Stephen’s French

Abstract This essay studies Stephen’s explorations in Ulysses into the sounds, meanings, and performances of French words uttered and exchanged during his sojourn in Paris and rekindled in his mind as he walks in Dublin. Alongside a reading of the early drafts of the “Proteus” chapter, showing Joyce’s ideas and hesitations as he elaborated Stephen’s thoughts on the French language, this essay examines the complexity of Joyce’s agon with the Irish Revival around the problem of translation. Translation seemed an inescapable part of Irish experience. But where Yeats wrote of translation, Joyce’s text leans toward traducement. Yeats had written about reviving Ireland’s dying heritage by translating the Gaelic past into the English present. Joyce’s text, however, seems to warn against subjugation to a ghostly Gaelic past that could dictate and stunt the Irishman’s existence in the English language, traducing rather than translating him, into a servile puppet. This essay examines Joyce’s particular use of French to tackle this crisis of (translated) identity and to escape the translated Irishman’s debt to a spectral authority, by creating displacement, destabilization, and enrichment through the participation of foreign words in his text; by making French, as opposed to Gaelic, a constitutive aspect of Stephen, who mimics the sounds of French words and phrases, explores their grammar and tenses, and makes them part of his experience and physicality, questioning their effects on his identity, position in space and time, and linguistic constitution.