Betray to Become: Departure in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Leaving family, faith and fatherland is both an act of betrayal and a condition for creation in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This article situates the hero’s final departure from Ireland in the economy of betrayal staged within this künstelroman, an economy in which the surplus value is the work of art itself. This art does not, however, transcend this economy; it neither cancels out nor neutralises betrayal. Rather, it is imagined as perpetuating the very processes that engendered it. Betrayal is first discussed as a moment within the temporal movement of belief, the adhesive essential to the construction of individual and collective identities. It is then analysed as key to the dialectical relationship between concealing and revealing secrets in the text, where it is linked to motifs of confession and to figures of the artist as priest and confessor. This allows us to see why departure forms the condition for writing only the self, but also the rejected nation. Indeed, writing Ireland involves the unauthorised exposure of the secret confessions of the ‘bat-like’ national soul, confessions that can only be extracted by adopting the posture of the outsider, the one on the other side of the confessional’s lattice, on the other side of the Irish Sea. The writer is then to narrate the obscure secrets of the national community in order to decompose it, all the while recognising membership of the nation whose confidence he betrays. This sheds light on why, in Joyce’s early work, departure, while necessary, can never be complete nor final. Betrayal thereby proves a useful prism through which to re-read the importance of exile in Joyce’s conception of literary creation and in modernist crossings more broadly.