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'.