Lacan Reading Joyce

Colette Soler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138327252
• eBook ISBN: 9780429830426
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book discusses Jacques Lacan's contribution to understanding the life and work of James Joyce, introducing Colette Soler's influential reading to English readers for the first time. Focusing on Lacan's famous Seminar on Joyce, the reader will no doubt learn much from Lacan, but also, as Soler shows, what Lacan learned from Joyce and what perhaps, without him, he would not have approached with so much confidence.

Le Sinthome. This is the title Jacques Lacan chose for his seminar devoted to Joyce in 1975–76. He wrote the word 'sinthome' in its original spelling, from the Greek, and thus used the technique so dear to Joyce: the equivocation between the sound that is heard and the graphic representation that is seen. Is it surprising that the author who recognised in 1956 with 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious' that the Freudian practice of speech revealed an unconscious that writes – something Jacques Derrida found quite remarkable – would end in 1975–76 with Joyce?

Lacan Reading Joyce will be of great interest to professional and academic readers in the respective fields of Lacan and Joyce studies, including psychoanalysts in practice and training, as well as researchers and students in psychoanalytic and modern literary studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Sinthome. This is the title Jacques Lacan chose for his seminar devoted to Joyce in 1975–1976. He wrote the word ‘symptom’ in its ancient spelling, coming from the Greek, thus introducing what Joyce made use of: the equivocation between the sound that is heard and the graphic representation that is seen. Is it surprising that the author who began in 1956 with ‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious’, a text in which he recognised that the Freudian practice of speech revealed an unconscious that writes – something Jacques Derrida found quite remarkable – would end in 1975/1976 with Joyce?

The literary stake is certain and Lacan does not recoil from formulating his hypothesis about the writing of Joyce, new master of the unreadable: he put an end, Lacan said, to the dream of literature (J/L, p. 36). This is a double thesis, about literature, as distinct from poetry, and about Joyce. Dream! This term provides sufficient indication that the literary stake is being measured against the yardstick of psychoanalysis. This is not a paradox, given that literature and psychoanalysis both share the same question: how far can one go, what can one obtain, with the word as sole instrument, be it spoken or written? I use the term ‘psychoanalysis’, but this means psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition, where Lacan wished to open a new path, in both theory and in practice, going from the romance of free association to the real of what does not speak: the letter.

This is where he encounters Joyce. More precisely, this is where he encounters Joyce for the first time as a question for psychoanalysis, because he had encountered his work many years before. We know that in his youth, Lacan had frequented Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and there heard readings from Ulysses. We cannot ignore the fact that Lacan had a thesis about Joyce as early as 1967, in his text ‘La méprise du sujet supposé savoir’, well before The Sinthome. But when he came back to him, in the period of the Borromean knot, his questions were completely different. Interestingly, Lacan did not make use of Joyce the way a so-called ‘man of letters’ would. On the contrary, he recognised in him the writer [l’écrivain] – let me say, not in vain [pas vain] – who, in the literary field, had paradoxically brought about a passage toward the real of the letter, beyond its effects of meaning. Now, according to the Seminar of the year before, R.S.I. (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), this is precisely what the symptom does, the symptom that is of interest to psychoanalysis: it makes the unconscious exist in the real, the real of jouissance. It is from this standpoint that Lacan reads Joyce. There is thus a clear convergence. The thesis is complex and deserves to be made explicit, but it shows that the question is far from being only literary.

Lacan was truly seized by Joyce – I think this is a good way to put it. He returned to him as if by chance (tuché in Greek) when, at the insistence of Jacques Aubert, he attended the James Joyce International Symposium, held in Paris on 16–20 June 1975. But really there is no question that, already for several years, he had been as if . . . inhabited. Lacan’s published writings attest to this. So do the many allusions made in passing, for example, in the ‘Postface’ to Seminar XI in 1973 (Lacan, 2012), and at the end of the lecture on ‘The Symptom’ (4 October 1975), so before the seminar and yet again in the ‘Preface to the English-language edition of Seminar XI’ (18 May 1976). There are others. But if he was seized, it was to dig deeper the furrow he had opened in psychoanalysis, the furrow of the real at stake in it. In 1975, this problem was nothing new for Lacan, nor was the question of the function of writing for the unconscious, which Freud’s practice had shown to be ‘structured like a language’ to be deciphered in speech. But in 1975 he posed the problem in new terms, linked to his thesis of the real unconscious and the function of the Borromean knot, introduced a few years earlier. Lacan attempted to rethink the whole of the analytic experience with his new schema, including the classical diagnostic categories of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, and above all, the possibility of a terminable analysis. As we know, the question began with Freud and it is warranted, for Freudian practice – defined as it is by language structured solely as free association under transference and the deciphering of the unconscious – has no principle for ending, any more than does the series of whole numbers with which one can continue to count all the way to infinity. How then to situate an ending – and the nature of the changes produced in the desire and symptoms of the analysand – without convoking what is not language, the real?

Thus, in The Sinthome, the seminar dedicated to Joyce, there are several things at stake. I will not take up all of them, only those that determine the reading Jacques Lacan made of James Joyce, together with their impact on the progress of his own advances. There is, first of all, Lacan’s interrogation, as an analyst, of the case of James Joyce, his person and his place in the new categories of the Borromean clinic. Here we should not forget that it was Joyce who had offered himself as a case, that of ‘the artist’, with a definite article, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Parallel to this, there inevitably arises another question about the function of the written work, in terms of its possibility and even its possible necessity, for its author. The analyst doesn’t need Joyce to be concerned with this question. It arises each time someone asks for an analysis to help with ‘writer’s block’. Moreover, the writer who struggles to put pen to paper has become an important theme in literature. And hence the question of the written work in an author’s subjective economy.

Well before Joyce, St Thomas – so important to the young Stephen Dedalus (Joyce, that is) – at the end of a lifetime of writing devoted to nothing less than a . . . Summa – described as sicut palea ’ the function of the work as object, equating it to a waste object, to put it politely. This is the function of destitution of the subject, the very same function that awaits the analysand at the end of an analysis, according to the ‘Proposition on the analyst of the School’ (Lacan, 1968). Was this the case for Joyce, or was it the opposite, an instance of the unanalysable? This, in a nutshell, is the problem.

And where did he get his artistic know-how? An altogether different question, the question of ‘know-how’ that comes up more than once in the Seminar. Although not elaborated at length, Lacan throws a rather original light on this question. I have no doubt that it conceals another implicit question about the know-how that the act of the analyst supposes. Lacan credits the analyst with a knowledge. He spoke about this for an entire year (1975) at Sainte-Anne Hospital, the very heart of the psychiatric institution, under the title ‘The knowledge of the psychoanalyst’, undoubtedly in response to the theme of ‘non-knowledge’ in vogue at the time, especially among members of his School, which he described as a ‘mystagogy of non-knowledge’ (Aé, p. 359). Know-how is something altogether different, and the question is of great consequence. Generally little inclined to grant absolution, Lacan said: ‘One is only responsible within the limits of one’s savoir-faire’ (S, p. 47).

But certainly more far reaching is the problem of the end of analysis which, I have said before, is bound up with the question of knowing whether or not it can assure a passage to the real that would put an end to the wild imaginings (lucubrations) of the transference, limit the dimension of meaning, and wake one up from the waking dream that speaking beings inhabit.

And that does not even take into account what is at stake with the Borromean knot . . .

It is not surprising, then, that the style of the Seminar borrows nothing from the style of the Joyceans so attached to each word, so concerned with each detail, so devoted to elucidating each point and tracing each of Joyce’s allusions. On the contrary, in The Sinthome, there is no fascination whatsoever with the text of the author who is his object; nor will one find anything that resembles a proper literary analysis. Lacan obviously evokes the text in passing, comments on some epiphany, some expression or some contribution to the vast literature about Joyce. But even so, he says very little about it, even though he has read Joyce carefully and examined the critics who are legion. The page he devoted in his Seminar to one Mark Shechner, who believed he had analysed Ulysses, speaks volumes. This analysis, Lacan says, ‘makes a terrifying impression’ (S, p. 56). Immediately afterwards, he feels obliged to makes excuses for some of Freud’s inclinations in a similar direction. As for the Joyceans, he summarises their work as ‘consisting in wondering why Joyce put such and such thing here or there. Naturally, they always find a reason why; he put it there because, just after, there is another word’ (p. 132). As for Lacan, apart from his demonstrations and explications of various Borromean knots, which I will not go into, he pushes forward with many questions, questions that will await answers over the course of several sessions, such as: was Joyce mad? Indeed, this is a question that he specifically asks. Recalling Picasso’s formula ‘I do not seek, I find’ (p. 74), Lacan notes that it does not apply here for, in fact, he is seeking. But, conversely, the Seminar makes a number of categorical assertions that form a thesis, most of them awaiting argumentation. An example – I will take it up later – is his discussion of the woman he eventually names as Nora Joyce.

Often enough psychoanalysts speak of deferring to the artist. Lacan himself did this with Marguerite Duras, and more generally when he said that one should ‘take a leaf from the book’ of artists. But this was before Joyce; with him it was something different. It is not his text that he admires. He does not hide the fact that, as for the poems, he finds them unconvincing; and as for Finnegans Wake, he agrees with a critic who finds it tiresome. And Lacan makes clear the reason why: because it neither arouses our sympathy nor causes anything to resonate with our unconscious. This poses the unavoidable question: why read it?

But if Lacan, analyst, does not admire the writer, he does admire the case, and more precisely what Joyce, thanks to his art, managed to do with his life and the conditions of his birth. This is truly what allows him to be called ‘Joyce, the symptom’ (J/L, pp. 21 and 31)

We know how much Freud looked to literature but, as far as he was concerned, it was in artists that he recognised the precursors of psychoanalysis and in literary texts the opportunity to put the analytic method to the test. From Sophocles to Goethe, from Jensen to Dostoevsky, he thought of literary fiction as anticipating the discovery of the unconscious; the writer’s elaboration was homologous to that of the analysand who attempts to speak his truth – to be interpreted, although it can only be half-said. Thus when the neurotic recounts his family history – which he never fails to do in his analysis – this is likened to telling a story. And if Freud speaks of the neurotic’s ‘family romance’, it is to say that the scenario for this story has the structure of a novel. The artist’s know-how is conceived as the equivalent of what he himself called the ‘work of the unconscious’, an unconscious that speaks, an unconscious that constructs messages that need to be deciphered. By putting literary works on the same level as the series of formations his practice interprets – the dream, the lapsus, the bungled action, the message of the symptom – he has not exactly avoided the pitfall of applied psychoanalysis.

On this point, Lacan reversed the Freudian perspective: analytic interpretation does not apply in literature. Every attempt in this direction has always been futile and totally incapable of serving as the basis for any literary judgment. For any work, whether it be poetry or a novel, the text can always be interpreted, that is to say, we can give it meaning. Here psychoanalysis verges on being a hermeneutics. But this meaning has nothing to do with the work itself. Indeed, as I have said elsewhere (Soler, 2001), one possible definition of the work in its relationship to meaning is to say that it resists interpretation as much as it leads to it, remaining always open to the revised readings that are the delight of literary criticism, while at the same time existing outside those readings. Between its meaning and its existence, there is no common measure. The enigma remains on the side of production, forever attached to a know-how that is not subject to interpretation. I could pastiche Lacan in saying: ‘that one writes remains forgotten behind what one writes’.¹ In other words, when works are read as a message, these readings say nothing about the activation of the know-how which produced it or had effects. ‘Joyce the Symptom’ is not an interpretation of the Joycean work. It is an original diagnosis of what Lacan called, as did Joyce himself, ‘the artificer’. A diagnosis of uniqueness, therefore, and contrary to any standard: a diagnosis of ‘absolute difference’ (Lacan, 1998a, p. 276), the only diagnosis worthy of a psychoanalyst.

In the Seminar devoted to Joyce, the reader no doubt learns much from Lacan, but I propose to examine something else: what Lacan learned from his reading of Joyce.

Note

1 Speaking about analysis, in L’étourdit Lacan said: ‘that one says is forgotten behind what is said in what is heard’ (1973, p. 5) making the distinction between what is said, the truth of the saying, its meaning and the act of saying itself.

Chapter 2
Symptom, Sinthome

It is not easy to approach the seminar on Joyce le symptôme without some preliminary remarks, given that Lacan reads Joyce on the basis of his elaborations of the time. Take, for example, the term ‘symptom’, to which he had given a new definition the previous year in R.S.I. The use of the term was reworked to such an extent that he changed its meaning.

First, I will put this into perspective in relation to Freud. We know that Lacan returned to Freud, in opposition to the analysts of his time. He claimed to be a follower of Freud, indeed, an authorised follower. But he also deviated from him; and he significantly corrected him. In particular, this happened with the Oedipus complex, which he recognised but also very swiftly and sometimes very virulently criticised. He objected to it not with the mirror of an anti-Oedipus but with a ‘beyond Oedipus’, the first figure being, we must not forget . . . the woman, insofar as she is ‘not all’ in the Oedipus complex (Soler, 2003a, pp. 17–18).

Freud's novel

In the beginning of psychoanalysis was ‘Freud’s novel’ (Aé, p. 309). I will put it this way. Now, what does a novel do but tell a story. Freud paid attention to those told by his analysands. For everyone, the dream tells a story, sometimes a very bizarre one. But there is also our waking dream, the one Freud called ‘the neurotic’s family romance’. It is always the story of an unhappy childhood in which the most burning desires are unfulfilled. It haunts the subjectivities of adults who most often remain the child they were (Soler, 2013), such that we can speak of the ‘ubiquitous child’ (Aé, p. 369). At the heart of this memorialised, at times mythicised story, of which everyone bears the traces, Freud, through deciphering symptoms, recognised the presence of an unknown kernel, the fixity of a scenario that dwells within each speaking being, expressed in each of his utterances, in all of his acts. Yet the subject knows nothing about it until an analyst eventually reveals it to him. According to Freud, it is called the phantasy. Lacan said: fundamental phantasy. A story within a story, an invariant of historical memory that anchors the dialectical slippage of meaning. Let us call the phantasy a ‘one-way street’, sustaining desire, regulating all relations between a subject and others, and between a subject and the Other of discourse. A ‘one-way street’, but one that goes around in circles, like a story told by the stand-up comic Raymond Devos. And Freud asserts that, for each of us, in the end there is just one indestructible unconscious desire, to be interpreted, particularly in dreams. But curiously, he adds that a single dream, completely interpreted, could alone yield the meaning that orients an entire life. Lacan could call this phantasy novel real in his Seminar La logique du fantasme. Its constancy removes it from the dialectic of linguistic narrative and, by virtue of this fact, puts it in the position of an invariable postulate, an anchoring point for all the stories that each of us tells about ourselves, about our own lives.

And we certainly tell stories! We tell them to children, big and small: fairy stories, horror stories, stories about the Santa Claus who doesn’t exist. We...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preamble
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Symptom, Sinthome
• 3 The Heretic
• 4 An Original Diagnosis
• 5 Symptoms
• 6 Borromean Art
• 7 The Stepladder
• 8 Art-dire
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index