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

Young Stephen comes to awareness of his situation only gradually, by intuiting from small signs. There is something about the adult males around him that affects his feeling about himself. For example, he thinks how pleasurable it would be to deliver milk for a living

if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at his trainer's flabby stubblecovered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. (64)

The father's descent has apparently been precipitated, as John Joyce's was, by the demise of Parnell and the victory of anti-Parnell forces within the Irish Party. Stephen's fantasies of himself as the Count of Monte Cristo indicate that something of this has come through to his youthful consciousness. The Monte Cristo fantasy is formed on the same pattern as the Celtic Revival fantasy. Edmond Dantes (read heroic Ireland) languishes in prison while Mercedes (read Kathleen ni Houlihan) is forced to marry the rich enemy; Dantes escapes, becomes rich Count, gets revenge. It is, of course, the usual fantasy of the powerless. Later Stephen will figure himself as artist spurned by a materialist woman, and, in Ulysses, as Hamlet: characters wrongfully cast out by philistines. The mythic formula of his life has been determined by the story of Parnell and its aftermath in his own family. The Celtic Revivalists had resurrected Parnell as Cuchullain, but Stephen, as he did under the table, chiasmically changes the form of the story. Parnell rises from obscurity to heroic status, then falls; Dantes falls from heroic status to obscurity, then rises. In progressing from the Count to Hamlet, one essential change has taken place: his youthful belief in ultimate victory has been defeated.

This habit of savoring one's position as victim of injustice is a species of mental sin discussed by Aquinas under the name "morose delectation." "He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret" (67). It is a solitary sin, dependent for its continuance upon continued mortification. This helps to explain why Stephen is not interested in joining societies for the improvement of things in general:

When the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her fallen language and tradition.... [But] he was happy only when he was far from [such voices], beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades. (84)

As an alternative to his private myths the Celtic Revival is emotionally unsatisfactory: the springdayish optimism of the civic improver lacks the kind of interesting complexity he seeks.