Wrestling with languages - a Portrait

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce

- I can't understand you, said Davin. 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?- p205
......
A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness.
- This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.- p205
......
- My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. 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? - p205

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. -p193

I don't share Stephen's highly emotional disdain against Irish or English; however, I do connect with him through my own confusion about native and learned languages. Of all things, language is what connects us with cultures and cultural heritage. That one would prefer something other than his "own" says far more than what's contained in words. He is inevitably individualistic, an outsider and a loner. Whether he finds peace or disturbance, as a consequence, has more to do with his own sensitivity towards the irony and randomness of life, his own sense of self-identify, and, the cultural and societal pressures he happens to be subjected to.

When I first realized that I could not write Chinese as well as English, it came less a surprise than a disappointment. It was not a surprise, because, at that time, I hadn't read or written much Chinese for more than 14 years and it was a disappointment because it set a definitive low limit to what I wish to accomplish. Of course, the assumption - likely the truth - is that one can only do this much with a foreign language. On the other hand, this little English I know I do enjoy enormously, the fun of the language per se, the literature, the science, and the communication with the like-minded... To some degree, it has defined me: for whatever I treasure most in life, incidentally, I've found much more in this foreign language. The large picture is sad but at the personal level, I shall be grateful and satisfied - the universe of an outsider is certainly distinct from the insiders but is it necessarily smaller?

For Stephen, the emotion seemed much more intense, probably because being a writer, or an artist, he needed more justification and acceptance from others, who happened to be his country men, whom he had to love and whose language he would rather abandon, and the English people, whom he should have hated more and whose language he truly mastered (and not to mention the incredibly intense hatred between the two cultures). So Stephen was engaged in a struggle of truth and denial. Part of his anguish was perhaps having to have this wrestling at all.

To speak or not to speak, hmm, it's a rather big question.