Last-minute Tundish...

Fanon makes clear the immense role language plays in constructing the identities of the colonizer and colonized and states, “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” (38) The French that the Antilles Negro speaks seems self-empowerment, but is also complicity with a culture that deems him inferior. In Portrait Stephen refuses to learn Irish: “this race and this country and this life produced me…I shall express myself as I am.” (220) By Fanon’s formulation, Stephen’s attempts to forge an Irish identity through his colonizer’s language is paradoxical, self-defeating – by using English, he is already “tak[ing] on [an English] world.”

However, I find it a problematic conclusion - Stephen’s discussion of the tundish with the Dean reads on one level like Fanon’s examples of European enforcement of black inferiority by talking down in pidgin Creole, with Stephen’s morose reflection that “the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205) when the Dean takes the word as a lowly Irish construction. As it turns out, it is “English and good old blunt English too,” (204) while “funnel,” conversely, is of French origin, a remnant of the time England itself was ‘colonised’, or conquered, by the Normans. The Dean’s identity as an Englishman and Stephen’s identity as an Irishman, however, define the identity of the respective words in their conversation – the French word appears more English than the English word that appears Irish, and Stephen’s revelation arguably does not make the Dean any less English nor he any the more.

This perhaps demonstrates that the identities of the colonizer and colonized also play an immense role in constructing their languages, and redeems somewhat Stephen’s decision to refashion English for an Irish identity – as well as Fanon’s contradictory usage of French for his theses.

And we have arrived at the end....

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that ‘[t]o speak a language is to take on a world, a culture’ (38). In doing so, we lose a sense of our own national identity and culture, and there is a certain fear in there being a lost in the continuation of this culture. We certainly see this conflict embodied between Stephen and Davin: Stephen represents the higher culture of Irish that has been ‘assimilated’ into English culture (in other words, the privileged one. Think LKY and the like) and is an example of the anxieties surrounding a potential loss in identity that Fanon highlights in his article; Davin represents the peasant, the Irish that is fiercely trying to hold on to his Irish identity –‘Whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password’ (196).

Perhaps we can understand this conflict better by looking at our own Singaporean context. In absorbing the English language as our first language, we have created a common language that helps to unify everyone together, making it possible for people of different races, cultures and backgrounds to communicate with one another. But at the same time, we have lost, or at the risk of losing, the very cultures that our very forefathers had brought along with them when they came to Singapore. One of my Malaysian friends asked me today why is it that in Singapore, we have the option of dual sound for Japanese and Korean dramas but not for Hong Kong dramas or dramas in dialects? My answer was that the government wanted to unify the Chinese together by pushing for Mandarin as the Chinese’ Mother Tongue, and not the dialects. Yet, there still exists a worry that in doing so, we are losing the unique culture that each dialect group brings with them. We are like Stephen and Davin: being easily assimilated into the Western culture to the extent that when I went to England people reacted with surprise that 1. I dress the way they dress. 2. I talk the way they talk. 3. My major is English Literature; at the same time, we are struggling to hold on to our Asian values, to our own traditional cultures and negotiating a Singaporean culture at the same time.

Since this is the last blog post of the week, I’d like to say that at the end of this module, I have looked deeper into my own sense of self and my own notion of a national identity. I question what is it that I have lost by growing up in Singapore, by being introduced to English at an early language and loving (and thus consuming) English and English culture more than say Mandarin and Chinese culture. Looking back, I wished I had put in more effort in Chinese and learnt more about my own culture; at the same time, I also wonder what life would have been like if I had grown up in Malaysia (being a Malaysian at first) as opposed to in Singapore. What language would I be speaking and would I be comfortable with? What culture will I be in? What mask will I be wearing? Perhaps, I should like Stephen, attempt ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ just to make sense of things. Just kidding.

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.

A solution perhaps to the linguistic dilemma of former colonized writers

In “The Negro and Language,” Fanon reinforces the significance of language and argues that language “provides us with one of the elements in the coloured man’s comprehension of the dimension of the other” (17). The issue of language is equally important to Fanon as to Joyce. In Joyce’s texts, language is inevitably bound up with both identity and power, amongst other issues. Primarily through Stephen, Joyce grapples with the issue of language: when Stephen says that “the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205), he duly recognizes the English language as belonging first and foremost to the dean, who is metonym for the British Empire. As such, English will always be for him a colonial language, an “acquired speech . . . so familiar and so foreign” (205). By taking on another language (220), Stephen sees his ancestors as betraying their Irish roots.

Through Stephen, Joyce examines and indeed, reinforces the dilemma of the formerly colonized writer writing from the periphery. While Joyce recognizes that English is a foreign tongue, one that is estranged from Irishness, he is writing in English. This dilemma is in fact not restricted to Joyce but also to Achebe, who has faced criticism from the African writer and critic, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who sees the use of English as "part of the neo-colonial structures that repress progressive ideas." Similar to Achebe who “Africanizes” his use of English by referring to African traditions and cultures, one way that Joyce negotiates this dilemma is to create a new form of English that is imbued with Irish references. He inserts Irish vocabulary like the “tundish” (205) and references specific to the Irish context, such as “Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book” which was “standard in primary and intermediate schools in Ireland” (280). Joyce also goes one step further than Achebe by creating a new English that is syntactically disjoined. Rather than English being fluid and transparent, Joyce’s English is fragmented and opaque as evinced both through his modernist form as well as the postmodernist technique of including other literary forms like the diary and other intertextual references.

proof of existence

one part of fanon's essay that really leapt out at me was when he was relating how he gives european foreigners to france directions and realises that there is a difference in the perception of europeans and Negros because of the Negro's cultural lack:

When it comes to the case of the Negro, nothing of the kind. He has no culture, no civilization, no 'long historical past.' This may be the reason for the strivings of contemporary Negroes: to prove the existence of a black civilization to the white world at all costs. (34)

and u know, that really struck me with a sense of pathos. why should a race of people have to fight so hard, just to prove it exists? shouldn't its physicality, its national identity and land speak for itself? and yet isn't that what everyone does, in social settings and conversations, one speaks to remind others of one's presence--otherwise, one is just not there. and that's why fanon's argument of language as being something more powerful perhaps than physical manifestations of identity, being something that "assumes a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (17-8) really speaks to me. one speaks, really, to assert one's identity. and correspondingly, the way one speaks or what one speaks shapes one's identity (and social perceptions of that identity) as well.

and has anyone noticed the ridiculous proliferation of the irish presence in postcolonial lit? (or is it just me - maybe i'm biased, having hated seamus heaney in jc...i'm just not a fan of seeing rape of the land and one's identity in rolling hills, earth and digging spades) fanon's assertions really hit home with why there is so much irish literature preoccupied with deconstructing and fixing the irish identity within the context of the confusing, destabilised political climate imposed by the british. the irish are overcompensating for the hegemonising of their identity by the british empire--they have to speak out - and volumes at that - to make themselves heard, to constantly assert and reinforce their identity and place in the world.

i wrote about colonial linguistic violence in one of my very first blog entries for the class. it's really striking how that superficial understanding has come much further--colonialism is not just about usurping someone else's language, someone else's education systems, how children are raised, etc. it's about taking away someone's identity--the very proof of their existence.

Joyce’s Epigraph, title and Modernist interpretive freedom

The epigraph that frames the novel comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it can be translated as “he turned his mind to unknown arts” It refers to the story of how Daedelus, the fabulous artificer reacted by fashioning wax wings when told by King Minos of Crete that he and his son would not be allowed to leave the island. Since Icarus flew to close to the sun and fell to his death, the epigraph seems to mirror the rising and falling trajectory that through the various chapters in the book. As Lucas pointed out last week, the narrative movement of each chapter ends on a high note, only to be brought down low by the depressing image or scene that introduces the next chapter. However, apart from framing the rising-falling trajectory, the epigraph seems also to be an open invitation to interpretive freedom. The image of imaginative exploration seems to invite all readers to open their minds to new ways of seeing. The provisionality of the novel’s title as evident in how it is “a” portrait and not THE definitive portrait of an artist as a young man also provides a sense of the modernist openness and subjectivity. Since the portrait by its very nature reflects both the perceive as well as the subject, it seems that Joyce is calling upon his readers to actively participate in this process of meaning-making, where those who approach the text seeking definitive meaning or a prescriptive reading will not succeed. This openness and interpretive flexibility of the text which demands active readerly meaning making is evident in Chapter one, when young Stephen cowers under the table and learns about fear and punishment. The phrase “pull out his eyes Apologize” is repeated in a singsong manner, and the reader has to decide if this represents the voice of authority hammering home the lesson, or the consciousness of an already rebellious Stephen throwing back the threat in a mocking tone.

Lingua [Franca] Siapa?

The exploration of language as it affects/ is affected by the colonizer and the colonized is one that is perhaps most interesting when we consider Joyce. While language is obviously a carrier of culture, the adoption of language in terms of colonial dynamics is perhaps most aptly captured in Fanon’s idea that “the Negro wants to speak French because it is the key that can open doors” (Fanon 38).

The language of the colonizer, indeed that that is foreign to the native language( British English to Irish in Joyce’s novel), is deemed as superior and the underlying need to survive in the colony ( or in the face of the empire) sees the native “ incarcerating a new type of man”(Fanon 36). Here we see the ideas of language as opportunity, language as professed through power and therefore language as a form of power to be partaken of.The link between identity and language is further confounded when we contemplate Fanon’s idea that “every dialect is a way of thinking”( Fanon 25) and that the native adoption of a “language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation” ( Fanon 25). The complexity lies in the way the native tries to forge a new identity by acquiring the power of the new language, but at the same time renounces his own identity. What Fanon suggests is that the Negro/Native has “no culture, no civilization” (Fanon 34) to fall back on and so his native language is bankrupt of value in the opinion of the Western world( the colonizers)

What remains to be asked then, is who’s language is it really, this language of the colony? It takes on words of the native language/dialects, but is forcibly structured to that of the colonizers. Meaning in some cases remain constant, but take on different forms: Joyce’s novel sees Stephen wonder about how even in the existence of “different names for God in all the different languages in the world … still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God” (CH 1). Lingua Franca becomes Lingua Siapa, in the imposition of foreign on the local(in the eyes of the colonized) and of the local on the alien( in the eyes of the colonizer).

If we take into account Stephen’s role as an artist and his struggle to forge an identity in a changing Ireland through language we are left to contemplate the implication of language on expression and identity.The power behind the imposition, accessibility and usability language then complicates itself in the forging of a new (colonial) identity.

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.

'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'.

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.

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

'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.]]