Power, (re)Structure, Everyone and One.

(warning I have taken painkillers for my back : a muscle relaxant im convinced they give horses)

The first thing that hit me about Joyce’s writing, was well, Joyce’s writing. His ‘unconventional ‘ use of punctuation especially when it comes to speech suggests that the dialogue that is shown becomes merely a reflection in the mind of the listener, rather than a product of the speaker per se. Its all very modernist, but this week im struggling to find the link(s) between the text and the reading.

Stephen’s struggle in school with Father Dolan seen in his situation over the broken glasses and hand-caning suggests the obvious issues with authority. In the novel we see tensions that arise between state and church when it comes to notions of authority. The culture that Stephen must rise against seems to be embedded in a tangle of power struggles. In much the same way as the colonies we have seen in previous texts on the course , Ireland becomes “ a half-way house between Britain and the Empire”(Jackson 136).

Struggling between formulating an identity of its own and being an extension of imperial impulses, Jackson notes Ireland struggled between a government style that was “colonial and metropolitan” (Jackson 126). The notion of “Cultural nationalism” and “political consciousness”( Jackson 136) that arises because of British imperialism comes from that “interrelationship of Irish Society with the British Empire” (Jackson 139). This seems to be something mirrored in other texts that we have done like Foster’s A Passage to India and Orwell’s Burmese Days where the locals start to become more aware of politics and how it affected lives.

Joyce’s novel revolves around Church, Self, Establishment and Power- four themes that are all, like Ireland ‘sand Britain’s fate: interrelated. In this sense perhaps we can draw links between Jackson, Joyce, Modernism and Colonialism by noting how power structures are altered on both a macro level; country(govt/ religion),society as well as micro level; individual.