'Terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world': Joyce's A Portrait and the Global Bildungsroman

This article considers James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a postcolonial Bildungsroman avant la lettre, in part because it establishes an attitude toward Bildung that looks beyond idealist and nationalist consolations toward something like global belonging. Central to this vision of the novel as a global form is the philosophical concept of world-making, which I argue conditions the way Joyce's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, understands his own formative desires. This understanding drives him, ultimately, to abandon the options laid out for him by colonial society; to embrace his own inner life and the moments of aspiration that are its outward and visible signs; and to imagine a world in which his 'wayward instincts' would count as forms of aesthetic accomplishment. This relationship to inner life entails a relationship to the future that differs from conventional progressive models of selfformation. In A Portrait, Joyce describes temporality of aspiration that posits the triumphant recognition of one's own Bildung, a standpoint that redeems the path toward it from error and misprision. Stephen's formative quest isgrounded in a relationship between aspiration and freedom that was first articulated by German idealist philosophers like G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schiller. As a child, his sense of freedom at first feels like a new form of bondage; but he soon learns to resist the designs others have on him and to follow his own aspirations. His turn to art which grants him the power of creating a world and himself to the worlds of others, is the only option left to a young man whose experience of the world has failed to live up to what he could imagine. Through canny and salutary misrecognitions, he moves from his early childhood experiences of méconnaissance, to the moment on the strand and his aesthetic elaboration of it, finally to arrive at a moment of creation, in which the world he creates opens him to the world at large in a new and hopeful way. This, I argue, is the force of the novel's conclusion, the corrective gaze the young artist casts on his own narrative, from the perspective of his journal entries, which bring his inner life directly into contact with the life of others. In this respect, Joyce bequeaths to postcolonial and global fiction the template for a world in which aspiration forces a heroic path toward the future and new destinies for Bildung.