The "unfettered freedom" of "flitting bats": The Inoperative Community in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The aim of this study is to reconsider the interaction between the individual and the community as outlined in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I intend to underscore the inescapability of the notion of community for the protagonist, who attempts to redefine his communal ties rather than reject them altogether by exile. My hypothesis is that Stephen tries to fashion new ways of belonging and affiliation. In order to demonstrate this, my essay offers an innovative interpretation of A Portrait in light of the theoretical work on community proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Bourdieu. Refuting the conventional paradigm of the modernist artist as an isolated individual, completely detached from the community, I argue that Joyce depicts numerous modes of human interconnection and that these, in turn, can be interpreted as alternative, unavowable communal formations that occur in moments of finitude, isolation, and corporal exposure.