Europe's Times and Unknown Waters #3
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lansată în Aprilie 2009
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Postmodernism in Keith Ridgway’s novel… The Parts. Narrative techniques of the Irish postmodern novel - by Marcela Iuga
Changeability and Polymorphism in O’Connor’s Exile and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - By Narcisa Braşoveanu
Postmodernism in Keith Ridgway’s novel…
The Parts
Narrative techniques of the Irish postmodern novel
by Marcela Iuga
“In this perspective postmodernism may appear as a significant revision, if not an original épistémé, of twentieth-century Western societies” [1]
The spatial circle of postmodernism narrows from Western Europe to the “most western” point of the continent and that is to Ireland. Ireland is a special, paradox, country for this matter:” The contemporary Irish novel occupies an especially complex, cultural and intellectual space where there is a strong sense of both continuity and disruption.” [2] Irish post modernity is concomitant with the British movement, Ireland living a postcolonial era: “ those who have been previously marginalized or silenced even before they found their new identities”[3] From a literal point of view England “adopted” as English writers some Irish authors: Lawrence Sterne, Bram Stoker, Flann O’Brain, Samuel Becket, and the most important, James Joyce. These authors are tributary from an early to a late modernism (from Sterne to Joyce): Irish literature itself occupied a central position in the development of European modernism in the early twentieth century”[4]
But in fact the Irish contemporary novel is written by: John McGahern The Dark, Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun and Memoir; Jennifer Johnston Shadows on our Skin, The Gingerbread Woman, Grace and Truth, This is not a Novel, How Many Miles to Babylon?, The Invisible Worm; Robert McLiamWilson Eureka Street; Sebastian Barry The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty; Patrick McCabe Mondo Desperado; Colm Toibin The Master; Robert Welch Groundwork.
For these writers postmodernism is: autobiographical fiction ( fictional memoir), history, politics, nationalism, heroism ( the Troubles in Eureka Street), the imaginary, the fictive, meta-textuality(This is not a Novel): “ the subject matter of late twentieth century literature has, and is, changing despite its, sometimes self-conscious, affinity with the past”[5]
The novel, as an epic literary gender, is not specific Irish. The tradition goes back to the ancient Gaelic time when poetry, spoken verse gave an identity to the nascent people: “ Many Irish cultural nationalists felt that the novel... was inadequate to the task of representing the nation... and when prose fiction did emerge as a form it was – with its roots in the Gaelic story telling tradition(Gerry Smyth, 1997:25-6); “ If the Irish writer fells any deep affinity with the novel as a verbal form, it may be when, as Gerry Smyth says, it is ‘parodied, mimicked, overlain with all forms of narrative””[6] Furthermore Smyth moves on in stating that a nation results and depends upon a historical narrative. Bachtin comes to his help sustaining that the novel is an art form that can give simultaneous expressions to a variety of voices [7]
In our search for Irish postmodernism we come back to a preceding artistic current - realism, which characterized especially British modernism. Irish realism is more transparent. And “in the latter part of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty- first century, scepticism about realism as a ‘mirror’ referencing is prevalent in literary, social and cultural criticism.”[8]
There is a common feature of postmodern literature present in all Western literatures metafiction: “In the Irish, and the Anglo-American and European novel for example, this is evident in its metafiction, which is fiction’s self – conscious awareness of its role in the process of reconfiguration and its capacity to ask questions about representation.”[9] Special features of the contemporary Irish novel are: “The newfound emphasis on heterogeneity, and upon representation as reconfiguration as much as configuration, brings together contemporary art, culture, history and politics in a shared concern with the limits and the nature of individual and collective identity of Ireland and Northern Ireland, often in comparable but also different ways.” [10]
Contemporary Irish fiction gives a new perspective on Irish history and that is a multilayered view of the puppa russa / matrioscha: “like a Russian doll there are secrets within the secret while the dominant discourses are often contradictory and frequently change to accommodate new and emergent perspectives.” [11]
In 1983 Bhabha states that the voice we hear in the text is the voice of the conquered that has freed him of the conqueror: “when those who have previously been silenced acquire a voice, when the socially marginalized emerged from the margins, a spatial shift occurs. This spatial movement can be envisaged in geographical, social and even metaphorical terms.” [12] The relation of Ireland to the past is one of re-contextualization, reinterpretation: “what has to be recognized more widely in Irish society, and culture is that interrupting the continuum with the past and present involves reclaiming rather than rejecting tradition.”[13]
The novel that we are going to tackle was written in 2003 by Keith Ridgeway: The Parts. Therefore we are confronted with a beginning of the 21st century novel. Its author is young having been born in Dublin in 1965. He currently lives in London. His first book was a fictional prose work- novella- Horses, which appeared in Faber First Fictions Volume 13 in 1997. In 1998 The Long Falling, was published by Faber & Faber, London. A collection of short fiction, Standard Time, followed in 2000, also from Faber & Faber. At the same publishing house appeared in 2003 The Parts. His most recent novel is Animals, from 2006, published by 4th Estate, London.
Keith Ridgeway
Ridgway's work has been translated into several languages and has been published in France>, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Belgium> and The Netherlands, as well as in the States. His 1998 novel The Long Falling, under its French title of Mauvaise Pente, was awarded both the Prix Femina Etranger and the Prix Premier Roman in Paris in 2001. The writer was awarded The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2001. [14]
The novel is organized at least in what regards the formal building: it starts with a dedication “for Kenneth” and has four units: Firstly, Life, Death and Lastly. Also it is circular thanks to a short sentence:” Here we are.” [15] That repeats itself both at the end of Firstly and at the end of Lastly. It is formed by an adverbial modifier of place “here”, a 1st person, plural personal pronoun “we” and a verb of existence “to be” with its sequence of tense “are”. It is amazing that the author is able to set the reader into context by using only three words, issuing place, characters’ ontological status that of existence, of creation.
The narrator is both omniscient and subjective. From here it is deductible that we deal with a paradox: the fact that the narrator would know everything that happens would make him objective. Plus it has a third person narration so not a usual contemporary first person. So we would see him heterodyegetic, outside the text. But, in fact, the narrator is not only inside the text but it is in the characters’ mind and dreams. He might be, from this point of view, as stated in This is not a novel, “a bit like God”. But this narrator is not a conqueror. This is not a novel of imprisoning the characters but of freedom. We must remember always that postmodernism is a fight against realism.
Realism’s main feature is objectivity, omniscience, third person narration. Or the only way of going against this is parody. And it is this what Ridgeway does in writing his novel: deconstructs the notion of objectivism and God-like narrator through a playful, ironical narrator that is in a friendship relation with its characters. Even though he knows everything, these characters seem always to mock him: “These are strange kinds of people. / There are too many men in tears.” [16]
Consequently an example, exempla docet, of phrase construction shall uncover the omodyegetic narrator who is the only voice of the characters’ thoughts: “How many are there than? Seventeen? Seventy eight? Two?/ The paramedic on his third shift in a row waiting for the world to hop into The Delly Copter thinks there’s seven. He’s been in four of them and he reckons that he knows about three others. The woman selling cigarettes and biscuits and milk and newspapers in the all night Spar things there’s only six. She once saw a couple doing it in a doorway on Northumberland Road, screaming their heads off, bear buck naked except for boots and high heels. The copper in the cop car waiting for the kerb, dying for a cigarette and missing his wife, he thinks there might be as many as forty. He’s seen some things. Kitty Flood thinks there’s only one but she’s a complicated woman. Delly Roche doesn’t think about it at all. Dr George Addison - Blake has found sixteen so far, because he knows where to look. Kez thinks there’s thousand.”[17]
The title chosen by the author is simple: The Parts. A plural noun pre-modified by the definite determiner/ article the. Parts could have two diverse meanings: the first is formal because of its four obvious parts – the book itself is organized and this shows inner cosmogony but everything else is a chaos. The characters and the action are hard to follow because of the flashbacks and the brake of the text in multiple plans illustrated by icons and separatist lines and writing fonts. The parts, for a change are - Firstly, Life, Death and Lastly. The second meaning has to deal with the content that illustrates one of the postmodernist features and that is fragmentation: “The Parts shares airtime with Joe Kavanagh, radio host struggling with interference from his private life; Barry, his producer, about to be ambushed by something suspiciously like love; Delly Roche, a woman who wrongly thinks death might provide her with a way out; Kitty Flood, over-eater, under-achiever, party to a secret from the past; Dr George Addison-Blake, stranded strange American with funny ideas about medical ethics; and Kez, the Dublin rent boy who links them all, without quite knowing it, to a single story, part hilarious, part scary, part beautiful. Just like life.”[18]
There are divided actions that focus on central characters because this novel has exactly six main characters: Kitty Flood, Delly Roche [Fidelma Gilmore], Dr George Addison – Blake, Joe Kavanagh, Barry and Kevin whose nickname is Kez: “The boy’s name is Kez. It is. Really.”[19] He connects all the other characters without even realizing. And still he is not the only central character: “Delly dreams of dying. Dr George Addison – Blake feels the wet grass through his clothes. The radio presenter plays more music than he usually does, and his producer watches him. Kitty Flood hovers in the dark.”[20]
All in all this is not a final paper. It needs a lot of work to be done. Because, even now as I am writing, I can feel the eyes of Kevin, Kitty, George, Joe, Delly and Barry, watching me and telling me to remember their story. I do not want a memory inhibitor as Daniel Gilmore did. Because when we have reached Jennifer Johnston’s ‘The End’ we choose not to forget. But always to create and recreate them through ourselves.
Endnotes:
Bibliography
Changeability and Polymorphism in O’Connor’s Exile and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
By Narcisa Braşoveanu
The two novels are examples of the manner in which the Irish identity is constructed at different levels ranging from the historical one an ending with the artistic one, all of them being diffusely interwoven within the complicated narrative thread, allowing the artistic subjectivity to emerge and to gradually discover itself. Thus, these levels, which have rather been proposed by narratology, refer to the following issues: the particular historical context of the authors as empirical/biological individuals, the literary-aesthetic specific context, the consideration of these two novels both as expressions of change and relativity of values and as narrative entities permeated by biographical details, the complementary relation between the novel construction and the construction of the subject, and, finally, the theme of hunger, be it spiritual and/or physical, connected with the characters’ narrative structure and development.
The aim of the present paper is to disclose the similarities and differences between the above mentioned novels, as they belong to a similar historical and literary background, still maintaining their features of singularity resulted from the subjective-artistic perception of the general ontological coordinates, on one hand, and from the particular existence of each author, on the other hand. As a matter of fact, both novels may be considered as “written records” of these aspects, both of them portraying their creator as an artistic identity marked and influenced differently by the existential stream.
The Irish Context at the Turn o the Century
Following the chronological line, one discovers that Exile and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are not separated by a big time interval, as the former was published in 1910, and the latter in 1916, being, of course, preceded by what is considered [by critics] to be its sketch, namely Stephen Hero. Thus, the issue of historical and literary contexts does not present such a tremendous disparity in the formation of these two novels, becoming only a common cultural matrix wherein the distinctions are made by the authors themselves as creative artists and by more specific, biographical determinations.
The history of Ireland (of what is today The Republic of Ireland) is characterized, during the 19th and the first part of the 20th century, by major changes occurred on various aspects of the political and social life, changes that led to the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1922. Firstly, the political scene was populated by characters who either tried to maintain the strong bonds with and dependency of Great Britain (The Unionists) or who fought against such union, wishing freedom for Ireland (The Nationalists). Daniel O’Connell (1823), “the Great Liberator”, known for his campaign of achieving emancipation; Thomas Francis Meagher, one of the most prominent rebels of the Young Irelanders who led the nationalist rebellion of 1848; the republicans of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (James Stevens and the Fenians – Fiana Fail) who led the 1867 insurrection; Michael Davitt and his Land League, demanding “Fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure” (the three Fs), Charles Stuart Parnell, the Protestant landowner and founder of Irish Parliamentary Party (in the 1870s), the controversial figure who challenged the Irish society by living with Katherine O’Shea, the separated wife of an Irish MP; Wyndham (state secretary)and his Land Purchase Act (1903), gradually giving back the land to the rural landholders and tenants; W.E. Gladstone’s two unsuccessful attempt to introduce Home Rule (1886 and1893); John Redmond (the new leader of IPP) and his balance of power in the Commons, which allowed Home Rule Bill to pass in 1910 (a third one being introduced in 1912) – all these are as many examples of such historical figures who contributed to the creation of a convulsed political landscape, generating social tensions, while continuing the “tradition” of disagreement and opposition between the Unionists (organized in Ulster Volunteers Force, during those times) and the Nationalists (fighting the former by creating the Irish Volunteers). The last important event worth mentioning is the 1916 Easter Rising, an attempt to gain the independence of Ireland, led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood mostly in Dublin, during the Easter Week, and suppressed after six days of fighting. The period between 1916 and 1921 reveal a continuum of political violence, the outcome being the partition of Ireland and the independence for 26 counties out of its 32.
From another standpoint, Ireland was also confronted with natural disasters, the most noticeable being its second “Great Famine” (1845-1849), when the potato blight resulted in mass starvation (that was unwillingly reinforced by Peel’s import of low quality Indian corn) and emigration, the number of population dropping from over 8million to 4.4milion inhabitants in 1911.
The last issue that has to be mentioned is the replacement of the Irish language, Gaelic, by English, the language that was preferred by the Irish politicians. Of course, the Great Famine had its role in this matter, as it generated a decreasing number of Gaelic speakers, its effects being doubled by the creation of the National School education system, introduced by the British Government.
Therefore, if the 19th century was a period of “physical force nationalism”, the beginning of the following century was defined by the intensified conflicts between the two socio-political and religious drives of Ireland, The Protestant Unionists and the Catholic Nationalists, the upheaval of violence directing the Irish history to one of its most important moments: the birth of the independent state of the Republic of Ireland.
In addition to these and considering history at a smaller scale, one cannot help to notice the fact that the home cities of both writers, Galway (Patrick O’Connor) and Dublin (James Joyce), are subject to a similar process of socio-economic decline. If in the case of the latter, there was a decrease in the general welfare, Dublin being outrun by Belfast, Galway, the only city of the Connacht province, designed huge projects of developing means of communication with the North America; being the closest Irish port to this continent, it also tried to become the largest one, but failed. Still, it is important the fact that Galway managed to open the communication with outside world by the development of railways during the second half of the 19th century. This issue of decline and mobility becomes an interesting topic with Joyce – as Stephen himself is subject to a personal changing ending in the rebellious and self-asserting act of leaving his native places – but, especially with O’Connor, as he is the one that centers his novel on a character letting himself drift towards extinction, acquiring a pattern of apparent happy fragments of individual history succeeded by imminent collapse.
Moreover, the events of the “grand narrative” impose their presence predominantly with Joyce’s novel [the novel under discussion here], more specifically the conflict between the Unionists and the Nationalists described through the eyes of a child who does not understand why there is so much tension in the discussion held at the family reunions (even during the Christmas dinner), who is impressed by his aunt, Dande, wearing “a maroon [Davitt’s specific colour] velvet dress with a green [Ireland’s and Parnell’s symbolic colour] velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders, walking proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the water edge”, and who, ultimately, is strongly affected by Parnell’s death, in fact so daunted that he envisions his burial (“He is dead. We saw him lying on the catafalque.”; “Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!”); but not that daunted as to have sufficient inspiration to write a patriotic/political poem about Parnell – although he tried to do that, the outcome was just a simple enumeration of four names, namely those of his colleagues. And, of course, while the first chapter ends with Stephen’s confusion related to history and politics (“It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?”), the second chapter discloses another Irish issue, namely that of religion and its dogmatic coordinates that dictate the individual’s behaviour, without allowing him/her to modulate the developing lines of his/her own self (“he heard about him constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good Catholic above all things.”). Questioning the concept of “sin” and mingling it with the concrete human drives, Stephen applies the sequence of revolt, remorse and renewed revolt: “He turned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. […] his blood was in revolt. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast.” – his wish and determination of becoming a Jesuit priest – his renunciation act, as the life of a priest compelled dedication and restrictions (elements which cannot exist in an artist’s life). The last matter is that of the language, Joyce and, through him, Stephen being aware of the artificiality of the English language when compared to the native Irish language, Gaelic, but still making use of it in their own creations – Joyce writes in English and, consequently, Stephen does not only “speak” in English, but he also “writes” poetry in the dame language.
Michael, O’Connor’s character, is a figure who rejects Irish history and who chooses not to introduce it in his journal-like narrative. What he unveils is rather a personal (his)story, ignoring the larger frame and creating a narrative discourse about his own existential trajectory, a little bit suspended outside history, within a subjective chronology, rendering his misfortunes outside his country, outside his town and family, in foreign surroundings, having strangers as family and denying his own one. Michael records his ontological stream, staring with his accident in London, continuing with his travel back home in Galway – where his identity remains hidden, his only face being that of a circus freak, of an anomalism beyond the laws of nature and society - , his return to London and his death among homeless creatures, his fellow beings, belonging to nature (represented by the park in the middle of the city), owing nothing and to nobody. But, ironically enough, and, at the same time antithetically, O’Connor, and through him Michael, speaks the old Celtic language, namely Gaelic (the language into which the novel was written). Another interesting twist is being offered by the contrast between the language of the narrative (i.e. Gaelic) and its story setting in England (or mostly in England) which implies the fact that the main character speaks in English.
Thus, both characters display a rejection of externally imposed systems, in the attempt of revealing and/or constructing their self, but, while Michael does this by ignoring the systems, casting individual oblivion upon them, Stephen approaches an open path, annihilating them by exposure. Furthermore, if the former delves into exile and prefers the dramatism of a life without bonds – or rather with bonds chosen by himself, determined by his will - , the latter struggles with these bonds, submerging into their core. Simultaneously, there is a complementary, antinomic relationship between these two characters: one speaks a foreign language in his own home and ends up by fleeing away in a self-imposed exile, while the other “speaks” his native language in a foreign set up (the exile itself) and finds his death.
The literary-aesthetic specific context
Being written at the beginning of a new century, the two novels chronologically and structurally belong to Modernism, Exile tending towards early Modernism, while A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, towards late/high Modernism. From the point of view of the Modernist ideology/narrative technique, both novels exhibit, in different qualitative and quantitative degrees the traits of this literary current and human forma mentis. Thus, the issue of subjectivity may be considered as the main topic of these two novels, as they deal with the formation and development of the human being, more specifically of the artistic face of this process of becoming. And, if in the case of A Portrait, the title is suggestive in this respect, also allowing biographical insights (see infra), in Exile the artistic side of the individual (also with biographical hints) is discovered by Michael’s story which takes the shape of a journal, and, therefore a thorough account of one’s life (or, at least as thorough as the author consents it to be, as it is, after all, a journal of an actor-narrator, in Lintvelt’s terms). While Stephen renders five important stages of his inner maturity, concerning defining topics such as language, religion, society, family, church and, above all, an individual system of values and aesthetic beliefs (“Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic, but an aesthetic stasis, an ideal pity or terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged ant, at last, dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty which is the first formal aesthetic relation of part to part in any aesthetic whole, or of an aesthetic whole to its parts or of any part to the aesthetic whole.”), Michael is rather focused on an introverted journey., always accompanied by the spiritual and physical hunger, a hunger which, in his case, takes the form of a stringent, but liberating identitary lack solved by a constant mobility and shift of social and, for that matter, individual personae ranging from “the unfortunate that was not killed on that unlucky day”, to the freak of the circus, to the child-like figure saved by the Big Red-Haired Woman, to the lover of the Fat Lady and, finally, to the hunger-stricken creature wasting his life in the park in the middle of the big city (“…but I am too weary and exhausted to notice this; I am too tired to be aware of the great black river sliding past me like a huge horrendous serpent. I don’t even see that the great serpent with its myriad lights, its myriad eyes, the thousand precious stones glistening in its skin. I do not marvel at it one bit. I marvel only at myself.”). another identitary issue also rises with Stephen as he tries to locate the exact coordinates of his person, establishing an interesting and, at the same time holistic arrangement of external factors in comparison to which one usually creates his/her objective, general individual outline: “Stephen Dedalus is my name,/ Ireland is my nation./ Clongowes is my dwellingplace/ And heaven my expectation.”
Moreover, there is a certain fragmentarism of the stories with both novels, a narrative flow that regurgitates parts of the entire story. This sequence of directly narrated fragments of the story and implied events (indirectly induced to the experienced reader) is marked by the textual, visible blanks, gaps of the chapters, in A Portrait, whereas, it reveals the same textual gaps in Exile, but, this time, their nature is not only inter-chapter location, but also intra-chapter location, their high frequency sustaining the rhythm of the Irish narrative art. In Exile, these gaps have another function too, namely that of creating within the tabular order the effect of the hunger: collapses of consciousness, of coherent thought, of the rationally organized old mode of story-telling. Furthermore, this construction of the fictional world, by the usage of fragmentarism for delivering the creation of a(an artistic) subject/subjectivity involves the reader in an active process of reading not only the story, but the narration itself, including the viewing of the general images that emerges, an image that equates the main characters with the empiric authors (Stephen – James, Michael – Patrick).
The language matter is another argument for sustaining the insertion of these two novels within the borders of Modernism, this having been analyzed in the above pages, as an issue related to the historical-national Irish context. But, from a linguistic point of view, namely one that underlines the relationship between language and both the surrounding and internal realities of an individual, language becomes a medium through which the artistic subjectivity tries to communicate not to his fellow being, but, more importantly, to his own self. Thus, Stephen uses this “tool” for making clear his rebellion against “home, fatherland, church”, transforming the expressive force into a journal of the individual on the verge of complete self-assertion (the last pages of the novel). On the other hand, the issue of language is only indirectly explored in Exile, being turned into a silent entity as the surrounding narrative reality imposed the practice of a foreign language (London – English).
The blurring of distinction between genres, another trait of Modernism, can be fully discovered with both novels. If A Portrait is impregnated with fragments disclosing the features of the essayistic style, including hints from philosophic and aesthetic papers, especially in the last two chapters, when Stephen delves into clarifying the threads of his artistic self (the discussion on Thomas Aquinas), the old dramatic/melodramatic style permeates Exile, infusing it with a sense of pathetic and lyrical verbosity. Of course, the lyrical fragments do not fail to appear in Joyce’s novel, but their quality is a more serious, grave one, corresponding to the existential tone of the higher frame that hosts them (i.e. A Portrait).
“And she would have, only that her room was cold and empty when I got there. It looked as if nobody had lived in it for years. I began to feel lonely. My heart filled with sadness that that woman who had once comforted me like a mother was not there to welcome me.” (Exile)
“The truth and the beautiful are akin.”; “In the virgin womb of imagination the word was made flesh.”; “I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”; “Welcome, o, Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”; “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Although one cannot really speak about intertextuality with Exile – there are only fugitive literary, comparative remarks, such as that referring to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – , there is an intense process of allegory, transforming the characters into compressive and comprehensive figures that reveal traits of super-human entities within a titanic interplay. Thus, Michael himself becomes the image of the Irish wanderer, always in search of his identity and his own self, the Big Red-haired Woman translates the mythological Ireland (an impersonation to be found in the old Irish literature, brought back to life during the Irish Revival), the Fat Lady encodes England and its geographical “longing” after Ireland, and, ultimately, the Little Yellowman converts the insatiable human drive towards power (the will to power, in Nietzschean terms). When it comes to A Portrait, the main intertextual “suggestion” is that of the myth of Dedalus, the Greek architect/creator, a myth which is beautifully interwoven with the modern story of the artist.
From another perspective, Gilles Lipovetsky, in his volume L’ère du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain from 1983, identifies two types of individualistic revolutions: on one hand, there is a first such revolution corresponding to Modernism and to the Modern individual, and, on the other hand, there is a second such revolution, the space Postmodernism and of the Postmodern individual. If the latter is not of immediate interest in what concerns the present paper, the former is important as it unveils some characteristic that one may discover within the two novels under discussion. Thus, Lipovetsky’s analysis has as result a Modern individual characterized by a vertical axis of values and beliefs around which both the subjective and objective ontological streams are being centered. Stephen Dedalus, as well as Michael, is defined by a gradual, yet constant process of personal liberation and acquisition of individual freedom, outside any external deterministic factors. The main difference between these two rests in the fact that, while Stephen (apparently) manages to escape the superimposed institutions of family, nation and church, Michael, who openly denied them by his choice of the living in exile, seems to have no other solution than that of the final, ultimate escape from the human condition: death. The revolt that these characters enact is a revolt against the ideal modern society which, according to Lipovetsky, is based on subordination to rules, norms and conventions, disregarding the differences between every human being.
Change and Relativization of Values
From the above mentioned opposition between the individual drives towards self-assertion and the generalizing pattern imposed by the norms of society, one can distinguish the signs of change and mutability within Joyce’s and O’Connor’s novels. In fact, this Relativization of values might be considered the driving force of these narratives as it generates the sequence of events and transformations to which Stephen and Michael are being subjected.
In the case of A Portrait the pattern of individual change is accompanied by the external fields of reality encountered by the character. After each confrontation Stephen’s conceptual world suffers major mutations. Accordingly, the first chapter brings about a modification regarding the concepts of family, geography (the written expression of his localization in the world), politics, and, finally history, the character transforming them from a series of external, given tools of individual orientation into internal reference points, used either in an appropriating or rejecting process, but still emulating and selecting the elements that will become determinative factors within the artistic development of the self.
“Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother?”; “Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!”; “It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation […] The great men in history had names like that and nobody made fun of them.”
The second chapter unveils a powerful confrontation between the dogmas of Catholicism and the human instinctual drives perceived by religion as “sins”. In fact this important concept introduces Stephen into the world of a dichotomy (almost in a Metaphysical manner) between the spirit, belonging here to the Catholic Church, and the flesh, always living on the chthonic space of temptations. The result is that Stephen surrenders to “the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.”, a gestures which is fully displayed within the following chapter as a form of resentment, so intense that leads him to a self-induced wish of becoming a priest. Still, the reconsideration of his feelings and emotions (chapter four), although keeping a religious tone, ends up in the mythic call of his artistic ancestor (“A voice from beyond the world was calling. ‘Hello, Stephanos!’”), guiding his steps towards the final transformation of the self. The final chapter combines the discussion between Stephen and his fellows, thus a dramatic fragment, with the entries in his journal. The topic of the dialogue establishes the last concepts to be clarified: beauty, art, truth – all rendering either the kinetic or the static principles; by its aesthetic content, this discussion takes the shape of the Platonic dialogues, reiterating and adapting them within the new frame of age and individual.
O’Connor’s novel discloses the effect of relativization of values, a phenomenon out of which the human being’s becoming emerges with an individualized trajectory, including the choices made within a continually shifting universe. The series of changes and relativizations to which Michael is subject to starts with the “unfortunate” event of the accident, an event which did not take his life, but which deprived him of any common means of acquiring a status, of making a living. Thus, he is forced by a superior force, not denominated as destiny, but – typically Irish – as luck (bad, in the case of the opening pages, but also alternating with its good aspect). Moreover, the concept of family is being replaced with that of community, as Michael refused the family he was naturally given and accepted different fellowships, though the relational pattern kept functioning (misunderstandings, fights, mutual help when in need, manipulation). The man that pretended to be his friend, being, in fact, a friend of his money and of alcohol; the residents of the first house he lived into after the accident (“The man who had helped me down the stairs spoke to me in a charitable way and said they had business with me. […] He praised me as a poet might praise his lover. […] The Language that flowed from him was rough. […] I, too, was moved by the speech. […] My heart was full of thanks and love…”); the circus community, within which the director (“the head of the family”) behaved in a wicked, manipulative manner, even towards his daughter (the Fat Lady) – whom he never publicly acknowledged as such; the Red-Haired Woman’s house and Michael’s double perception of her, as a mother and as a lover; the experience of home and family from behind the protection of a false identity, of a mask (the tour in Ireland, Galway); the last house that hosted him, a house which was like a prison (a debtors’ prison), retaining him not only form revealing his lack of money, but also for revealing his shame in the eyes of the family (the Big Red- Haired Woman locked him in the same room with his so-called fiancée, the Fat Lady, so that she may call his family to see him in disgrace); the park in the middle of the city, the place of his most intense hunger crises – all these loci construct a multiply-focused foreground for Michael’s spiritual, and physical change, his mobility between them being also ensured by the transportation developments. Thus, the individual in the new era creates the surrounding reality using the external given inputs but, above these, transforming him/herself into an auto-determined creature.
Thus, the old values of society – which is constantly acting as an oppressive background – are being challanged by both characters, but, while Stephen is centred on change/becoming out of these values, Michael is being generated by relativization of these values. This is not to say that both processes are separately distributed to each of them, but that they coexist in each of them, one dominating one character, and the other giving the main trait to the other character.
Docudrama
These two novels, beside being extraordinary narrative constructs, are a complementary space to reality, one that offers the possibility of self-creation to their author. Moreover, they represent a world which is still permeated and (partially) determined by the self of the empiric author. Thus, there are direct correspondences between James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus, on one hand, and between Michael and Patrick O’Connor, on the other hand, correspondences which behave both as subjective marks of the authors-creators and as strong ties connecting the two realities, that of the real and that of the fiction.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Séamus Seoighe) was born in February, 1882, in Dublin, more specifically, in the suburb of Rathgar. His life, starting at this moment, was punctuated by a long and restless series of journeys, of back and forth movements, mostly from the outside of his self-imposed exile to the inside of his home, Ireland. The main characteristic of this constant mobility and, after all, instability was his drive toward Ireland and toward his family, two concepts that are present in his work; although their Irish meaning/reality is denied in his novel(s), the physical contact with them helped him narratively recreate them. Starting with the movement to Bray in 1887, continuing with his pretext-study journey to Paris (1903), his geographical wavering between Trieste – Zürich – Dublin – Rome (1904-1920) and ending with another restless mobility between Paris and Zürich (1920-1941), Joyce’s existence knew only one element of stability, namely Nora Barnacle, from Galway city, the one he will have two children with (Giorgio and Lucia), the one he will marry only in 1931 and, ultimately, the one who will refuse the Catholic Mass to his burial in Zürich, in January 1941 (“I couldn’t do that to him.”). This structural movement can also be discovered in the internal restless that characterizes Stephen and that generates his impetuous desire of constant search of his self and, at the same time, of a gradual self-assertion. From another perspective, this mobility, as a form of acknowledging the world while acknowledging yourself, is only suggested by the last lines of A Portrait, as Stephen writes in his journal his wish and intention of personalizing the world as it is given, of transforming it according to his own aesthetic beliefs. Other biographical elements that can be traced within Stephen refer to the 1891 poem, Et Tu Healy, written by Joyce on the occasion of the death of Charles Stewart Parnell and even sent to the Vatican Library in a copy form. Differently from him, Stephen’s similar poem does not undergo a textual shape at the time of Parnell’s death, as his distress was too intense, but only later. Furthermore, James, as well as Stephen, attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College (a boarding school near Sallins, in county Kildare), a college which he had to abandon as his father could no longer pay the fees.
His tendency of translating the individuals of real life into characters of the narrative/literary world was revealed from his early writings wherein many of his colleagues from University College Dublin (1898 -1903) served as models. This was continued with A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, in the case of which he was the most important individual to be translated (along, of course with the episode of meeting Nora on the sixteenth of June, 1904 – the temporal segment of Ulysses, with Italo Svevo/Ettore Schmitz, his Jew friend – Leopold Bloom and many other such correspondences).
Patrick O’Connor (Padràic O’Conaire – 1882 -1928) was born in Galway and, throughout his life he tried to consolidate his connection to this city and, moreover to the Irish background, while being in exile. As it happened to Joyce, O’Connor’s life is also pivoted on the concept of mobility, but, this time it acquired more dramatic hues, as it was generated rather by poverty than by certain internal instabilities and desire to create a distance between him and his family/nation. Being abandoned by his father (when he was six years old) and bereft by his mother’s death (at the age of eleven), Patrick was subjected to a constant shift of language and perspective, as he was left in the care of an English-speaking uncle (while he talked in Gaelic with his mother) and as he was forced to learn Gaelic and later English in school. When he was seventeen years old he went in London where he worked, joining the Gaelic League too. This period is the one that serves him as foundation for his novel, being subjectively and allegorically displayed. The equation Patrick –Michael does not have so many lacks, the entity resulting from the mixture between these two being much more homogeneous than it was the case with Joyce – Stephen. Thus, one may say that the anaphoric reference of the possessive “his” is simultaneously double. All his misfortunes, as well as all the positive events of his life are an interesting account of the inner sufferings imposed by his contextual condition, namely that of poverty. Moreover, his externally generated exile is completed by an internal one, as Patrick-Michael is subjected to a process of self-estrangement. Starting with his accident, which operates a physical departure both from the “old” Michael and from the normal/accepted external appearance of a human being, and continuing with the circus freak mask, kept while returning to Galway too, this process increases up to his transformation from a physical cripple into a spiritual cripple, one that cannot find himself/his self but in the peace of death. The torments that describe his inner world are amplified by the first person narrative, the acuteness of sensations and feelings being authentically rendered, involving the reader into a dramatic existential whirl.
When comparing the blend between the real person and the narrative persona of these two writers one cannot help noticing the fact that the entity James-Stephen is being characterized by a rather factual extension of similarities (more events from James’s life are being transposed into Stephen’s), whereas the entity Padràic-Michael displays an enlarged subjectivity (only one episode from Patrick’s life is translated into Michael’s, but his subjective/internal human level is being expanded to is unbearable limit).
Novel Construction – the Construction of the Subject
Using the terms of narratology discussed by Lintvelt, one may assign the label of homodiegetic actorial narrative to Exile and that of homodiegetic auctorial narrative to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With the former, the label proves to match the narrative content as the character who narrates the story is also the protagonist of the story, thus fulfilling a double function, that of the actor and that of the auctor, inserting himself within the frames of the story and of the narrative. Moreover, one can discover the fact that there is also an internal focalization (in Genette’s terms) rendered by the first person narrative, the “I” of the novel, this generating the impression of immediate flow of events, the perspective being that of simultaneity of event and utterance (action and the act of narrating), the discourse of the characters mostly being what Genette calls “récit primaire” (the discourse of the narrator). These traits are complementary contradicted by the last nine lines of the novel out of which the reader finds out that what he/she had been reading up to that moment were the pages written by Michael, the one who was found dead “under an oak tree, in the middle of a park, in London, England.”. Interestingly enough, the note states that “some of these pages were in his pocket”, a fact which suggests that the content of the narrative is a mixture between the authentic events and feelings experienced by Michael and a fill-in-the-gaps work completed by the founder of these pages, their first reader and possible editor. But there is no clue to the identity of the authentic and invented fragments, the areas of uncertainty forcing the following readers to an interpretative reconsideration, without negatively affecting the qualitative status of the novel. Following the narratological, structural line of this world of fiction, the construction of the subject does not present a very high degree of intricacy. The pattern of subject development is that of a constant alternation between positive ontological experiences and negative ones, the concept of “bad luck” being one of great importance for the character as it offers him the possibility of casting the responsibility and guilt on an external entity/conjuncture. Thus, the accident is followed by the huge sum of money he receives as compensation, the joy of being hired in the circus, by the slavery relations he has to undertake, the escape from the circus, by the spiritual misery he has to endure in the new house, the Fat Lady’s love, by the shame when confronted with his family, and, ultimately, his chosen freedom amongst the poor and the homeless determines his death. These two aspects create a unique perspective of the wandering soul/self that has crossed the borders of his home (nation).
Differently from Exile, A Portrait employs the homodiegetic auctorial narrative mode, the actor-narrator being the protagonist of the story, but creating a progressive psychological distance between these two facets of his narrative act. There is also an objective treatment of the narrative “I”, out of which the impersonal effect of the third person narrative stems. This may be considered as the result of the external focalization upon the stream of events and feelings, still keeping the homodiegetic, internal perspective, a perspective which is reinforced by the use of the first person narrative in the final journal pages. From the point of view of the discourses present within this novel, they are both “récit primaire” (of the narrator) and “récit second” (of the characters). Thus, the narrative construction is subsequent to its content, structurally sustaining the aesthetic belief in the impersonality of the artist, in the impressionistic/receptacle-like function he/she accomplishes. Consequently, the subject construction is rather complex, employing the Aristotelic concept of techné, systematically pursuing the individual “bildung” on various ontological levels: the social level, involving the inclusive configurations of family, nation and church, the political level, the religious level (interwoven with the first one), and, finally, the cultural level, its most important aspect being that of the aesthetics; all these converge to the emergence of an artistic self subjected to a constant phenomenon of epiphanies, of gradual perception of external and internal realities within an impersonal and authentic existential frame. Actor and auctor, Stephen gives an account of his artistic becoming, fulfilling the promise encrypted in his name: he is his own creator, submerged under the deterministic strata of external factors, but evicting himself as a victor figure: “Welcome, o, life! […] Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”.
In addition to these, there is one other observation that has to be mentioned, one that refers to a kind of objective identification of both characters, beyond their subjective self. And that is the “geographical” identity. If in the case of Stephen this appears in the beginning of the novel, during his childhood (“Stephen Dedalus is my name,/ Ireland is my nation./ Clongowes is my dwellingplace/ And heaven my expectation.”), opening a lifespan perspective, in the case of Michael it appears at the end of the novel, after his death, thus closing the cycle of life (“this poor man was found dead under an oak tree, in the middle of a park, in London, England.”). This type of identity is not only expressed by other persons than the characters themselves (Fleming, with the former, and the founder of the papers/the editor, with the latter), but its nature is marked by verbal determiners: if the one referring to Stephen has not the usual definite determiners, but the specialized ones (“my”), suggesting the potentiality of what it defined (i.e. Stephen), the one involving Michael is indefinitely determined (“an/a”), proposing an existential, final blank. Moreover, this identification can firstly be encountered within the last pages of his journal, the exact date being also specified: “Maybe my curse might have more effect were I to write it down on paper…and I have written it here, sitting under an oak tree, in the middle of a park, in London, England, on this beautiful spring morning on the nineteenth day of April in the year nineteen hundred and seven.” There is, with Michael, a reiteration of the geographical identity, underlining the precision of the end of his journey.
Thus, the narrative constructing effort implied by these two novels reveals a complementary design, yet distinct and unconscious, as the author themselves were not aware of each other, the only communication they shared being that of the same historical and literary context, a context which is also proved by the almost exclusive Modernist meaning assigned to the month of April – Eliot, O’Connor, Joyce (A Portrait closes with an entry from the twenty-seventh of April involving the celebration of individual rebirth, but one that is partially destroyed later in Ulysses) invest in this month an antinomic signification, suggesting death and not regeneration.
The Hunger and/of the Characters
The concept of “hunger” takes different shapes and has various effects in each novel. If in the case of A Portrait one cannot speak about a proper hunger, its meaning is covered by the identitary search into which Stephen is being involved. His inner drive towards artistic and, therefore, personal accomplishment is the one that coordinates his narrative existence, guiding him throughout the many-folded structure of his own reality, offering him the chance of departing from the received values of a narrow society, doubling it by the chance of creating his own system of values, of applying his own ethic, aesthetic view upon the external and internal worlds. In fact, this personal perspective undergoes a process of dispersion starting from within and expanding into the outside. Whether it is a phenomenon of internalization of externalization it matters less, the result being the important element of Stephen’s ontological equation: the construction of his identity as an artistic one, an overwhelming act which gives him the freedom beyond the initial deterministic standpoint. The change in his own (human) condition is his first gesture of creation, a first complete flight of the liberated self, a flight gathered from the gradual, localized escapist gestures (escaping from family, religion, nation, politics, inner guilt) –
“When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?” — “I will not serve home, fatherland, church. […] I do not fear to be alone.”
Exile, on the other hand, displays a dimorphic structure of hunger: a physical hunger and a spiritual hunger. The relationship between the two of them is one of interdependency, each of them being, in turn, the cause and effect of the other. Michael, from this point of view, is a double subject, suffering from the pangs of the physical hunger, generated by the social reverse of welfare, namely poverty, and from the pains of not reaching the desired state of a completely free individual. But, towards the end of the narrative there are two instances in which he seems to have acquired this state: the house in which he lives after the circus escape, in what was known as Little Ireland (keeping “the Irish heritage of language, music and literature”) and his last days spent in the park. And, this individual freedom is offered by the role of the story-teller within the small community of children that he fulfills in the first case and by the unexpected peace that he extract from the role of the carefree observer in the park. If the former mask revealed Michael in an active position, creating fictional realities for the listeners (according to the old oral Irish tradition), the latter distributes him into a passive position – he is a vector towards whom every impression emigrates: he observes life, in its various forms, the animate and inanimate world, concentrating, at the same time on his inner sensations, feelings and thoughts.
“The hideous treacherous world that unfolds itself every day before my eyes. The anxiety, the heartache, the weariness, and the deprivation! The poverty that hangs over all, like a great cloud, all the worst sicknesses of body and soul!”; “I had intended to finish the children’s story first, but she wouldn’t let me.”; “They [the poor creatures in the park] are still there. But this time I do not see them as black spots on the flesh of the giant. No, they are more like jelly-fish left on a beach by the tide. As if they had been waiting for a very long time for the tide to come in again and float them away.”
The other effect of the physical hunger is that of an intense delirium, one that, when cumulated, produces the mental space within the borders of which Michael can become a creator, an artist-wanderer on the fields of free association and imagination
“The sun is smiling in the sky like an indulgent mother whose only wish is to comfort and care for her children. The water in that pool over there, […], is now like a lake of silver dancing in the sunshine. […] There is not a corner in the park that is not bursting with growth and new life.”; “A kind of merriment came into my heart.[…] There were a lot of people in the park, but they had no notion of how happy was the cripple who was singing heartily under the oak tree.”
Thus, both Stephen and Michael are being constructed on the idea of lack, of missing parts of the soul and of the body, accomplished by the drive of filling these forms in the negative in a compensatory process of self-assertion and self-generation.
Conclusions
Exile and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man complete each other, disclosing the threads of a search of subjectivity that takes different paths, but it also beautifully answers the authorial ontological needs of inner defining coordinates. The narratives emerged out the individual creative process is complex, connecting reality and fiction through a validation process involving historical and literary contexts (be them general and/or personal), and, above all the human self.
Bibliography
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