The woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the politics of creativity - character in Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

In a conversation that introduces and informs Stephen's discussion of esthetics, Joyce dramatizes the loss of the Irish language as a loss to the nation and the national artist. Talking with the dean in the physics theater before class,(5) Stephen discovers that they use different words to refer to an instrument for filling lamps. The dean calls it a funnel while Stephen calls it a tundish, a word that the dean, who is English, assumes to be Irish. Stephen notes their different relations to the English language and is troubled by the implications:

- 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)

Recognizing English as a colonial language and one in which his particularly Irish thoughts might not easily be spoken, Stephen nonetheless realizes that this language is his "native" tongue, the first he learned to speak. Like many Irish, he does not speak what Madden might call his "own language." The result is that the medium of Stephen's esthetic expression will always be foreign for him; he speaks in an acquired speech and writes in an acquired script.

Even the possibility of an Irish influence within the English language is minimized by Stephen's later realization:

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? (Portrait 251)

Stephen's realization of the loss of his national language and his initial thoughts about the effect of this loss on his writing, however, do not spark an attendant nationalist politics. He presents the issue of lost language in conversation with his friend Davin in the context of his refusal to serve a nationalist cause: "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?" (Portrait 203). Yet Stephen's attempt to create an Irish art that will forge a national conscience is a version of the sacrifice he refuses at this moment.

In Stephen Hero, while Stephen argues privately for a complexly realized politics, his public essay for the Literary and Historical Society at his university seems nearly apolitical. Though the actual essay is not presented in this draft, we might infer a version of it through reader and audience responses. The university president, who considers censoring the essay, accuses Stephen of taking an estheticist position:

this theory you have - if pushed to its logical conclusion - would emancipate the poet from all moral laws. I notice too that in your essay you allude satirically to what you call the antique theory - the theory, namely, that the drama should have special ethical aims, that it should instruct, elevate and amuse. I suppose you mean Art for Art's sake. (Stephen Hero 95)