Language: The Colonized and the Colonizer

It is ironic that Fanon uses the language of the colonizer (French in his case) to present the case about language as an instrument of imperial ideological domination.  Like Joyce, and like many post-colonial intellectuals and writers from Acebe to Edward Said, he faces the paradox of needing to present the state, the case of his people and culture in a language that does not belong to him.  In Joyce's case, he fights that paradox by, among other things, calling into question the Englishman's own command of language.  The word 'tundish' comes to mind; in Portrait the professor thinks that it is an Irish word, when in truth it is as English a word as words can be (Heaney in his notes mentions that 'tundish' is in fact a mid-Elizabethian word).  The slave knows the master's language better than the master.  Ellis from Burmese Days would not have stood for this; "We shall have to sack [the native butler] if he gets to talk English too well," he says.

And yet English can itself be termed a 'colonized' language.  It has roots in both Germanic languages and Latin, with a liberal helping from latter-day French and German, not to mention Hindi, Mandarain, Chinese, Malay, and a whole host of other languages.  English is probably unique in this among imperial languages.  Is it truely 'colonized', or does the very act of borrowing transforms the word into another instrument of ideological domination?  'Anime' in its native Japanese context refers to any animated work, including 3D modelling; in English it has come to mean cell-shaded animation from Japan or done in 'the Japanese style'.  Is this an ideological stereotyping, or is this a simple case of borrowing from another culture?  Is the act of 'borrowing' in language ever free of power implications?  These are questions that I have yet to come up with answers for.

Mastery of language - whose power

Sorry, just got to share this. Just to add to Kelly’s experience, I was in Sweden (many years ago) at some international camp and someone asked us (we were all female!) if we lived in trees in Singapore and if the women stayed at home to cook!?! (No he was not trying to be funny. He thought Singapore was in China!) Talk about ignorance right?

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power” (Fanon 18). Let us rephrase that “Mastery of the colonial language affords remarkable power”. The colonial language continues to be a powerful medium and this is evident in the sheer number of English books we find in bookstores around the world. Fanon states that the one “who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is” (Fanon 38) but we see in Stephen that the more he acquires the colonial language, the more aware he becomes of his alienation from it:

The language in which we are speaking is his before mine. How different are the words . . . on his lips and on mine . . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired language. (Portrait 205)

The question is how does one reconcile the use, or need for the English language with preserving cultural identity? I think Yeats and Joyce have done that. They have appropriated the English language and blended it with their own culture to create an “Irishness” that people will study for a long long time (English Literature students at least). They are examples of how a colonized people can ‘fly by those nets’ (Portrait 220).

'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.

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.

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...]

'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.]]