David Pierce, James Joyce's Portrait: A New Reading (review)

Abstract

David Pierce, James Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019), xiii+209 pages Many who read and teach Irish literature will associate David Pierce with his expansive and inclusive 2000 anthology, Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century. His latest book, James Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading, attempts something different: to be a moderately sized, user-friendly interpretation of Joyce’s classic for twenty-first-century students. Neither a guide nor a commentary, it seeks to enrich a young person’s own reading of the Portrait, providing just enough context and study of parallel texts so that this generation may have a genuine and meaningful encounter with Joyce’s book. Those of us who regularly teach the Portrait share this book’s goal: we know well the challenges and the possibilities. Few of us, however, will have Pierce’s mastery of the subject and ability to judge what should (and should not) accompany a student’s first experience with the book; and for this, we teachers, along with general readers, are much indebted to him. His view of the Portrait is clear and convincing: it is a novel, not an autobiography nor a historical documentary, and its primary subject is writing. More specifically, it is about language and style. Characters matter, and so do settings, but these are secondary to perspective and theme. Pierce asserts that ‘A Portrait is a study in the relationship between narrative and discourse, how a story is told and what we readers make of such a story. It is a study in what was happening then and what it perhaps means to us now’ (8). There is plenty of room for readers here: they are co-creators of this text, not simply receivers or respondents, and they have much rewarding work to do. Pierce has always been interested in the ‘gap’: in his anthology, these were the voices of the dispossessed and the forms not previously regarded as canonical. In this book, he focuses on the internal gaps Joyce placed in the text, such as who or what is narrating certain passages, or the meanings of some important but vague words: ‘smugging’ or ‘soul’, for example. In these sections, Pierce supplies a broad range of ideas from respected Joyceans, and offers his own opinion; but he allows the reader to fill in the gaps, just as Joyce does. His Joyce is not the cold ironist of many twentieth-century critics, and he is definitely not the looming figure that John Banville sees crowding out successive Irish writers. Rather, Pierce’s Joyce resembles the one Seamus Heaney portrayed in ‘Station Island’: he is the friend of twenty-first-century readers and writers, who asks them to listen to the past and then strike their own note in the present. Many Studies • volume 109 • number 435 344 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews of my students agree with Pierce that ‘Joyce can be a surprisingly comforting figure, especially when it comes to getting through a difficult time’ (34). However, today’s readers cannot connect with the Portrait unless they grasp some central themes: freedom, pre-eminently, but also fathers and sons, religion, sexuality, memory, nationality, and so forth.To clarify and to contextualise them, Pierce’s third chapter presents Joyce’s notions alongside those of Yeats. He follows this with a chapter showing how the Portrait grew out of the aesthetic movement, taking cues from similar works produced by J K Huysmans, Walter Pater, George Moore, and Oscar Wilde. This is an important corrective, since the younger Joyce’s work was still in dialogue with writers of the 1880s and ‘90s, and with more than just Ibsen, Dante, and the exemplars Stephen Dedalus lists in the Portrait. Still, Pierce shows how Joyce also broke much new ground, in narration and especially in his focus on the earthly, the daily, and the habitual, that begins in the Portrait and comes to fruition in Ulysses. A real strength of the book is Pierce’s strict separation in his treatments of the text (Chapter 1) and the author (Chapter 2). His close reading of the Portrait’s first chapter is especially insightful. The timeline of Joyce’s life...