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

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

In choosing Edmond Dantes over Cuchullain, Stephen has chosen, with Gabriel Conroy, the Continent in preference to Ireland. He has also chosen a literary form: he has chosen to be a novelistic hero in preference to an epic hero. As M. M. Bakhtin has pointed out, epic heroes do not develop and they have no secrets:

The individual in the high distanced genres is an individual of the absolute past and of the distanced image as such, he is a fully finished and completed being. This has been accomplished on a lofty heroic level, but what is complete is also something hopelessly ready-made. . . . He is, furthermore, completely externalized. There is not the slightest gap between his authentic essence and his external manifestation. All his potential, all his possibilities are realized utterly in his external social position.... Everything in him is exposed and loudly expressed. (34)

Clearly, Stephen Dedalus, he who hides under the table and composes the chiasmic word-charm, he who will understand trigonometry and politics, cannot be a never-changing Cuchullain. Similarly, the world that he inhabits cannot be the easily interpreted good-or-bad world of the epic and of the Celtic Revival; it must be the difficult to interpret world of the novel. Cuchullain always knows who his enemies are. Even if they are his son or his foster brother, there is no doubt about their enmity, and his course of action is clear. Edmond Dantes, on the other hand, does not know who his enemies are, is not aware of all the machinations and secret self-interests that determine his fate.

The peasant theme in A Portrait offers an example of the shifting and tentative, the novelistic nature of Stephen's personal mythopoeia. Stephen's thoughts on the subject begin with a struggle between the romantic view of peasants as picturesque and the view that associates them with darkness and bats, and, unlike the peasant theme in Stephen Hero, undergoes a progression. Stephen, going to sleep at Clongowes, thinks,

It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy. But, O, the road there between the trees was dark! You would be lost in the dark. It made him afraid to think how it was. (18)

Romantic notions based on the repetition of the word fire give way as the word dark repeats in his mind. Living with peasants would destroy his boundary line, the embryonic identity he has been constructing; the "you" he has created, a person who, in contrast with rats, will someday understand trigonometry and politics, would disappear in the darkness.

But his attitude is not one of simple revulsion. He likes the way peasants smell, and from the beginning he has associated the sense of smell with his mother, who put the queer-smelling oilsheet on his bed. Mothers are frightening too because they embody the dark womb that precedes the "once upon a time" of consciousness. He sees the peasant seductress of Davin's story as "a type of her race and his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed" (183). The guileless Kathleen calls the stranger, a common Irish term for the English, to her bed. The political joining of Ireland with England which took place in 1800 was called the Act of Union. Out of this union is born the "disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul" (162).