X-Men Glow in the Dark Sticker Book

For both writers, young men are the subjects of books whose action, in part, consists of training them-as artists-to write something like the books they are in. In one of those phrases from Ulysses that aids the -771- reader trying to grasp Joyce's methods, the narrative describes "a sort of retrospective arrangement" by which the present casts light back on the past. Progressive and retrospective arrangements provide a double texture, and part of the interest, say, in Stephen Dedalus as artist is the way he once was the portrait that Joyce would have him draw. This notion is implicit in the two ways of reading the title, a portrait of an artist when he was a young man or a portrait of an artist by a young man. Joyce is well aware that his portraits, whatever their provenance, are of artists who have not accomplished very much at the time he writes of them. Indeed, the failures and trials of the artist are among the sorrier and funnier spectacles of life, and he is quick to include that part of the artist's story in his fiction as well ...»