James Joyce and the Politics of Desire

Suzette A. Henke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138184084
• eBook ISBN: 9781317291930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This title, first published in 1990, offers a feminist and psychoanalytic reassessment of the Joycean canon in the wake of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva. The author centres her discussion of Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Finnegans Wake, and Exiles around questions of desire and language and the politics of sexual difference.

Suzette Henke's radical "re-vision" of Joyce's work is a striking example of the crucial role feminist theory can play in contemporary evaluation of canonical texts. As such it will be welcomed by feminists and students of literature alike.

1
THROUGH A CRACKED LOOKING-GLASS

Desire and Frustration in Dubliners

Virgin veers into Virago. … No body, no belly, no breasts, just tongue.

(Hélène Cixous, “Sorties”)

At the time he was composing Dubliners, Joyce was fond of envisaging himself as an Irish Zola (Letters II, 137) and, in a 1904 letter to Constantine Curran, declared that his short-story collection would “betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Letters I, 55). It would hold up to his fellow citizens a “nicely polished looking-glass” of moral opprobrium and offer a caustic, multi-dimensional mimesis of Irish decadence.¹ If one reads Joyce’s indictment of Dublin’s “hemiplegia” from a psychoanalytic perspective, then Irish paralysis might be diagnosed as a Freudian symptom of psychic hysteria – the neurotic displacement of aggression, anger, or frustrated libidinal desire played, replayed, and played out in the text of Dubliners through a pervasive leitmotif of collective repression and social decenteredness. In Joyce’s city at the turn of the century, men and women are continually pitted against one another in patterns of anxiety and hostility, with each sex perversely demanding mythic satisfactions of imaginary presence and psychic integration that the other cannot possibly provide.²

Women and children have been relegated to the margins of discourse in a culture that is male-centered and woman-avoidant. Barred from communal iteration, they cannot articulate desire, communicate feeling, or valorize emotional need. Males, in turn, adopt a speech that strips language of affect and represses erotic expression, until masculine sexuality erupts as a manifestation of phallic urgency – an instinctual yielding to dark, secret, and inarticulate drives. Eros is enacted on a stage of overt danger and covert pleasure, so that the model for heterosexual coupling becomes one of antagonism and conquest – a battle for power won by such gay lotharios as Corley and Gallagher and lost by confused, unimaginative spirits like Little Chandler and Bob Doran. In relationships between the sexes, the central specter is always envisaged in terms of male desire blocked by the perversities of an arbitrary and tyrannical female will.

Joyce incorporates into the text of Dubliners an anatomy of male hysteria over the paralytic fear of being feminized – a terror of Mother Church and Mother Ireland that gives rise to the psychological need for coldness, detachment, and logocentric control. Unconsciously emulating their English masters, the Irish assert a specious manhood through blustering claims to patriarchal privilege, making infantile demands that frustrate and feminize those already demeaned by colonial subjugation. The citizens of Dublin are tormented by insatiable desires endlessly replayed on the body of Mother Ireland – a body defiled, raped, and adulterated by British authority. The body of the mother has been usurped by English impostors, but the Irish refuse to enact a national Oedipal rebellion. Kathleen ni Houlihan has been reconstituted in fantasy as an infinitely desirable female, an imaginary presence and center of psychic integration whose possession is always-already deferred by the intervention of paternal antagonism.

Abject, and cast off from the maternal body, Irish males search for symbols of replacement everywhere in their environment. Mimicking the father, they make themselves into concretized fetishes and identify with the child-phallus that could, in fantasy, satisfy and fully possess the alienated maternal figure. Ireland becomes a text replicating the repressed Gaelic unconscious, and the citizens articulate the letter of the unconscious by inscribing themselves in language as the “child-phallus who wishes to penetrate his mother’s body. … Exhausted in its course, desire ultimately becomes its own object.”³

CHILDHOOD AND INITIATION

The beginning of Dubliners is oddly sterile and womanless. Joyce depicts a desiccated Garden of Eden inhabited by a fallen race whose imaginary maternal center has been erased, lost to memory, and eradicated from the mind of the child-narrator who appears in the text as a self-generating character. Maternal separation is the background of his emerging consciousness, the wound or scar of abjection that unmans him even before he has developed a sense of mature individuation. The perpetual gap in the narrative is the unnamed loss of a mother never mentioned – a symbolic absence at the heart of a barren world. It is indicated only in the interstices of the text and evoked, perhaps, by the child’s comforting recollection of the familial warmth of Christmas, a pre-Oedipal fantasy that gives refuge from the “vicious region” of paternal nightmare.

Joyce’s inaugural story, “The Sisters,” is dominated by the shadow of a phallic lawgiver whose physical deterioration and mental paralysis were abruptly terminated by a fatal stroke. The boy in the tale has apparently been captivated by the name of the Father, so that his impressionable mind resembles an Aristotelian tabula rasa inscribed by an impotent pedagogue. Barred from self-defining utterance, the child writhes in a world of silence and isolation: he does not speak, but ponders with curiosity the contradictory grown-up voices that appropriate the powers of language. Baffled and mute, the enraged boy tries to sublimate passion in futile, animal gestures: “I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger” (D 11). Incapable of naming the father who has died and betrayed him, he reverts to a semiotic system of bodily maneuvers while pondering the ellipses of adult discourse that obscure the identity of a failed Father-God.⁴ “I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his [Cotter’s] unfinished sentences” (D 11), the boy tells us.

Apparently orphaned (or, like Nora Barnacle, sent out to fosterage with relatives), the child, in search of a paternal surrogate, submits to rigorous training in the kind of logocentric discourse that eventually destroys his tutor, Father Flynn. Yet it is the boy who functions as confessor to the drooling prelate in a dream that identifies the priest as a virtual “simoniac” guilty of foisting outmoded ecclesiastical offices onto his vulnerable charge. Although the pedagogue can mimic the most august of Catholic theologians, he has evidently lost faith in the Jansenist dogma he preaches. His stance is hypocritical, his tutelage a game. He becomes hebephrenic and hysterical when the womb/chalice of Mother Church cracks and is rent asunder by his own megalomanic and specular gaze. With his faith in sacramental authority shattered, Father Flynn can no longer atone for the religious doubts that finally drive him mad. His desire for faith and spiritual jouissance flows back upon itself in frustrated torrents that flood the soul with guilt and deny satisfaction to an unquenchable passion for hermetic power.

As in traditional myth, the impotent patriarch must be killed in order that the young – and the simple – may survive. Joyce calls attention to Father Flynn’s sisters in the title of the story, despite their seemingly peripheral role in the narrative. Nannie and Eliza are ignorant and ill-educated, naïve, and somewhat fatuous. They employ malapropisms, talk about “rheumatic wheels” and the Freeman’s General, and superstitiously proclaim that James’s “life was, you might say, crossed” (D 17). Although barred from the dominant discourse, they express gentle sympathy for a brother whom they tried to protect from the assaults of a perilous world. “We wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it” (D 16), they proclaim. In the first version of “The Sisters,” Joyce is more explicit about the priest’s phallocratic arrogance: “He had an egoistic contempt for all women-folk and suffered all their services to him in polite silence” (D 247). It is the sisters, however, who provide an incisive, epigrammatic diagnosis of James’s malady: “He was too scrupulous always” (D 17). Oblivious of the Draconian complexities that tormented their brother, Nannie and Eliza minister to his needs without succumbing to dementia. They respond to the priest’s truculence with beef-tea and conversation; and they survive, like Anna Livia in Finnegans Wake, to serve a communion of sherry and crackers at his wake.

When females in the story attempt to speak, their words are usually reduced to vacuous gibberish. Unable to master patriarchal discourse, they function as servants to the cultural imperatives that circumscribe their lives. Feminine utterances belong to the little language of social banter and polite conversation – a parole that tends to be euphemistic and evasive. Poor deaf Nannie has been “wore out” from catering to the exigencies of her brother’s illness and, like a classical fate or a figure out of Dante, mutely points upwards and beckons to the terrified child. Her mutterings and elocutionary failures veil the reality of death and distract the boy from direct confrontation with the spectral body laid out before him. As he expresses silent contempt for the shabby old woman who summons him to ritual mourning, the child-narrator, mirroring his mentor, already exhibits a dangerous penchant toward intellectual arrogance and self-conscious scrupulosity.

It is significant that the boy’s aunt cannot bring herself to utter the word “die” and cloaks the event in dramatic mystery: “Did he … peacefully?” she asks. Death is obscured by euphemistic language until the horror has been sanitized and fades into a static verbal icon. The vocabulary of prettiness and tidiness reduces the priest to an aesthetic object, a decorous and decorative artifact – little more than a “beautiful corpse” (D 15). St Thomas Aquinas’s definition of beauty as “that which, when seen, pleases,” illumines the sisters’ repressed emotional relief at their brother’s recent demise. Freed from the intrusions of imperious male authority, the survivors celebrate a wake that releases them from deepseated hostility and allows them to admire the priest as a safely crystallized visual spectacle in a non-threatening, photographic tableau. The dead – essentialized, objectified, and mentally displaced – become the malleable property of the living who mold the memory of the deceased in the image of their own projected fantasies.

If Nannie and Eliza are contemporary versions of the New Testament figures Martha and Mary, their brother is portrayed as a parodic Lazarus with little potential for resurrection. The moribund Father Flynn could hardly be aroused from sedentary torpor and, in the last years of his life, seemed only to respond to the stimulus of High Toast snuff. Death comes as a climax to protracted paralysis – a condition that might, ironically, have been symptomatic of tertiary syphilis.⁵ At the end of the story, Father Flynn’s body is exhibited as a stiff phallic rod, a visible sign of masculine authority mentally ossified long before rigor mortis sets in. “There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur” (D 14). The savage and threatening nostrils, surrounded by tufts of animal hair, possibly suggest an unconscious screen-image of the threat of genital invagination.

The verbal puzzles initially announced in “The Sisters” by the words “gnomon,” “simony,” and “paralysis” are eventually revealed not as riddles, but as indeterminate symbols that haunt the textual unconscious of the narrative. The priest’s potential siglum proves to be the incomplete angular or phallic formation of a parallelogram stripped of a diminutive, filial corner. “Without a doubt,” says Cotter in the original version, the “upper storey … was gone” (D 244). Similarly, the story (or storey) is rife with examples of both physical and spiritual paralysis, as well as simoniacal practices that barter ecclesiastical offices purchased at too high a price.⁶

Two genuine riddles or aporias in the tale – the mystery of Persia and the mysterious chalice – both evoke repressed symbols of ritual wholeness and imaginary plenitude. In response to Cotter’s “unfinished sentences,” the boy recollects a dream set in the sensual ambiance of “long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange – in Persia, I thought” (D 13–14). The reference to Persia alludes to an Oriental Other, an exotic vista projected by the fragmented male consciousness and fantasmatically associated with harems, licentiousness, and voluptuous female flesh. The Catholic priest’s western asceticism is challenged by the boy’s unconscious through inverted images of tantalizing desire. The “grey paralytic” is imaginatively represented as a greedy simoniac eager to exchange ecclesiastical knowledge for a disciple’s unwitting troth. The death of this stern father-figure, who lives by the letter of the law, exchanges règles for jeux in the boy’s psychic economy through a movement of carnivalesque pleasure. The child becomes the priest’s confessor, and traditional authority is up-ended in magical, exotic charade. When the word-master dies, the narrator acknowledges a sudden surge of psychosomatic release: “I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death” (D 12). The boy’s unconscious knows what his waking mind cannot admit: that this “great friend” was guilty of sins of pederastic desire deflected into a demand for psychic appropriation. The older man’s “great wish” for the child was a powerful projection of his own need for psychological mastery – a desire to gain control of the boy under the aegis of pedagogical insemination and to mold this docile disciple into a spiritual replica of himself. It is not surprising, then, that the protagonist confronts his erstwhile guru in a land whose voluptuous topography subverts the older man’s pretensions toward asceticism and logocentric control. His indeterminate fantasy lacks both closure and accessible intellectual meaning. “I could not remember the end of the dream,” the narrator confesses (D 14).

According to the symbol-system of the Oriental Tarot, the chalice or cup designates a female fertility principle – the womb/body/invaginated mother worshiped as pre-Christian goddess. Catholic ritual appropriates the sacred cup for purposes of symbolic couvade in the Mass – a ritual that re-enacts Christ’s “last supper” and his nurturance of the twelve apostles with the bread/host of his own sacrificial body. By virtue of ecclesiastical authority, Father Flynn could mimic the creative function of the mother by pronouncing words that evoke the living presence of Christ in “body and blood, soul and divinity.” The law and authority of the father supplants the pre-symbolic, uterine magic of the fertilized mother. The body of Christ becomes a maternal, nurturant host, and the words of the priestly father summon the sacramental rebirth of a divine, incarnate Son. The metaphorical rite, however, is suspended over the void by perpetual acts of faith. If belief in the ritual should fail and the body of the surrogate womb/chalice crack, then the priest will be stripped of his theological center and “castrated” of the rights/rites of phallic mastery. The demented prelate is powerless to recuperate an integrated image of himself without faith in the specular projections of a mirroring maternal chalice. In compensation for the loss of mystical contact with an imaginary and valorizing maternal field, he turns to a young disciple in search of an/Other to replicate his schizophrenically split subjectivity.⁷

The priest attempts to seduce the young boy through Lacanian movements of mesmerizing speech. He consigns a fragmented self-image to the care of the other, whose admiring gaze, reflected back in the eyes and consciousness of the subject (je), will offer an ideologically unified, if illusory vision of the self (moi). It is only through the regard of the other (the look, gaze, or mirror of approval) that the fragmented subject is able to construct a fictive self-image – an image which, for all its apparent integrity, is a myth contingent on deliberate misprision. The child performs for the priest a function that the chalice of Mother Church could not. He provides a Lacanian mirror for the debilitated prelate and, by doggedly re-enacting the priest’s ecclesiastical obsessions, sutures an implied wound of psychic castration.⁸

Father Flynn, in turn, shields his naïve disciple from acknowledging a split in human subjectivity by acting as a psychological mirror that displaces the repressed figure of a pre-Oedipal mother and inscribes (or indoctrinates) the child into the symbolic order and law of the Father. The priest perpetuates a myth of subjective cohesion accessible through complex strategies of intellectual and linguistic mastery. The boy-disciple has recourse to patriarchal assurances of personal initiation into a superior world of masculine knowledge, power, privilege, and satisfaction. In the original story, the child naïvely speculates: “Of course neither of his sisters was very intelligent. … Perhaps he found me more intelligent and hono...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Defusing the Patriarchal Can(n)on
• 1 Through a Cracked Looking-Glass: Desire and Frustration in Dubliners
• 2 Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Narcissist
• 3 Interpreting Exiles: The Aesthetics of Unconsummated Desire
• 4 Uncoupling Ulysses: Joyce’s New Womanly Man
• 5 Molly Bloom: The Woman’s Story
• 6 Reading Finnegans Wake: The Feminiairity Which Breathes Content
• Ricorso: Anna Livia Plurabelle and Ecriture Feminine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index