A Multicultural and Multifaceted Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity represented

Transcription

1 A Multicultural and Multifaceted Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity represented in Contemporary Literature Written in English

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3 A Multicultural and Multifaceted Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity represented in Contemporary Literature Written in English Edited by José María Gutiérrez Arranz Cambridge Scholars Publishing

4 A Multicultural and Multifaceted Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity represented in Contemporary Literature Written in English, Edited by José María Gutiérrez Arranz This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2008 by José María Gutiérrez Arranz and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): , ISBN (13):

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface... viii Introduction... ix Part I: United Kingdom? The Celtic and British Isles The Undermining of a West Briton: The Deconstruction of Joyce s Gabriel Conroy Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny... 3 Imaginative Fiction, Cultural Memory, and the Traumas of Armed Conflict: Representations of the Violent Past in the Irish Troubles Graham Dawson Selves and Corners: Personal Identity in Willa Muir s Belonging Carmen Luz Fuentes Epic Imaginings from the Celtic Fringe of Britain: The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid Daniela Kato Lucky Poet or Eternal Man : Hope and Humanity in the Autobiographies of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir Kirsten Matthews Herbert and Scotland: Forked Tongue Ricardo J. Sola Buil National and Social Warfare in Arthur Conan Doyle s Historical Romances of the Fourteenth Century Antonio José Miralles Pérez The Identity of the Modern(ist) Self: T. S. Eliot between Philosophy and Literature Miguel Ángel Crespo Perona... 93

6 vi Table of Contents Salvestro s Destination: A Herring Identity José María Gutiérrez Arranz Notes to Part I Part II: Imperial Heritage and Postcolonial Hybridity George Eliot s Daniel Deronda: Towards a Culture of the Dialogic Aubrey McPhail Trop vieux pour service?: Empire, War and Global Ho[l]mes in the Writings of Arthur Conan Doyle Catherine Wynne Cultural Hybridity in Cosmopolitan London: Zadie Smith s White Teeth Esther Lau Nation and National Identity in the Novels of Chinua Achebe Neena Gandhi Notes to Part II Part III: The American Melting Pot Canadian Literary Identity Revisited: A Multicultural and Feminist Approach to the Novel in English until the 20 th century Natalia Rodríguez Nieto Unmasking Nationalism: Transnationalism versus National Identities in American Drama Steven E. Wilmer Framing African American Cultural Identity: A Look at the First and the Last of August Wilson s 10-Play Cycle Sandra G. Shannon Africa and America in August Wilson s Drama: The Construction of a Hybrid Identity Elvira Jensen-Casado

7 Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity vii The Cajuns Identity in Tim Gautreaux s Short Stories Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez Narrating the Nation in Navajo Poetry and Storytelling: Historical and Mythological Memory and the Construction of a Navajo National Identity in Luci Tapahonso s Sáanii Dahataał: The Women Are Singing Javier Valiente Núñez E Pluribus Unum: The Quest for Identity in American Literature José Manuel Barrio Marco Notes to Part III Contributors

8 PREFACE We would like to acknowledge all the people and institutions that have encouraged the fulfilment of this volume. Many thanks to Cambridge Scholar Publishers, who offered us their technical support and experience in editing this kind of books; to our University (San Antonio Catholic University of Murcia, Spain), for its incalculable help in the success of the I International Conference on Nation and Identity in 19 th - and 20 th -Century Literature in English, held in Murcia between 14 th -16 th September 2006, the authentic core of this volume; and to our contributors, whose wisdom accomplishes the maxim collected by one of them, Dr. José Manuel Barrio Marco: E Pluribus Unum (from many heads, one volume ). The editor of this book has chosen to refer to we at the beginning, since the task of editing such a considerable book cannot be due to the labour of only one, but a team of interesting and hard-working scholars. Therefore, the names of Elvira Jensen Casado and Antonio José Miralles Pérez must be included in this preface.

9 INTRODUCTION This book contains a multicultural and multifaceted study of ideologies and conflicts related to the complex realities and fictions of Nation and Identity represented in contemporary literature written in English. The history and present time of the United Kingdom, the British Empire and North America provide vast fields of research which have been explored by our selection of authors. Their interests range from the moral and personal consequences of modern nationalist conflicts to the memories of old racial confrontations on the British soil. Readers will find analyses and reflections on the individual s pursuit of identity in a challenging environment that covers more than two centuries of mainly Western civilization and abound in national dilemmas, social concerns, authoritarian legacies, and problematic postcolonial hybridizations. Short stories, novels, plays and poems by Irish, American, English, Nigerian, and Scottish writers will enable readers to consider the diverse approaches, propositions and debates the issues raised by Nation and Identity are being dealt with. Following these criteria, our co-operators push the boundaries of eclecticism and introspection. Regarding the first part of this volume ( United Kingdom? the Celtic and British Isles ), in The Undermining of a West Briton: The Deconstruction of Joyce s Gabriel Conroy, Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearney examine the undermining of Gabriel Conroy s identity in James Joyce s The Dead. They consider the relationships between national identity (British/Irish), class, and gender in order to reveal the power binaries that were operating in Ireland, particularly Dublin, during British rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The theoretical underpinnings that Adachi and Kearney utilize derive directly from Jacques Lacan s notions of the formation of identity and the role of the Symbolic Order in this process and Jacques Derrida s concept of difference and its importance in the formation and operation of logocentric systems. In Imaginative Fiction, Cultural Memory, and the Traumas of Armed Conflict: Representations of the Violent Past in the Irish Troubles, Graham Dawson reflects upon the contribution made by imaginative fiction to the cultural politics of memory in a context of armed conflict and its resolution: that of the Troubles in Northern Ireland commencing in

10 x Introduction 1969, and the Irish peace process launched in Due to this, Dawson explores particular texts which deploy contrasting strategies of representation to examine acts of violence, their effects upon social relationships and identities, and their ongoing legacies in political, cultural and psychic terms. Two analysed examples are William Trevor s Beyond the Pale and Deirdre Madden s One by One in the Darkness. In Selves and Corners: Willa Muir s Concept of Personal Identity in Relation to Belonging, Carmen Luz Fuentes examines Willa Muir s autobiographical writings with the aim of showing how she was able to question the basic assumptions of personal identity and to capture complex socio-cultural absurdities. Fuentes recalls Willa Muir s expectations when writing about the role of women in a gender-based society, the importance of a professional career for the construction of a satisfactory self-image, and the myths of a Scottish national psyche resulting in conflicting personal identities and the importance of her autobiography, Belonging, characterised both by an awareness of the group-identified self, and by a thirst for autonomy and self-definition. Daniela Kato, in Epic Imaginings from the Celtic Fringe of Britain: The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, points to the reevaluation of the concept of epic, a fact repeated again and again since ages, which in Britain acquired a peculiar sense from the Celtic Fringe (Scotland and Wales). From a more idiosyncratic point of view, Hugh MacDiarmid s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and In Memoriam James Joyce are the key points of her analysis of the modern British epic of a revolutionary poet just like MacDiarmid. Once again, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir s autobiographies are the aims of Kirsten Matthews Lucky Poet or Eternal Man : Hope and Humanity in the Autobiographies of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. Matthews explores the different ways in which the question of what a human being is is treated, pretending to trace a link between the particular definition of the individual, the family and tribe, and the nation. Her article sets the imaginary communities of MacDiarmid and Muir alongside the places they claim in their actual social, political and national contexts. As an aura for being mentor and reference, Hugh MacDiarmid is mentioned by Ricardo J. Sola Buil in Herbert and Scotland: A Forked Tongue. The Scottish poet W. N. Herbert belongs to the young generation of vanguard poets who as much in Scotland as in England pay special attention to the sound impact of the poem. The plurality of voices in poetry, according to Simon Armitage, takes Herbert to re-write myths and old and modern poses, to revisit the inherited cultural world and the physiognomy of the present.

11 Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity xi The bitterness in his characters is the introspectic interest of Miralles- Pérez s article National and Social Warfare in Arthur Conan Doyle s Historical Romances of the Fourteenth Century. The author explores the possible balance in the English, French and Scottish cultural forces that Doyle handled in his medieval fiction. Despite national and social conflict, he believes all identities (Saxon and Norman, noble and low-born) form the cultural tradition determining his personality as a Victorian gentleman. T. S. Eliot s twofold literary perspective is the aim of Miguel Ángel Crespo Perona s The Identity of the Modern(ist) Self: T. S. Eliot between Philosophy and Literature. His modernist vision and intellectual attention to the ideological conditions of his own time reveal an interdisciplinary approach: the study of the philosophy of F. H. Bradley is applied to his own use of philosophical ideas and quotations in literary or critical works. Crespo recalls Elliot s experience of nationhood, language and culture as a dismemberment to be healed by the practice of literature and ideological commitment. Lawrence Norfolk s The Pope s Rhinoceros is the main objective of the article by José María Gutiérrez Arranz, Salvestro s destination: A Herring Identity. The main character, Salvestro, begins in Usedom, a faraway island of the Baltic Sea, his, according to Gutiérrez, unreliable adventure, which is based on his unreliable past and his possible unreliable personality. Norfolk locates the story in a delicate agbe, the fight between the Spanish and the Portuguese to control the whole world, providing that the Pope Leo X is rewarded with a fascinating animal, a rhinoceros; this unreliable project seems to proclaim the herring identity of Salvestro. Yet in the second part of the volume ( Imperial Heritage and Postcolonial Hybridity ), Aubrey McPhail, in George Eliot s Daniel Deronda - Towards a Culture of the Dialogic, recalls a letter by George Eliot addressed to Harriet Beecher Stowe, in which she remarked her wishes to join those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. Eliot s Daniel Deronda is, in McPhail s opinion, not only a critique of Imperial claims of the East, nor does the alleged Christian/Jewish split in the plot reflect narrowly in the Victorian notions of East and West. The novel also offers a dialogic world-view of the imperial notions concerning identity, culture and by extension nation, both foreign and domestic. Catherine Wynne deals with Sherlock Holmes relationships with home and empire in Trop vieux pour service?: Empire, War and Global Ho[l]mes in the Writings of Arthur Conan Doyle. In her article, Wynne considers how the detective often undertakes anti-criminal efforts with the intention of purging the domestic space and policing territorial boundaries.

12 xii Introduction The author also places Doyle s detective in his literary context by drawing on the imperial and Gothic fictions of the late nineteenth-century, with particular reference to Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, George du Maurier, and Richard Marsh. Esther Lau s Cultural Hybridity in Cosmopolitan London: Zadie Smith s White Teeth focuses on the depiction of a number of characters in White Teeth, Zadie Smith s debut novel. Lau recalls this criticallyacclaimed novel which touches upon critical themes such as race, religion, history, sexuality and culture. The author employs Bhabha s theory of hybridity as a way of reading how postcolonial subjects in the novel view their identities in a cosmopolitan society. Neena Ghandi s Nation and National Identity in the Novels of Chinua Achebe discusses the concept of nation and national identity in five novels by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Ghandi holds that there are two specific periods in Achebe s literary career: in the period before colonization, the awareness of a nation is not so clearly defined; in the postcolonial novels, the major theme is the role of the elite in the creation of the nation. Ghandi highlights the contradictions in the decolonised world and the complex and intricate relationship between nation, race and class in Achebe s novels. In the last part of this volume ( The American Melting Pot ), we find more intricate analyses. The forced silence of Canadian female writers is the focus of Natalia Rodríguez Nieto in her article Canadian Literary Identity Revisited: A Multicultural and Feminist Approach to the English Novel until the 2oth Century. The fact that many writers have been ignored by major critical trends because of an apparent lack of literariness (including English Canadian women writers and minor male novelists) are due, according to Rodríguez, not only to being a marginalized sex or minority working in a marginalized genre in a marginalized colonial culture, as Lorrain McMullen points out, but also to being made invisible by the Canadian literary canon. Steven Wilmer analyses in Unmasking Nationalism: Transnationalism versus National Identities in American Drama some recent dramatic performances that have questioned the dominant concept of a unified nation with strong national borders and that have provided a different perspective on the whole concept of national identity. Wilmer also examines several different approaches to multicultural and transnational theatre in North America, all of which deconstruct and destabilize the notion of a unified nation state. Sandra G. Shannon, in Framing African American Cultural Identity: A Look at the first and the Last of August Wilson s 10-Play Cycle,

13 Study of Ideologies and Conflicts related to the Complex Realities and Fictions of Nation and Identity xiii focuses on the former and the latter of the ten plays that recast the history of African Americans in 20 th Century America, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf. Shannon focuses upon teasing out possible new meaning that emerges as a result of August Wilson s now-completed cycle, particularly upon the ways in which Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf, while situated decades apart, manage to speak to each other from across this temporal divide. Elvira Jensen Casado s Construction of Hybrid Identity: African and American in Wilson s Plays deals with the combination and blend of cultural traditions, values and norms from Africa as well as from Europe in the African American culture represented in Wilson s plays. Jensen looks at this unique identity, African and American, in two of Wilson s plays, considering how characters are limited and conditioned by society, but at the same time also empowered and endowed by a strong and solid spirit of struggle. The history of the Acadians, a French speaking minority who were one of the first Europeans arriving in North America in 1604, is the core of Emilio Cañadas The Cajun Identity in Tim Gautreaux s Short Stories. After some migrations owing to different reasons, the Cajuns definitely settled down in Louisiana and their current situation is illumination of Tim Gautreaux s stories. Cañadas enlightens Gautreaux s task when he leaves his characters free to wander around his stories creating a global scenario for the development of both his stories and his characters. The Navajo poetry and storytelling is illuminated by Javier Valiente Núñez in Narrating the Nation in Navajo Poetry and Storytelling: Historical and Mythological Memory and the Construction of a Navajo National Identity in Luci Tapahonso s Sáanii Dahataał: The Women Are Singing. The article discusses how the concept of nation is narrated in some of Luci Tapahonso s poems and stories through the evocation of Navajo historical and mythological memory. The recollection of certain historical events that left a permanent trace in Navajo culture after the European conquest and settlement of the new Americans and of the Navajo myths, legends, stories and religious traditions that conform Navajo popular memory gives rise to the emergence of a Navajo national identity in Tapahonso s work. Finally, José Manuel Barrio Marco, in E Pluribus Unum: The Quest for Identity in American Literature, engages with the idea of the most extraordinary experiment in political, socio-cultural and economic evolution ever seen in the history of the world, the United States of America. This melting pot of races and religions, according to Barrio, this New Jerusalem, Land of Promise or Garden of Eden has been in

14 xiv Introduction constant change and evolution since its foundation, and the American writers, together with the mottos and symbols of the government of the United States, have helped to preserve or alter the image of the nation.

15 PART I UNITED KINGDOM? THE CELTIC AND BRITISH ISLES

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17 THE UNDERMINING OF A WEST BRITON: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF JOYCE S GABRIEL CONROY SETSUKO ADACHI AND MICHAEL KEARNY Introduction In James Joyce s The Dead, the character Gabriel Conroy can be held to be a projection of what Joyce might have been had his identity been constituted differently by the Symbolic Order of colonial Dublin and its binary oppositional systems. In Conroy, Joyce provides the reader with a character who possesses a similar historicity to his own but whose ineluctable failure of the psyche is the result of the conditions of a colonial politics, culture and economy (Gibson, 71). The deconstruction of Conroy begins by focusing on Joyce s formation of the character. Attention will be given to the Symbolic Order and the binary oppositional sets that function in the dual logocentric systems emanating out of London and Rome and through which the identities of the city s inhabitants are formed. Here the Symbolic Order is based on the work of Lacan and is defined as the matrixing mechanism, the sets of cultural constructions, which are derived from binary oppositional sets, that operate upon the notion of Derridian différance, and which in myriad combinations program human identity (Kearney, 106). The article will conclude with a textual analysis that examines Conroy s interactions with Lily, Miss Ivors, and Conroy s wife Gretta. This section will expose how colonial Irish society, particularly Dublin society, structured relations between men and women, and intellectuals and non-intellectuals. This will reveal Conroy, because his identity has been matrixed by this colonial Symbolic Order, to hold English culture above that of Irish culture, to be a West Briton.

18 4 Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny Historical Setting First, it is necessary to consider the Symbolic Order and the binary oppositional sets that comprise it and act to constitute and control the systems of colonial Dublin, for they act in formulating both James Joyce s and Gabriel Conroy s identities. Within Ireland during this period many factions were operating; however, for space considerations, this paper will focus on five major elements (there is considerable cross-over between groups due to shared interests): Anglo-Irish Colonial or Unionist, Catholic-Celtic West Briton, Anglo-Irish Revivalist, Catholic-Celtic Home-rule, and the Fenians, who were opposed to both the British and the Catholic clergy systems of control. Of concern to all these groups is the shift, or reversal, in the binary oppositional sets and relevant discursive formations of Anglo-Irish empowerment over Catholic-Celtic Irish subjugation. After the fall and death of Charles Stewart Parnell, Dante s green velvet back brush of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce 1976, 8), and the ensuing political division and ineffectiveness of what had been a unified national movement (McCartney, 294), the power structures that had been operating in British ruled Ireland, and more specifically Dublin, were being undermined by new movements: for example, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League, and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival. Edward Said argues in Yeats and Decolonization that colonized peoples, the disaffected indigenous populations of regions under imperial rule, where the land and government are under foreign control and where the native culture and language are forced into a position of inferiority in binary opposition to that of the oppressor, often situate their sights in fictional and mythical directions where the native language and culture have primacy and where control of the land is under the indigenous peoples: For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination The search for authenticity, for a more congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history, for a new pantheon of heroes and (occasionally) heroines, myths, and religions these too are made possible by a sense of the land reappropriated by its people. And along with these nationalistic adumbrations of the decolonized identity, there always goes an almost magically inspired, quasi-alchemical redevelopment of the native language (Said, ).

19 The Undermining of a West Briton 5 Considering this, movements that created dream-worlds [of] a nationalistic Tír-na-nÓg, where poetry meant more than politics and where ideals counted far more than votes (McCartney, 294), were an obvious progression. The Gaelic League s Douglas Hyde held the view that the course to be taken by the Irish generation of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the generation of Conroy, should be one of de-anglicisation : the refusal to imitate the English in their language, literature, music, games, dress, and ideas (McCartney 1984, 296). The Gaelic League spread the ideals of national self-reliance and self-respect through embracing Irish language and culture, and campaigned against all forms of West-Britonism (McCartney, 296). It is within this turbulent and changing environment that the identities of both James Joyce and his hero, Gabriel Conroy were formulated. Joyce viewed the political and social options awaiting him within Dublin as a route to paralysis and stagnation. If power were wrested from London, the power of the Catholic clergy (the logocentric system of control coming from Rome) would still prove to be suffocating: one foreign governing body, London, would be replaced with another, Rome; Victorian repression would be replaced by Catholic repression. The option of adhering to the old power structures established by the crown would be equally destructive. This would be a betrayal to his country, his Irish-ness: Joyce would only be a lackey to the crown, for Irish people can never be English because in a colonial relationship there is a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction between ruler and ruled, whether or not the latter is white (Said, 228). This paralytic environment was the Symbolic Order that formulated Joyce s identity, and that of his character Gabriel Conroy. The difference between Joyce and Conroy is that Joyce s preternaturally acute sense of irony detected [what awaited him if he remained in Ireland], not only a slavish obedience to the Church, but a continuing subservience to contemporary English cultural models (Gibson, 32). For Joyce, to remain in Ireland would be for him to relinquish his aesthetics, his art, and his independence, and accept the paralysis and stagnation that was propagated by the dual logocentric systems of control emanating from Rome and London. Joyce, by coupling the strength of Nora Barnacle to his confidence, is able to head to the continent and escape the nets. Conroy, who possesses a nervous disposition instead of Joyce s strong constitution, is unable to leave and therefore becomes a model of the fate that could have befallen a weaker Joyce. Gabriel Conroy is ensnared within the dual logocentric systems. He cannot shift to the Catholic-Celtic system or the Anglo-Irish Revival

20 6 Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny system without relinquishing the power he has obtained by adhering to the British colonial system that promotes British cultural superiority. The Formation of Gabriel Conroy As in the Lacanian model of identity formation, where myriad networks from the Symbolic Order combine to make distinct and individual identities (albeit fragmented), Joyce utilized various character traits and life histories culled from different people to construct Conroy. In doing this Joyce creates a character that is probably a fantasy-projection of himself. Patrick Parrinder makes this point in his book James Joyce and attributes this fantasy-projection as being based on Joyce s idea of what he might have been had his talent failed him and had he lived on to become a man of settled habits in his native city (Parrinder, 66). While fear of his talent failing him may have been a contributing factor to the formulation of this fantasy-projection, it should not be over emphasized. Perhaps the phrase his talent failing him is not accurate here: he was sure of his talent; the problem was whether it would be acknowledged and his work accordingly distributed. Joyce was worried about failure, but his main concern was whether he was ever going to find a publisher for his works, for he was quite convinced of his gifts (Gibson, 96). This confidence in his talents shielded him from the paralysis to which Conroy succumbed. However, Gibson argues that while Joyce was confident of his abilities, it was not egoism or self-display that fuelled Joyce to continue writing: He needed to understand the circumstances that had made him what he was. For understanding them also involved a recognition of how they might have been different, how similar circumstances might be countered or changed. This recognition meant grasping the specific character of the historical forces that had been formative for him. In other words, it meant grasping their historicity. Joyce had a preternaturally acute sense of historicity. People and cultures obsessively construct patterns to persuade themselves of the enduring sameness of things. Irish colonial society made Joyce quite remarkably disinclined to believe that such patterns had any binding force. (Gibson, 96) A point that Gibson fails to address in this passage is that it is not solely Irish colonial society that constructs Joyce s disbelief in the absoluteness of these patterns. Other elements of his particular Symbolic Order, contributions to his identity development from his father, would have played a major part in differentiating him from other Dubliners in

21 The Undermining of a West Briton 7 situations similar to his, and thus given him the abilities to escape the nets of Ireland. Therefore, considering the trials he endured in creating his art and Joyce s confidence in his talent, and his keen understanding of historicity (on both cultural and personal levels), rather than Parrinder s position of what he might have been as a failed writer, it is more probable that Joyce derived this fantasy-projection from ruminations on what his life would have been like had he been of a different character disposition. If his identity had been constructed even slightly differently, he may have lacked the confidence and determination to leave Ireland, he might have succumbed to the stagnation and paralysis propagated by his native land, he may not have had the cunning to decipher the nets being thrown at him by Ireland, nor the strength and agility to avoid them. If the discursive formations of the Symbolic Order that formulated the identity of Joyce had aligned in a different pattern, a pattern that constructed a man of weaker conviction, Joyce may have had a character more similar to that of his friend Constantine Curran. Conroy s personality is based on a mixture of traits from three main people: Constantine Curran, John Joyce, and James Joyce. Curran went to university with Joyce and is described as goodhearted and controlled. Ellmann recounts that Joyce granted his cleverness as well (Ellmann, 63). Joyce borrowed timidness from Curran: Curran s nickname was Cautious Con. Ellmann explains that Curran possessed the same high color and nervous, disquieted manner as Conroy; however, he suggests that Joyce magnified this trait for effect and holds that Curran was a more distinguished man than Joyce s representation of Conroy: Curran held the position of Registrar of the High Court. Another element that Curran shares with Conroy is that he had traveled to the continent and ha[d] cultivated cosmopolitan interests. Joyce also provides Conroy with a brother named Constantine, who, like Curran s brother, was a priest (Ellmann, 247). Curran s timidness may be read as a product of the logocentric system of control emanating from London which propagated the construction of colonized identities that were imbibed with inferiority due to the negative position they were assigned by the British discursive formations, systems of control, in the constructed oppositional sets of British-Irish, colonizer-colonized. Joyce was most probably able to escape this aspect of the discursive formations of the Dublin Symbolic Order because of contributions to his identity from his father. John Stanislaus Joyce s political leanings favoured the Fenians, who had an intransigent hostility to England and who were also traditional enemies of the Catholic clergy : the Fenian view, and the view

22 8 Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny that John Joyce consistently provided James Joyce with while he was growing up, was that the Catholic hierarchy had repeatedly proved to be the accomplice of the British state in Ireland (Gibson, 23-24). Thus, James Joyce was indurated by [an] early domestic training and inherited [a] tenacity of heterodox resistance [to] many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines (Joyce 1990, 666). From this it can be argued that Joyce constructed Conroy as a character who paralleled his own history, but who lacked the strong conviction and confidence that was matrixed into his own identity from the paternal aspects that were part of Joyce s particular Symbolic Order to form a heterodox resistance to London s logocentrism. For the composition of Conroy, Joyce borrowed his father s oratory style. The setting is taken from his parents history. Like Gretta and Gabriel Conroy, Mary and John Joyce regularly attended an annual post- Christmas party (most likely held on January 6 th : the Feast of the Epiphany) held by relatives. The Misses Morkans represent James Joyce s maternal relatives the Flynns: Annie and Eliza (the unmarried sisters), Mrs. Ellen Callanan, Mrs. Julia Lyons, and Mrs. Callanan s daughter Mary Ellen. Their house, like the Misses Morkans, was located on Usher s Island and was known as the Misses Flynn School (Costello, 115). Stanislaus Joyce, in his book My Brother s Keeper, explains that except for the literary allusion which Gabriel Conroy considers above the heads of his listeners, the speech in The Dead is a fair sample, somewhat polished and emended, of his [John s] after-dinner oratory (Joyce 1964, 28). Other aspects provided for Conroy are derived from Joyce s life. Conroy most likely represents what Joyce believed he himself might have become if he had not been able to escape the nets of nationality, language, and religion that Stephen Dedalus, in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, holds Ireland flings at its inhabitants (Joyce 1976, 203). Conroy, like Joyce, has been the beneficiary of a superior education (Gibson, 74). Conroy writes book reviews for the Daily Express; Joyce wrote book reviews for this paper from December 1902 to November While Conroy falters under Miss Ivors accusations of him being a West Briton, Joyce most surely possessed the conviction of his abilities and the confidence in his own political beliefs to have fended-off such cursory attacks: cursory, for Joyce s reviews in the Daily Express were rife with barbs aimed at both Unionist and Anglo-Irish Revivalists. Joyce was not concerned with the papers politics nor the politics of its readers, for he knew that he would never alter a comma in what he wanted to say either to suit the editor s views or flatter his patroness, Lady Gregory (Joyce 1964,

23 The Undermining of a West Briton 9 191). The most important shared historical elements between Conroy and Joyce are the biographical circumstances of their romantic partners: Gretta Conroy and Nora Barnacle. Both Gretta and Nora are from Galway in the west of Ireland and have not been the recipients of a higher education. The culturally constructed male-female binary oppositional set that privileges males can be seen operating here. Moreover, that Joyce creates a character, Gabriel Conroy, that is so obviously condescending to his wife only to have his anticipations of a sexual encounter, and in turn his confidence shattered (this results from the epiphany where Gabriel realizes that Gretta is not filled with romantic/sexual thoughts of him but that her mood and tears are for another), suggests that Joyce may have been exposing and attacking the culturally constructed binary system of exploitation and control, the social doctrine of patriarchy. The climax of The Dead hinges on Gretta revealing to Gabriel, which instigates his epiphany, the story of Michael Furey (Joyce 1982, 220). Based on Nora s history, Michael Furey can be held to be a representation of two people: Michael Maria (Sonny) Bodkin and Michael Feeney. Like Michael Furey, Sonny Bodkin was from Galway, had a good singing voice, and delicate health. Mirroring Gretta s story in The Dead, upon hearing that Nora was being sent to work in a convent after the death of her grandmother in 1897, Sonny went to see her on a cold wet evening. Sonny had tuberculosis and left his bed on this endeavour (Ellmann, 243). He professed his love for Nora, and she implored him to go home or he would get his death in the rain. Nora never saw him again. Like Michael Furey, Sonny became ill from that evening: [h]e contracted rheumatic fever which left him with rheumatism and a weak heart. Unlike Furey, Bodkin did not die immediately; however, he remained sickly, and passed away on February 11, 1900 (Costello, ). According to her sister Cathleen, sixteen-year-old Michael Feeney was Nora s first love. She met him while working at the convent. Feeney died in 1897 from typhoid complicated with pneumonia (Costello, 242). For Joyce, a person with a jealous disposition, Nora s past loves were problematic: he was disconcerted by the fact that young men before him had interested her (Ellmann, 243). While heading east to the continent introduces trials and uncertainty into Joyce s life, the option of remaining in Dublin and falling into a routine existence was not palatable. In moving east, Joyce creates distance between Nora and her dead past loves; moreover, Joyce flies past the nets to a setting where he can create art. On the continent he can escape the controlling binaries of colonial Dublin and the paralysis it foists upon its

24 10 Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny inhabitants. It is quite plausible to argue that Joyce s construction of Conroy stems from Joyce looking back to the west and pondering what he might have been if he had not had the strength to leave Dublin and head to the east. Conroy s Interactions with Three Women Joyce depicts Conroy s lack of conviction/confidence by focusing on situations where the male/female binary oppositional set (this set can be held to operate upon Derrida s concept of différance) is undermined by females. Conroy s identity is severely shaken by three women who subvert these systems: Lily, Miss Ivors and Conroy s wife Gretta. Lily, the caretaker s daughter who acts as a maid to the Misses Morkans, unintentionally, through her Dublin, Catholic-Celtic, non-revivalist Irishness, reveals that Conroy s self-esteem is structured and maintained by the colonial Dublin Symbolic Order that has constructed his West Briton identity. Miss Ivors (Conroy s intellectual equal) labelling Conroy a West Briton reveals his lack of confidence. Conroy s undermining is concluded when Gretta reveals the passion of her past love. Lily The fragility of Conroy s West Briton identity, his dependence upon the binary oppositional sets of the Dublin Symbolic Order for his confidence and his self-esteem, are revealed by Lily. Conroy s feelings of superiority over the girl are displayed in his reaction to the pronunciation of his name; she uses the parochial three-syllable pronunciation rather than the empowered educated two-syllable pronunciation: Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy? asked Lily Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname (Joyce 2000, 177). Conroy proceeds to talk to her in a friendly yet superior tone: Tell me, Lily, he said in a friendly tone, do you still go to school? O no, sir, she answered. I m done schooling this year and more. O, then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh? (Joyce 2000, 177) Conroy assumes that Lily will adhere to the discursive formations of the Symbolic Order that constitute the male/female, educated/uneducated, master/servant binaries. When Lily does not, Conroy s position is undermined:

25 The Undermining of a West Briton 11 The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness: The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you. Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes. (Joyce 2000, 178) Conroy depends upon others adhering to the governing discursive formations for reaffirmation of his identity. To restore his composure, to raise his confidence, he takes on the benefactor/superior/master role of giving Lily a coin: When he had flicked luster into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket. O Lily, he said, thrusting it into her hands, it s Christmas-time, isn t it? Just here s a little. He walked rapidly towards the door. O no, sir! cried the girl following him. Really, sir, I wouldn t take it. Christmas-time! Christmas-time! said Gabriel, almost trotting to the stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation. The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him: Well, thank you, sir. He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl s bitter and sudden retort. (Joyce 2000, 178) The way this incident generates mental anguish displays Conroy s lack of confidence. He is too dependent upon others and their operating within the dictums of the controlling order. His fear of utter failure, in the quote below, displays Conroy s anxiety about failing to maintain his superior position in the binaries that have been established by the colonial system: The indelicate clacking of the men s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure. (Joyce 2000, 179)

26 12 Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny Conroy s confidence is dependant upon the notion that English culture is superior to Irish culture. He is trapped by the binaries of the logocentric system. The undermining of his confidence by Lily at the beginning of the story initiates a situation where his confidence will be systematically eroded through interactions with females that circumvent the systems of control that form the discursive formations of the Dublin Symbolic Order. Miss Ivors Conroy s dependence upon the binary oppositional sets was due to his lack of conviction/confidence. His insecurity in this regard has him overly concerned with external evaluations. In the Dublin Symbolic Order, binary oppositional sets were often concerned with political positions. Miss Ivors directly throws a choice between West Briton and Irish identity at Conroy, which is politically judgmental: West Briton/bad; Irish/good. Conroy is agitated when Miss Ivors makes her point, within the earshot of others, that Irish is their identity. Miss Ivors condemnation of his West Briton-ness and her insistence that he embrace his Irish-ness is upsetting. Once again, he misreads a female, for her charge is somewhat friendly and flirtatious: O, Mr. Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer? It would be splendid for Gretta too if she d come. She s from Connacht, isn t she? Her people are, said Gabriel shortly. But you will come, won t you? said Miss Ivors, laying her warm hand eagerly on his arm And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land? Well, said Gabriel, it s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change. And haven t you your own language to keep in touch with Irish? asked Miss Ivors. Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know Irish is not my language. Their neighbours had turned to listen to the cross-examination. Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead. And haven t you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country? O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I m sick of my own country, sick of it! Why? asked Miss Ivors. Gabriel did not answer for his retort had heated him.

27 The Undermining of a West Briton 13 Why? repeated Miss Ivors. They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss Ivors said warmly: Of course, you ve no answer. Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy. He avoided her eyes for he had seen a sour expression on her face. But when they met in the long chain he was surprised to feel his hand firmly pressed. She looked at him from under her brows for a moment quizzically until he smiled. Then, just as the chain was about to start again, she stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear: West Briton! (Joyce 2000, ) Conroy s agitation stems from Miss Ivors reversal of the British- Culture-Language/Irish-Culture-Language binary. In order to shore-up his identity, Conroy questions the intellectual capability of Miss Ivors. Was she sincere? Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? (Joyce 2000, 192). Gabriel tried to banish from his mind all memory of the unpleasant incident with Miss Ivors. Of course the girl or woman, or whatever she was, was an enthusiast but there was a time for all things. Perhaps he ought not to have answered her like that. But she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit s eyes. (Joyce 2000, 191) One of Conroy s problems is that he does not know how to meet Miss Ivors charge, which is quite in contrast with Joyce. Joyce had strong conviction and confidence, and being corned so easily about cultural superiority, as in the above, or about writing for the Daily Express, below, would not have happened to him: Well, I m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you d write for a rag like that. I didn t think you were a West Briton. A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel s face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. (Joyce 2000, 188)

28 14 Setsuko Adachi and Michael Kearny Conroy is hindered from expressing the opinion literature was above politics because it was too grandiose. He senses Miss Ivors is political and seeking to reverse the British/Irish binary. Had Conroy a stronger conviction, had he seen the limits of the binaries in the controlling system of Ireland, then the phrase would not have been grandiose, indeed it may have helped him to escape paralysis. Conroy tries to recover from the ridicule through a process that discloses the controlling systems to which he adheres. His plan was to criticise her indirectly. He is unnerved to think that she may be sitting at the supper table, and he feels she would not feel sorry if his speech failed; then an idea, which gave him courage, came to him: He would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: Ladies and Gentlemen, the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack. Very good: that was one for Miss Ivors. What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women? (Joyce 2000, 193) While Miss Ivors did not stay for supper, Conroy s speech was successful. The supper table was where the West Briton order dominated. He converted Miss Ivors place from superior to inferior: he propagated the English culture over Irish culture binary. Miss Ivors challenged Conroy as his intellectual equal by subverting the binary, and to maintain his identity, it was necessary for him to reestablish it. His want was to such an extent, that he readily sacrificed his two ignorant aunts. Gretta Gabriel adheres to the culturally constructed patriarchal husband/wife binary oppositional set that disempowers and subjugates women. Gabriel is not interested in what Gretta thinks. When she expresses her interest in visiting Galway, his reply is cold: he is not concerned as to why she would be interested in visiting the West. What words had you with Molly Ivors? No words. Why? Did she say so? Something like that. There were no words, said Gabriel moodily, only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland and I said I wouldn t. His wife clasped her hands excitedly and gave a little jump.

29 The Undermining of a West Briton 15 O, do go, Gabriel, she cried. I d love to see Galway again. You can go if you like, said Gabriel coldly. (Joyce 2000, 191) For Gabriel, Gretta exists in his mind first and he projects onto her what she should be. Gabriel s mind is filled with a fictional Gretta. Gretta in Gabriel s mind reflects an image that is constructed upon the patriarchal husband/wife binary, where Gabriel is the central and empowered figure. With this image, Gabriel is buttressing his identity through a sense of empowerment, even ownership over Gretta: She [Gretta] leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while standing at the curbstone, bidding the others good-night. She leaned lightly on his arm, as lightly as when she had danced with him a few hours before. He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage. But now, after the kindling again of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust. Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure. (Joyce 2000, 216) This new adventure is a fantasy image as opposed to Joyce s and Barnacle s actual escape. However, there is no trace of Gabriel s thoughts turning to what Gretta actually thinks or feels. There are hints that she may not share his image, that she is not the reflection of his mind, such as the instance where Gretta was able to see the comical aspect of Miss Ivors leaving. Gabriel seems to be completely oblivious to this. Another sign of disparity between Gabriel s Gretta and Gretta herself is the instance where the real Gretta strains Gabriel and makes him nervous. It is inserted after his deprecating statement that his wife takes three mortal hours to dress (Joyce 2000, 176). Gretta s comments regarding goloshes reveal Gabriel to be the more fastidious and Gretta to be the free spirit: O, but you ll never guess what he makes me wear now! She broke out into a peal of laughter and glanced at her husband, whose admiring and happy eyes had been wandering from her dress to her face and hair. The two aunts laughed heartily too, for Gabriel s solicitude was a standing joke with them. Goloshes! said Mrs Conroy. That s the latest. Whenever it s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. To-night even he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn t. The next thing he ll buy me will be a diving suit. Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly (Joyce 2000, )