The Curve of an Emotion: The Years of the Portrait, 1904–1914

Abstract

Joyce began the earliest versions of what was ultimately to become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man even before the first of the Dubliners stories. He wrote a sketch, or story, which Stanislaus suggested he call ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, in one day, 7 January 1904, after he heard that a new journal was being started, called Dana. He showed it to one of the editors, W. K. Magee (also called ‘John Eglinton’, as in Ulysses) one evening at the National Library; Magee records that he read it in Joyce’s presence and then ‘handed it back to him with the timid observation that I did not care to publish what was to myself incomprehensible’ (Workshop 200). The sketch is indeed dense, and one could be forgiven for feeling that not much was lost to the world of literature when Magee turned it down (aside from Magee’s chance to publish the future Great Writer); in fact the rejection gave Joyce the impetus to pursue his subject — himself — at length, in an autobiographical novel. He began, Stanislaus reports in his diary, ‘half in anger, to show that in writing about himself he has a subject of more interest than their aimless discussion’. Again, it was Stanislaus who supplied his brother with his working title: Stephen Hero (Diary 12), after the unlikely name of its protagonist, Stephen Daedalus.

… the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.… [A] portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.

‘A Portrait of the Artist’¹