Novel v memoir: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

At last, at the conclusion of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Dedalus breaks free from everything holding him in Ireland/Dublin, especially free from his faith (though as his best friend, Cranly, notes he thinks about Catholicism an awful lot for someone who professes to have no faith), from his family, from his friendships. Dedalus, speaking of course for Joyce, enunciates his famous credo, the trilogy that will now guide him: silence, exile, and cunning (you have to wonder what he meant by silence - Joyce/Dedalus give no evidence of a predilection for silence, here or ever), and, how did he put it?, forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated (?) conscience of his race - in other words, he sets of for what he knows will be a lonely, challenging, perhaps impoverished life - and of course part of the beauty is that we know of Joyce's suffering and of his ultimate success. Even the poignant end note, which shows that it took him 10 years to write this short novel and that he did so in a remote corner of Italy - so far from the scenes that he re-created in his imagination - the distance was vital for his creativity. Joyce's choice of articles in the title are important: this is clearly not the portrait, and not of an artist - but one way of looking at the particular artist: others would be entirely different in their provenance. This novel of course has some beautiful moments and some daring (for its time) narrative strategies, and by the end it is a broad, if not comprehensive, examination of the maturation of the mind of a writer and of the initial forays in the creative process (a terrific account of Dedalus trying to write a villanelle gives as good a sense as anything ever written of what it's actually like to write a poem) - that said, a large part of the beauty of this novel is understanding its place in Joyce's work: it would not be a great a novel had the artist not gone forward to write Ulysses. But it is a beautiful, short novel, a work of imagination (which Joyce aptly compares with the transubstantiation of the church). Today's Joyce would no doubt cash in with a memoir, touting it and setting for the exhibition of his life for all to see on the talk shows and the blogs. Which one's the artist?