POLITICS AND TRANSCULTURE ON LANGUAGE - THE IRISH SETTING

In the final entry (dated 26 April) of what appear to be diary entries in the waning pages of James' Joyce spectacular book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus says:

"Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. 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."

A Portrait of the Artist is more than a coming of age book; it is not a young man's struggle to find his identity but rather a struggle to pursue that identity unrealized in the midst of home, country, religion, and language. Stephen Dedalus was actually James Joyce in disguise, and in his declaration to go away from home to forge the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, Joyce was not simply (if simple!) referring to the physicality of his destination but further so, to its cosmic ruminations by fulfilling the ventriloquial version of his own voice translated into his own form of writing, his own form of language, and his own form of art - away from the "uncreated conscience of his race", the Irish.

What was so bad about the Irish that Joyce, through Dedalus, wanted so much to disentangle from its cultural and linguistic clout? Nothing, just big time historical. Gaelic, not English, is the original language in Ireland, but when Great Britain conquered Ireland, one of the biggest imperialist impositions occurred in history. Gaelic - the first European tongue after Latin to develop its own literature - was practically wiped out towards the end of the 18th century by the British ruling that English be the official language in Ireland, and this was further upheld by the British control of Irish schools in the 19th century.

It was through this imposition, added by the imposition from the religious side (Catholicism from Rome) that made Joyce believe the Irish oppression as not just created by the British and by the Vatican but, more harrowingly, by the Irish upon themselves through their cooperation with the oppressed.

A Portrait of the Artist, then, is Joyce's attempt to break away from family, race, and country - through this words:

"I shall express myself as I am."

The big irony is that A Portrait is written in English, and considered 3rd greatest in Modern Library's selection of the 20th century's 100 greatest novels in English (Ulysses, also by Joyce, happens to be number 1).

W.B. Yeats, GB Shaw, S. Beckett, and S. Heaney - all Irish who wrote in English - have won the Nobel.

The great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes once said that the world does not need another writer in English - as long as there is an Irish.

What would have happened then if the Irish, through today, spoke only in Gaelic? Will Ireland produce a Nobel winner in Literature? Would the world have heard of James Joyce? What kind of identity will a young man, as himself, struggle to achieve? What kind of portrait will he portray?

As for the rest of us who read them, where will we be?