A Portrait and Its Discontents: The Dissonance of Voice

From the first few extraordinary chapters of Joyce’s novel, we are alerted to the importance of voice and discourse to the novel: Stephen hears the voices of his father, and his playmates at school questioning him about his identity. Indeed, working within the paradigm of the bildungsroman, Joyce indicates the dialectic of self and society, and inner and outer life that the hero must reconcile or merge as the end-point of his development into maturity and full sensibility. Joyce even has his protagonist list in “the flyleaf of the geography” (12) his place in relation to Clongowes, Ireland, and Europe. Indeed, the narrative at this point evinces a comic inclusiveness where Stephen’s consciousness registers the accents of his parents, Dante, and Uncle Charles, with no thought as how best to structure and frame the ideological dispute between the strident Fenian militancy of Mr. Casey and the conservative Catholicism of Dante that breeds, as Jackson points out, “division within families” (136).

Stephen must come to reject what he terms “the din of all these hollowsounding voices” (88) flooding his consciousness that seek to claim him for their own. Joyce ironically subverts the bildungsroman tradition by pointing out that the resolution of Stephen's identity plunges him into radical isolation and distance from societal institutions from without that threaten absolute disempowerment. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, says Stephen in Ulysses, and thus he records the deep failure of the complete awakening of any authentic Irish historical imagining from the shackles of a colonial system that demand narcotic conformity to the dominant history and culture it disseminates. An absolute space of interiority then becomes not only the privileged mode of representation of the self and its struggles, but an absolute mandate of incommensurability that ensures its authenticity. .