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

Unlike his confusing encounter with Wells, Stephen begins here to be a perceptive reader of the ulterior narrative of empire. Later, the young man realizes he has acquiesced once again to what Said has called the "absolute hierarchical distinction ... between the ruler and the ruled" (228), and records his anger in his journal:

That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Portrait 251)

Stephen's disaffection in this scene functions not merely to represent the colonial subject's dispossession from the colonizer's language as Said and others have suggested; Joyce also problematizes and inverts this scene to convey the impact of cultural assimilation on the colonizer. When one culture endeavors to absorb another, the native does not disappear; instead both cultures work subtle transformations on one another to create a new form. Both parties are thus forever, irremediably, affected by mutual contact. As Said has pointed out, "Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic" (xxv). On one level, Joyce represents this influence in the person of a British dean who has, in effect, "gone native." This Englishman's conversion is certainly less dramatic than Kurtz's transformation in Heart of Darkness, but as an English convert to Catholicism's priesthood, the dean of studies has nonetheless betrayed his nation's "civilizing mission" by returning to the "primitive" religion.

Stephen perceives the resultant alienation from both Englishmen and Irishmen that "this halfbrother of the clergy" (Portrait 190), this "poor Englishman in Ireland" (Portrait 189) experiences, but as he fixates on the dean's linguistic snub, Stephen fails to notice that the priest shares his dissociation from the Saxon tongue. Stephen's contention that tundish is an English word is correct as far as it goes; in fact, tundish is still identified in Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary as "British Dialect." However, Stephen is not thorough enough in his reading of etymologies. The Oxford English Dictionary additionally recognizes tundish as a combination form of tun and dish, words encoded with decidedly more complex origins. Variations of tun, meaning a cask or barrel designed to hold spirits, can be traced through a variety of languages, including Old and Middle English, but also - interestingly - to Middle Irish, Irish, and Gaelic. The OED concludes: "Origin uncertain; apparently not originally Latin or Romanic." This blurring of etymology results in the disaffection and foreignness that unsettle both Stephen and his dean in this scene and reveals the multiple layers of colonial impact: the Englishman fails to recognize the Englishness of the word; the Irishman does not apprehend its Gaelic origins. Thus this English language, already a hybrid tongue, may not be comfortably claimed or disowned - by either man. By revealing language's predilection for absorbing, evolving, and finally "returning not the same" (Ulysses 13.1103-4), Joyce demonstrates that the cultural text is an extraordinarily complex and dynamic phenomenon, one incapable of being harnessed by any singular political ideology.