Fabricated Ghosts: A Metahistorical Reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Abstract Joyce had the inspiration for a short story called “Ulysses” in Rome in 1906 but was unable to get “any forrader than the title,” as he explained to his brother (Letters 11209). After returning to Trieste, he finished “The Dead,” another story he had conceived in Rome, in September 1907, and quickly set about rewriting the sprawling manuscript of Stephen Hero in the condensed five-chapter format he was to call A Portrait of the Artist asa Young Man. After many frustrations and interruptions he finished the novel in 1913-14.1 “Ulysses,” and the experiences in Trieste and Rome that had prepared Joyce for writing it, had to be set aside while the long-gestating bildungsroman struggled toward completion, a work whose content, though not its form, had taken conceptual shape by 1904. While writing Ulysses, Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that he was losing interest in Stephen Dedalus because the young man, in contrast to the protean Leopold Bloom and the expanding text of Ulysses itself, had acquired a shape that could not be changed.2 But Stephen may have begun to be a burden to Joyce almost as early as 1904, when he embarked on his autobiographi­cal novel; ousting all other creative and historical possibilities, Stephen became part ofJ oyce ‘s personal nightmare of history, a juvenile alter ego persisting as a negative afterimage, a goad to writing that was also a clog on experimental impulse.