The Democratic Predicament: Cultural Diversity in Europe and India by Jyotirmaya Tripathy & Sudarsan Padmanabhan

Author:Jyotirmaya Tripathy & Sudarsan Padmanabhan [Tripathy, Jyotirmaya & Padmanabhan, Sudarsan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9780415811897
Google: 6YF_MAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 16193610
Publisher: Routledge Chapman & Hall
Published: 2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

James Joyce and Rabindranath Tagore

When a signature petition in support of world peace, disarmament, and a host of other worthy internationalist causes begins to circulate in his college, Stephen Dedalus — the protagonist of James Joyce’s bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — is not impressed. At first, the lofty goals of the campaign elicit his weary disinterest, but he is also angered by the absurdity of their being urged on the world by one of its absolutist monarchs — Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Less aware of these international political dynamics, Dedalus’s friend Davin — described as a simple-minded peasant boy, steeped in the myths of Ireland and widely thought of in the college as a ‘young fenian’ — has signed the petition. When a bemused and scornful Dedalus asks him whether this means that he has turned his back on Irish nationalism, Davin is perplexed. Confounded by Dedalus’s refusal to support pacific internationalism and his insistent mockery of Irish nationalism, it seems to Davin as if Dedalus cannot give his allegiance to anything or anyone. ‘I can’t understand you’, he bursts out. ‘One time I hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk against the Irish informers. What with your name and your ideas… Are you Irish at all?’27 Davin’s repeated entreaties to Dedalus to ‘be one of us’, provokes the latter to a bitter denunciation of Irish nationalism, citing its betrayal of its most loyal sons and its suppression of individual freedom. For Daedalus, ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow’.28

Yet, contrary to the conventional reading of Daedalus as wanting to leap out of a stultifying provincialism into a liberating post-national identity, Marjorie Howes has drawn attention to the extent to which he continues to inhabit the very intellectual structures that he disavows. Even as he rejects the prevailing forms of cultural nationalism, vowing to ‘fly by’ the ‘nets’ of nationality, language and religion (in an allusion to the classical tale of Daedalus and Icarus), he continues to think of the ‘nation’ in precisely the terms those forms offer him.29 In a reading influenced by David Lloyd’s account of the centrality of the autobiographical form to nationalist discourse, Emer Nolan argues that although Daedalus is devoted to the elaboration of a narrative that is diametrically opposed to the aspirations of contemporary cultural nationalism, ‘none the less the aestheticist self-creation offered by Daedalus offers a structural homology to the artistic mission to which it is ostensibly opposed. In his resolutely individualistic self-fashioning, Daedalus ironically re-enacts the self-making and self-discovery of the nationalist cultural project’.30 Indeed, the novel closes with his determination to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’31 — an enterprise that many nationalists would be happy to claim as their own.

Daedalus’s ironic nationalism parallels Joyce’s relationship to the Irish Literary Revival, of which he was a critical member — both in the sense of being important and dissenting.32 While critical of the exclusivist

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