James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has largely escaped the attention of postcolonial criticism. In many ways, however, Stephen’s/Joyce’s life in the novel resembles the history of Ireland at the turn of the century. While the novel ...
James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has largely escaped the attention of postcolonial criticism. In many ways, however, Stephen’s/Joyce’s life in the novel resembles the history of Ireland at the turn of the century. While the novel deals with young Stephen’s pains and efforts as a colonized subject, it also allegorizes the story of a colonized nation, on whose shoulders the burden of decolonization and modernization is imposed. In this way, Stephen’s/Joyce’s personal story is deeply intertwined with the national story of Ireland as a colonized nation. And Stephen’s aspiration and maturation into an artist allegorize the process in which a colonized individual/nation negotiates his social/historical burden. Thus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also can be read as a "portrait of the colonized subject as a young man." In my study, I read the novel at least on two levels: first, as a Bildungsroman of Stephen Dedalus, who stands at the threshold of adulthood; second, as a Bildungsroman of the nation, Ireland, which is on the verge of independence and modernization. More importantly, since Stephen as an artist declares at the end of the novel that he will "forge the uncreated conscience of his race," the novel can be read also as a Bildungsroman of a new national discourse or historiography to speak for a postcolonial Ireland.
At the same time, since A Portrait, unlike regular Bildungsromane, traces Stephen's/Joyce's final rebuttal of colonial/national Bildung, it can be read as an anti-Bildungsroman. Again, since the text, unlike orthodox historiographies, records the contemporary Irish political/historical context in an alternative way, it can be read as an alternative, personalized historiography by which history's normative, homogenizing power can be disrupted.