Joyce and Lacan

Reading, Writing and Psychoanalysis

Daniel Bristow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138938069
• eBook ISBN: 9781317383383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What happens when the intellectual giant of twentieth-century literature, James Joyce, is made an object of consideration and cause of desire by the intellectual giant of modern psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan?

This is what Joyce and Lacan explores, in the three closely interrelated areas of reading, writing, and psychoanalysis, by delving into Joyce's own relationship with psychoanalysis in his lifetime. The book concentrates primarily on his last text, Finnegans Wake, the notorious difficulty of which arises from its challenging the intellect itself, and our own processes of reading. As well as the centrality of the Wake, concepts of Joycean ontology, sanity, singularity, and sexuality are excavated from sustained analysis of his earliest writings onward.

To be 'post-Joycean', as Lacan describes it, means then to be in the wake not only of Joyce, but also of Lacan's interventions on the Irish writer made in the mid-70s. It was this encounter that gave rise to concepts that have gained currency in today's psychoanalytic theory and practice, and importance in wider critical contexts. The notions of the sinthome, lalangue, and Lacan's use of topology and knot theory are explored within, as well as new theories being launched.

The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and students and teachers of literature, theory, or the works of Joyce and Lacan.

Chapter 1

James Joyce, in and out of analysis

Audi partem alteram.

– Saint Augustine

Le monde est à l’envers.

– William Shakespeare

This formulation from Maurice Roche’s Codex will operate throughout this work as a guiding thread.¹

On all sides, sheeting²

On 20 June 1975 – the last day of the fifth International James Joyce Symposium – Jacques Lacan delivered his second lecture on the topic ‘Joyce the Symptom’ to the audience congregated at the Sorbonne in Paris. His first speech had inaugurated the event on Bloomsday four days before, but it is in his second that he comes to a definition of what it means to be ‘post-Joycean’.³ In effect it means realising what the other side – or, in French, l’envers – of the symptom is.

In 1995 Roberto Harari published his seminal work, How James Joyce Made His Name; it centred on the Seminar that Lacan dedicated to Joyce under the title Le sinthome, delivered in the academic year following the Symposium, 1975–1976. At its end he concludes that the ‘pathway’ that that Seminar opens up ‘allows us to give psychoanalysis a new name: to call it, now that Lacan has swept the way clear, a post–Joycean psychoanalysis’.⁴ This chapter will thus explore what it may mean to be ‘post-Joycean’, and this in the three integrated areas of reading, writing, and psychoanalysis, and it will concentrate on what the other side of the symptom – the ‘sinthome’, as Lacan latterly designated it – is.

Thus, to begin with psychoanalysis: its most important discovery – that of the unconscious – was made by Sigmund Freud at the tail end of the nineteenth century. To refamiliarise ourselves with its concept we will look to the very first paragraphs of Freud’s introduction to his 1915 monograph on the subject, ‘The Unconscious’:

We have learnt from psycho-analysis that the essence of the process of repression lies, not in putting an end to, in annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious. When this happens we say of the idea that it is in a state of being ‘unconscious’, and we can produce good evidence to show that even when it is unconscious it can produce effects, even including some which finally reach consciousness. Everything that is repressed must remain unconscious; but let us state at the very outset that the repressed does not cover everything that is unconscious. The unconscious has the wider compass: the repressed is a part of the unconscious.

How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious. Psycho-analytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible. In order that this should come about, the person under analysis must overcome certain resistances – the same resistances as those which, earlier, made the material concerned into something repressed by rejecting it from the conscious.⁵

Freud, in his paper on repression, also of 1915, had discussed how repression’s functioning is primarily detectable in the ‘return of the repressed’. The ‘translation’ back into the conscious from the unconscious that Freud talks of earlier is then not only the first indicator of repression, but of the unconscious also, of which repression is a constituent part. Something of the ‘recirculation’ that commences Joyce’s last major work, Finnegans Wake, is therefore locatable here; it is almost as if Freud’s ‘Unconscious’ should begin with the non-capitalised ‘r’ of the Wake’s first sentence; though with the ‘r’ of ‘repression’ rather than of ‘riverrun’. Indeed, we are here returned to repression and the unconscious – as we are in Joyce to ‘Howth Castle and Environs’ – without actually having left off from them.⁶

This theme of the return of the repressed is later concentrated on and developed by Lacan: ‘Repression’, he states, ‘cannot be distinguished from the return of the repressed in which the subject cries out from every pore of his being what he cannot talk about.’⁷ It is thus that the unconscious forces the articulation of its repressed content through symptomal returns, such as in slips of the tongue, dreams, tics, bungled actions, and other such parapraxes. It is in these very articulations that we find proof that ‘the unconscious itself obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks’, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, apropos of Lacan.⁸

As we know, Lacan himself famously stated that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, and in the Écrits – in ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ – he describes the processes of its interpretation in psychoanalysis as akin to the reading of hieroglyphics, citing the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion as the discoverer that Freud should be most likened to, over Christopher Columbus, for example.⁹ These reflections find further elaboration in a contemporaneous interview, conducted by Madeleine Chapsal for L’Express in May 1957, in which Lacan suggests more explicitly the similarity between the interpretation of the unconscious and the reading, or deciphering, of hieroglyphics. ‘A psychoanalyst is not an explorer of an unknown continent, or of great depths’, he states; ‘he is a linguist. He learns to decipher the writing which is under his eyes, present to the sight of all; however, that writing remains indecipherable if we lack its laws, its key.’¹⁰ Thus the structuralism of psychoanalysis: in its practice, interpretation bears resemblance to the deciphering (the reading) of ‘Egyptian hieroglyphics’ (a form of writing), based on their overall structure:

As long as we look for the direct meaning of vultures, chickens, the standing, sitting, or moving men, the writing remains indecipherable. When taken by itself, the sign “vulture” means nothing; it only finds its signifying value when taken within the context of the set of the system to which it belongs. Well, analysis deals with this order of phenomena. They belong to the order of language.¹¹

Lacan again evokes this metaphor in 1964, in his eleventh Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the structure of which was designed to be introductory to the new audience he was addressing after relocating the Seminar, and the instance of which will become important to this chapter. Although Lacan’s methodology in the previously cited passage clearly combines classical psychoanalytic technique with the methods of linguistics – those of Ferdinand de Saussure, for example – it is still precisely Freudian, and this can be seen in its contradistinction to the technique of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung’s method, in this regard, relies on the exact opposite of the linguistic model, matching symptomal phenomena not against the system or order of its language – not against the subject’s personal history or backstory, for example – but proposing a catalogue of ‘archetypes’ into which the unconscious articulation must fit; i.e., proposing that the sign ‘vulture’ has a constant direct meaning in itself, even when isolated from other signs around it.

However, it is in this Freudo-Lacanian systematicity which is like a language, and by which the unconscious operates, that we are beginning to perceive the relation of the unconscious – and thus of psychoanalysis – to the processes of both writing and reading. In Jacques Derrida’s Resistances of Psychoanalysis he discusses a footnote of Freud’s, in The Interpretation of Dreams, which ‘calls upon the reader as a witness in the way one might address oneself to a confessor or to some transferential addressee, some would say to an analyst, assuming that a reader is not always an analyst’.¹² For us, this passage at once succinctly delineates how the processes through which a reader interacts with a text are similar to those through which an analyst commences interpretation, and demonstrates the relation that exists between the unconscious, and writing (Freud’s footnote in this case) and reading. Derrida’s actual referent here, however, is the ‘navel’, that part of a dream – its structuring principle – that can never be unravelled, psychoanalytically. Derrida frames the navel as always already in excess of interpretation, but not as a resistance to it, and thus this excess can – and has to – extend to the unconscious itself (as an element of the Real, and in its real element). The unconscious’s structurality has to evade interpretation so as to maintain its very structure as unconscious; i.e., that which structures the unconscious must not, and cannot, come to consciousness. The extraction of the navel, of the unconscious’s excess, must thus always remain a structural impossibility: in Lacan’s terms, this impossibility is, then, the Real of the unconscious. (The order of the Real for Lacan designates the impossible or unsymbolisable; one way to think of the Real, in relation to the Symbolic – discounting for a moment Lacan’s third order, the Imaginary – is to see it in terms of trauma: trauma is an encounter with the Real, the first symbolic impressions of which we repress; the Real is thus of necessity always foreclosed to, and from, us.)

To begin to explain the earlier summations concerning reading, writing, and the unconscious, we will introduce certain modes in which their tripartite system can be, and has been, represented. First, we will do so with recourse to a two-sided structure – encompassing the idea of ‘l’envers’ – which we will come to term the unificatory/separatory principle.

To give a further inflection to the notion of ‘l’envers’ – and the uses to which we will put it – we will here turn to the chapter entitled ‘Front and Back’ in Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production, in which the words ‘endroit’ and ‘envers’ are translated variously as ‘front’, ‘outside’, and ‘back’, ‘inside’, etc. He forewarns us here that ‘the ‘front’ (endroit) and the ‘back’ (envers) can legitimately be regarded as no more than suggestive metaphors. As ‘ideas’ they are contaminated by the normative fallacy from which they have been only artificially separated.’¹³ This ‘normative fallacy’ which Macherey identifies involves the first position (‘A’ in Figure 1.1) of the unificatory/separatory principle, which will be explored in further detail within this chapter and especially in the coming chapters; however, we will argue that this position in the principle is not in all cases normalising, and thus nor always fallacious, but is sometimes the only adequate model for demonstrating the structurality of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prefatory Remark
• 1 James Joyce, in and out of analysis
• 2 Was Joyce mad?not by a transparent sheet …
• 3 From Joyce-the-symptom to the sinthome
• 4 Joyce’s knots: death and sex before the Wake
• 5 Waking the read: the indelible sigla of Finnegans Wake
• 6 The object meaning raised to the dignity of the Thing
• Index