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.

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