whether he should he

 should pay for the past mistakes of his former countrymen, challenging the overall

trend  at that time. Hence this is the Irish talking about themselves - and to me, it appears we  have had an Englishman, by the name of Wells, whose sense of guilt has made 

him  discover "inter-linear" writings, which aren't visible to others. The Irish have been

 questioning themselves - true. Look at the sentiments of Dedalus about the English

 language - 

"--The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How

different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on

mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His

language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired

speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at

bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."

Hence it is clear that the loss of identity and language is causing the whole country to be on a soul searching exercise. The humility of this loss cannot be imagined by us. We of little Sri Lanka, although have succeeded in safeguarding their faith and language have been severely affected in our attitude towards modern life to such a degree, that a return to ourselves, if we've had natural evolution as a people, and not a forced one by three European invaders cannot even be imagined. It would take a resolution of committed, honest intellectuals, with a nationalistic orientation to set things right - or at least to set the ball rolling - and it doesn't appear to be imminent however hopeful we may wish to be. Thus the undertow is the mood of a nation robbed of it's roots - and cry of a people. The fact that Mr. Wells has read it as a collective hate towards his people appears to be such a revelation of guilty conscience, that I couldn't help being amused. Mr. Wells had offered to settle things for Ireland, and his countrymen of even the modern times haven't yet rid themselves of this bout of burden - alas! For an England without this burden, a country that doesn't offer unasked for help is what their former victims hope for most, even today.