Post-Colonial Power Structures: Colonization as Depicted Within James Joyce's Dubliners

The actions and beliefs of Farrington in James Joyce's Counterparts can be examined and understood through the theories of Stuart Hall, wherein a subject of colonial rule will appropriate the imposed power structure inherent in a colonizer/colonized dynamic (such as Dublin under British rule). It is important to note, however, Farrington lives in a post-colonial environment. In this way, after a colonizing body leaves, the learned desire for power remains, resulting in an even more indelible and destructive internal colonization. Farrington demonstrates how this internalized self-hatred and desire for power (understood as residual fallout from the discourse of his particular socio-political context) perpetuates and manifests in other physical space-specifically the office, the public house, and the home. This perpetuation proves so dangerous, because Farrington's manipulation of the inherited power hierarchy only serves to reinforce that very system, creating a potentially unbreakable cycle.

The first physical space we are introduced to Farrington is his place of business. The initial adjectives to describe him are "tall and of great bulk" (Joyce 86). Joyce describes him further as a man with "a hanging face...Counterparts can stand as an example, the natural reaction is not to revolt against the power hierarchy. It is to absorb its nuances and reflect it in other situations. Hall echoes this sentiment when he says a colonizing force "had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as 'Other'" (192). In other words, the negative representations of a culture do not indoctrinate and infiltrate only the colonizing body. The colonized learn these imposed traits as well, planting the seeds for later struggle between what they have heard (inferiority to the colonizer) and what they intrinsically feel to be true (equality with the colonizer).

Farrington's insistent desire to go to the public houses illustrates this point exactly. The bar is a place of camaraderie among men, but it cannot be said it is a place devoid of a power hierarchy. Rather, it is a place where the power hierarchy is simply built upon different terms. The man with the best story to tell wins the seat of honor, and this position can change from day to day (Joyce 93). There is fluidity in this structure, while the office feels a rigidly established and unchangeable system. Farrington desires this space not because he finds egalitarian relief from the very concept of power, but because he has the potential for upward mobility. In this way, the physical space has changed, but Farrington cannot leave the learned power dichotomy behind. Yet Farrington fails to find power even in the bars. While physical strength meant nothing to the power structure of the office, in the bars, strength could mean everything. When called upon to partake in arm wrestling, his friends implored Farrington to "uphold the national honour" (Joyce 95). This sentiment equates Irish honor not with intelligence or emotion but with brute strength. Farrington's friends seem to echo the colonizing sentiment that grueling manual labor is all the indigenous Irish can hope to accomplish. Their speech reveals just how prevalent and stubbornly rooted such learned thoughts can prove to be. Farrington, however, loses this battle of strength and finds himself humiliated (Joyce 96). Even in a system where he has an opportunity for advancement, he leaves frustrated and paralyzed anew.

The last physical space Farrington enters is the home. It is important to note there is an implied power structure always at play within the home-the parents are above the children. Therefore, it is here Farrington is guaranteed standing. Yet "he loathed returning to his home" (Joyce 97). If power is what he desired, why would he loathe the one place it was practically guaranteed to him? The answer appears to lie within Farrington's relationship with his wife. When he comes home, there is no dinner, a dying fire, and she is away at chapel (Joyce 97). The home is often understood as a haven, yet Farrington returns to an empty place where a religious divide is palpable. The power he has over the home is compromised, because the interference of religion precludes it from being complete. Desperate to assert his power and utterly unable to do so in any other physical space, Farrington savagely beats his small son. Just as Alleyne is tyrannical in his power, so too is Farrington. In this way, Farrington's job as a reproducer of documents should not be taken lightly. We see Farrington as a copy of Alleyne-the colonized as a copy of the colonizer. He internalizes and then reproduces at every step the vicious abuse of power he witnesses.

Without consciously intending to, Farrington has both furthered and reinforced this destructively perpetuating system. After all, Farrington's abuse only produces a son just as powerless as he feels everyday in the office. Examining Hall and Joyce's examples, there is no evidence that Farrington's son will have any more luck breaking out of this system. In witnessing an abuse of power, the son has learned exactly what Farrington learned from Alleyne, and what Alleyne learned from his colonizer, and so on. It is therefore altogether likely the son will similarly absorb and manifest his quest for power just like his father before him. Hall proclaims "this inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms" (192). We can see clearly through Farrington a man crippled by his conception of self and culture. And what he illustrates most clearly is that unconscious aspect that makes inner expropriation so debilitating. Farrington does not set out to reproduce these viciously cyclic systems. He simply acts with the learned tools available to him, and in doing so helps to create the self-perpetuating abuse of power.

One of the most crucial aspects of Counterparts is understanding that Joyce is depicting a post-colonial Dublin. The overt colonizers have left, and yet the systems are still firmly in place. In an office, those institutions cannot be left behind. In a public domain such as the tavern where many "colonized" men gather, those institutions cannot be left behind. Even among family the institutions stubbornly remain. And the reader sees through Farrington that the repercussions are often humiliating, debasing and horrific. But one's surrounding discourse is not something often questioned. The sentiments are internalized and overlooked as even a subject of inquiry. They become the commonplaces people operate under and the modes of thinking people operate with. For this very reason, it becomes understandable just how ingrained learned powerlessness is and how difficult it is to escape.

Works Cited

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." English 202: Introduction to the Study of English Language and Literature Autumn Quarter: 2006. Ed. Leroy Searle. University of Washington: 2006. 190-198.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. United States of America: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1996