Ecce Auctor: Self-Creation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

As its title indicates, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is something of a self-reflexive affair, authorial navel gazing as it were. By evoking a formula familiar to portraiture, this title indicates that its creator will be presented an inchoate state. The supplementary “as a Young Man”—absent from the title of Joyce’s original 1904 essay¹ —emphasizes the distance and dissonance between the character presented and the artist, whilst still acknowledging some ambiguous measure of potential consonance. In this way, the novel narrates the possibility of its own genesis. This is, of course, the generic condition of autobiography (which is not to say that A Portrait is an autobiography, at least not in a traditional sense), since all autobiographies (including fictional ones), in their own individual ways, propose to directly or indirectly narrate the story of how their authors came to write them.² Indeed, Paul Valéry goes one step beyond with the claim that “there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.”³