James joyce, p.63
James Joyce, page 63
That is the political impasse that Stephen Hero describes. Joyce seeks to apply to Ireland a Marxist paradigm in the full consciousness that Ireland was in Marxist terms an anomaly, in a state of retardation that was anterior to the stages of development towards a socialist society. Ireland was a country, or an inhabited space, arrested in a pre-modern condition. Joyce seems to be positing the idea that Ireland was a country in which the possibility of political advance was forestalled; that the preconditions for the practice of politics in any enlightened or progressive sense of the term—and really in any sense at all—were absent; and that this was a condition of some significance and interest in comparative politics that could sustain his novel and the interest of a prospective readership in or outside Ireland. Aside from being a thin and dispiriting backdrop, it was critically dependent on the bleakness of Stephen’s (and the novel’s) conception of the possibilities for political advance in Ireland. Stephen seems to assert the imperative of political agency and the impossibility of it in the same breath. That conflict renders Joyce in some respects a figure of his generation in Ireland. Objectively he despaired of political progress in Ireland; at the same time, he shared in some degree the intimation of his generation that statehood was achievable, while making more allowance than most of his contemporaries for the possibility of it not being realised.
What is of significance is the novel’s conception of the electiveness of adherence to nationalism. A significant part of Stephen’s objection to conventional nationalism is what he sees as the self-exculpatory idea of victimhood arising from the fact of English conquest and dominion. This he sees as a diminishing of the responsibility of the people of Ireland for the fate of Ireland, and an Irish refusal of agency which he sees as engendering a complacently passive collective conception of nationalist identity. What is original is Stephen’s reconception of the idea of nationalist allegiance as an elective act rather than a passive acquiescence in an inherited or communal identity. That conception is dramatised in the novel by Stephen’s withholding of assent from nationalism. It is an election of the same order as Stephen’s repudiation of Catholicism, which in some respects it mirrors, with the difference that Stephen’s refusal of assent to nationalism is contingent, a decision in response to a set of circumstances at a particular point in time, however improbable he may think it that either the circumstances or his own assessment could change. Part of what unsettles Stephen is that his ardently nationalist contemporaries, who share to some degree the idea of the embrace of nationalism as an elective act, turn out be deferential to the Church and acquiescent in the conventional pieties of nationalism. That is what lies at the heart of Stephen’s solitude.
The Catholicism that Stephen opposes is Catholicism as a socio-political institution rather than Catholicism as a faith. His resistance to Catholicism is itself primarily political, and his rendering of Catholicism blurs into his treatment of nationalism reflected in his scorn for what he terms conjointly ‘the patriotic and religious enthusiasts’.60 His refusal of formal allegiance to nationalism and his criticism of the emergent new nationalism is, however, markedly less absolute than his repudiation of Catholicism. The characterisation of Stephen as ‘the greatest sceptic concerning the perfervid enthusiasms of the patriots’ falls short of imputing to him a complete repudiation of their stance.61 The refusal of foreclosure is clearest in the significant exchange with Madden, the figure based on Joyce’s friend George Clancy, who becomes the Davin of A Portrait. Stephen’s exchanges with Madden represent the principal discussion of his relationship to Ireland and Irish nationalism in Stephen Hero, as do his exchanges with Davin in A Portrait.
—So you admit you are an Irishman, after all, and not one of the red garrison?
—Of course I do.
—And don’t you think that every Irishman worthy of the name should be able to speak his native tongue?
—I really don’t know.
—And don’t you think that we as a race have a right to be free?
—O, don’t ask me such questions, Madden. You can use these phrases of the platform, but I can’t.
—But surely you have some political opinions, man!
—I am going to think them out. I am an artist, don’t you see?62
Given that Stephen’s objection to ‘the patriots’ largely relates to the language revival, the inference is that if that could somehow be negotiated, Stephen might be able to find common cause with them, however qualified.
Stephen’s answers to Madden are open-ended rather than renunciatory and are a good deal more tentative than the statements in the body of the novel, such as, for instance, ‘The programme of the patriots could obtain no intellectual assent from him’. It could be said that Madden’s questions are pitched at a level that is more beguiling and general and less readily dismissed by Stephen than the policy prescriptions of the patriots.63 There is also the fact that Stephen is close to Madden. Stephen was moreover drawn to the companionship of other ‘patriots’ in University College. His mediocre First Arts results lead to ‘a domestic squabble’. Stephen’s father ‘ransacked his vocabulary in search of abusive terms’ and threatens to write to Stephen’s godfather in Mullingar to cut off his financial support. Stephen’s mother pleads with him to be reasonable: ‘Reasonable be damned. Don’t I know the set he has got into—lousy-looking patriots and that football chap in the knickerbockers. To tell you the God’s truth, Stephen, I thought you’d have more pride than to associate with such canaille.’64 The depiction of McCann, the figure in the novel who stands in an instantly recognisable way for Francis Skeffington, perhaps distracts from the significance of Stephen’s companionship with the ‘lousy-looking patriots’ in the plural. Joyce permits the observations of the truth-telling Daedalus père to mitigate the distanced severity of Stephen’s strictures on the patriots.
The novel remained unfinished. Joyce ceased working on it in the summer of 1905, within the first year of exile. While in principle he could have returned to it to incorporate some form of political resolution, it is unsurprising that there is nothing to suggest that he considered doing so. It would have entailed wheeling around the entire trajectory of the novel and forfeiting its suspense, such as it is, which consists of leaving Stephen on an indeterminate edge. His altered relationship to Ireland as subject is part of the reason Joyce could not go back to completing Stephen Hero.
Impasse
In March 1906 Grant Richards, the London publisher with whom Joyce was in touch about publishing Dubliners, suggested that Joyce should write a novel ‘in some sense autobiographical’. Joyce replied from Trieste that he had already written ‘nearly a thousand pages of such a novel’, and that the twenty-five chapters written comprised about half the book, a remarkable statement that conveys how far he was from abandoning Stephen Hero. ‘But it is quite impossible for me in present circumstances to think about the rest of the book, much less to write about it.’65 Joyce continued to refer tenaciously to ‘my novel’ long after he had suspended work on it, but there was a note of doubt in what he wrote to Stanislaus from Rome in January 1907: ‘The other day I was thinking about my novel. How long am I at it now? Is there any use in continuing it?’66
It was not easy to rework, as Joyce found when he returned to the text in late 1907. His revision of the first chapter became the inception of A Portrait. Stephen Hero remains a novel of some substance, distinct from A Portrait, that reveals much of Joyce’s thinking immediately before and after leaving Dublin. It is also a unique rendering of the Ireland that he left: what might be called the ‘state of Ireland’ element of the novel, which is substantial, was to be, if not absolutely abandoned, drastically curtailed by modernistic foreshortening in A Portrait. Stephen Hero retains a haunting incompleteness, and the idea that it is reducible to a discarded esquisse for A Portrait is to be resisted.67 Joyce came to distance himself from it and did not wish it to be considered as part of his oeuvre. He had Paul Léon inform the editor Theodore Spencer in late 1938 that he called Stephen Hero ‘a schoolboy’s production written when he was 19 or 20’ (in fact he was in his early twenties).68 What survived of the manuscript was published in 1944, three years after Joyce’s death.
Stephen Hero is a novel of impasse, the writing of which itself ended in impasse. It is not easy to see how it could ever have been finished. By its end Stephen is increasingly isolated. He has second thoughts about Cranly, sees little of Madden, and is thrown back on the company of his brother Maurice. There is a doubt about his return to University College for the second year of his arts degree, brought about by mediocre results that threaten his godfather’s continued sponsorship, which in turn puts his relations with his father under further strain. Perhaps that portends a contemplated change in the novel’s direction,69 but it is the point at which the novel ends. Significantly, exile, towards which A Portrait turns at its close, does not feature in Stephen Hero, though that may reflect the point the novel had reached when Joyce put it aside. Stephen’s predicament is unrelieved and seemingly irresolvable. That is perhaps what Joyce wanted to render with as much visceral exactitude as he could achieve. One of the curious and beguiling sub-themes of the novel is Stephen’s persisting half-bemused, half-grateful cognisance of the kindnesses shown and the tolerance extended to him by some of his friends and family, including the solicitude of his father, though it finds expression chiefly in sarcasm, and even by the Jesuits. His estrangement is not the reciprocation of ill will that is shown towards him: his quarrel is structural, with Catholic Ireland.
What prevented Joyce from reworking Stephen Hero was that the novel was conceived over-programmatically as a bildungsroman of alienated youth, rendered contemporary by its socialistic hue and heightened allusions to science; there is a dissonance between its continental perspective and the opulence of the faintly archaic English in which it is written. The persona of Stephen is held captive by the construct. Joyce was precluded by the static depiction of Ireland, and by the conventions of the traditional bildungsroman—which pit a young person growing into adulthood within the fixed institutional confines of an established state—from developing what he would come to think was conceptually distinctive and interesting about Ireland: its pre-statal inchoateness.
Joyce wrote to Grant Richards in March 1906, ‘This novel also has the defect of being about Ireland.’70 That remark raises the issue of whether Stephen Hero was at any stage publishable. There is also the issue of readership and likely reception. In the unlikely event that it found a publisher, it risked achieving a meagre but damaging notoriety through being misconstrued as a fictional anti-Catholic or even anti-Irish tract. Joyce was quite conscious of this—it is one of the criticisms levelled at Stephen in the novel—but it is an inhibition he chose to defy.71 The novel was unfinished, but Joyce made no attempts to secure an agreement for its publication other than mentioning its existence as a half-written work in progress to Richards in terms that were scarcely calculated to inspire a wish to publish it when complete.
By the time he attempted to return to Stephen Hero in November–December 1907 (if not earlier), the paradigm of the novel had ceased to match Joyce’s advances in technique, reflected in the Dubliners stories he was writing, and the shift in his political perspective that occurred in exile. In the summer of 1905, some few months after he had put Stephen Hero aside, Joyce would render Ireland in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ through the prism of the contemporary Parnell myth in the setting of a drab municipal election headquarters in Dublin. It was a stunning rendering of Irish political torpor, the more moving because Joyce could not suppress an affinity with its cast of struggling characters.72 It would have been hard after ‘Ivy Day’ to return to piling up chapters of the projected unwritten half of Stephen Hero. Joyce’s guarded expressions of alignment with Sinn Féin, which meant he no longer saw the ‘patriots’ as an indiscriminate bloc, were conveyed in his letters to Stanislaus in September–November 1906 and must have reflected long anterior consideration. This guarded alignment represented the resolution, extra-textual and post-exilic, of the impasse of Stephen Daedalus in Stephen Hero. It was scarcely a complete resolution, but it offered its author a way forward.
What gives Stephen Hero its not very effective edge of political drama, if not quite of uncertainty of outcome, is Stephen’s slightly contrived withholding of assent to nationalism. Joyce never declared himself a nationalist—and it is part of the argument of this book that the issue of whether Joyce is an Irish nationalist cannot be determined by his refusal to avow himself to be such. His position is certainly not identical with Stephen’s.73 Stephen’s opinions are more rigid and static than Joyce’s, and he seems at times prepared to countenance a renunciation of nationalism without ever quite going that far. The device of not declaring himself a nationalist, applied with a degree of elasticity in response to changing circumstances, was one that Joyce nevertheless maintained. The fact that he was no longer living in Ireland came to be a feature of Joyce’s apologetics. It was a stance that permitted him to observe a certain continuity from his initial critique of Irish nationalism right through to his aloofness from the independent Irish state, and it might be said to connect Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake, written after the attainment of Irish independence. It was never likely that independence, or any other event, would cause a change in Joyce’s posture; equally, the idea that independent Ireland’s reactionary cultural politics and deference to the Catholic Church came as the least surprise to Joyce is naïve. That at least of Stephen Hero endured.
1. Francis Hackett, review of Stephen Hero, New York Times, 18 January 1945.
2. S. Joyce, entry for 2 February 1904, in Dublin Diary, 11–12. The dates of composition of the surviving chapters are usefully chronicled in Marc A. Mamigonian and John Noel Turner’s pioneering ‘Annotations for Stephen Hero’, James Joyce Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 347–518. They are also noted in Roger Norburn, A James Joyce Chronology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
3. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 48–49.
4. Mamigonian and Turner, ‘Annotations for Stephen Hero’, 348.
5. Joyce to Josephine Murray, 24 December 1904, Letters I 58.
6. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, [?2 or 3 May 1905], Letters II 89.
7. Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, postmark 7 June 1905, Letters II 91.
8. S. L. Goldberg, Joyce (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 16, 33.
9. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 49–50.
10. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 51. This fragmentary quotation, which represents all that survives of the lost early chapters of Stephen Hero, suggests that the later chapters which survive are not discontinuous in tenor with the earlier ones. Stephen refers to ‘the mental swamp of the Irish peasant’ (SH 95).
11. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 54.
12. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 58.
13. Curran to Joyce, 26 February 1907, James Joyce Remembered, 63.
14. Lernout, Help My Unbelief, 61. Whether Huxley’s brilliant coinage with its timeless-sounding bad Greek was an intellectual advance, given that it came to carve out an alternative within and to compromise the encompassing clarity of the idea of atheism, is debatable. Joyce was a-theos, without god, an atheist in the pre-Huxleyan dispensation. It is likewise unlikely that Joyce’s self-characterisation to Lady Gregory as a ‘misbeliever’ goes any further than his being a non-believer. Joyce to Lady Gregory, n.d. [November 1902], Letters I 53; Lernout, Help My Unbelief, 102.
15. SH 133.
16. SH 134.
17. SH 139.
18. SH 146.
19. SH 146–47.
20. SH 194.
21. Lernout, Help My Unbelief, 117–18; Mamigonian and Turner, ‘Annotations for Stephen Hero’, 469–70.
22. SH 147. The reference to Africa, as well as the subject of the passage, confirms that it owes something to Joyce’s meditation on Newman’s Callista, as discussed in chapter 8, ‘ “The Language of the Outlaw”’.
23. O’Malley, Vatican I; Lernout, Help My Unbelief, 28–45.
24. SH 53.
25. SH 53.
26. SH 146.
27. SH 44.
28. SH 45.
29. SH 46.
30. It has been suggested that Fr Healy may be based on Fr Eugene Sheehy, a brother of David Sheehy, who later came to live for a period in the Sheehy household (Mamigonian and Turner, ‘Annotations for Stephen Hero’, 442). Fr Eugene Sheehy was famous as a firebrand nationalist cleric in the era of the Land League. It seems improbable that the somewhat ingratiating and Gladstone-reverencing figure of Fr Healy was modelled on Eugene Sheehy. It is possible that in giving Mrs Daniel the maiden name of Healy, Joyce was slyly emphasising the anti-Parnellism of David Sheehy (who hated Healy), anticipating a far more considered feminising of the surname of T. M. Healy in ‘A Mother’.
31. SH 156–57.
32. SH 208–9.
33. ‘Trieste Notebook’, in Scholes and Kain, Workshop of Daedalus, 98.
34. SH 76–77.
35. SH 204.
36. SH 61–62.
37. SH 54.
38. SH 159.
39. SH 61.
40. SH 53.
41. SH 66–67.
42. SH 67.
43. SH 197–99.
