Stephen Dedalus and the Politics of Confession

Abstract

I In the spring of 1907 James Joyce, tutor, writer, and (sometime) bank clerk delivered a series of three public lectures at the Universita Popolare in Trieste. In those lectures, the first two of which survive, the young Joyce expressed strong reservations about the misplaced zeal of twentieth-century Irish nationalism. Anglo-Irish attempts to promote a national recovery of Celtic culture had served, in Joyce's estimation, only to limit the advancement of Irish art and thought. The economic and intellectual conditions prevail in [the Irishman's] own country do not permit the development of individuality, he lamented in Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove (CW, p. 171).(1) With a catalogue of Ireland's past contributions to world culture, Joyce warned the Irish had betrayed their legacy as vital players in the European cultural theater by embracing artificial national identities. Joyce's description of the Irish situation in these early lectures reflects the differences separated him from most of his older contemporaries. Yeats's revival sought in the Celtic legacy of Ireland an artistic and political alternative to the shackling dominance of Catholicism. Resistant to the conception that, in F. S. L. Lyons's words, any Irish work that claimed to be `national' would be judged according to whether or not it conformed to the stereotype which ascribed to Catholic Ireland the virtues of purity, innocence, and sanctity, the Yeatsian artist allied himself with a history neither England nor Rome could claim as its own.(2) For Joyce, though, the wholesale rejection of Catholicism merely exchanged one problem for another. In an effort to challenge Catholicism's influence over the lives of the Irish population, the Celtic renaissance had constructed a national fiction equally ill-equipped to represent Ireland's complex modern culture. Revival of the Irish language, retrieval of Celtic mythology, and the infusion of old mysticisms into contemporary literature were measures Joyce believed to be as limiting to the development of a free Irish consciousness as any Catholic nationalism. To turn from the coherent absurdity of Catholicism to a cultural identity was just as ancient Egypt is dead (CW, pp. 168, 173) could result only in another impotent aesthetic and political agenda. Lashing themselves to the mast of uncritical nationalism in a desire for collective strength, Irish artists were in Joyce's mind submitting to a ruining power would limit the nation's options for self-determination and wreck Ireland's journey to renewed cultural prominence. Scholars have long recognized Joyce's ambivalence regarding the attempts of the Irish literati to Celticize Ireland's culture. Much recent work, though, has taken up the question of how Joyce's texts treat nativist and specifically Catholic nationalisms. Yet this discussion has focused almost entirely on the later writings. Postcolonialists concerned with evaluating the politics of Joyce's modernism have chosen Ulysses and to a lesser extent Finnegans Wake as their preferred texts..4 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, at least from this perspective, has been largely ignored. In the novel Joyce was composing at the time of the Trieste lectures, he produces a crucial text for assessing his development of a uniquely Irish modernism. A Portrait publicly rejects Catholic nationalism's claims to speak for all Ireland, even as it resists the solution of transnationalism by manifesting a sustained engagement with the Irish-Catholic discourses of Joyce's youth.(3) That the illusion of literary independence offered by the Anglo-Irish Celtic revival held little charm for the young Joyce is well established; the security of nativist Catholicism was to his mind equally inadequate appears to need further assertion at this point in Joyce studies. …

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