The line/language of beauty

Reading Fanon and Joyce in tandem this week brought up a particular issue that surfaces in the other texts we have studied: the importance of beauty in language, and the relation of the colonised (as a "tourist" of sorts of the coloniser's language) to beauty.

In a rather unfair exchange (among many others), the coloniser aestheticises the Other as a means of adding beauty to the English language and as a means of creating beauty. I'm thinking of Said and Gikandi here - the selective use of material or pseudo-spiritual aspects of the East/Other to make art. There's a hint of this in Joyce as well, when yellow ivy makes Stephen think of ivory: "one of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run: India mittit ebur" (157). India sends ivory: the coloniser's language is the medium that makes aspects of the East - the romanticised image of India, the material of ivory - beautiful. The coloniser is thus placed in the powerful position of the artist.

However, I call this exchange unfair because the colonised is barred from reciprocating. The privilege of the artist does not extend to the colonised, and this is very evident in Fanon's description of the French talking down to the native, even if the native is fluent in French: language to the native must be fragmented and thus made unbeautiful (for the native, language can only serve as a means of communication and the coloniser's assertion of power). The native is thus barred from the realm of the aesthetic and kept from creating beauty in language, because the notion of beauty, as with language, comes with an accompanying world of cultural knowledge and tradition (as Fanon and Joyce describe). The coloniser-artist feels more and more threatened the closer the native comes to this hallowed world. For the colonised, however, the problem lies in how to access beauty without resorting to this cultural world of the coloniser; Stephen, for instance, cannot enunciate an aesthetics of beauty without thinking through the borrowed lens of Aquinas. The colonised can thus try to reclaim this coloniser's cultural notions of beauty for his own, or he can rewrite his own standards of beauty.

I argue that the latter is what Joyce does in Portrait. By placing Irish Stephen in the role of artist, he reclaims agency for the colonised to act as a creator of beauty, as Joyce himself does through his modernist play with language. Rejecting the hermetic line of beauty, as it were, of the omniscient authorial voice, he revels in fragmentation, showing how fragmented language can be beautiful - contrary to the French in Fanon. Joyce, therefore, enacts a reversal of the talking-down and deaestheticization of language that goes on in Fanon; this is, arguably, an excellent example of how the colonised artist can reclaim beauty for himself.

Last Post!!! :)))

I just have to say this— doesn’t the bit in Fanon’s article about Charles Andre-Julien introducing Aime Cesaire as “a Negro poet with a university degree” and “a great black poet” remind you of Obama?! “The first black president…” and such? His race foregrounded his presidential post/campaign only because he belongs to a group that was once (or still?) discriminated for its race/skin color in America.

Anyway, going back to Fanon’s article, I liked how Fanon wanted to “help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment”, to not be a “slave of their archetypes”. I think this idea is to some extent, I hope I’m not stretching it here, being developed in Portrait, though the ‘their’ is not limited to the complexes borne out of colonialism or only referring to colonizers’ expectations of the colonized individual. Fanon showed that language means power, that it means adopting a culture and Portrait shows that language also means discourse, a system of beliefs. After all, the novel is about what everyone, belonging to different systems, expects from Stephen right? So can we say that the nationalist discourse (Parnell,etc) in specific, since this is actually directly borne out of colonialism, also sets up expectations (on the nationalist’s behalf) of Stephen and actually a colonizer would anticipate that the colonized Catholic Irish man would naturally support Parnell. Or am I reading Fanon all wrong? Eeps.

Anyhow, I think it is significant that in the end, Stephen chooses to reject all the (conflicting) discourses he is exposed to; he instead fashions an identity for himself that lies outside and beyond the reach of these systems. Stephen hears a sermon and tries to speak/act the religious discourse/way. He fails because it goes against his natural tendency to appreciate beauty. The epiphany is then an understanding about his own self, about the kind of language he is meant to use which involves describing his experience of seeing and living. The language of an artist’s.

"Was that poetry?"

"The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?"

I don't think we are ever going to get away from the issue of language and Stephen in Portrait. Stephen's unrequited love for Emma Clery is complicated by her involvement with Fr. Moran in the Irish language revival movement. And language gives way to cultural formation and expression; it is the gateway to ideas, feelings and philosophies, to a people's way of life. Language is necessarily political; it interpellates its subjects and speakers into a particular modality of thought, over and against alternative philosophies and ideologies. And for Stephen, the threat of the resurgence of Gaelic is intertwined with his untenable desire for Emma. In a very real sense, he loses Emma to language.

Language and words are, however, Stephen's arsenal. His quiver full of arrows, if you will. The aforementioned penultimate apprehension of her transmutes Emma into poetry by his lustful thoughts. His ironic decorporealization and retextualization of Emma is a "brute-like" violence of the mind enabled by language. Here, Emma is at once an idealized vision of Irish femininity that remains untenable to Stephen. Having experienced the carnal encounter with a woman's flesh, followed by the orgasmic epiphany of his vision of the female muse, Stephen is finally able to repudiate his affinity for this vision of Irish femininity based on Clery's apparent affinity for the wrong language, the wrong religion, the wrong man. Stephen above all must unshackle himself from all those issues before taking flight. Constantly trumping his own indigenous language would result in self-disenfranchisement, and Stephen's intense devotion to his own individual soul underlies this desire to come into his own, above all things else.

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)

And I thought soul-buying was the Devil's trade...

With Portrait, our course has finally come full circle - we started out debating what our texts of Empire had to do with Modernism, and we will doubtlessly now debate what this text of Modernism has to do with Empire. (Kidding…sort of…) I'll have to admit to looking out for references to Empire throughout the first three chapters, eyeing each instance Stephen considers the boundaries of his world with suspicion… Of course, overlooking for now the complicated relation Ireland has to the British Empire, the only obvious references I've seen in them are the ex-students "now…in the burning tropics," (117) and "saint Francis Xavier…the apostle of the Indies," (115) and the latter is something that struck me.

"He went from country to country in the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptising the people. He is said to have baptised as many as ten thousand idolaters in one month…He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God…" (115)

Perhaps I'd spent too much time last week staring at the commodification of women in Stoler's article, but the impression this description of the "great soldier of God" (115) gives me is that of a commodification of the African and Asian natives on the part of the Church. From this extract, it occurs to me that the missionaries who ventured to the colonies were seeking as much of a profit as the colonists (whose overriding economic agenda has been impressed on us week after week) - albeit a profit for their immortal souls. Natives are not looked upon as persons in their own right, but merely as potential converts for a "soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register." (160) Of course it's a lot easier to grab such great bargains, converts by the swathe, in regions where Christianity is newly introduced than back home - a "true conqueror" saint Francis Xavier indeed was, as shrewd a businessman as any in the EIC…

[So sorry for posting so late last week, Dr. Koh! I'm posting a little earlier this week in penance...]

Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Are you weary of reading Joyce today,
Lost in the deep dark soul of night?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

His words for students hath raised hell
Five parts, unequal and not alike
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Christmas ruined, long live Parnell
Or is Britain put to the fight?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

The low ringing of the church bell
Resonates; makes Stephen contrite
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Strange sex with a mademoiselle
Then repentance, before taking flight.
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

And yet you have held on so well
Sluggish eyes, brain without respite!
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

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.