Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe: Political Geography in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

At this early stage of A Portrait, Stephen Dedalus stands as a painfully sympathetic figure. He feels homesick; he is confused about his geography lesson; and he has just been shoved into a sewer ditch. His attempt to locate his place in relation to the universe causes him further confusion and gives him a headache. Even into his adulthood, the issue of Stephen's rightful place remains unresolved; his eventual goal of exile only suggests where it is not. This ongoing drama of place and displacement makes it easy to bypass the peculiarities of Stephen's schoolboy list in favor of his adult meditations on language, religion, and art. As a result, the crucial error in his flyleaf inscription remains unacknowledged: Stephen skips from Ireland to Europe, excluding The United Kingdom as an incorporating term. He thus unwittingly produces a text that rends a gaping hole in the fabric of British colonial history. Despite such narrative interventions, it is still tacitly acknowledged that the concerns of Joyce's A Portrait are primarily aesthetic rather than political, as its transformation from the more socially conversant Stephen Hero to its compressed final form suggests. While more recent attention to Joyce from a postcolonial studies perspective has helped debunk the legend