Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic

Adding on to what Sarah has said about language and colonial discourse, I completely agree with the idea that Stephen's familiarity with English proves the success of the ISA (ideological state apparatus) of education in assimilating the Irish into the coloniser's dominant culture and language. However, this is not solely a one-way street and cross-culturization, for lack of a better word, takes place.

Stephen compares the different way the British dean of studies and he relate to the English language:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Portrait 189)

Here, he claims the dean to have a superior relationship to the English language which is "his". Later, Stephen realizes he has acquiesced to the difference between the coloniser and the colonised on the basis that he was both British and a dean: this does not mean he is right.

That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Portrait 251)

Joyce problematizes the scene here and suggests that the coloniser himself is impacted by cultural assimilation, the dean easily labels a word he is not familiar with the Irish "other". To suggest that the dean has come "to learn [his own language] from us" is humourous but is also a perverse version of the master (English)- slave (Irish) dialectic. Often one thinks of the way the coloniser has affected the colonised, but fails to think of this exchange as mutual.

Through this process of cultural assimilation, neither the English nor Irish culture is, according to Said, "single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic". (Quote from an online article). Both are subject to the other culture, relying on the other to sustain a power relation modeled on the Hegelian model.