I’ve been hearing a milestone of modernist prose, if my memory of literary labels doesn’t fail me. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a Socratic tango in which Lust and Guilt swoop partnering in protracted turns about the dance floors of Stephen Daedalus’s excitable young mind. Extended rants about the damnable carnality of dirty boys obsessed with virgins make you want to run screaming from every church you pass. Colin Farrell voices all of it wickedly on Audible, as a good actor can.

At times the reader experiences the stream of consciousness by portage, hoisting canoe on shoulder and trudging past roiled, gurgling waters. They would’ve had him spinning directionless had he tried to paddle them. He puts into the river again when it has a narrative flow that may carry him to his longed for destination, indeed, to any destination. 

Isn’t modernism where most of what goes on is in the character’s head, faithfully interrupted by pointillistic sensory and ambient detail? Snatches of dialogue ensue? A person chews a fig for forty pages, picking his teeth with a match at intervals? Examines a picked seed before flicking it away? The itinerant personae speak in tongues, deal one another rhetorical blows hugger mugger, smack each other colorfully about the chops? The verbal sparring and inflamed revery is the action, not so? Framed by the walking, smelling and staring?

Libido, license, repression, weightlessness, torment, intellect, beauty and filth. Most of all, words! Torrents of them.

I thrilled near the climax to hear the Joycean “silence, exile and cunning” phrase. It has clung to me as a meaty mantra. The ending crafted by this artificer, voluble poet who writes in page breaks, is a wonderful beginning, the more so for seeming remote at times — the ending, I mean, not the poet. He’s in the room and then some. 

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