James joyce, p.62
James Joyce, page 62
Mr Daniel had sat for his county some years before and for this reason he was chosen to impersonate the Speaker of the House. McCann [Skeffington] always represented a member of the Opposition and he spoke point-blank. Then a member would protest and there would be a make-believe of parliamentary manners.
—Mr. Speaker I must ask …
—Order! Order!
—You know it’s a lie!
—You must withdraw, Sir.28
Stephen ‘imagined he had explored this region sufficiently’ and would have ceased attending the Daniels’ were it not for ‘the unpleasant character of his home’ and his romantic interest in the ardent Irish culture enthusiast Emma Clery.29 She prompts him to return to the Daniels’ after an interval of absence. Among the guests is an elder brother of Mrs Daniel’s, Fr Healy, who has returned from the United States after seven years fundraising to build a chapel near Enniscorthy:30 ‘He was greatly interested in the new Gaelic revival and in the new literary movement in Ireland. He paid particular attention to McCann and to Stephen, asking both of them many questions. He agreed with McCann that Gladstone was the greatest man of the nineteenth century and then Mr Daniel, who was glowing with pride at the honour he was paying so honourable a guest, told a dignified story of Gladstone and Sir Ashmead Bartlett and deepened his voice to reproduce the oratory of the grand old man.’31
These glimpses of the Daniel household in Stephen Hero permit Joyce to deal with parliamentarism in much shorter compass than his suspicions of the ‘patriots’ of which the novel treats at much greater length. Politically it serves to convey Stephen’s amused indifference to Irish parliamentarism after Parnell.
Parnell’s name is not mentioned in what survives of Stephen Hero. There is reference to a ‘fierce argument about Tim Healy’, which flares into a near brawl, in the billiard room of the Adelphi Hotel between Cranly’s diminutive and drunken friend who was a clerk in the Agricultural Board Office and a ‘thick set medical student’.32 Joyce was at his least self-consciously Parnellite, and his resistance to nationalism was at its height, at the time of writing Stephen Hero. The rise of a nationalism defined by commitment to Irish language revivalism presented a fresh threat—a new regression—that was of more immediate concern to him.
It is revivalism—less the project of the revival of the Irish language in itself than the emergence of a neo-nationalism infused by the idea of revivalism—that provides the secondary political subject of Stephen Hero, after the hegemonic influence of Catholicism and the Catholic Church. Stephen Hero attests to the depth of Joyce’s dread of an inexorable Gaelicising drift which, in a solipsistic spiral, would carry Ireland still further than the Parnell Split already had from the paradigm of enlightened modern European statehood. In tracking Joyce’s political thinking across time, what is most salient is the subsuming of ‘advanced’ nationalism within a category defined by him as ‘the patriots’ whose nationalism he characterised chiefly in terms of the advocacy of the revival of the Irish language. This was an exaggerated perception that attests to the degree of Joyce’s alarm at the ideological direction of revivalism. The indiscriminate characterisation of ‘the patriots’ was not maintained in A Portrait.
As his review of William Rooney’s Poems and Ballads discussed in chapter 9 makes clear, Joyce had a deep aversion to the term ‘patriotism’ and its cognates. His sarcastic designation of ‘the patriots’ is likely to derive from his father’s sarcastic comments which affirmed his own reservations. His note on Oliver St John Gogarty that ‘he called himself a patriot of the solar system’ is not flatteringly conceived.33
In the novel, Stephen’s position is starkly stated, if not quite in absolute terms. ‘The programme of the patriots filled him with very reasonable doubts; its articles could obtain no intellectual assent from him.’ In that programme as rendered in Stephen Hero, the revival of the Irish language was uppermost. Such assent ‘would mean for him a submission of everything else in its interest and that he would thus be obliged to corrupt the springs of their speculation at their very source’.34 Stephen’s position is later restated: ‘He himself was the greatest sceptic concerning the perfervid enthusiasms of the patriots.’35
There is a group portrait of the circle presided over by ‘a very stout black-bearded citizen’ (Michael Cusack) where ‘reigned the irreconcilable temper’. Madden frequented that circle, which foregathered in Cooney’s tobacco shop, inspired by the shop of Cathal McGarvey, An Stad, at 1A North Frederick Street. Griffith is indiscriminately included in the group. Though it attests to a certain intentness of observation on Joyce’s part, the group portrait is scathingly reductive: ‘By all this society liberty was held to be the chief desirable; the members of it were fierce democrats. The liberty they desired for themselves was mainly a liberty of costume and vocabulary and Stephen could not understand how such a scarecrow of liberty could bring serious human beings to their knees in worship. As in the Daniels’ household he had seen people playing at being important so here he saw people playing at being free.’36 In the reference to their being ‘fierce democrats’, one can discern Joyce’s despairing measuring of the Irish-language-driven patriots against continental European republicans, radicals, and revolutionaries.
Stephen fashions a connection between the proponents of an Irish revival and the Catholic Church. He propounds this in his principal exchange with Madden: ‘Do you not see, said Stephen, that they [the priests] encourage the study of Irish that their flocks may be more safely protected from the wolves of disbelief; they consider it an opportunity to withdraw the people into a past of literal, implicit faith?’37
This was perhaps a debating point rather than a conspiracy theory, though it did not bear much scrutiny. If younger priests and postulants were adherents of the revival, they reflected the views of their class and generation. It did, at a secondary level, inform Stephen’s suspicions of the revival and permitted a composite reference in the novel to ‘the patriotic and religious enthusiasts’.38
The idea of a clerical-revivalist nexus lingers in the novel. It does not escape Stephen’s notice that the weekly meetings of the League were ‘largely patronised by priests’.39 One of the objections that Stephen raises against the ‘patriots’ is what he sees as their deference to clerical authority. In the prelude to the last citation, Stephen objects to Madden (George Clancy) that the ‘new movement’ deferred to the Church (something that Fenianism certainly had not). Madden tells Stephen ‘that the new movement was politic’, and that ‘if the least infidelity were hoisted on the standard the people would not flock to it’. Stephen replies by deploying against the ‘new movement’ an old Fenian tenet: ‘Stephen objected that this working hand in hand with the priests had over and over again ruined the chances of revolution. Madden agreed: but now at least the priests were on the side of the people.’40 Stephen could not agree with this. It is striking that, in what survives of Stephen Hero, Stephen does not go any further in highlighting Fenian anticlericalism, though it was to come to the fore in the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait.
There is a parallel, more personal sub-theme to do with the collaboration of the priesthood in one element of the ‘new movement’ and the Church. The relationship between Emma Clery and a young priest, Father Moran, is that between the Gaelic League and the Catholic Church made flesh. It is the person of Emma Clery who incarnates the link between the Irish Revival and the priesthood. Watching them together, Stephen was driven into ‘a state of unsettled rage’, partly from jealousy and partly because the spectacle seemed to him ‘typical of Irish ineffectualness’: ‘Father Moran’s eyes were so clear and tender-looking, Emma stood to his gaze in such a poise of bold careless pride of the flesh that Stephen longed to precipitate the two into each other’s arms and shock the room even though he knew the pain this impersonal generosity would cause himself.’41 Stephen is driven later to affront Emma’s ‘distressing pertness and middle class affectations’42 by proposing ‘just to live one night together’.43
The Mullingar Fragment
The bulk of what survives of Stephen Hero comprises what was in Joyce’s library in Trieste. There was a further, earlier fragment that Stanislaus retained that closely and perhaps immediately precedes the principal surviving text.44 It relates to a visit by Stephen to his godfather and benefactor, Mr Fulham, who lives outside Mullingar. The fragment is of importance in relation to what is lost because it is not set in University College or the city of Dublin.
Mr Fulham is a substantial farmer and patriarchal Catholic who ‘saw in the pride of the Church the only refuge of men against a threatening democracy’, and whose defence of the tenant farmers was enunciated on semi-feudal grounds. A neighbour, Mr Heffernan, who is of smaller holdings, comes to dine. It transpires that Mr Fulham is himself the beneficiary of land purchase legislation that had its inception in the Land League and Parnellism: Mr Heffernan points out to him that ‘you enjoy the fruits of Nationalist agitation’.45 This is affirmed during an argument in which Mr Fulham proclaims, ‘I am a great enemy of disloyal movements. Our lot is thrown in with England.’ Earlier, it is stated that Mr Fulham, ‘like most of his countrymen, was a persuaded politician’.46 This means that he possessed opinions on political subjects; while the issue of his voting allegiance is not addressed, his opinions would not have disqualified him from supporting the Irish Party.47 Mr Heffernan has a different perspective to the grander Mr Fulham’s. His son, who is studying for the priesthood in Clonliffe, is learning Irish ‘because he believed that the Irish people should speak their own language and not the language of their conquerors … and he tells me all the young students there, those who are to be our priests afterwards, have these ideas’.48 Declaring the Catholic Church would never incite rebellion, Mr Fulham solicits the views of Stephen as ‘one of the young generation’. Stephen provocatively declares, ‘I care nothing for these principles of nationalism.… I have enough bodily liberty’:
—But do you feel no duty to your mother-country, no love for her? asked Mr Heffernan.
—Honestly, I don’t.
—You live then like an animal without reason! exclaimed Mr Heffernan.
—My own mind, answered Stephen, is more interesting to me than the entire country.
—Perhaps you think your mind is more important than Ireland!
—I do, certainly.49
This was Stephen at his most serenely provocative. ‘Stephen had enjoyed this little skirmish: it had been a pastime for him to turn the guns of orthodoxy upon the orthodox ranks to see how they would stand the fire.’50 Yet there is something more to it. At least on the Irish Revival, Stephen is aligned with Mr Fulham, who, pleased at the putting down of Mr Heffernan, is indulgently tolerant of his godson’s opinions. After the passage of arms, Stephen considers, but thinks better of, making the observation that ‘my godfather is the Papal ambassador to Westmeath’.51
The Mullingar fragment shows Joyce applying quasi-Marxist categories, if somewhat incoherently. Mr Fulham is possessed of ‘the pride of the burgher’ and ‘had affection for the feudal machinery’.52 In his characterisation of Mr Fulham, Joyce also adopts, though not harshly, the left-nationalist position that land purchase would create a sated conservative farmer class and should be postponed until the achievement of Home Rule. Joyce also awkwardly negotiates (or renders Stephen’s awkward negotiation of) rural Ireland. Mr Fulham proclaims that ‘our Irish peasantry’ is the ‘backbone of the nation’. The narrative continues, ‘Backbone or not, it was in the constant observance of the peasantry that Stephen chiefly delighted. Physically, they were almost Mongolian types, tall, angular, and oblique-eyed. Stephen whenever he walked behind a peasant always looked first for the prominent cheek-bones that seemed to cut the air and the peasants in their turn must have recognised metropolitan features for they stared very hard at the youth as if he were some rare animal.’53 Even though the perceptions were rendered reciprocally, it came disquietingly close to hostile English stereotypes of Irish small farmers. Neither was the effect quite contained by the disarming statement later in the novel, ‘He acknowledged to himself in honest egotism that he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignation at a bad line of verse.’54 Stephen found himself in Mullingar still mired in a political impasse.
The Political Crux of Stephen Hero: Stephen’s Nationalist Crisis
The crux of Stephen Hero is that, at the point at which it breaks off, Stephen continues to withhold assent from Irish nationalism, though conscious of his nationalist affiliations. It is a position so closely bound up with the argument of the novel that he is obliged to maintain it. The issue of who or what has claims on Stephen’s allegiance is repeatedly put to the fore. The novel poses the issue of Stephen’s relationship to Ireland and the Irish people. Stephen may refuse—perhaps somewhat formalistically—to embrace nationalism, but that relationship becomes the central preoccupation of the novel. Stephen’s withholding of assent from nationalism means that the relationship cannot be axiomatic and yet Stephen’s is plainly something more than a purely personal revolt. Central to Stephen’s position is the conception of the role of an Irish writer, and a socialism which in application is informed by the outcome of the Parnell Split.
The issue of whether Stephen’s revolt is personal or relates to his capacity as ‘a literary artist’ is blurred in the novel. Both are true at once. When he remembers to do so, or when he has to, he stands on his role as an artist, but the fury of his protest seems to cut deeper, so that the accent seems to fall on a personal non serviam to nationalism and its shibboleths old and new.55
He acknowledged to himself in honest egoism that he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignity of a bad line of verse; but at the same time he was nothing in the world so little as an amateur artist. He wished to express his nature freely and fully for the benefit of a society which he would enrich, and also for his own benefit, seeing that it was part of his life to do so. It was not part of his life to undertake an extensive alteration of society but he felt the need to express himself such an urgent need, such a real need, that he was determined no conventions of a society, however plausibly mingling pity with its tyranny should be allowed to stand in his way, and though a taste for elegance and detail unfitted him for the part of demagogue, [in] his general attitude he ought to have been supposed not unjustly an ally of the collectivist politicians.56
Stephen asserts an existential ethic of independence, but it is one that merges with the idea that a writer in a country like Ireland is compelled to assume a public burden in espousing an artistic and intellectual liberty which extends to the affronting of conventional pieties fervently sustained by his or her fellow countrymen. Such writers find themselves obliged to assume a quasi-exemplary role that is unsought, as if coerced into exemplarity.57 This is implicit, if not always obviously so, in Stephen’s thoughts and utterances.58
Breaking with the Thomas Davis model of the writer as the publicist of nationalism, Joyce was revolutionary in redirecting the writer’s role to the contestation of regnant nationalist sentiment and normative values. He was moreover implicitly asserting the potentially transformative role of the writer in the modernisation of Ireland. In relation to the role of the writer, Joyce’s ambition surpassed the politic gradualism of the writers of the Celtic Twilight. He was measuring himself silently against Yeats: this was a maintenance of the guerrilla aspect of his role of ‘literary artist’ that related back to ‘The Day of the Rabblement’. None of this is directly proclaimed in Stephen Hero in part because Stephen Daedalus is merely ‘a literary artist’ (or ‘an amateur artist’) rather than a consummated writer: it is nonetheless the public nexus of the agon of Stephen Daedalus without which the novel lacks meaning.
In general, Stephen does not assert a hegemonic role for the artist. The exception is in his thoughts for the paper that he is to give at the university titled ‘Art and Life’: ‘In fine, the truth is that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age’. In the narrative this is treated with some scepticism: Stephen is characterised as ‘this heaven-ascending essayist’.59 But in the burden he assumes of fiercely contesting the condition of Ireland, there is an implicit assertion of a quasi-sacrificial co-identity with the Irish people, or with what the Irish people could yet become. Stephen conceives that connection as deriving from socialism rather than nationalism. His furious protests against what he discerns as a state of vassalage, while directed in considerable part and unsparingly at the passivity of his countrymen, are also pronounced on their behalf. His consciousness and defiance mean that he is not himself in a state of vassalage, so that it is predicated on a sense of being collectively demeaned and thereby diminished. Stephen refuses to accept the romantically abstract conception of Ireland as a noble ideal that is expounded in the novel primarily but not solely by Madden. He insists that Ireland must be understood to mean the people of Ireland; that much is socialist. He then has the problem that, on his analysis, the Irish people have been contemptibly acquiescent in the degraded state of Ireland, in both its submissive Catholicism and its political abjection. This derives from the defeated and receding Parnellism of the Split (though in what survives of the novel, that is not made explicit), reflecting Joyce’s sense, at the time of writing, that the Split lacked contemporary traction and seemed for practical purposes a lost cause.
