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?