That Which Fanon Cannot Speak, Joyce Must Not Remain Silent

Fanon’s writing interrogates the importance of the politics of language in a colonial context. Language is never a naïve, transparent tool or mode of communication that can be translated across cultures without remainder; indeed since the writings of someone like Wittgenstein, we have come to see that our understanding of the world and others is fundamentally mediated through the language we speak. Fanon urges us towards recognizing the power differential inherent in such an utterly intersubjective phenomenon such as language use. It is a well known pithy that a standard language (of the colonizer) is a dialect backed up by an army, and the mechanics of the interpellative gaze of the imperialist fixes the “dialect” of the colonized in a subordinate, hopelessly objectified position that closes off genuine dialogue. This damns all writing from the colonized from the start: all attempts to assert an authentic form of colonized consciousness through their own language further traps them in “the arsenal of complexes” of “the colonial environment” (30) that infantilize or exoticizes them.

In such a system, the only way out is through acculturation to the master culture; to be otherwise is indeed to be pathological. Stephen must mediate between these two positions in his literary endeavours, between the language of high European realism of the nineteenth century, and a nascent modernist form that must capture and create the conscience of his race and country. The voice of the colonized cannot assert and speak in a cultural, historical and social vacuum, and it can be recognized as language only in its basic difference from the colonizer’s. Fanon shows us how native bodies can be regulated and disciplined in the mould of the master; Stephen’s adamant stance of non-servitude is the assertion of his irreducible alterity that denies inferiority and resists subjugation.