Early Forms: Giacomo Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Reading James Joyce’s earlier work can help us understand how his experiments in different literary forms fed his literary development, in terms of both themes and techniques he would expand upon in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Yet, we should be wary of treating these supposedly ‘minor’ works as mere preludes to the ‘major’ later masterpieces. As the Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey writes:

‘The shorter works are most fruitfully approached not only as half-realized versions of Joyce’s more ambitious productions, but also as stilled frames in an ongoing process of reading and writing, a process that he parodied, practised and refined throughout a lifetime of experimentation with language.’

Before publishing Ulysses in 1922, Joyce published shorter fiction that can be read in a direct evolutionary line with his later novels. However, his surprisingly diverse early work also includes poetry, drama, journalism, nonfiction, and experimental work that defies easy labels. In this short essay, I’ll consider two examples from his early period – the very different versions that led to Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the ‘stilled frame’ of Joyce’s creative process captured in Giacomo Joyce, a lesser known work discovered and published after his death.

By the time A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published as a book in 1916, it had gone through several false starts. The published novel tells the coming-of-age story of Stephen Dedalus, in five long chapters covering childhood, school, first loves, friendships, university, and existential and emotional crises along the way. In the next unit’s focus on autobiographical interpretations, I’ll consider the similarities between Joyce and his protagonist Stephen. For now, let’s focus on Portrait’s unusual gestation.

In 1904, Joyce composed a short essay entitled, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, which was rejected by a Dublin literary journal. In dense philosophical prose, it offers a self-portrait of Joyce at 22, grappling with artistic and spiritual dilemmas that would continue throughout his work. When the essay was rejected, Joyce used the same notebook to sketch out a novel called Stephen Hero, originally planned in twenty-five chapters. In 1907, he completely reimagined this project, shifting from Stephen Hero’s more conventional realism to the bolder exploration of Stephen’s developing consciousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Over the next decade, Joyce struggled to finish and publish this version – at one point throwing the whole manuscript into a fire in frustration, when it was thankfully saved by his sister. Finally, after sending the first chapter to Ezra Pound in 1914, Pound shepherded Portrait towards publication, printing 25 instalments from it in his magazine The Egoist, before the novel’s US edition in 1916 and UK edition in 1917, with the Egoist Press. From the unpublished essay and the abandoned Stephen Hero (both of which were made available after Joyce’s death) to the serialised and book versions, Joyce’s first novel is not only a portrait of Stephen’s youth but a snapshot of Joyce’s messy development.

The work known as Giacomo Joyce offers another fascinating glimpse of Joyce’s writerly evolution. When Joyce and his family left Trieste in 1915, among papers left with his brother, Stanislaus, there was a blue notebook with the Italian version of the author’s name scribbled on its cover. Inside, there were eight pages containing fifty short prose fragments, which appeared to have been written sometime between 1911 and 1914. There is no evidence that Joyce ever had any interest in publishing Giacomo Joyce; and it seems clear he saw it as fodder for other work, repurposing material word-for-word in Portrait, Ulysses, and elsewhere. Yet, its pivotal position within his oeuvre – written while he was finishing Portrait and beginning work on Ulysses – made it an important document when rediscovered by Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann and finally published in 1968. Read on its own terms, Giacomo Joyce resists easy classification.

Some scholars have read it as a piece of experimental short fiction, telling the loose story of a man walking around Trieste, reflecting on the city’s sights and sensations while half-heartedly pursuing a young woman he has been tutoring in English. Others have been tempted to read it as an autobiographical account of Joyce’s infatuation with his student Amalia Popper. Others read it as a kind of prose poetry, recording loose impressions and thoughts in a way we could compare with the ‘epiphanies’ he wrote between 1901 and 1904. Giacomo’s ambiguous status is one of its main attractions, I would argue, and central to its meaning from the opening question: ‘Who?’ Who is asking this, we might ask. Who wrote ‘Giacomo Joyce’ on this lost notebook (definitely not in Joyce’s handwriting)? Who is the intended reader of a text preserved by chance?

The messiness of Joyce’s early career contrasts with writers who have the good fortune to publish a successful first novel followed by a string of others. His experiments with form and struggle to publish offer a window into the historical dynamics around modernist literature, and the evolution of texts like A Portrait of the Artist or Giacomo Joyce give us a unique insight into the creative process of an author too often reduced to the difficult reputation of Ulysses or the Wake.