selling out

We see a lot of reference to being evicted from houses (“...the landlord will put us out” sans “boro”), leaving houses (189), or selling off houses (“...his father’s property was going to be sold by auction”). If a house can be read as a metaphor for a person’s culture, then the significance of Stephen experiencing the loss his homes may mirror the cultural genocide that Ireland experienced under British rule. Also, since eviction and auctioning both have a kind of monetary relevance, we might argue how the text negotiates the idea of ‘selling out’, particularly in the case of the Irish with respect to their own national culture and language.

This notion of selling out is evoked in Fanon’s reading where he talks about the “new man” who has deliberately suppressed his native culture and embraced the culture of the new mother country. (“...he answers only in French, and often he no longer understands Creole.”) Fanon calls this “the death and burial of its local cultural originality”, and Stephen later says heatedly, “My ancestors threw off their language and took another...they allowed a handful of foreigner to subject them.”

Coming back to the idea of selling out, I think that both texts seek to redress the painful reality of how a unique culture can be lost or eroded because its people lack something like moral courage or nationalistic pride. Stephen attempts to do so in his eventual decision not to abandon Ireland but to take it on himself to “forge...the uncreated conscience of [his] race”, and Fanon, through his criticism of an oppressive White culture which values the humanity of a person only after that person “renounces his blackness, his jungle”. And I think both are successful partly because I found both texts’ justified in their arguments (and do despise the cultural bigotry of colonizers), and partly because of the great deal of influence they still retain to this day..