In my last post in the “Fantastic Paragraphs” series, I considered a paragraph from a novel, whose construction–and deviations from our expectations of what a paragraph should do–reveals a lot about the mind of the narrator. Here, I quote a paragraph that I credit with driving home to me the genius of James Joyce.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was the first Joyce book I read, and the one I have read the most. I have a chapter about it in my book, as well as a short article about it in James Joyce Quarterly. Though many people find it less charming than Dubliners and less humorous than Ulysses, I still love this novel. I also love to teach it. But on my first reading, I struggled through the first pages. To be honest, I barely understood anything. But when I reached the paragraph where the hero Stephen Dedalus, still a young boy at boarding school, lies in his bed in the dormroom and tries to imagine where the prefect goes to after putting him and the other boys to bed, I suddenly realized why James Joyce is so often considered one of the best stylists in English:

The prefect’s shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end? He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as carriagelamps? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironingroom above the staircase. It was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there but the hall was still dark. A figure came up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw their master’s face and cloak and knew that he had received his deathwound. But only the dark was where they looked: only dark silent air. Their master had received his deathwound on the battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

More than anything, it’s the repetition–reminiscent of a folksong–that gets me. “He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side” halfway through the paragraph is mirrored by “… his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.” I have never been able to account for the effect this repetition has on me, but it was profound and immediate. My marginal note in my copy of the novel is, for the last sentence of this paragraph, “best line in the novel.” It’s not just repetition, obviously. It’s a pretty typical example of one of Joyce’s favourite rhetorical figures: chiasmus, or crossing-over. Rather than repeating the same elements in the same order, Joyce repeats them like this: A B C D | D C B A. He does this all the time in his early fiction, but to me this paragraph’s last sentence is the most memorable instance in his writing.

Now it might sound like I’m not talking about a fantastic paragraph but, rather, a fantastic sentence. But I think this fantastic sentence, coming at the end of the paragraph, makes the whole paragraph so suitably strange and spooky, filled with the awe, fear and curiosity of a young boy at night in a strange place…