The reality of language

Ireland's position as a site of divided identity, as Jackson suggests, lies partly in "the failure of the British to define Ireland either in fully metropolitan or colonial terms" (150). Definitions, and language as the key means of definition, are thus invariably tied to the shaping of identity and one's reality.

This is something that struck me very much about Joyce (and perhaps it is true of modernism in general as well): words are as much political as they are aesthetic. Like Orwell, Joyce seems to espouse a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the language you use defines your reality, which in turn defines and restricts your language. Stephen's formative years are matched and reflected by the literal formation of language and its semantic possibilities. As a boy, meanings are multiple and malleable, reflecting the tabula rasa state of his mind: "What did that mean, to kiss?" (11-12); "God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too" (13). Meanings, however, become restricted by social conventions, as shown by the coding in colours and language that Stephen learns. The lexical item "green rose" must be rejected because "you could not have a green rose" (9). Green (and maroon) become associated with the political reality of Ireland - green for Parnell, maroon for Davitt. In this way the rejection of the "green rose" becomes more subversively diabolical: you can have red or white roses, York and Lancaster, but to map Irish green to a British symbol is denied by linguistic and "realistic" (insofar as the real is shaped by language and society) conventions.

The effect of language on the state of of being colonised is thus highly complex: if a person is brought up in the capacity of a colonised man, how does one separate what this reality imposes on him as opposed to the reality that is his and that he can shape? How does Ireland (or India, or other colonies) define its reality when it is caught in a linguistic and real-world "halfway house" (to quote Jackson)? Language is slippery; so is reality and identity. Joyce emphasises this with his use of language, which slips and slides, fractures and builds, to create a sense of the "real": Stephen's burgeoning consciousness, matched and mapped by the reader's own consciousness in the reading experience. And yet, in line with Joyce's own identity as Irish (reflected and shaped by this characteristic of his language), shadowing it all is a constant questioning of the "real" that he builds and its relation with the "master language" of English: "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...my soul frets in the shadow of his language." (167)

Leakage

I find it interesting how colonialism has switched from a racial problem, to a religious one. At least one thing stays the same, that colonialism is essentially a rule of difference. In Ireland, the Empire’s involvement made use of religious difference, between Protestants and Catholics. To elaborate further, this rule of difference is ironically an effort by the British Empire to work with local allies. As Jackson states, “[t]he cultivation of these allies might be linked to the policies of division and rule which were often the hallmark of the British colonial presence” (130). In addition, “[t]he British, in Ireland and elsehwerre, were always keen to exploit division, and to transfer their affections and support from one local community to another, depending on their calculation of advantage” (131).

Jackson’s commentary on colonialism in Ireland is refreshing, because it states some of the positive side effects of colonialism. He is careful not to appear as endorsing or valorizing British colonialism in Ireland, but it made me curious about the ‘leakages’ or side effects that colonialism had not intended.

These ‘leakages’ can, I think, be related back to the modernist techniques. The idea of resisting totality, of ‘leakages’, is perhaps another way of highlighting plurality of meanings, the futile efforts in containing and establishing control for something inevitably eludes and escapes. In a strange way, I see Stephen’s rejection of everything, as a form of ‘leakage’, to resist taking any sides and to abandon all forms of binding structures.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning (268, 269)

Pieces of Empire

Jackson's article highlights several issues that contribute to the contradictory/tense relationship between the British Empire and Ireland. One such issue is that of differential treatment of the Irish Catholics. What is interesting for me, I guess, is that here differential treatment and biasness is based on religion rather than race/colour seeing, that both the Irish and British are after all caucasians.

How much 'stronger' (for lack of a better word) is religion a driving force to discriminate and rule over in comparison to race as a dividing category? Does Portrait give us readers anything to back up this statement?

And just a sidepoint - I think the fragmented nature of the text reflects the fragmented colonial state which is in part a product of the various government structures (which complicate colonial ruling - it becomes a mess as Jackson puts it in the article).

In addition, in relation to this module... the texts have so far discussed the different colonial situations in various parts of the world - Burma, India, Ireland.. this I suppose, grants us a better insight into colonialism/imperialism. The spectrum of voices and perspectives is modernist in its multiplicity which rebels against the fixed certain-tude (is there even such a word?) of texts narrated by a third person.

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'.

Modernism and Empire and, Identity

This is the first time I’m reading anything by Joyce and well, it was an experience. Anyway, I felt that it was a novel about influences and I really saw modernism and empire come together in this novel because Stephen is trying to find/shape his personal identity as a person (I always thought modernism has much to do issues of identity because of its style of using stream of consciousness, multiple viewpoints). I thought it was adorable but also meaningful and astute when Joyce wrote from a child’s perspective and Stephen sees himself as belonging to “Ireland…Europe…The world…The universe”. The discipline of geography itself appears redundant because countries only stay put on the map. In reality, people move, migrate, cross boundaries, invade territories. In this process of moving then, identities lose their clear-cut definition. A white man in England would be just that; in India however, he would have a different identity, perhaps as a pukka sahib. So what escapes the colonized child’s attention is that Ireland does not just belong to Europe; it belongs to the Empire. His own identity is as such, because of the Empire, is fragmented even before he starts to shape it.

When reading the Christmas dinner bit in Portrait, the part about how “the British imperial rule in nineteenth-century Ireland generated a political culture where families might be divided through their Irish or imperial allegiance” from Jackson’s article was brought to mind for me. In this scene, it is not about ‘Us. v. Them’ or even Protestant v. Catholic. Joyce shows another type of division in which “Irish allegiance” gets problematized. It appears at one level to be a debate about whether religion should enter politics or whether the latter should remain secular. But I felt (since Stephen is sitting at the adult table for Christmas for the first time and watching this scene unfold) that this debate would only further complicate the construction of self-identity for the protagonist. Mr. Casey, Mr. Dedalus and Dante are all Catholics and they are all for the liberation of Ireland (since Dante whacked a man who had “taken his hat off when the band played God save the Queen” with her umbrella) but yet, what a heated argument! Who is the ideal patriot? Who is the ideal Catholic? Empire thus enters to prevent someone from ever resolving such issues of identity and like Jackson says, an individual or family ends up housing within itself contradictions or ambiguities.

Fragmented Interiority of Empire and Self-Destructive Tendencies

Jackson’s survey of the Union’s internal composition of divisive and volatile nationalisms, with its negotiations of tensions of state oppression and movement towards social advancement to and from the Empire and Ireland, forms the backdrop of Stephen’s modernist anxieties in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Stephen, the volatile anxieties of his nationalism in such a milieu can only be transcended in a certain pathway. The Hegelian dialectic of power relations that stratifies the colonies to the Empire, then possibly reflected in the internal colonization of Ireland, and its anxiety of living within such a paradigm (as Stephen experiences) can only be shaken off with a modernist transcendence - art.

This aim to achieve transcendence from the political and economic power relation between Ireland and the Empire is one of self-destructivity and violence within the Self. We see that Stephen, in his escape from the haunting of his double-crossing countrymen, seeks multiple forms of “self-flagellation” to either expunge his internal conflicts or to heighten his consciousness to a transcendent level. Stephen’s obsession in the death of the Irish martyr Parnell, and the scenario of how his Irish compatriots had sold him out to his death, reflects what Jackson summarises as the “volatile, and unpredictable political culture” of Ireland (Jackson 152).

On the cultural perspective, Stephen’s achieving an epiphany after sleeping with a prostitute, subsequently subverted by his extreme devoutness followed by another epiphany and then once again subverted by his disillusionment and the leaving of the Order show a constant debunking of possible pathways of transcending the milieu of ambiguity of Ireland and the Irish Self. Stephen’s journey show that to escape the slightest “British experience of Empire” (152) as detailed in Jackson’s chapter, the artist must then exile himself from the machine of the Empire totally, and how that is not possible even in a self-destructive mode.

Paradox: the empire as both an agent of liberation and oppression

Jackson argues that Ireland under the British Empire epitomized its contradictions, where for the Irish the empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression, and it paradoxically provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration. The Irish’s attitude towards the British Empire was often an ambivalent one: Although they were major participants in Empire, they also formed a significant source of subversion.

This ambivalence is evident the characterization of Stephen. On the one hand, Stephen resents colonial rule, and diagnoses Ireland as suffering multiple levels of imperial subjection under British colonial rule and the Catholic Church. Stephen sees the empire as alien and menacing, lamenting that “when the soul of a man is born into this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight”, where he shall attempt “to fly by the nets” of “nationality, language and religion” that entrap him. He asserts that he is the “servant of two masters, an English (British colonizers), an Italian (the Roman Catholic Church), and a third who wants me there for odd jobs.(the contemporary Irish Nationalist movements that he perceive as being ineffective because they do not break free from this condition of subjection.)” When Stephen states in Ulysses that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, he is referring to Ireland’s long history of colonization by England, the ineffectiveness of the Irish resistance and the fact that the Irish had grown to love their enslavement, and cooperated with their oppressors to reinforce their subjection. Thus, although Stephen sees the true Irish self as one that has not yet been awakened, and is confident that his art will be the means of liberation, the text ironises this belief as being naïve because his mind is too supersaturated with the English language (such that he knows the word “tundish” and the English dean of studies does not) and the Catholic religion. This ironising is apparent in the scene where Stephen experiences an epiphany of his artistic vocation. Although he identifies with his namesake Daedalus, the text uses irony and distance to suggest that Stephen can be the over-striving Icarus who falls because his ideals are over ambitious and unrealistic, causing him to fly too near to the sun and drown as a result.

However, Joyce's modernist text is then again highly ambiguous because it does not completely undermine Stephen's bid to be an artist, and resists a definitive meaning and closure because it suggests that although the Catholic religion entraps Stephen, it could also paradoxically provides him with the creative ability as an artist to be a "priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life."

The Apathetic Empire

We have gone from India to Africa, Africa to Burma, and Burma to Ireland. Textually speaking, I’d say that we as readers have conducted a little imperialist mission of our own—if those texts are microcosms of countries, our analyses and deconstructions of them then make us something like conquerors and colonizers. And indeed, we occupy a position of considerable power: able to argue a text in any way we choose, justifying just about anything by twisting and turning evidence into our favour. The only ethical thing to do then is to be responsible in our interpretations, rather than dressing them up because they sound good. Now, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, it is precisely for this reason that I confess I’ve gathered a pretty nasty impression of the British Empire.

Jackson talks repeatedly about how the “strategies of British government in Ireland resembled their colonial counterparts in many ways.” While there is nothing wrong with having a consistent foreign policy, there is something decidedly reprehensible about maintaining it despite the negative effects it was known to have on the subjected colony, e.g. the viceroyalty infrastructure—“resentments, intrigue and snobbery which it generated, were broadly familiar…throughout the Empire”; or implicit social stratification which arose either from “British dependence upon, and exploitation of, local allies…local elites”, or the conferring of “imperial honours and titles”.

In fact, it gets uglier when we find out that the British were “keen to exploit division”, routinely “transfer[ring] their affections and support from one local community to another”—the effects of which we can see in the resentful relations among the Irish in Portrait (“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”). The lack of British urgency in sending aid during the Irish potato famine is also a mark of imperial incompetence and apathy towards the people under their rule. The religious liberation that the Empire touted to bring was really a paltry front for what was just “imperial economic vampire[ism]”, and it is no wonder that Portrait’s Dedalus articulates the need to free himself from the these colonial “nets”, thus expressing a desire for freedom/liberation which his mythological name itself invokes.

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.