For Monday, you will need to have read the first 100 or so pages of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Let's read up through the line "I didn't tell him about his underpants" on page 103. Doyle does something in this novel that other writers have tried to do but very few have pulled off authentically: he writes in the voice of a child. This is a perspective we've talked about a lot this semester but have not encountered in the literature. Paddy Clarke, age 10, is one of the most intriguing narrators in contemporary Irish fiction. Doyle won the Booker prize for this novel (which is more or less the U.K./Ireland equivalent of the Pulitzer), and I think you will quickly see why. It's a gem.
I have to say paddy clarke has been an interesting read so far. I've enjoyed it. it was a little bit harder for me to get into at first bc the voice and style is so different. but once i did i started enjoying it more. i think this is one funny crazy kid who comes from a bit of a dysfunctional family. but most of us do. but he seems really bright and you can sense that he's really trying to make sense of things and get a grip on what's happening in not just his family, but with his country as well. it will be interesting to see how his life turns out and what new perceptions he gains.
ReplyDeleteI know we are pretty much done with the semester, but I was reading a little from Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist, and I think I found a little connection back to Paddy Clarke in it, which really excited me (you know the geeky thrill of an English major when different texts connect).
ReplyDeleteIn a portrait of an Artist, Stephan is shown to be very sensitive to his 5 senses as a boy "There was a night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was a smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy." Similarly Paddy explains "There was a smell of the church off the desks in the school...I could smell the same sell as you got off the seats in the church. I loved it. It spicy and the and like the ground under the tree. I licked the desk but it just tasted horrible" (61)
I think Joyce is explaining how the budding of an artist develops in his childhood, the sensitivity of his surroundings develop into a love of words. Stephan (Joyce's protagonist) seems appealed to nature of words, just like Paddy. Stephan thinks that "suck is a queer word" just as Paddy is empowered by the word vigor and is mystified by the word fuck.
I think what I like most about this connection, is that when I finished reading Paddy Clarke I couldn't help but anxiously ask myself, what is going to become of this kid? But now I think I know, Paddy is going to be an artist, a lover of senses and a writer of words.