Silencing Stephen: colonial pathologies in Victorian Dublin - protagonist in author James Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Tracey Teets Schwarze

A community that is opinion-ridden, even when those opinions are in themselves noble, is likely to put its creative minds into some sort of prison. If creative minds preoccupy themselves with incidents from the political history of Ireland, so much the better, but we must not enforce them to select those incidents.... Above all, we must not say that certain incidents which have been a part of literature in all other lands are forbidden to us. It may be our duty ... to bring new kinds of subjects into the theatre, but it cannot be our duty to make the bounds of drama narrower.... Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom....

("An Irish National Theatre" 389-90)

For his pains, Yeats was accused of withdrawing into aestheticism; John Eglinton later charged him with omitting "all moral seriousness" from his faction of the revivalist movement (9).(9) Yeats himself noted the evolving differences between himself and Russell: "I am nothing but an artist," wrote Yeats to AE, "and my life is written in words. You are the other side of the penny, for you are admirably careful in speech, having set life before art, too much before it, I think, for one who is, in spite of himself perhaps, an artist" (qtd. in Rodgers 197).

Significantly, Yeats is absent from the gathering in "Scylla and Charybdis"; Stephen confronts not Yeats's literary revival but Russell's. Joyce is clear about the distinction: Russell appears in the episode as a peasant-glorifying populist. Yeats, by contrast, is recognized as the patron of art, not ideology (we hear he has admired Padraic Colum's line, "As in wild earth a Grecian vase" [Ulysses 9.304-5])(10) and it is Yeats's position that Stephen defends: Real literature must not be ideology's handmaiden. Here Stephen makes his own most pointed attempt to accomplish Portrait's mission, reaching and defining Ireland's conscience. This is the most animated Stephen we have seen - or will see - in Ulysses. He "rudely" (Ulysses 9.228) and "boldly" (Ulysses 9.670) challenges his listeners with "tingling energy" (Ulysses 9.147), cheers himself on and holds at bay the "Nestor" doubt that feared a "back kick" from history. Now he holds at bay those anxieties: "What the hell are you driving at?" asks the voice of self-doubt. "I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons" (Ulysses 9.846-47). Stephen brings all his intellectual weapons to bear against this movement which would create a literature that values politics before all else, endeavoring to make its representatives - Russell, Eglinton, Best, Lyster - acknowledge the damage to real art caused by their exclusivity and insularity. Stephen's primary tactic is a re-vision of Shakespeare - not to reject him as a literary model, but to expose the inconsistencies between Anglo-Ireland's rhetoric and its valorization of the English bard. Stephen makes three points about the playwright that are completely antithetical to the goals of the Irish Revival: first, that Shakespeare glorified not the peasantry, but the elite classes to which he himself belonged; second, that he represented in his art not the virtue of the English race but its corrupted chastity, which he had experienced first hand (as both cuckold and adulterer); and third, that he promoted a politicized agenda that propelled England's imperialist aims. In the following passage, Stephen drives home his first two points: