ABSTRACT
It might not be true for other readers, but for me the going getsdistinctly tough as we cross over from Dubliners to A Portrait. In part this is to do with making sense of a novel that keeps shifting focus, a novel that at one and the same time invites and resists interpretation. In part it’s to do with figuring out the relationship between the main protagonist Stephen Dedalus and the author James Joyce. In part it stems from our having to invoke often abstract ideas that the novel itself is exploring, such as child language acquisition and development, theological questions involving the soul and damnation, the theory of beauty as propounded by St Thomas Aquinas, and the idea of writing and exile from the self. I try not to shrink from confronting such difficulty here but, as before, I tend to rely on the concept of delay in the hope that this will intrigue or help the reader. I get delayed in the first part of this chapter on approach work to the novel, whether as context or initial exposition, and some of this is fairly abstract, but the movement of the chapter is towards seeing A Portrait as an extraordinary novel about language. Let me say at the outset, however, that Joyce, I think, had to write his way through this autobiographical phase before he could come upon a different kind of terrain, but if we want to understand Bloom in Ulysses we have first to understand Stephen in A Portrait.
