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prosecute him for pornography. In 1911, still quarrelling with
Roberts, in a moment of rage, despair and family-oriented histri-
onics, he even threw the uncompleted work into the fire, but Eileen
fished it out. Joyce rewarded her with three bars of soap and a new
pair of mittens. It was only after Pound got in touch that he felt
encouraged to finish the book. Pound arranged for it to be published
in instalments, in a new and unusual London review, the Egoist, of
which he was effectively literary editor. Joyce seems to have finished
the book at more or less exactly the time he left Trieste.
What should we make of this history of composition? Joyce
might conceivably not have finished A Portrait at all. There was
nothing foreordained about his progress to canonization as a
supreme modern genius. He was by no means sure that he was
ever going to find a publisher for his work. Throughout the Trieste
years, whilst convinced of his gifts, he was often haunted by a fear
of possible failure, and made various plans for the future which
might very well have meant giving up writing altogether. Yet, at
the same time, telling the story of his own life obviously very much
mattered to him, enough for him to persevere. This particular
drive had nothing to do with egoism or self-display. He needed to
understand the circumstances that had made him what he was. For
understanding them also involved a recognition of how they might
have been different, how similar circumstances might be countered
or changed. This recognition meant grasping the specific character
of the historical forces that had been formative for him. In other
words, it meant grasping their historicity. Joyce had a preternatur-
ally acute sense of historicity. People and cultures obsessively
construct patterns to persuade themselves of the enduring same-
ness of things. Irish colonial society made Joyce quite remarkably
disinclined to believe that such patterns had any binding force.
His sense of historicity is part of what made him one of the great
modern experimenters. It also enabled him, in Ulysses, to write
the most historically precise novel that has ever been written.
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The strange, often bleakly evocative novel that is A Portrait took
shape on the shores of the Mediterranean. A sense of detachment
is intrinsic to it. This is sometimes mistaken for the detachment of
the social critic or moralist. In fact, it is more like the detachment
of the vivisectionist, a term which Joyce used to proclaim the scien-
tific modernity of his work. He chose the word with particular care.
Like the anatomist, the vivisectionist is skilled in cutting up bodies.
He or she is an expert on the structure of the body, its parts and
their functions. But, unlike anatomy, vivisection is carried out on a
living organism, an organism, in principle, still capable of growth.
In A Portrait, Joyce became the vivisectionist of his own soul.
A Portrait is a late example of the nineteenth-century tradition
of the European Bildungsroman, the novel concerned with the
development and formation of a young man. Exceptionally, how-
ever, the young man in question grows up in a culture that is both
European and colonial. Three kinds of personal development are
at stake in A Portrait: first, Bildung itself, the official formation of a
young man in a particular stratum of colonial society. Joyce shows
us very clearly how far the two imperial masters are responsible for
this formation. Bildung takes place in specific institutions, family,
school, university, church. It is also a product of cultural institu-
tions, literature, music and so on. For Joyce, of course, Bildung is
crucially a question of language, discourse, habits of thought that
are verbal habits, too. Second, there is the opposite of Bildung,
what Thomas Mann wryly called Entbildung, the coming apart or
dismantling of formations. Mann himself took an almost lascivious
delight in watching the German bourgeois psyche crumble, as in
the case of Aschenbach in Venice. Joyce s strategy was different.
For Joyce, a novelist of a colonial society little more than a decade
from independence, Entbildung also implies counter-formation.
Counter-formation comes about as a result of counter-discourses
(rebellious, anti-colonial, anti-clerical etc.). A Portrait handles the
relationship between Bildung, Entbildung and counter-formation
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with immense subtlety and an extraordinary awareness of hidden
ironies. Here we see the Joyce of the Triestine writings as a novelist,
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