Of Dupes and Duping Dupes

As an Irishman, Stephen’s position is much more fluid than the simplistic compartmentalization of “duped” and “duping dupes” as described by Fanon. There is no tension between the renouncement of being black to becoming whiter and the rejection of white influence and sticking to being black. The issue of being a colonized European also seems to exempt him from the Prospero complex as documented in Fanon’s work.

In Joyce’s work as well as Fanon’s, one aspect of colonization is consistent in both cases -- that of language’s effect on culture. As Fanon writes, “to speak means . . . to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17 - 18). Such a empowerment in education that allows the colonized to gain power to either fight his colonizers (which unfortunately is still mired by his use of the coloniser’s language) or renounce his origins of the colonized (yet still problematic because he will never be a fully evolved human in being a pure white).

With this power attained by education to be wielded in either directions of the duping paradigm as laid out by Fanon, we find that Stephen is an anomaly. Such powers that Fanon describes as both constructive and destructive (Fanon 29), are turned inward in Stephen’s case. His self-flagellation to achieve some epiphany to transcend his conflicted self of Irish/English is perhaps due to his being different from the Russian/German and the Negro (Fanon 34). Unlike the rest of the Europeans, he has no other language or stature outside the metropole, precisely because it is his motherland where he, like the Negro, will have to derive value from. Yet unlike the Negro, he has a culture, a civilization and a “long historical past” (34), by virtue of Ireland being a part of Europe before being Unionised. I believe that it is this uber liminality that causes the anomaly of inward, self-violence by the weapon inherited from the coloniser.