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By Root 1530 0

in a style of scrupulous meanness.” In writing Portrait, on the other hand—his troubles with publishers notwithstanding—Joyce’s main hurdles were personal and artistic, not public. In the 1904 essay, he writes with dissatisfaction about the conventions of autobiography, in which the “features of infancy” are presented only in their “iron, memorial aspect”: Youth is narrated only from the hindsight of maturity, and with a false confidence that betrays the real uncertainty of those early years. Joyce states as a goal—though one he is unable satisfactorily to accomplish in the early essay—an autobiographical style that would present the past as “a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.” The essay’s opening, manifesto-like paragraph concludes with the statement that for those exceptional individuals for whom an autobiography is a worthwhile undertaking, “a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.”

Joyce thus sought to forge (a word that plays an interesting role in Portrait, as we’ll see) a style of shifting emphases and perspectives, drawing its imagery and vocabulary from different sources during dif ferent periods of his protagonist’s life—a technique we might today, in light of the nearly simultaneous work in narrative technique being carried out in England by writers like Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, call “impressionism.” Joyce’s “Portrait” essay is certainly impressionistic—nearly to the point of incomprehensibility; his impressionism in presentation is combined with a preciosity of style, rendering the resultant text narrowly self-involved. Over the years of its genesis, however—and because of, not merely in spite of, its trials and persecutions—this first “Portrait” became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, achieving a nearly perfect accommodation of style to mood and thought—“the curve of an emotion,” precisely. In the much-discussed 1997 Random House poll that named Joyce’s Ulysses the number-one novel of the twentieth century, Portrait came in a close third, behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; this novel that nearly arrived stillborn has now been confirmed as a twentieth-century classic and has been installed as a mainstay of high-school and college curricula in English-speaking countries around the world.

Though written very nearly in tandem, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have very different agendas, and represent very different reading experiences, as well. We might, for purposes of illustration, think of Joyce’s first two works of fiction as representing critiques of two rather different literary genres: Dubliners, a critique of the short story as Joyce had inherited it, in which complicated psychological struggles are simplified and resolved in the course of three thousand words; and Portrait, a critique of the deeply romantic legacy of the Bildungsroman (novel of education and maturation) and its close relative the Kunstlerroman (which focuses on the development of the artist), forms that perpetuated a notion of heroism wholly unsuited to the realities of life and art in the twentieth century.

If early readers and critics of Dubliners were taken aback by Joyce’s unflinching reportage of the sordid details of modern urban life, contemporary readers are more often struck by the stories’ very abrupt endings : Time and again they seem merely to stop, dead in their tracks, rather than properly ending. The first three stories, in this regard, are representative. “The Sisters” ends while one of the eponymous sisters is in mid-conversation, mid-sentence: “So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him.... The ellipsis that closes the story is just one of twenty sets in this very elliptical three-thousand-word story, in which meaning seems to lie just behind the words, in between the words, peeking out at us but ultimately eluding us. At the close of the second story, “An Encounter,” our narrator calls for help to his