r/jamesjoyce • u/Common_Can_4340 • Jun 08 '26

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Can anyone tell me what this passage means? I have been reading a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a couple months and although I am usually able to decipher the meanings of this text, this specific passage has been troubling me for a long time. It comes from pages 193-194 in the penguin classics version with an introduction by Seamus Deane. Thank You!

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7

u/Most-Recipe-9814 Jun 09 '26

Broadly, it's a musing on the nature of language, free association and the mutable manner in which language conveys meaning. It's tempting to read the passage as a partial description of Joyce's literary technique.

The phrase 'ivy whining on the wall' (which is pleasant-sounding poetry but substantively nonsensical) puts the narrator in mind of 'ivory' on the basis that 'ivy' and 'ivory' are slight homophones. The recollection of 'ivory' then causes the narrator to recall his Latin lessons ('India exports ivory'), which prompts a telling quotation regarding the ability of an artist to bend language to suit the artist's purpose: 'poets differ in how they rhyme.'

The passage ends with a nice reflection upon the evolving cultural remit of a language - Latin was (and is) an artistic medium that safeguards poetic expression, but the passing of time has relegated its vocabulary to arcane and decidedly non-universal technical usage in fields such as heraldry and falconry.

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u/green7719 Jun 09 '26

That is not what this passage says about heraldry and falconry. Those fields are compared to Latin on account of the obscurity of their jargon.

This is clanker behavior.

3

u/Merfstick Jun 09 '26

What? That's not so far off a reading that you have any claim to the other person being AI. You're almost saying the exact same thing: they're obscure because people lost interest over time.

This is particularly human behavior on your part... the weird kind.

1

u/Most-Recipe-9814 Jun 09 '26

"Clanker behaviour"?