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

- What is your father? Stephen had answered:

- A gentleman.

Then Nasty Roche had asked:

- Is he a magistrate? (9)

Lesson: the civil officers of the English government are the important people in Ireland. He learns the Story of Hamilton Rowan (10), who used the only strategy available to him, silence, exile, and cunning, to escape English captivity. Lesson: Irish heroes are not conquerors, but people who cope cleverly with being conquered. He gets shouldered into the square ditch. Lesson: the small and the weak must develop cunning or must suffer.

He summarizes the lessons he has learned on the flyleaf of his geography book:

Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe (15)

For now, at least, he is defined by his place. His mind will be formed by the experience of this place. And the process of formation is what we are reading: the narrative style of this section is that of a young boy's internal voice explaining the salient features to himself:

That was the way a rat felt, slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out-of. Sleek slimy coats, little little feet tucked up to jump, black shiny eyes to look out of. They could understand how to jump. But the minds of rats could not understand trigonometry. When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things. (22)

Unlike the internal voice of Maria in the story "Clay," which helps her exclude anything which might endanger her rather fragile idea of who she is, Stephen's voice, like Leopold Bloom's, actively explores his world and comes to conclusions about world and self that are scrupulously tentative. It is this scientific approach which will eventually enable him to see his personal myths and those of his culture for what they are: an imaginative accommodation of subject status to the creation of a significant self.

Stephen's education in the effects of colonial status is also the theme of the Christmas dinner episode which follows. The real tragedy of the fight between Dante and the two men, Mr. Casey and Simon Dedalus, is not that the family does not get along, but that their ideas of themselves have been formed entirely by the institutions that govern them. Their powerless rage succeeds only in spoiling the dinner, and is capped by Mr. Casey's tale of spitting in a woman's eye, and Dante's boast of the church's role in killing Parnell. Injustice of the conqueror begets the meaner injustice of the conquered. This Christmas dinner is Stephen's first with the adults; the children eat in a separate room. It is his initiation into the adult world, and what he learns is that, in Ireland at least, there is no adult world. Stephen writes his complete address as citizen of the universe, but Simon, Mr. Casey, Dante show him that Ireland will be his farthest boundary if he stays there.

Stephen encounters his nationality just as David Copperfield encounters Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse or as Pip gets temporarily lost in the feckless Finches of the Grove men's club, but his is the greater hurdle. The nationality dilemma is particularly insidious because one's identity is derived from the very thing that is the impediment to one's development.