Joyces Politics and Irish History - Essay Example

Joyces Politics and Irish History James Joyce has been canonized as much as any other writer of the twentieth century. His writing techniques have been studied, copied, and placed among the tenets of Modernism. Though Irish, he is typically called a British writer, and people could hardly be blamed for thinking this to be so considering his first book, the short story collection Dubliners. As Joyce noted himself, he wrote the stories “for the most part in a style of scrupulous meaness” ( Dubliners 302), and “Two Gallants, along with other stories, “goes beyond a dispassionate rendering of Irish ‘paralysis’ and treats the theme of active betrayal” (370). In a review of Ulysses, the reviewer Joseph Collins quotes Joyce as stating: My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? No honorable and sincere man has given up his life, his youth, and his affections to Ireland from the days of Tome to those of Parnell but the Irish sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him for another. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow. These words, as well as his harsh treatment of Dublin in his early stories, can easily lead to the conclusion that Joyce had little or no love for his home country. Using the modernist approach, one could state that Joyce’s use of Irish history and politics was merely used to place the stories in a certain context but don’t necessarily add to the meaning of the works. There has been more of a recent movement to consider Joyce’s use of history and politics in his work. As Ireland at the time of Joyce’s writings was under British rule, Joyce can be viewed as a postcolonial writer. As the critic Peter Barry writes, “One significant effect of postcolonial criticism is to further undermine the universalist claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics” (193). In this view, Joyce is no longer considered to be a writer who touches upon universal themes that all people can identify with. Through postcolonial criticism, he becomes a writer who was attacking the oppressive force of an imperial conqueror. Through re-examining his works, we can find evidence to support these claims. One of the first things that a colonising force must do is to replace the language of a conquered land with its own. Joyce had a keen interest in the use of language, as he was constantly experimenting with it in his works. As Barry states: This ‘humble’ attitude to language may remind us of Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts about the English language in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, especially in the early scene in which Stephen is patronised by an English priest because of his use of a local dialect word. Stephen tells himself ‘the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine…My soul frets in the shadow of his language (195). The language of a country can be a great source of pride. By taking away a language from a people, this source of pride is stripped in order to assimilate the conquered, for in order for a group of people to think like another group, they must be speaking the same language. The language of a country is also very intertwined with the history of a country. The language is the tool which is used to record the history of the country; it is very much intertwined with its collective nationality. As Jules David Law states, “For Joyce, as we shall see, the relation between language and home is resonant with issues of political identity, ethnicity, and national existence” (197). In Dubliners, we can see Joyce’s conflicted feelings towards his home country played out through notions of language. Notions of language are intertwined with notions of what home is, and as Law states, “already in Dubliners we are witness to the overlapping notions of home at work in our culture. Home is where we come from, home is what we are most familiar with, and home is what we imagine we would feel most comfortable with” (198). As was previously mentioned by Stephen Dedalus, the language of the conquerors belonged to them before those that were conquered. As the conquered are not at home in their language, they are displaced from what their idea of home is. They have lost touch with where they came from, and they have no idea of what is familiar of comfortable. This is the overall effect that the colonisers seek, and this is one aspect of which Joyce was protesting against the conquering force the English. Ulysses is generally the work that Joyce is best known for; it is often included within lists of most important novels in the English language, which considering the attitudes expressed in the previous section can be rather ironic. The first section of the novel, generally referred to as “the Telemachiad,” is perhaps the most overtly rebellious of the sections in the book. The book is modeled after the Homeric epic “The Odyssey,” and Stephen Dedalus plays the role of Telemachus, with the first section of the book concentrating upon him. Originally, much of the criticism concerning his role in the novel concentrated on his search for a father figure, but as Andrew Gibson states, “the recent post-theoretical interest in a ‘postcolonial Joyce’ and in Irish history and politics in Joyce studies has given us a very different Stephen to that constructed by the humanists” (22). If we are to equate the early life of Joyce with Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then the Dedalus of Ulysses is the grown version of Joyce, and Dedalus’s resentment towards the English is also Joyce’s resentment of the English. It is very important to the structure of the novel that it begins with Dedalus’s resistance to British ideas. Resistance to the British is the first idea that is met with in the novel, placing it at the forefront of ideas being explore in the novel. In this section, “the English presence and its consequences are principally embodied in three figures in the first two chapters, Haines, Mulligan, and Deasy. All three characters require Stephen of an acquiescence…he refuses to give” ( Gibson 22). Haines, as an Englishman, represents the oppression of the English himself. Mulligan, having invited Haines to stay with him, represents the Irish who welcomed the English in without a fight. Deasy represents the next step towards being assimilated; he is respectful of the English government and is condescending towards Stephen. Stephen begins his dissent towards the British when he asks Mulligan “How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?” (4). At first Mulligan seems to agree with Stephen, stating “God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion” (4). He soon shows his deference to Haines, though, as he encourages Stephen to attempt to get money form Haines. When Stephen shows his attitude towards Haines, however, Mulligan responds by saying “You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?” (16). Mulligan represents the Ireland that Joyce mocked in Dubliners. Mulligan has lost his all sense of his national identity and looks upon Haines as a source of money rather than as an oppressive figure, such as the way the Stephen does. Haines, when he is confronted with Stephen’s resentment towards the English, manages to come up with the excuse that “We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame” (20). In this we see at least a recognition of the person representing the English that Ireland and its people have been mistreated by them. Still, there is no direct blame that is accepted, as “history” is being blamed. Stephen sees this answer for what it is: “Most importantly, he resists the kind of politic compromise with England that is represented in Muligan” (Gibson 23). If Stephen had accepted this answer, then he would have been the same as those that Joyce had criticised in Dubliners. By continuing with his dissent and by not allowing Haines to almost shrug off this answer, he is forcing the political aspect of their transactions into the forefront: “For Cheng, the ‘Telemachiad is a powerful anatomy and exposure of English hegemony in Ireland” (Gibson 22). By keeping to his views, the reader is forced to consider the extent to which the English have suppressed the Irish. It is seen in every aspect of the communications between Haines and Dedalus, and, as Mulligan has succumbed to the assimilation process, Dedalus and Mulligan’s communications are also tainted with the oppressiveness of the English. The form of the novel is very important to its political nature. Ireland does not have its own epic along the lines of Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, or The Odyssey. Some opinions have stated that Ulysses was an attempt to craft an epic for Ireland by paralleling the form of The Odyssey. However, the opposite could also be said to be true. Ulysses isn’t really an epic; it is a mock epic: “Joyce thrusts a parodied form of the English novel into Europe” (22). He uses the form of the epic, but its contents are hardly epic in nature. Instead of fighting Cyclopes and other mythical beasts, we get descriptions of people on the toilet. Instead of Penelope waiting faithfully for Ulysses to return, we get Bloom worrying that his wife Molly is unfaithful to him and the eventual realisation that she is in fact. By drawing parallels between such highly idealised behavior and the low behavior that takes place in the novel, Joyce is mocking the values of the culture that holds these epics in such high regard. This is a less direct but still effective means of criticising the English. It is also rather subversive; the people reading the novel might not even have realised at the time that their values were being mocked. It should be noted that titles of sections of the book such as the “Telemachiad” have been given by critics in order to help in discussions with the novel. In fact, the title Ulysses is the only direct clue given y Joyce that there are supposed to be parallels drawn between his novel and The Odyssey. Rather than being an Irish epic, the novel functions as a means of protesting the treatment of Ireland. In order for Ireland to properly have an epic, it would have to set itself free from the oppression of its English conquerors and re-establish its own identity. In this way the novel is very much political in nature. Indeed, beyond his criticisms of the English, Stephen spends much of his time in the first section pondering about what the Irish national identity could be if restored. He struggles with and is very aware of the Irish’s willingness to be subjugated. He finds in the old woman with the milk a possible symbol for the Irish national identity. She is called “Old Mother Groban, “ a figure from an Irish folk song. However, she is a rather ironical symbol of Ireland, as she does not recognise the native tongue of her country when Haines attempts to speak it to her. While he might have been looking for an example of the Irish identity, he only found another example of an Irish person that has lost her national identity along with her language. Some critics have objected to the placing of Joyce within postcolonial literature. He has already been highly studied and canonised, and he belongs to the white male class that was responsible for oppressing African, Asian, and Caribbean countries that first developed the ideas of postcolonial criticism. However, by concentrating on technical aspects of his writing, “it shifted attention away from the manifest political content and ideological discourse of Joyce’s work by emphasizing his unarguably potent role and influence in stylistic revolution” (Cheng 82). With the suppression of their language and culture by the British, there is no doubt that the Irish experience can be compared to India in terms of colonisation by England, and pandering to ideas that he doesn’t belong simply because he was a white male attempts to revitalise the notion that their could possibly be a universal way in which to experience the world; there is not either a single way in which to experience the “white” world, as the Irish have always thought of themselves as separate from the English experience. Joyce obviously had a conflicted relationship with his home country. While he criticised Dublin and used Dublin as an example of the sort of paralysis representative of all of Ireland, he only did so because he thought that Ireland could be so much more than simply a colony of a more powerful force such as England. By not simply viewing the historical and political context of Joyce’s work as mere details, a new power is given to his work. He becomes an angry writer that is pushing for change, that is encouraging Ireland to restore its national identity. He only could have had such anger and passion for a country that he truly cared about. Works Cited Cheng, Vincent, Of Canons, Colonies, and Critics: The Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Joyce Studies. Cultural Critique, No. 35 (Winter, 1996-1997), pp. 81-104 Collins, Joseph, “James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle.” Review published in The New York Times on May 28, 1922. Available from Gibson, Andrew, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses. Oxford University Press, New York, 2002. Joyce, James, Dubliners(Norton Critical Edition) W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2005. Joyce, James, Ulysses. Ann Arbor Media Group, Ann Arbor, MI, 2005. Law, Jules David, “Joyce’s ‘Delicate Siamese’ Equation: The Dialectic of Home in Ulysses.” PMLA, vol. 10, no. 2 (March 1987) pp. 197-205. Read More