Popular Culture Review
Joyce, in writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was
influenced by accounts of Rembrandt doing his self-portraits
and so tried in his writing to embody this circular or reflective
structure.. . . Like an artist sitting before his easel drawing a
self-portrait by means of a mirror, Joyce tried to reproduce the
AB/BA structure. . . . A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
thus begins with Stephen Dedalus’s father telling Stephen his
very first story as a child, and it ends with an invocation of
Dedalus the artificer, who has become Stephen’s patron for
writing. It begins with Stephen’s father saying “Once upon a
time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming
down along the road,” and it ends with the hero of the novel
writing “27 April, Old Father, old artificer, stand me now and
ever in good stead. Dublin 1904/Trieste 1914.”^
This is the same circular structure we find in Derrida’s Memoirs of the
Blind and Grover’s The Monster at the End of This Book. The story loops back
on itself, the portrait turns out to be a self-portrait, the monster turns out to be
Grover, fear (on the first page) turns out to be embarrassment (on the last page),
and the confrontation with Death—with one’s self as Other—is defused in the
very act of the confrontation itself, in the myth of the self-portrait. Stephen
Dedalus looks at himself looking back at himself, just as Rembrandt must have
done standing before his mirror, but the image we get is not of a man looking
into a mirror. It is not a painting of one’s self while painting one’s self Instead,
in such an endeavor we inevitably turn the subject into an object, a flat thing that
stands still before us and lets us hold it, reduce it, keep it in our consciousness.
The image of Rembrandt, though he has easel in hand, is not painting. It is
inanimate and still. One might even say not-alive. And this is the necessary
consequence of the self-portrait. The subject doing the painting creates an object
on the canvas. And objects have a curious relationship to death. The object is at
once apparently dead and yet, since it never was alive, is incapable of truly
dying.
The book operates in the same way as the painting. Stephen Dedalus
“lives” for us forever, though James Joyce is gone. But the book, as a collection
of signs, has an air of death to it as well. The fact that words can point to things
in their absence means that these things are not eternal and not really needed.
My own name, Peter, is a marker that mourns. You can see my name in print
there in the previous sentence and that name will conjure me up—but in a way
that speaks more to my absence than my presence. The fact that “Peter” can
keep me in your consciousness indicates that 1 can be gone and still be thought
o f Names hint at the death of the world, at the absence of the things about
which they speak. As a placeholder for something, a word draws attention to the
fact that in its absence, the thing can still be meant. In order to think about me,
you don’t need me present. Our names will far outlive us, and so at the moment,
of my naming there is my death. At the moment of naming the world—naming