Language, Art, Ethics

- Early blog post: but the epiphany is in the later bit so it's hopefully ok.

- sorry there were some errors; have tried to clean them up.

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I liked Lucas' close reading of the epiphany scene, and how he correlated it with the eileen scene to show how the repeating motifs create, among other things, a sense of the continuity of Stephen's consciousness throughout the text. One thing that struck me was the descriptions of Eileen and the unnamed girl: while Eileen seems 'corporeal' to us, the girl appears mainly as a 'corpus', a body of text.

Lucas pointed out the repetition of "Ivory" in the two passages, a reference to the litany of the Virgin Mary. I suggest that Stephen's language and conceptualisations don't adhere to Eileen: she mocks the litany (and thereby Stephen's idealisation of her), her actions and comments on pockets are non sequitur, she runs off "all of a sudden";

Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold.

even the syntax participates: the full stops seperate the tropes of religious imagery from her being.

In contrast the muse is transformed entirely by the "magic" of his language, she has no name; her body metamorphoses into that of a bird. each clause is a simile of Stephen's making, we see her only as he sees her. She has no agency of her own, only able to "suffer" his male gaze, transformed into an inactive aesthetic object.

This, i suggest, contributes to the sense of "disillusionment" in the novel: there is no union within the epiphany, it is, in fact an act of violence that objectifies and reifies the girl. Perhaps the same thing happens to Dublin: the transformation of city into intertextual tropes, while 'validating' or 'canonising' the Irish city, is nonetheless a kind of disembodiment, a kind of loss. In other words, a problem in the ethics of representation.

Here comes The Dedalus!

There is something remarkably Modernist about Stephen Dedalus' fascination with language and the inner world of emotions; it is this very quality that has us in thrall from the very beginning of the novel (at least it is for me), and his exploration of the associative qualities of language and prose that attempt to draw out the fluid quality of individual consciousness is also accompanied by an increasingly desperate sense of alienation. He rejects the nationalist cry ("Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or mystic after") because it is an uncritical patriotism; it is above all, a communal movement and as such, demands conformity for success (Parnell's clandestine affair with Kitty O'Shea dooms him). Stephen prizes his individualism: "You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" and this, I think, transcends the English/Irish binary opposition to come up with an aestheticist sensibility, one that is as self-assertive as a "portrait" and intellectual, almost demiurgic. His father taught him whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Stephen learns a more important lesson in his "reality of experience": never to peach on yourself.

The reality of language

Ireland's position as a site of divided identity, as Jackson suggests, lies partly in "the failure of the British to define Ireland either in fully metropolitan or colonial terms" (150). Definitions, and language as the key means of definition, are thus invariably tied to the shaping of identity and one's reality.

This is something that struck me very much about Joyce (and perhaps it is true of modernism in general as well): words are as much political as they are aesthetic. Like Orwell, Joyce seems to espouse a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the language you use defines your reality, which in turn defines and restricts your language. Stephen's formative years are matched and reflected by the literal formation of language and its semantic possibilities. As a boy, meanings are multiple and malleable, reflecting the tabula rasa state of his mind: "What did that mean, to kiss?" (11-12); "God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too" (13). Meanings, however, become restricted by social conventions, as shown by the coding in colours and language that Stephen learns. The lexical item "green rose" must be rejected because "you could not have a green rose" (9). Green (and maroon) become associated with the political reality of Ireland - green for Parnell, maroon for Davitt. In this way the rejection of the "green rose" becomes more subversively diabolical: you can have red or white roses, York and Lancaster, but to map Irish green to a British symbol is denied by linguistic and "realistic" (insofar as the real is shaped by language and society) conventions.

The effect of language on the state of of being colonised is thus highly complex: if a person is brought up in the capacity of a colonised man, how does one separate what this reality imposes on him as opposed to the reality that is his and that he can shape? How does Ireland (or India, or other colonies) define its reality when it is caught in a linguistic and real-world "halfway house" (to quote Jackson)? Language is slippery; so is reality and identity. Joyce emphasises this with his use of language, which slips and slides, fractures and builds, to create a sense of the "real": Stephen's burgeoning consciousness, matched and mapped by the reader's own consciousness in the reading experience. And yet, in line with Joyce's own identity as Irish (reflected and shaped by this characteristic of his language), shadowing it all is a constant questioning of the "real" that he builds and its relation with the "master language" of English: "How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit...my soul frets in the shadow of his language." (167)

the ironic tone of the novel

I would like to suggest that novel invites us to take an ironic view of Stephen's artistic ambitions. This can be seen from the title of the novel- "The portrait of an artist as a young man." The word "portrait" suggests that the novel is a self-conscious attempt at framing the artist as a young man. If this is so, the novel then highlights the artist and his inexperience, thereby setting up Stephen's ambitions and his perspectives as flawed and perhaps even foolish. This invites the reader to stand at a critical distance from Stephen, and to evaluate his ambitions. Therefore, when Stephen triumphantly proclaims that his art will be the means of liberation for the Irish people;

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"

is the title of the novel then hinting at the impossibility of this success?

Stephen D(a)edalus: Loner or Liberator?

Yet, for all his lonely self-assertion, Stephen recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration. (vii)

With the obvious allusion to the overreaching Greek hero Daedalus, our young protagonist comes to us as not quite straightforward a hero-to-be. Contrary to his claim that as a liberator of his race he wanted to “forge…the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (pg), Stephen hardly exhibits traits of a liberator. A voluntary social loner instead, he is deeply alienated from his family, friends, and in a larger sense, the Irish community. Yet despite his attempt to assert his individual identity, Stephen finds himself deeply embedded within the “nets” of “nationality, language, [and] religion” (220). For example, he excels in English, writing poetry and essays well, yet recognizes that English is the language of the British colonizers:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine…I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (205)

As for religion, at beginning of Part III, Stephen keeps going back to visit the prostitutes, “prowl[ing] in quest of that call” (109), yet he has a sense that this is sinful: “He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment” (110). When Father Arnall gives his sermon, Stephen is greatly affected, unlike the other boys, driving deeper his loner status at the same time inscribing him deeper into this “net” of Irish nationality.

I guess ultimately my post this week comes as a set of questions: (1) can we really take Stephen to be the liberator of his race, and (2) can Stephen’s grappling with these “nets” be allegorical of a nation trying to break free from its British/Roman past, if after all, Stephen’s struggles are also very much personal ones? If so, (3) how fit is the character of Stephen for this hero/liberator role, if he is so deeply embedded in these very “nets” that he is trying to fly free from?

Leakage

I find it interesting how colonialism has switched from a racial problem, to a religious one. At least one thing stays the same, that colonialism is essentially a rule of difference. In Ireland, the Empire’s involvement made use of religious difference, between Protestants and Catholics. To elaborate further, this rule of difference is ironically an effort by the British Empire to work with local allies. As Jackson states, “[t]he cultivation of these allies might be linked to the policies of division and rule which were often the hallmark of the British colonial presence” (130). In addition, “[t]he British, in Ireland and elsehwerre, were always keen to exploit division, and to transfer their affections and support from one local community to another, depending on their calculation of advantage” (131).

Jackson’s commentary on colonialism in Ireland is refreshing, because it states some of the positive side effects of colonialism. He is careful not to appear as endorsing or valorizing British colonialism in Ireland, but it made me curious about the ‘leakages’ or side effects that colonialism had not intended.

These ‘leakages’ can, I think, be related back to the modernist techniques. The idea of resisting totality, of ‘leakages’, is perhaps another way of highlighting plurality of meanings, the futile efforts in containing and establishing control for something inevitably eludes and escapes. In a strange way, I see Stephen’s rejection of everything, as a form of ‘leakage’, to resist taking any sides and to abandon all forms of binding structures.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning (268, 269)

A Portrait and Its Discontents: The Dissonance of Voice

From the first few extraordinary chapters of Joyce’s novel, we are alerted to the importance of voice and discourse to the novel: Stephen hears the voices of his father, and his playmates at school questioning him about his identity. Indeed, working within the paradigm of the bildungsroman, Joyce indicates the dialectic of self and society, and inner and outer life that the hero must reconcile or merge as the end-point of his development into maturity and full sensibility. Joyce even has his protagonist list in “the flyleaf of the geography” (12) his place in relation to Clongowes, Ireland, and Europe. Indeed, the narrative at this point evinces a comic inclusiveness where Stephen’s consciousness registers the accents of his parents, Dante, and Uncle Charles, with no thought as how best to structure and frame the ideological dispute between the strident Fenian militancy of Mr. Casey and the conservative Catholicism of Dante that breeds, as Jackson points out, “division within families” (136).

Stephen must come to reject what he terms “the din of all these hollowsounding voices” (88) flooding his consciousness that seek to claim him for their own. Joyce ironically subverts the bildungsroman tradition by pointing out that the resolution of Stephen's identity plunges him into radical isolation and distance from societal institutions from without that threaten absolute disempowerment. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, says Stephen in Ulysses, and thus he records the deep failure of the complete awakening of any authentic Irish historical imagining from the shackles of a colonial system that demand narcotic conformity to the dominant history and culture it disseminates. An absolute space of interiority then becomes not only the privileged mode of representation of the self and its struggles, but an absolute mandate of incommensurability that ensures its authenticity. .

Pieces of Empire

Jackson's article highlights several issues that contribute to the contradictory/tense relationship between the British Empire and Ireland. One such issue is that of differential treatment of the Irish Catholics. What is interesting for me, I guess, is that here differential treatment and biasness is based on religion rather than race/colour seeing, that both the Irish and British are after all caucasians.

How much 'stronger' (for lack of a better word) is religion a driving force to discriminate and rule over in comparison to race as a dividing category? Does Portrait give us readers anything to back up this statement?

And just a sidepoint - I think the fragmented nature of the text reflects the fragmented colonial state which is in part a product of the various government structures (which complicate colonial ruling - it becomes a mess as Jackson puts it in the article).

In addition, in relation to this module... the texts have so far discussed the different colonial situations in various parts of the world - Burma, India, Ireland.. this I suppose, grants us a better insight into colonialism/imperialism. The spectrum of voices and perspectives is modernist in its multiplicity which rebels against the fixed certain-tude (is there even such a word?) of texts narrated by a third person.

the sermons remind me of my secondary school days

Joyce's passages of fire and brimstone, and Stephen's classification of himself as a sinner, besides providing me a road map of my post-mortal future, remind me strangely of what Foucault says of homosexuality:

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

[History of Sexuality]

which is not to suggest that Daedalus was homosexual, but rather that his outward acts of fornication now informs his identity, his soul: he's now a species of sinner going to hell.

I'll admit to not being a fan of joyce (prefer nabokov for my dose of literary genius), and, fried out as i am, may have missed stuff, but: given how closely catholicism is tied into the irish identity, i wonder if stephen's sexual sins, by making him a bad catholic, also make him a bad irishman. taken this way, perhaps we could say that it is, in a sense, colonialism that informs stephen's guilt over his promiscuity since the fervent catholicism (in education and religion) is related to the history of Ireland as a colony.

it seems a stretch, but then again, we do witness this phenomena in our own time and space: for instance in the debate over things like keeping 377 of the penal code, and the peculiar arguments of certain ministers whose european religion motivates a desire to keep english law.

A Portrait

The tension between identity and language is interesting. Davin asks Stephen “Are you Irish at all” (219) because he spoke against the Irish reformers. What does it mean to be Irish, or British (or Singaporean for that matter since we do not even have a language of our own). There is a lot of emphasis on language in Portrait, Davin believed that speaking Irish would make Stephen more ‘Irish’ but I get the sense that language does not and cannot define our identity. The same thing that is called a “funnel” or “tundish” doesn’t change what it is; it merely changes the perspective in which we recognize it. If it is not language, what defines our nationality? This is quite a stretch but Stephen needed to find new perspective/find his identity or redefine ‘Irishness’ by leaving Ireland and in Passage, Ronny became more ‘British’ in India (British imperialist cliquishness) which was accentuated by his initial admiration for Adele’s individuality (Passage 44) until it led to her being ostracized by the colonists’ community.

“Irish families simultaneously upheld and subverted the Empire” (Jackson 137) – this split in loyalty exists not only in Ireland but within the empire itself. We’ve seen it in Flory and Veraswamy in Burmese Days, Fielding and Aziz in Passage, and Stephen and Davin in Portrait, there is no absolute consensus within their own community on colonialism. So far, we’ve been associating the two camps colonizer/colonized in terms of racial binaries - white/non-white but in Portrait, we’re reminded that Europeans (Irish) too were colonized by the British. In previous texts, colonialism is intrinsically linked to race, at the same time, it isn’t really just race. Nationality is defined by the language we speak, the views we share yet we don’t share the same views. The inability to categorize and define empire seems to be complicate by modernism’s multi-perspective, polyphonic voices that are allotted to individuals?

'History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.'

The above quote is from Joyce's Ulysses, and appears in the Introduction to the Penguin edition of Portrait (pg. xxxix).  It is especially appropriate when considering the relation between Portrait and the Irish historical condition - that of a victim of imperialism, both Roman (in the form of Catholism) and British.  At the end of each stage of the novel, Stephen seems to be on the verge of a revelation, of a grand renewal or beginning; yet within the first few pages of the next stage the revelation is proven false; the cake is a lie.  There is a parallel here with Parnell, who features so prominently in the first part of the novel, for the liberation that he worked for never came, even though it seemed so close.  Stephen/Joyce seeks to escape the vicious cycle of history, in order to find his own - and by extension Ireland's - place in the sun.  It is a looking forward, rather than the looking back of the Irish Revival.

james' modernist ambivalence

james' modernist anxieties come through in his portrayal of dedalus as a character with a confused self identity, a pastiche of different parts constituting a somewhat schizophrenic personality. like forster's characters (adela and mrs. moore), but to much a greater extent, dedalus undergoes an existential crisis of self a few times in the novel: "nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echoe of the infuriated cries within him...he could scarcely recognise as his his own thoughts, and repeated dlowly to himself: I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus..." (94 of my el cheapo "enriched classics" copy) When he tries to remember his childhood, he failed to recall any of its vivid moments and instead "recalled only names: Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes." (ibid) the reduction of his childhood memories to names reflects the deeply political background and politically confused identity of the Irish persona.

jackson's assertions that Ireland was a "half-way house between Britain and the Empire," and to Ireland the Empire was "a source both of constraint and liberation" depicts the colonised's dilemma as less one of racial subjugation and discrimination, as we saw with the other texts, but one of religion, politics and that of being used but at the same time helped or rewarded in some way. (i'm sure people doing irish poetry can shed more light on this!) jackson goes on further to describe the contradictions of Irish Home Rulers "being proud of Irish feats within the British Army, but contemptuous of the Army itself." dedalus' confusion about his self identity to the point of remembering names and not memories of his childhood hence reflects the experience of growing up in such a schizophrenic and politically contradictive environment. while such existential crises aren't uncommon in modernist texts written from the colonial side, including Woolf's and Forster's, i think that james depicts the unique political situation of the irish colonised as being caught in a difficult liminal space of being white and European, and yet exploited in similar ways as the "inferior" races of the East--and hence, ambivalent about one's political and historical identity but in a very different way perhaps, from that of the typical 'native'.

Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic

Adding on to what Sarah has said about language and colonial discourse, I completely agree with the idea that Stephen's familiarity with English proves the success of the ISA (ideological state apparatus) of education in assimilating the Irish into the coloniser's dominant culture and language. However, this is not solely a one-way street and cross-culturization, for lack of a better word, takes place.

Stephen compares the different way the British dean of studies and he relate to the English language:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Portrait 189)

Here, he claims the dean to have a superior relationship to the English language which is "his". Later, Stephen realizes he has acquiesced to the difference between the coloniser and the colonised on the basis that he was both British and a dean: this does not mean he is right.

That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Portrait 251)

Joyce problematizes the scene here and suggests that the coloniser himself is impacted by cultural assimilation, the dean easily labels a word he is not familiar with the Irish "other". To suggest that the dean has come "to learn [his own language] from us" is humourous but is also a perverse version of the master (English)- slave (Irish) dialectic. Often one thinks of the way the coloniser has affected the colonised, but fails to think of this exchange as mutual.

Through this process of cultural assimilation, neither the English nor Irish culture is, according to Said, "single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic". (Quote from an online article). Both are subject to the other culture, relying on the other to sustain a power relation modeled on the Hegelian model.

language as a mark of difference

Language, figures in many of the books on our course, as a sign of the coloniser’s domination over the colonised. For example, in “Burmese Days”, Veraswami is depicted as constantly speaking with an extra ‘s’ behind many of his words, almost as if the text is drawing attention to the difference in the way he speaks, a difference that perhaps marks him as being different from the colonial masters who are native speakers of the language. The text also highlights this inferiority in language in Ma Hla May who is depicted as saying during her denouncement of Flory in the church, “”Yes, that’s the one I mean—Flory Flory!” (She pronounced it Porley) (284).

This is also evident in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” where language exists as a sign of the English colonisation of Ireland. For example, the Dean thinks that “tundish” is an Irish word despite it belonging to the English vocabulary, and in this instance, Stephen appears to know the English language better than the Dean. However, despite this, Stephen is always mindful of the fact that he is ultimately still using the language of the colonisers, as evident when he says, “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine… His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (205). Hence language here too, will always be a mark of Stephen’s inferiority because the language is ultimately not his, but the coloniser’s, and the fact that he has mastered it so well only goes to show his degree of colonisation by them!

Modernism and Empire and, Identity

This is the first time I’m reading anything by Joyce and well, it was an experience. Anyway, I felt that it was a novel about influences and I really saw modernism and empire come together in this novel because Stephen is trying to find/shape his personal identity as a person (I always thought modernism has much to do issues of identity because of its style of using stream of consciousness, multiple viewpoints). I thought it was adorable but also meaningful and astute when Joyce wrote from a child’s perspective and Stephen sees himself as belonging to “Ireland…Europe…The world…The universe”. The discipline of geography itself appears redundant because countries only stay put on the map. In reality, people move, migrate, cross boundaries, invade territories. In this process of moving then, identities lose their clear-cut definition. A white man in England would be just that; in India however, he would have a different identity, perhaps as a pukka sahib. So what escapes the colonized child’s attention is that Ireland does not just belong to Europe; it belongs to the Empire. His own identity is as such, because of the Empire, is fragmented even before he starts to shape it.

When reading the Christmas dinner bit in Portrait, the part about how “the British imperial rule in nineteenth-century Ireland generated a political culture where families might be divided through their Irish or imperial allegiance” from Jackson’s article was brought to mind for me. In this scene, it is not about ‘Us. v. Them’ or even Protestant v. Catholic. Joyce shows another type of division in which “Irish allegiance” gets problematized. It appears at one level to be a debate about whether religion should enter politics or whether the latter should remain secular. But I felt (since Stephen is sitting at the adult table for Christmas for the first time and watching this scene unfold) that this debate would only further complicate the construction of self-identity for the protagonist. Mr. Casey, Mr. Dedalus and Dante are all Catholics and they are all for the liberation of Ireland (since Dante whacked a man who had “taken his hat off when the band played God save the Queen” with her umbrella) but yet, what a heated argument! Who is the ideal patriot? Who is the ideal Catholic? Empire thus enters to prevent someone from ever resolving such issues of identity and like Jackson says, an individual or family ends up housing within itself contradictions or ambiguities.

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.

Who was right then?

The links between politics and religion were brought across quite strongly in Portrait (which I felt weren't discussed enough by Jackson). At the Christmas dinner, the party talks about the death of Parnell who is an Irish Protestant and a nationalist politics leader. The conversation then turns to the idea of the Catholic Church meddling in state politics: Dedalus says “Nobody is saying a word against them…so long as they don’t meddle in politics; Dante retorts that the “bishops and priests in Ireland have spoken…and they must be obeyed” (35). The intermingling of politics and religion gets mixed up in individual relations, not only between grown-ups, but also between children, who must already learn to take sides. Dante discourages Stephen from playing with Eileen because Eileen was a protestant, and “when [Dante] was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin” (39).

The argument over religion and politics becomes somewhat cyclical [if the priests didn’t interfere with politics, it will be fine; but the priests are important and if people didn’t disagree with them, it will be fine etc.] Stephen sums it up with, “Who was right then?” (40) When Stephen thinks about God, he remembers that “Dieu was the French for God” and “though there were different names for God in all different languages in the world…still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God” (17). Everyone is right in some way or another, but the internal division that stems from politics, religion, and the effects of colonialism [how alliances with the British and the imposition of certain policies further fueled these divisions], passed on through generations, makes it impossible for any cohesive resolution.

Why Joyce is different...

While throughout the course, we have read texts that have been written by primarily by colonial authors, Joyce’s text is markedly differentiated from these because as an Irish (and formerly colonized) author, he writes from a marginal position. In contrast to Forster’s India, which can neither be properly classified nor categorized because it is a “muddle,” Joyce’s Ireland is one that escapes definition because of its ambivalent nature towards the British Empire. Here, it is apt to apply Jackson’s argument, that the relationship between the Irish and the British Empire is too complex in “its elusiveness, its contradictions, and its paradoxes” (123) to be glossed over. The Irish, as he points out, are both “agents and victims of the Empire” (152). The indefinable nature of the Irish experience and of Ireland is best illustrated, I feel, through Joyce’s use of language.

While Forster makes use of modernist symbols to render India unknowable, Joyce makes use of a modernist form of language that is fragmented to show the elusiveness and incomprehensibility of Ireland. Although Stephen makes use of the English language and recognizes it as a legacy of colonialism “so familiar and so foreign, will always be . . . an acquired speech” (205), Joyce, through Stephen, fragments language to reflect the ambivalent experience of being Irish and of Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire. Instead of language being presented in a linear fashion, language in Portrait is broken up in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. Different narrative styles – songs (3), Stephen’s diary, poetry (266) and so on – are integrated into the text, impeding fluid flow of language.

Thus, through use of fragmented language – a typical characteristic of modernism -- Joyce seeks to show and reflect upon the displaced position and identity of the Irish people. By so doing, Joyce’s modernism is thus closely aligned with Irish nationalism.

Finally, a text from the colonized

It is interesting how we are now reading a text where the colonized are Whites, the colony is Britain’s first and the author is the colonized. With the other texts, we have been debating about the White man as colonizer from reading what the author (who incidentally is writing from a position of the colonizer that gets to travel and visit other colonies) and we have recognized certain problems with these readings. While certain parts of the other texts could be argued to be shedding light on the plight of the colonized, the texts are also concerned with protecting their own standing as one that still privileges the colonizer. Furthermore, the texts are also more interested in highlighting the conflicts the White man, as part of the colonizing mission, caught in this cycle of imperialism faces than presenting detailed images of the hardships the colonized undergo. Hence, Portrait as a text written from the perspective of the colonized provides an interesting argument against the other texts that we have been reading thus far.

I have to admit, I don’t like Stephen. He’s a little too wishy-washy for me. However, it is quite refreshing to see how he negotiates the conflicts he feels towards the British Empire, his religion, himself and to Ireland. As a character who might be representing James Joyce himself, Stephen’s decision that he has to be an artist in order to deal with these conflicts is fascinating: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (276). What possibilities do art hold as a tool for finding oneself as an individual, and as establishing oneself as part of a community? How does art figure into nationalism and the idea of a nation?

Personally, I think art, in particular the written form, allows the artist to use language to retaliate, to create a space onto which they are able to project their own vision of Ireland. Art is a potential tool for revolution, and hence it is important to both the colonizers and the colonized. While one wants to use it to protect his vested interests, the other uses it to band their own people together in the realization of a nation.

Words, Words, Words...

“Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: through them he had glimpses of the real world about him.” (64)

As most of us know, Portrait is essentially a bildungroman that traces the growth of Stephen. In the chapters on Stephen’s formative years, the subjective reality of an individual is most prevalent in the language used by Joyce; short phrases, disjuncture in syntax and “nonsensical” words. As readers, we are essentially placed into the shoes of the characters and catch a glimpse of the world- but the world according to Stephen. As readers, we’re lead to grasp for meanings and make sense of the writing just as Stephen makes sense of the world. How Stephen starts viewing the world and making sense of the world is shown to be influenced by external forces just as much as it is an interior subjectivity that we as readers are privy to.

Reading this text (or any other particular text for that matter) requires a conditioning of sorts. The repetition of words, phrases and events serve to condition readers to a particular style/ way of reading. Past the first chapter then (or maybe earlier for some of you), one is sufficiently acquainted with the style [“learning by heart”] to look beyond mere stylistics- we start decoding: picking out the significance of the particular style or the relation to its historical context amongst other things. We start getting glimpses of the world of the character, the text and the author.

The significance of the relationship between reading [which is personal experience] and ideology/epistemology [external force] is apparent here. Whatever we deem to be deeply personal or subjective is ultimately the product of something larger than ourselves. Supplementing what we’ve discussed in past seminars: the individual can never be separated from the community, our body belongs to the state and the text cannot be separated from its context.

Paradox: the empire as both an agent of liberation and oppression

Jackson argues that Ireland under the British Empire epitomized its contradictions, where for the Irish the empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression, and it paradoxically provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration. The Irish’s attitude towards the British Empire was often an ambivalent one: Although they were major participants in Empire, they also formed a significant source of subversion.

This ambivalence is evident the characterization of Stephen. On the one hand, Stephen resents colonial rule, and diagnoses Ireland as suffering multiple levels of imperial subjection under British colonial rule and the Catholic Church. Stephen sees the empire as alien and menacing, lamenting that “when the soul of a man is born into this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight”, where he shall attempt “to fly by the nets” of “nationality, language and religion” that entrap him. He asserts that he is the “servant of two masters, an English (British colonizers), an Italian (the Roman Catholic Church), and a third who wants me there for odd jobs.(the contemporary Irish Nationalist movements that he perceive as being ineffective because they do not break free from this condition of subjection.)” When Stephen states in Ulysses that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, he is referring to Ireland’s long history of colonization by England, the ineffectiveness of the Irish resistance and the fact that the Irish had grown to love their enslavement, and cooperated with their oppressors to reinforce their subjection. Thus, although Stephen sees the true Irish self as one that has not yet been awakened, and is confident that his art will be the means of liberation, the text ironises this belief as being naïve because his mind is too supersaturated with the English language (such that he knows the word “tundish” and the English dean of studies does not) and the Catholic religion. This ironising is apparent in the scene where Stephen experiences an epiphany of his artistic vocation. Although he identifies with his namesake Daedalus, the text uses irony and distance to suggest that Stephen can be the over-striving Icarus who falls because his ideals are over ambitious and unrealistic, causing him to fly too near to the sun and drown as a result.

However, Joyce's modernist text is then again highly ambiguous because it does not completely undermine Stephen's bid to be an artist, and resists a definitive meaning and closure because it suggests that although the Catholic religion entraps Stephen, it could also paradoxically provides him with the creative ability as an artist to be a "priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life."

The Künstlerroman and the Irish Condition

Just for fun. This is Norman Rockwell's Triple Self Portrait. My dad showed it to me way back in sec. school and it's lingered in my memory.

In discussing the artist figure of Stephen Dedalus, I will be intruding somewhat into Part 4 and 5. Like my more post-modern, cheeky Norman Rockwell painting, there are various layers in the representation of Dedalus. On a macro level, Joyce creates a tableu of an older artist representing himself as a young man. On a micro level, an older more mature artist Stephen “paints a portrait” of himself as a “young man” growing up as a Irish colonised subject. On an even more micro level, in the narrative itself, the representation of Stephen’s mental world shows us young Stephen’s process of negotiating and working out his selfhood/identity by attempting to paint a “self-portrait” of himself as seen in on page 98. “I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus…The memory of his childhood…he recalled only names: Dante, Parnell etc etc.” Or by drawing a parallel between his position, embarking on his artistic career, with that of his mythical namesake, Daedalus, who in the Grecian myth, frees himself from prison with wings he fashioned.

Through Stephen’s negotiation of his identity as a self and therefore as an artist, Joyce evokes the problem of the Irish Condition, one that is similarly attempting to assert an Irish identity to free itself from the English coloniser. However, the dilemma of what the pure, un-colonised Irish identity is when English-ness has permeated and influenced the Irish identity arises. Where can the colonised subject go to liberate itself from the coloniser when its identity has very much been shaped by its colonial past, the coloniser’s language and culture. To support this, I point to Part 4’s trivial “tundish/funnel” incident with the English professor where Stephen realises his colonised position has been imbedded in him through language. “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205).

For Stephen, the true Irish self has not been awakened or liberated, but he hopes it will be liberated with his art. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (276). However, the question of whether he will succeed is left open by Joyce. Will he be an idealistic youth like Icarus who flies too near the sun and dies, or Daedalus? Is he like the artist in Rockwell’s painting, over-idealising himself? Is it even ever possible to totally liberate the colonised subject from his coloniser? By saying he will “fly by those nets” (220, emphasis mine) of “nationality, language and religion, will he really transcend those nets? Or will he perpetually be flying “by” in the sense of using/being caught in those nets?

The individual and the Community

The introduction to the Penguin edition of Portrait reads, “Stephen recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration. Similarly, it is in relation to his community that he learns the techniques of individuation, although it is by a process of inversion that he achieves his ambition to be self-born”.

I found this so apt and suited to some of the things we have discussed in class this whole semester- this whole idea of the individual and the community. I think starting form Passage, to Burmese Days, we have looked at how their authors tend to zoom out of a discourse of the community and focus on the individual impulse, hence complicating colonial discourse, which is usually understood on the larger, communal level, and this zooming in on the individual, we have labeled as being a very modernist technique.

Joyce however, complicates this very separation of the individual and community, where we realize that it does not really make sense to focus on an individual alone because the individual gains himself and shapes himself based on or in response to his community. Hence, Stephen’s individuality and interiority cannot be seen as being separate and excluded from the larger world he lives in for it is the community that allows him this individuation. Therefore, if we were to go back and revisit characters like Flory, Ronny and Aziz, perhaps we could now read them as not merely characters whose interiority we gain access to due to the modernist mode of representation, but as characters whose interiority is only possible because of both how their community shapes them, as well as our own community that allows us to read them.

293 words

And I thought soul-buying was the Devil's trade...

With Portrait, our course has finally come full circle - we started out debating what our texts of Empire had to do with Modernism, and we will doubtlessly now debate what this text of Modernism has to do with Empire. (Kidding…sort of…) I'll have to admit to looking out for references to Empire throughout the first three chapters, eyeing each instance Stephen considers the boundaries of his world with suspicion… Of course, overlooking for now the complicated relation Ireland has to the British Empire, the only obvious references I've seen in them are the ex-students "now…in the burning tropics," (117) and "saint Francis Xavier…the apostle of the Indies," (115) and the latter is something that struck me.

"He went from country to country in the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptising the people. He is said to have baptised as many as ten thousand idolaters in one month…He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God…" (115)

Perhaps I'd spent too much time last week staring at the commodification of women in Stoler's article, but the impression this description of the "great soldier of God" (115) gives me is that of a commodification of the African and Asian natives on the part of the Church. From this extract, it occurs to me that the missionaries who ventured to the colonies were seeking as much of a profit as the colonists (whose overriding economic agenda has been impressed on us week after week) - albeit a profit for their immortal souls. Natives are not looked upon as persons in their own right, but merely as potential converts for a "soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register." (160) Of course it's a lot easier to grab such great bargains, converts by the swathe, in regions where Christianity is newly introduced than back home - a "true conqueror" saint Francis Xavier indeed was, as shrewd a businessman as any in the EIC…

[So sorry for posting so late last week, Dr. Koh! I'm posting a little earlier this week in penance...]

Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Are you weary of reading Joyce today,
Lost in the deep dark soul of night?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

His words for students hath raised hell
Five parts, unequal and not alike
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Christmas ruined, long live Parnell
Or is Britain put to the fight?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

The low ringing of the church bell
Resonates; makes Stephen contrite
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Strange sex with a mademoiselle
Then repentance, before taking flight.
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

And yet you have held on so well
Sluggish eyes, brain without respite!
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

'It pained him...that he did not know where the universe ended.'

In the beginning of Joyce's "Portrait", Stephen attempts to place himself within the larger structures that surround him. Beginning with himself, he traces his belonging to his country, nation, and eventually, the universe' (27). While he believes that 'after the universe' comes 'nothing', he is troubled by whether there is 'anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began' (28). This failure to 'know where the universe end[s]' not only 'pain[s]' him, but makes him 'fe[el] small and weak' (28). Here, Stephen's uneasiness is three-fold:

1) The 'nothing place' (28) is something Stephen doesn't understand;

2) It is therefore regarded as something other to him, and is hence excluded from the list of places he belongs to;

3) He thus attempts to keep it at a distance from him by imagining that something exists to demarcate it as a different space altogether. This, however, fails, as he is unable to answer whether there is a 'wall' or a 'thin thin line' separating the universe' and 'the nothing place' (28).

These result in Stephen's anxiety, as his attempts to compartmentalize the world into neat categories of understanding go awry. This seems to parallel the uneasiness that the colonial powers felt when ruling their colonies. Replace Stephen's 'nothing place' with 'the native', and 'the universe' with 'the white world', and you have the colonizer's anxiety. In this new case, safety comes from the neat categories of the colonizer and the colonized- recall Chatterjee's argument that colonialism was based on ruling through difference and exclusionary tactics. Similarly, this safety is threatened with the blurring of boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized- recall Stoler's argument about metissage and metisse children, Ellis' outrage at a servant's improving English and the mere thought of a native as a member of the club, and other instances where transgressions of boundaries spell trouble.

[[Just a thought- in relation to our class' title, the modernist writer's attempt to be unafraid of the unknown is intriguing. Instead of 'feel[ing] very tired to think [of such big things]' (28), modernist writers embrace the unknown and the dissolution of neat boundaries, as these allow for new possibilities to be opened up. In doing so, they (attempt to) transcend the limitations of what the Empire was fearful of.]]

The Apathetic Empire

We have gone from India to Africa, Africa to Burma, and Burma to Ireland. Textually speaking, I’d say that we as readers have conducted a little imperialist mission of our own—if those texts are microcosms of countries, our analyses and deconstructions of them then make us something like conquerors and colonizers. And indeed, we occupy a position of considerable power: able to argue a text in any way we choose, justifying just about anything by twisting and turning evidence into our favour. The only ethical thing to do then is to be responsible in our interpretations, rather than dressing them up because they sound good. Now, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, it is precisely for this reason that I confess I’ve gathered a pretty nasty impression of the British Empire.

Jackson talks repeatedly about how the “strategies of British government in Ireland resembled their colonial counterparts in many ways.” While there is nothing wrong with having a consistent foreign policy, there is something decidedly reprehensible about maintaining it despite the negative effects it was known to have on the subjected colony, e.g. the viceroyalty infrastructure—“resentments, intrigue and snobbery which it generated, were broadly familiar…throughout the Empire”; or implicit social stratification which arose either from “British dependence upon, and exploitation of, local allies…local elites”, or the conferring of “imperial honours and titles”.

In fact, it gets uglier when we find out that the British were “keen to exploit division”, routinely “transfer[ring] their affections and support from one local community to another”—the effects of which we can see in the resentful relations among the Irish in Portrait (“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”). The lack of British urgency in sending aid during the Irish potato famine is also a mark of imperial incompetence and apathy towards the people under their rule. The religious liberation that the Empire touted to bring was really a paltry front for what was just “imperial economic vampire[ism]”, and it is no wonder that Portrait’s Dedalus articulates the need to free himself from the these colonial “nets”, thus expressing a desire for freedom/liberation which his mythological name itself invokes.

Power, (re)Structure, Everyone and One.

(warning I have taken painkillers for my back : a muscle relaxant im convinced they give horses)

The first thing that hit me about Joyce’s writing, was well, Joyce’s writing. His ‘unconventional ‘ use of punctuation especially when it comes to speech suggests that the dialogue that is shown becomes merely a reflection in the mind of the listener, rather than a product of the speaker per se. Its all very modernist, but this week im struggling to find the link(s) between the text and the reading.

Stephen’s struggle in school with Father Dolan seen in his situation over the broken glasses and hand-caning suggests the obvious issues with authority. In the novel we see tensions that arise between state and church when it comes to notions of authority. The culture that Stephen must rise against seems to be embedded in a tangle of power struggles. In much the same way as the colonies we have seen in previous texts on the course , Ireland becomes “ a half-way house between Britain and the Empire”(Jackson 136).

Struggling between formulating an identity of its own and being an extension of imperial impulses, Jackson notes Ireland struggled between a government style that was “colonial and metropolitan” (Jackson 126). The notion of “Cultural nationalism” and “political consciousness”( Jackson 136) that arises because of British imperialism comes from that “interrelationship of Irish Society with the British Empire” (Jackson 139). This seems to be something mirrored in other texts that we have done like Foster’s A Passage to India and Orwell’s Burmese Days where the locals start to become more aware of politics and how it affected lives.

Joyce’s novel revolves around Church, Self, Establishment and Power- four themes that are all, like Ireland ‘sand Britain’s fate: interrelated. In this sense perhaps we can draw links between Jackson, Joyce, Modernism and Colonialism by noting how power structures are altered on both a macro level; country(govt/ religion),society as well as micro level; individual.