James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading by David Pierce

Abstract

Reviewed by: James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading by David Pierce Greg Winston (bio) James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading, by David Pierce . Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019. xiv + 209 pp. £40.99 cloth, £19.99 paper, £15.00 ebook. The singular emphasis in the subtitle to David Pierce's volume belies its structure and rationale: in fact, James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading comprises many readings of Joyce's novel, including intellectual influences, literary themes, and formal devices. Overall, its chapters bear the stamp of a thoughtful teacher and delighted reader intent on sharing his well of scholarly knowledge and pedagogical experience. Pierce opens with Virginia Woolf's quotation stressing readers' self-reliance: "The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." 1 If such counsel would seem to undermine a critical project, here, it introduces readers to Pierce's use of touchstones to situate Joyce amidst modernist contemporaries and, more frequently, nineteenth-century predecessors, especially Ernest Renan, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. The introduction includes "First Encounters," an honest reflection of Pierce's initial frustration with A Portrait: "What is going on I would ask myself. Out of hearing of anyone around, I would mutter Help! Is there something wrong with me that I am struggling so badly?" (3). Such early agonies presumably led to confident footholds; if the rest of New Reading is an indication, these were primarily found in late Victorian aesthetics, with additional grounding in French realism [End Page 182] and Russian formalism. A subsequent section provides an overview of A Portrait's chapters 2-5 that emphasizes ideas of narrative cohesion, history, and the making of the artist, before Pierce asserts three principal themes he sees in A Portrait : the writing process, the Icarus/Dedalus myth, and freedom. This study places history and culture second behind intellectual influence and literary technique. While Pierce might occasionally bring facts of Dublin geography or Irish history to bear on his reading, his interpretations develop mostly apart from—and to a degree push back against—the turn in recent decades towards postcolonial and historical assessments of Joyce's work. Chapter 2, "The Life and Times of James Joyce" (37-66), is not a sustained historical argument, but rather a general literary timeline of Joyce's life, one that extends, tellingly, fourteen years beyond Joyce's own death to that of his brother Stanislaus in 1955. Indeed, Pierce often approaches A Portrait via the perspective of Stanislaus's writings as well as Richard Ellmann's biography. 2 His timeline typically blends Joyce's biography with Irish and European political history, occasionally inserting a layer of opinion, as in the entry for 1953: "Beckett's En attendant Godot is given its first performance in Paris, followed in 1955 by Waiting for Godot in London. Without Joyce and Beckett, the Irish writers who found a home in Paris, modern literature would be unimaginable" (65). Chapter 3 makes the case for reading A Portrait as a literary descendant of the aesthetic movement, with a focus on Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel À rebours, symbolism, and Oscar Wilde. 3 Pierce asserts these influential threads in what reads like a thesis statement for the chapter, if not a pitch for the entire book: "The aim is to better appreciate the nineteenth-century literary contexts behind Joyce's novel. Joyce's rebelliousness is both home-grown and part of a European movement, and it [sic] worth spending time on how Joyce learned his trade from others both in Britain and in continental Europe" (70-71). Pierce foregrounds British and Continental aestheticism rather than Irish nationalism. For those accustomed to seeing the novel with a postcolonial lens, this emphasis might seem to overlook some of A Portrait's social and historical realities. At the same time, it signals an interesting, and overlooked, critical direction—one that can shine fresh light on some of the ratiocination and debate of the university scenes. Chapter 4 does bring A Portrait into juxtaposition with the Irish cultural revival through its comparison with W. B...