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Myth and identity in Joyce's fiction: disentangling the image - James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by William O'Neill

The Literary Revival of turn-of-the-century Dublin was much concerned with expressing Irish aspirations through heroes. Finn and Cuchullain supplied imaginatively what Ireland had not been able to achieve in reality: an Irish hero who vanquished all foes. Joyce's contempt for this form of self-consolation is well documented. In his broadside "The Holy Office" he parodies Yeats as he declares that he, Joyce, "must not accounted be/One of that mumming company." Stephen of Stephen Hero devotes much energy to debunking the Revival. What is perhaps less well known is that Joyce's initial contempt gave way to a profound understanding of the psychology of the Revival and of the uses of myth in the creation of identity. The latter is the theme of A Portrait, and, indeed, it is the theme of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as well. Joyce's realization, or "disentangling" (to use Stephen's word), of this theme came about as he rewrote Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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In his earliest attempt at self-portraiture, an essay entitled "A Portrait of the Artist," Joyce portrays his young self as a contrary kind of hero, one who, rather than embodying the aspirations of the culture, defies cultural pressures and stands alone. He contrasts himself with the young nationalists who "in their relations among themselves and towards their superiors . . . displayed a nervous . . . and a very English liberalism" (61-62), who respond with enthusiasm to the poetry of Thomas Davis, and to whom "the memory of [Terence] McManus [an advocate of anti-English violence] was hardly less revered than that of Cardinal Cullen" (62). Cullen had discouraged aggressive nationalism and, as Archbishop of Dublin, had forbade a funeral ceremony for McManus to be held in any church in his diocese (62n.).

In this early attempt at self-definition it is the Catholic nationalists who provide a position of popular error against which Joyce is able to figure himself as lone hero. The young artist, in contrast to these self-contradictory peers, seeks the high ground:

Let the pack of enmities come tumbling after him and sniffing to the highlands after their game; there was his ground: and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers. (61)

In the segment of Stephen Hero which has survived, Joyce adds the Celtic Revival notions of Douglas Hyde to this erroneous orthodoxy. Stephen's pronouncements on the subject are frequent and often quite heated. He argues about it with Madden, a character modeled upon Joyce's university friend George Clancy:

[Madden:] - But really our peasant has nothing to gain from English literature.

* Rubbish!

* Modern at least. You yourself are always railing . . .

* English is the medium of the Continent.

* We want an Irish Ireland.

* It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

* I do not entirely agree with your modern notions. We want to have nothing of this English civilization.

* But the civilization of which you speak is not English - it is Aryan. The modern notions are not English; they point in the way of Aryan civilization.

* You want our peasants to ape the gross materialism of the Yorkshire peasant?

* One would imagine the country was inhabited by cherubim. Damme if I see much difference in peasants: they all seem to me as like one another as a peascod is like another peascod. The Yorkshireman is perhaps better fed. (54)

Clancy was both an active member of Hyde's Gaelic League and a friend of Michael Cusack, to whom he introduced Joyce. Richard Ellmann quotes an 1884 article of Cusack's which deplores the effects of "foreign and hostile forces and the pernicious influence of the hated and hitherto dominant race" (61). So Madden is expressing the kind of furious nationalism that formed a conspicuous part of the intellectual climate of turn-of-the-century Dublin.

That Joyce's anti-Celtic Revival feeling was as strong as Stephen's is evident in the manuscript of Stephen Hero, in the passage where Cranly's friend Glynn wishes to discuss Irish literature with Stephen. Up to this point in the book Glynn has been described as a clerk in the Custom House; but in this passage of the manuscript Joyce has crossed out the words "Custom House" and demoted him to clerk at the Guinness Brewery. Stephen's contempt for contemporary Irish writers, however, goes beyond Joyce's:

Stephen had the misfortune to be captured one night by Glynn, who at once attempted a conversation on the modern school of Irish writers - a subject of which Stephen knew nothing. (148)

This studied disdain is dropped temporarily when Stephen later discusses Yeats's "Tables of the Law" and "Rosa Alchemica." And in A Portrait Stephen's ignorance is again less than total; the revised Stephen has seen Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and, while he expresses no great admiration, does condemn those who hooted it (226). In Ulysses it appears that he does greatly admire at least one passage from The Countess Cathleen, Oona's song, "Who Goes with Fergus?" (15). Admission of interest in contemporary Irish writers came slowly and grudgingly. The Protestant agendas of these writers was undoubtedly one reason for this reluctance.

Myth and identity in Joyce's fiction: disentangling the image - James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by William O'Neill

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