Ah, the University Library...

Finally finished re-reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Now I have to read Ulysses, perhaps later in the summer. At any rate, I tramped on up to Davis Library and found this:

Stephen does not, as the careless reader may suppose, become an artist by rejecting church and country. Stephen does not become an artist at all. Country, church, and mission are an inextricable unity, and in rejecting the two that seem to hamper him, he rejects also the one on which he has set his heart.

-Hugh Kenner, “The Portrait in Perspective” (1956)

In other words, some part of Joyce knows that the rootlessness of the romantic artist is not a good thing in itself; it is a privation: the misfortune of being born into a small-minded nation (“race” in the sense of nationality). One might wish to be rooted in stronger soil, but one is what one is.

Kenner argues that Portrait was composed with its sequel in mind, so I won't say more until I've read it.