Once upon a time and a excellent time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…(P1).
Stephen Dedalus, the young modern mental of Dublin, leaves his hometown at the top of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and chooses a lifetime of self-imposed exile to cherish his artistic desires. Stephen reappears originally of Ulysses; nonetheless, regardless of his return to home he feels a deeper sense of loneliness and exile. In this text, Stephen Dedalus’ state of exile and alienation which principally starts along with his alienation and exile from his family, his religion, Catholic Church, and his motherland, Ireland. This sense of exile and alienation initiates from Portrait then continues and deepens into Ulysses. Afterward considering Edward Said’s view that the notion of exile is closely related to the mental, Stephen’s mental exile and its artistic representations can be studied. “Tuckoo” in some biological encyclopedias is referred to as a sort of bird, which all the time lives alone and when it’s time to lay eggs, a Tuckoo goes to put eggs in other birds’ nests. Simon Dedalus is retelling the Tuckoo’s story for the very young Stephen. That is what might be called Joyce’s dexterity, because from the very starting he provides his discerning reader what might be Stephen’s life like? His life that Joyce introduces from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and continues to Ulysses.
The story of Portrait concerns Stephen’s growing up alienation from the inflexible social environment. Exile is what Stephen chooses with a purpose to save his artistic desires and ambitions. Joyce made Stephen conscious of his name and the mythical role related to it. In Ulysses, some Dubliner also refers to Stephen Dedalus’s name: “you make good use of the name . . . fabulous artificer, the hawk like man. You flew. Whereto? Recent heaven . . .” (210). Stephen struggles to be a Daedalus, a skillful one who by the help of artful wings tries to fly away from the self-made maze of his life. His wings he makes in Portrait are to avoid wasting him in exile, too. He leaves behind his motherland, his religion, and his family to live in exile, while his mother believes on the closing lines of Portrait that Stephen must learn away from home and friends what the guts is and what he feels. Stephen Dedalus reappears originally of Ulysses. His mother is dead for about one 12 months now; his artistic attempts seemingly failed at Paris. He has left his home and resides at Martello tower, where he pays the rent, but Mulligan, his Irish, vicious friend keeps the keys. There may be a 3rd friend living with them for some days regardless of Stephen’s dissatisfaction, an English tourist. Mulligan, as Stephen calls him, has the role of a “usurper” in Stephen’s life, one in every of the various in his life, though. At the top, Stephen decides that he is not going to return to Martello tower, or to his father’s house. Subsequently, even coming back from the physical exile from Paris, he remains to be an outcast, an exile at home. Cawelti believes that the 2 male protagonists of Ulysses are each physical and spiritual exiles in Dublin. He states that Stephen Dedalus’s exile goes back to earlier times:
Stephen Dedalus deeply alienated from the dominant powersruling Ireland-the British empire and the Roman Catholic
Church- has gone to France a while before the novel
opens on June 16, 1904. But, he has failed in his attempt
at exile. Driven by guilt about his mother’s death and his
ambiguous feelings about her, he has returned to Ireland,
only to feel himself not at home in any way. His
ultimate fate is uncertain, but when he follows the pattern
of his creator after the top of the novel he’ll go into
everlasting exile. (Cawelti 42)
Edward Said in his book Representations of the Mental in regards to the modern, young intellectuals like Buzarov, Protagonist of Fathers and Sons, sates that:
The very first thing we notice about him is that he has severedhis ties along with his own parents, and seems less a son than
a form of self- produced character, difficult routine,
assailing mediocrity and clichés, asserting recent scientific
and unsentimental values that appears to be rational and
progressive. (Said 14-15)
Edward Said’s idea can be applicable to Joyce’s modern young mental, Stephen Dedalus, as well. Being unsatisfied along with his family relations, his obedient, passive, and pious mother; his heedless, incapable, and indolent Father, Stephen tries to interrupt away with them as soon as possible and replace the lost family and father with a self-produced identity as an artist. Stephen’s sufferings from family problems are excessive and that causes him to face away from his family. That is the situation of Stephen’s life in Portrait and the indisputable fact that his parents might be the primary restricting elements at his home; thus, he tries to flee from them and to take refuge in one other world. He imposes exile on himself and leaves behind his family to make a self-made world of art, wherein, he’s the authoritative figure. Deane declares that Stephen’s conflict inside his family is a really painful conflict and starts from Portrait and continues into Ulysses:
It was a conflict between a son and his parents-cultural, religious,
biological-and a desperate try and transcend the terms set by
such a conflict by producing a theory of the self as its own parent,
or, less desperately, a desire of the self for alternative; surrogate
parents who would permit the imagination to live its necessarily
vicarious existence. That is the plight of Stephen Dedalus in
Ulysses. (Deane 41)
One interesting point mentioned by some critics similar to Gibbons in Semicolonial Joyce is that, this chaotic and turbulent condition inside the family from which Stephen escapes, might be consequently of the colonial condition of Ireland. Or however this condition, in a broader scale, could symbolize the chaotic condition of Ireland. In line with Gibbons:
to call into query the integrity of the family was
to undermine the foundational fictions of the colonial
public sphere, and it was perhaps this porousness
between private and non-private life which led Joyce to
proclaim in an early letter to Nora: “my mind rejects
the entire present social order and Christianity-home
,the recognized virtues, classes of life, and religion
doctrines. How could I like the concept of home?
(Letters II, 48) [Italics mine]. (Gibbons 168)
Stephen also claims in Ulysses that he has no home to go. No home, no hometown, no motherland. One of the best policy for the in progress artist is to dwell within the realm of exile, “silence, exile, and cunning.” Before moving on to research Stephen Dedalus’s state of actual and metaphoric exile in additional details notice Joyce’s careful observance of the complicated Irish occupation condition. Joyce in his 1907 lecture in Trieste, Italy, entitled “Ireland, The Island of Saints And Sages” confesses that “I don’t see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of soul” (173). Joyce equates English and Catholic Church of their tyrannical influences. It appears that evidently each Joyce and Stephen in Portrait and Ulysses are aware of the destructive influence of those two forces: the imperialistic force and the tyranny of Catholicism. One has occupied the motherland, while the opposite has occupied the realm and freedom of soul, of the mental spirit; the mental spirit attributed to ancient Dublin and Ireland, as Joyce mentions in his Trieste lecture.
Actual Exile of Stephen Dedalus
I is not going to sleep here tonight, home.Also I cannot go. (U 29)
Stephen Dedalus’s physical exile and dislocation in Ulysses, isn’t recent for readers of Joyce and Portrait, where, Stephen from the very starting is an actual exile. As slightly boy, he is distributed to a different city to high school. That is his first experience of a tough time away from home, actually, his first experience of physical exile. He especially misses his mother. He cannot forget her red nose and eyes, once they were saying goodbye, for a very long time. He leaves home for the primary time to receive a very good education his father wishes for him. Nevertheless, his artistic desires and ambitions growing up inside, he struggles to remove the surface, physical obstacles, similar to, his biological family, his established religion, and nationality. His final selection to go and live in exile, somewhat than to live amid familiar, but restricting nets is the start of an adventurous flight toward an exilic life. His heart yearns for the “oceanic silence over the flowing waters” (P 135). In Ulysses, returning home from an experience of actual exile abroad, he feels more intensely that he isn’t home in anyway, anymore. Over again, he fancies “a voice, sweetened and sustained, called to him from the ocean … it called again” (U 29). Buck Mulligan Stephen’s Irish friend who resides with him at Martello tower and exploits Stephen and the English tourist, Haines, are aware of the indisputable fact that Stephen is not going to stay long in Ireland. Perhaps that’s the reason he misuses Stephen’s money and place. He tells Stephen that you simply don’t seem to remain long here. Besides, Stephen is not going to fight over what he has lost way back. Stephen Dedalus, back to Dublin and residential after a while of living away, not only feels his dislocation and alienation more deeply than before, but he has develop into more sensible as a prisoner of two masters. He says I feel like a “servant” of two masters: an English master in addition to an Italian one.
By these two masters, as his “color is rising” he means “the imperial British state” and “the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic church” (U 26). That is how he feels at his home. Haines believes that Stephen can free himself. He tells Stephen “in spite of everything, I should think you’re in a position to free yourself. You’re your individual master, it seems to me” (U 26). Mr. Deasy, the principal of the college Stephen is teaching at for a short while, also perceives the purpose that Stephen “is not going to remain in here very long at this work” (U 41). The mastery Haines and Mr. Deasy discuss indicates the indisputable fact that the people around Stephen also perceive his being dislocated and are aware of the indisputable fact that Stephen’s return into actual exile may be very probable. Subsequently, some friends and acquaintances around him, also feel that he’s a stranger at home, regardless of the indisputable fact that most of the individuals who know him, hail him as a successful literary young man inside and outside. A few of them also ask Stephen: “are you not joyful in your own home?” (U 262). That is the best way he feels at his hometown: “I don’t have any place to sleep . . . (U 537). Stephen’s strong sense of alienation and hatred from his home and his country, is perhaps applicable to his detest from the entire condition in Ireland. As he declares in Portrait, he believes that his ancestors gave in Ireland to a bunch of foreigners. He may be very sensitive to what has happened to their country by the technique of the English masters. Living in Ireland, Stephen’s soul feels more deeply the subjection to the 2 masters. For Stephen, as for Joyce himself, even the language they’re speaking in Ireland belongs to the English master, before it’s theirs.
In line with Howes, “Stephen’s estrangement from the language wherein he writes makes a classical colonial condition, wherein the colonizers attempt to force their language and culture upon the colonized” (257). Subsequently, it is feasible to conclude that Stephen’s rejection of all of the physical and actual idea of home, family, religion, and country might be in reality the rejection of the colonial and imperial force dominating his belongings. With a purpose to unchain himself from the foreigner force, he has to depart behind at first, the physical home, church, and country. Step one in achieving his goal is to impose an exilic life on himself. Going into actual and physical exile indicates, at a deeper level, his spiritual exile at home. In the next part Stephen’s symbolic exile, in addition to his mental exile as an artist can be studied.
Metaphoric and Spiritual Exile of Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus’s spiritual exile, alongside along with his actual exile, begins from Portrait and continues into Ulysses. Stephen from his early teenage years becomes disoriented and homeless amongst many alien traditions. In postcolonial studies, this sort of spiritual exile is common in colonial societies where, the dominating political force tries to dictate his cultural and artistic ideals on the colonized people’s society. Such condition derives artists and intellectuals into exile. They feel dislocated and disoriented amongst a well-known culture, which is being manipulated within the hands of others. Stephen’s artistic soul yearns for a free environment to breathe in. Nevertheless, from his early twenties in Portrait, when he’s justifying his final flight for his friend, Cranly, he’s aware of the indisputable fact that there isn’t anything as “free considering on this country.” Ireland isn’t a correct place to precise his artistic and intellectuals thoughts; he says, “I also am sure that there is no such thing as a such thing as free considering in as much as all considering should be certain by its own laws” (P 108). Stephen Dedalus’s metaphoric exile becomes more serious when one assumes his role as an mental in a colonized society; a society like Ireland with a really long history of subjection. In modern times, the concept of exile based on Edward Said is closely related to the notion of intellectuals.
Stephen Dedalus is referred to as one of the famous radical mental figures. In line with Said in Representations of the Mental, one in every of the intellectuals’ features is their nonconformity toward the socially accepted norms. After all, it doesn’t mean that they’re anarchists, but they’re reformists. Stephen’s nonconformity and unorthodoxy is revealed very easily through his thorough rejection of three of essentially the most crucial authoritative social sites of family, religion, and nationality. Stephen rejects to be the nice son of mother, because she wishes him to embellish himself with one of the threatening chains of slavery; a slavery of each body and soul, in Stephen’s view not less than. He rejects to enter the grey world of priesthood, for he believes in a self-created world of ingenious artist. Stephen, however, may be very skeptical of the advantages of any liberating movements to renovate the traditional Ireland. When his friends at school ask him to hitch the group and join for membership, he rejects. As Said within the introduction of Representations of the Mental indicates, an mental is someone who cannot “easily be co-opted by government or corporations”, and likewise an mental often questions “patriotic nationalism” and “corporate considering.” Stephen drops the Gaelic class as a consequence of this sort of beliefs and ignores his friend’s advice of “attempt to be one in every of us” (P 170). Nevertheless, for Stephen retaining his individuality and his individual independent mind is just too dear, even when he’s told at school that “you’re an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself” (P 103). He is known as an “antisocial” person, because he doesn’t join the nationalistic movements. Since he appreciates his own individuality higher than the rest, he is not going to join the gang. He declares, “you’re right to go your way. Leave me to go mine” (P 115).
The interesting point is that his rejection of the nationalistic movements might be at a deeper level the rejection of the colonial and imperial force exploiting his country and culture. He’s aware of the indisputable fact that so far as Irish people’s destiny is within the control of the British master, talking of liberating the motherland is vain; for one real reason: Ireland has proved to be disloyal toward her patriotic sons. She had given them away one after the other. Considered one of the examples has been Parnell, an impressive example in Stephen’s mind. Repeatedly, Stephen’s rejection of his country and religion are associated to one another in some ways. The Roman Catholic Church, the priest, and the Pope, in addition to the British imperial have occupied the Irish people’s lives; one has occupied the realm of the soul, and the latter the realm of motherland. Church has shown its hostility toward any nationalistic movements several times.
For Stephen and plenty of other intellectuals in Ireland, Catholic Church and the British master have the identical role in creating hard times for Irish race. Based on the grounds that every one these three traditional Irish values are considered “nets” for Stephen’s individual ambitions and desires, he should live a miserable life amongst all of the familiar, but restricting culture. He is taken into account an outcast and a marginal character at such a society. Although, he lives at his homeland, he experiences a spiritual exile. To develop into free from this metaphoric and spiritual exile, he should impose a physical exile on himself. He dares to depart behind all of the actual reasons of his symbolic exile. This mental young Stephen is what Said believes to be the novel and rebellious product of contemporary times, sort of individuals who query, to not say undermine, the authoritative sites. For Stephen, the young mental artist, language, the medium of his literary expression is an alien factor. Because, as mentioned before, this language belongs to the English master, before it’s his.
Nevertheless, he tries to master this implies of expression in his own literary world. As Howes in Cambridge Companion to Joyce mentions, “Critics have often suggested that Joyce’s linguistic virtuosity constitutes a project to re-colonize the English language, to take it away from the imperial masters” (257). That is what’s true of the exilic character of Stephen at school and when he returns from Paris to Dublin in Ulysses. Gibbons in an article included in Semicolonial Joyce mentions that Stephen in Portrait notices that “home” is one in every of the words, together with “ale” and “master”, that sound different on English and Irish lips, and we may “speculate that the latter two words, with their associations of alcohol and colonial domination, will not be unrelated to different resonances of “home” in Ireland (166). Stephen Dedalus, each in Portrait and Ulysses experiences a way of “half-involvements” and “half-detachments” along with his home and language. He finally decides to detach himself from Ireland and all its belongings. While before his mother’s death, he had some ties to return to Ireland, now that he doesn’t have such emotional ties anymore, he might resolve to fly into everlasting exile; the everlasting exile, which its physical and spiritual types are deeply connected to one another. The ultimate word on this part before going to the following part, wherein, Stephen’s artistic and mental exile can be studied, is Howes quotation from Semicolonial Joyce. Howes believes that Stephen’s exile is a posh one:
fighting competing ways of reworking the
local affiliations he has lost into membership in a
national community. This process depends upon two
major aspects. First, Stephen’s geographical movement,
other displacements, and the homesickness they produce
, and second, fantasized but threatening construction of
rural Ireland. (Howes 70)
Mental Exile of the Young Artist
Young Stephen Dedalus’s pays an expensive price to satisfy his artistic desires. Joyce traces the strategy of his character’s growth in becoming an artist. As mentioned before, Stephen rejects the authority of all the standard Irish nets, because they betray his artistic growth. Subsequently, he takes refuge within the realm of art, because in such situation, based on Deane, in Cambridge Companion to Joyce, “only art is beyond betrayal. It’s the only activity to which Stephen gives his fidelity since it is a type of production wherein his own authorship is secure. The issue is, in fact, that Stephen is all the time about to develop into an artist” (43). Stephen’s early conflict in Portrait to his struggles in Ulysses is to liberate his lonely soul amongst the various threatening traditions for his artistic process. His strategy to reach his decision is to make a pair of artistic wings; the artistic wings which could assure his escape and a triumphant flight. The purpose here is that Stephen doesn’t imagine within the old Ireland’s art to be liberating. He doesn’t imagine in local art in any respect. He, like his creator Joyce and at times his counterpart, believes within the international somewhat than traditional art. Stephen becomes more alienated, when he rejects, for instance, to undergo Gaelic language class, or to stay hard to Irish ideals of art or nationality. His logical perception of the Irish art is removed from a biased view. He believes that Irish art is the “cracked looking glass of a servant” (U 46).In line with Leonard, Stephen by this definition of Irish art perhaps is “hinting on the danger of staring back into an idealized past with a purpose to obscure the pain of an oppressed present and an apparently intractable future” (100).
The true artist, here, doesn’t try to evolve to social norms to make progress in his strategy of becoming an artist at home. Stephen rejects to evolve to the Irish political history in addition to its literary history. His alienation from each, the political in addition to literary history of his motherland, makes him a lonelier exilic figure at home. As mentioned and emphasized within the previous paragraphs, in Said’s opinion in Representations of the Mental, an mental figure confronts “orthodoxy and dogma” and tries to “break down the stereotypes and reductive categories.” He also believes that an mental like Joyce’s young, radical Stephen Dedalus isn’t “suitable and fit for domestication” (16), since the mental “is not going to adjust to domesticity or to humdrum of routine” (17). Said emphasizes again on the indisputable fact that Stephen’s entire early “profession” is a “seesaw” between rejection and acceptance of the three nets. Then again in Said’s view Stephen should “develop a resistant mental consciousness before he becomes an artist,” that’s because he’s a “young provincial and the product of a colonial environment” (16-17). Stephen Dedalus is entirely aware of the colonially occupied Ireland’s dead environment. He soon realizes that he is not going to find a way to develop his artistic and mental self, except by passing through “the boundaries of mythic individualism, which constrained equally his sense of artistic self and his use of expressive language” (Sherry 91). Only in this fashion, he could fully realize an emotional, artistic and mental life. To realize this purpose, he had to depart behind any restricting object and concept and to live in a volunteer exile. He is certain that conforming to any ideological institutes, similar to, Student’s National Movement at school would just undermine and reduce his individuality.
Thus, based on Said one other mental sign, which Stephen represents, is the indisputable fact that he questions and rejects “patriotic nationalism, corporate considering.” Stephen in Ulysses again shouts his nonconformity and declares that “Ah non, par example! The mental imagination! With me all or under no circumstances, Non Serviam” (517). Stephen by declaring “all or under no circumstances” might take note of the chaotic situation of Ireland on the entire; Its political, religious, social, economic, artistic, and mental situation of Ireland. Joyce in his Trieste lecture of 1907 criticizes all of the brutal British exploitations on Ireland, he particularly emphasizes on economic and mental damage attributable to imperial force. For Stephen the imperial forces, British and Catholic, exploit the artistic and mental aspects in Ireland as well. The dominating shadow of, for instance, Catholic Church on the connection between the relations in Stephen’s case, a son and a mother; or the dark shadow of the British force on the political situation of the motherland derives an mental mind like Stephen’s to prefer “all or under no circumstances.” By rejecting this “all”, Stephen is set to keep up his individuality. He seems to pay attention to the colonization of not only the land, but of the minds. In Ulysses, he declares, “struggle for all times is the law of existence but modern philatelist, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (he taps his brow), But in here it’s I have to kill the priest and the king” (521).Subsequently, Stephen believes in the concept considering as a person may be the redeeming think about his life. Stephen’s mental exile becomes intensified when he struggles to make his way through an inventive profession of self-creation. When his desire to create an ideal world isn’t fulfilled in the true occupied colonial Ireland, consequently, he quests for freedom and individuality in a world of art; an art world based on his own literary theory, wherein disloyalty doesn’t have any synonyms, but antonyms. The repressing, each physical and spiritual, domestic condition, the colonized literary and artistic culture, in addition to, the potential of falling from the “mental prominence with an allusion to the sounds of Daedalus’s counterpart, Milton’s Lucifer, on the ground of hell” (Sherry82) , makes Stephen to decide on a lifetime of “silence, exile, and cunning” (P 247). This selection to live in an inventive and mental exile is subsequently, for Stephen a heeling force. That is perhaps due to indisputable fact that based on Said living in exile creates a pointy vision for the mental artist, a sort of multi-dimensional view of things. The exiles see and see, not less than, two points of things; what it’s now and the way it got here to be like this. This might be one in every of Stephen’s purposes to live in exile, to present force to his artistic vision.
Moreover, Stephen’s view of this breaking away and exile is ambitious to some extent. At the top of Portrait dreaming of a utopia, he wishes to fly by so high, by the technique of his artistic wings, so that he can “forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Finally, Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses declares, “there may be no reconciliation . . . , if there has not been a sundering” (195). He is perhaps in the hunt for a sort of “reconciliation” in his artistic and mental exile, flying away, returning, and again …. Flying back or not?!? Restricting nets of family, nationality, and religion ultimately leads Stephen Dedalus to depart his motherland and live an exilic life. His physical exile starts at his early stages of life. Stephen’s alienating himself from the physical idea of home, country, and church denotes a deeper sort of exile, that’s his spiritual exile. Stephen’s rejection of authoritative status and never confirming to any preconceived norms, and his rebellious characteristics ,which makes him not classifiable, makes Stephen a very good example of an mental figure, fed up with the miserable condition of life in his motherland, living a painful exilic life either away from home, or at home.
Works Cited
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