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time the reality of experience” [p. 225]), or who doesn’t fervently hope that Eveline Hill will get on that ship with Frank, hasn’t truly engaged these texts in the spirit with which they were written. Regarding his most famous protagonist, the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Madame Bovary, c‘est moi”: Flaubert held himself neither superior to, nor different in kind from, his deeply flawed character. And like Flaubert, the reader of Dubliners and Portrait must be able to say, when she has come to the end: “Gabriel Conroy, c’est moi,” and “Stephen Dedalus, c’est moi.” For in the letter quoted above, Joyce promises not (as Shakespeare does, in Hamlet) to “hold ... the mirror up to nature”—but instead, much more menacingly, he holds the mirror up before his readers, that they might “[have] one good look at themselves in [his] nicely polished looking-glass.”

Portrait, in other words, moves the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman into the twentieth century, although in the process it drags along with it a resolutely nineteenth-century protagonist. In one of his last diary entries Stephen attempts to outdo his fellow countryman and poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats, who had referred to himself as one of Ireland’s “last romantics,” expresses the desire through his character Michael Robartes to “press / My heart upon the loveliness / That has long faded from the world” (W. B. Yeats, “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” The Wind Among the Reeds, New York: J. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1899); with even more romantic hunger than Robartes’s nostalgic longing betrays, Stephen expresses his desire “to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world” (p. 224). While Joyce does not allow the narrative of Portrait to level any explicit criticism at Stephen, other characters are free to do so, and seeing the great gulf opened up between Joyce’s prose and Stephen’s poetry, we might sympathize with Lynch’s closing comment on Stephen’s discourse on aesthetic philosophy: “—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable God forsaken island?” (p. 191). What, indeed?

One point upon which these two books agree is the absolutely fundamental role that language plays in our being-in-the-world; in both Dubliners and Portrait, Joyce forces us to pay careful attention to the language in which we cast our dreams, and to which we perforce bend our realities. Here again Joyce anticipates new discoveries made in the sciences, in this case the human science of linguistics. The idea, called in one of its early formulations the “Whorfian hypothesis,” is that we never use language without language at the same time using us: Language is not merely descriptive of, but in fact constitutive of, what we know as “reality.” Words, Joyce realized early on, always drag along with them the history of their prior associations and usages; words, in one sense, are never purely aesthetic objects, “certain good” in Yeats’s phrase, but are always already political objects. Stephen recognizes this, if inchoately, when he muses on the English-born dean of studies’ condescending attention to Stephen’s use of the word “tundish”:

—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (p. 167).

While Stephen may desire to press in his arms “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world,” there is an awareness at the textual level, if not perhaps at a conscious level, for Stephen, that he has not “made or accepted” the words of any human tongue, but must instead accept them at second hand. And this hand-me-down language, Stephen can’t help but notice from the very earliest pages of the novel, is always somewhat shopworn. Stephen’s vision