제4의 조국을 향한 예술가의 도정- 제임스 조이스의 탈식민화 양상

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to review colonial literati’s pattern of decolonization based on Irish writer James Joyce and his novels. For this purpose, the present researcher first made geographical, national, historical and emotional approaches to how Ireland located in the edge of Europe was portrayed and how the liminality was transcended, and then illuminated writer James Joyce’s identity as an artist in the peculiar situation of colonialism and his characteristic way paved by novels. Ireland has tragic history under the rule of neighboring Britain for nearly 800 years in the past, and it has lost its national language Gaelic for around 200 years since the 18th century. In the painful historic realities, however, Ireland is ironically known as a treasure house of world literature in the 20th century. This fact is supported by Nobel Prize of Literature winners George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett as well as James Joyce who pioneered an unprecedented area in the 20th century’s history of novels through Ulysses. Their works were distributed as world literature because they were written in English or a third language rather than in the Goidelic language, and for this reason, they have long met readers throughout the world not as Irish literature but as English literature. They represent the irony of the complicated and subtle fate of the writers whose were born native Irish or British Irish and thus whose identities were classified into pure Irish, Irish British, and British Irish. James Joyce, who criticized Dubliners’ life and consciousness so sharply through his novels that the books were forbidden to be published in Dublin, invokes only Ireland and Irish people (may be reduced to Dublin and Dubliners) in his novels, which were his 4th Fatherland (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses). In case of James Joyce who left his homeland and novelized only Ireland and Irish, his novels can be regarded as the sublimation of ‘Irishism’ transcending the colonial homeland. As the language for his writing, James Joyce chose English, the language of the British Empire, rather than his native language Goidelic. Although he wrote as a colonial writer and in colonial language English, he used English as a weapon to attack English literature, and restored his homeland Ireland in literature through overcoming the boundary of English literature. At the same time, he rewrote the world history of literature. The present study examined the national and literary rites of passage that Ireland, which was the poorest country in Europe and was despised as ‘White Black,’ had to go through until it cast off the yoke of long colonial rule by the English Dynasties and then the British Empire and stood alone as an independent strong country, and illuminated James Joyce’s novels, which transcended native Irish literature and rose high in the world history of literature in the bilingual environment, a bridle on colonial literati, from the viewpoint of the pattern of decolonization.