Language as an instrument of ‘transgression’
Language is the third “net” from which Stephen must free himself for growing as person and artist, emerging thus with a highly relevance. It affects to the Stephen’s perception of the world and, simultaneously, the Stephen´s worldview, in particular as he regards his view about Nationalism and Religion, he also determines his relation with the language.
In his conversation with Dean about the use of the term Tundish (unknown by Dean), Stephen reflects the discouragement that causes on him the use of a language that is foreign to him (or at least more distant to what it is for the British): “He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought: — The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (205).
But at the same time it also rejects the use that is made of the Irish language (Gaelic) for, through it, recover the old myths of an ancestral Ireland “His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped the rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth” (195).
Stephen considers that the submission to the British and to the English language was caused by a series of betrayals of his forefathers of which he is not responsible and therefore he doesn’t have to pay: “My ancestors threw off their language and took another […]. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?” (220).
But although he does not feel guilty, Stephen believes that freedom will not come by using its own Irish language, but it can be achieved by altering English language, that is, using art for transgressing the present status quo. For this purpose he assumes the challenge of using English for articulating an Irish experience that permits to build a new language being able to overcome the network that constitutes inherited corrupt language.
Stephen will try to transform the English language through art ,and that will change the identity that the British have imposed upon him; he is willing to be a creator, in this way his story of growing up and flying out of the existent language system becomes the story of his wrestling against the colonizer.
This new language would justify the transformation of usual syntax or grammar and the incorporation of Irish words that can create confusion as the “tundish” and the “funnel” cited above, and, as an artistic device of ‘transgression’, that would permit to reconcile Stephen with his country. In this way, language would play a key role in representing both social and artistic reality.
