Fragmented Interiority of Empire and Self-Destructive Tendencies

Jackson’s survey of the Union’s internal composition of divisive and volatile nationalisms, with its negotiations of tensions of state oppression and movement towards social advancement to and from the Empire and Ireland, forms the backdrop of Stephen’s modernist anxieties in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Stephen, the volatile anxieties of his nationalism in such a milieu can only be transcended in a certain pathway. The Hegelian dialectic of power relations that stratifies the colonies to the Empire, then possibly reflected in the internal colonization of Ireland, and its anxiety of living within such a paradigm (as Stephen experiences) can only be shaken off with a modernist transcendence - art.

This aim to achieve transcendence from the political and economic power relation between Ireland and the Empire is one of self-destructivity and violence within the Self. We see that Stephen, in his escape from the haunting of his double-crossing countrymen, seeks multiple forms of “self-flagellation” to either expunge his internal conflicts or to heighten his consciousness to a transcendent level. Stephen’s obsession in the death of the Irish martyr Parnell, and the scenario of how his Irish compatriots had sold him out to his death, reflects what Jackson summarises as the “volatile, and unpredictable political culture” of Ireland (Jackson 152).

On the cultural perspective, Stephen’s achieving an epiphany after sleeping with a prostitute, subsequently subverted by his extreme devoutness followed by another epiphany and then once again subverted by his disillusionment and the leaving of the Order show a constant debunking of possible pathways of transcending the milieu of ambiguity of Ireland and the Irish Self. Stephen’s journey show that to escape the slightest “British experience of Empire” (152) as detailed in Jackson’s chapter, the artist must then exile himself from the machine of the Empire totally, and how that is not possible even in a self-destructive mode.