ilchinealach reviewed Stephen Hero by James Joyce
Review of 'Stephen Hero' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
conflicted about this! on the one hand, its very existence is an act of Joyce-idolatry. by whatever measure you use it is obviously an earlier draft of Portrait, written at a stage when he wasn't quite hitting the formal and stylistic irony as well as he later did
on the other, there's loads of stuff here that i always wish Joyce dealt with in his other works. we see far far more in the way of the revolutionary generation then taking shape (albeit its more middle-class adherents) in the form of the Gaelic League, the GAA as well as serious considerations of what revolutionary politics are and should be. Joyce's representation of this milieu is obviously not a favourable one and in many ways seems to shaped what irish intellectual culture more broadly would come to regard this generation as, i.e. racist against the English, as opposed to anti-imperialist. there …
conflicted about this! on the one hand, its very existence is an act of Joyce-idolatry. by whatever measure you use it is obviously an earlier draft of Portrait, written at a stage when he wasn't quite hitting the formal and stylistic irony as well as he later did
on the other, there's loads of stuff here that i always wish Joyce dealt with in his other works. we see far far more in the way of the revolutionary generation then taking shape (albeit its more middle-class adherents) in the form of the Gaelic League, the GAA as well as serious considerations of what revolutionary politics are and should be. Joyce's representation of this milieu is obviously not a favourable one and in many ways seems to shaped what irish intellectual culture more broadly would come to regard this generation as, i.e. racist against the English, as opposed to anti-imperialist. there are some moments in which Joyce's cynicism seems to be justified, there are indications that this cohort will merely replace the English as a ruling class, there's a reference to a Gaelic Leaguer who is a large landlord in one of Dublin's brothel districts, but these are always conveyed in the context of a broader Nietzschean objection to politics as a sphere of action at all, which would be hilarious if it wasn't in earnest
even though it is a fragmentary work that was later significantly improved upon, its still in many ways head and shoulders above a lot of irish novels, both then and now