Joyce and the Two Irelands

Chapter Four: Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist

chapter four 0 9 Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist The published pages of Stephen Hero contain a nearly complete version of the part of the novel that Joyce called ‘‘the University College episode’’ and that he later condensed into Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist. The episode, which often focuses on the manifestations of the Revival within UCD, contains Joyce’s most extensive account of the movement. It distinguishes a Griffithite political strain of cultural nationalism from an apolitical strain such as Moran advocated. Perhaps because Joyce inclined toward Griffith rather than Moran, the political strain figures more prominently in Stephen Hero and is treated more sympathetically. For the most part, however, the novel criticizes the Irish Revival whatever its form. Composed in early 1905, the novel attacks the movement and its followers with much the same satirical harshness found in ‘‘A Mother,’’ which Joyce wrote later that year. This attack on the Revival is closely linked to an even harsher one on the Catholic Church, whose ties with the Revival Stephen sees as extensive and insidious. The assessment of the Revival in Stephen Hero comes mainly from Stephen, who at this stage in the book’s development is essentially Joyce’s mouthpiece. Like Joyce, he also is full of contradictions. On the one hand, he claims indifference to the Irish problems that preoccupy the UCD student nationalists and Revivalists. We are told that ‘‘he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignity of a bad line of verse’’ (SH 146). In the next sentence , however, we are told that he ‘‘wished to express his nature freely and fully for the benefit of a society which he would enrich.’’ This plan to ‘‘enrich’’ his society—presumably Ireland—puts him close to, if not in, the 100 Tseng 2000.8.26 13:25 OCV:0 6052 Potts / JOYCE AND THE TWO IRELANDS / sheet 112 of 232 stephen hero and a portrait of the artist camp of Yeats and other literary Revivalists who thought of their work as contributing to the country. The information that Stephen might be considered ‘‘an ally of the collectivist politicians’’ (SH 147) gives a possible clue to the sort of enrichment he had in mind, but this suggestion that he is an incipient socialist borders on the preposterous. Stephen shows no interest in, or even awareness of, an Irish working class or labor movement. Though he recognizes that there are gross inequities of power and wealth in Ireland, he does not relate them in any way to capitalism nor does he show any interest in seeing them corrected. The forces in the country that most occupy his mind are not capitalism and socialism but Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church. What concerns him most about these two forces is their relationship to intellectual freedom, which he prizes above all else. When he speaks of enriching his society through expressing his nature, he apparently means promoting intellectual freedom through some sort of autobiographical writing. One of Stephen’s main objections to the Revival is that it does not aim at providing this sort of freedom. Alluding to efforts at reviving the Irish language and to a related habit of wearing items of Gaelic clothing, like Miss Ivors’ brooch with the ‘‘Irish device,’’ he dismisses the liberty desired by Revivalists as ‘‘mainly a liberty of costume and vocabulary’’ (SH 61). According to Joyce, rather than being simply indifferent to freedom of thought, the Catholic Church has waged a powerful and effective war against it, turning the Irish into intellectual slaves and cowards. In a long passage describing Stephen’s reaction to the depressing scenes he observes in walks around Dublin, Joyce summarizes the church’s effect on the Irish: These wanderings filled [Stephen] with deep-seated anger and whenever he encountered a burly black-vested priest taking a stroll of pleasant inspection through these warrens full of swarming and cringing believers he cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism: an island [whereof] the inhabitants of which entrust their wills and minds to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis, an island in which all the power and riches are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar . . . confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may...