Joyce

The Return of the Repressed

Susan Stanford Friedman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780801427992
• eBook ISBN: 9781501722929
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Did James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce's works—revolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and central. It includes ten essays that identify repressed elements in Joyce's writings and examine how psychic and cultural repressions persistently surface in his texts. Contributors include Joseph A. Boone, Marilyn L. Brownstein, Jay Clayton, Laura Doyle, Susan Stanford Friedman, Christine Froula, Ellen Carol Jones, Alberto Moreirias, Richard Pearce, and Robert Spoo.

PART I

Making the Artist of Modernity: Stephen Hero, Portrait, Ulysses

1

(Self) Censorship and the Making of Joyce’s Modernism

Susan Stanford Friedman

There is at least one spot in every dream at which
it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its
point of contact with the unknown.

SIGMUND FREUD, The Interpretation of Dreams

—Do you mean to say, said Stephen scornfully, that
the President must approve of my paper before
I can read it to your society!
—Yes. He’s the Censor.
—What a valuable society!

JAMES JOYCE, Stephen Hero

One of the “unplumbable” spots in the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the disappearance of the Jesuit “Censor.” In some three hundred manuscript pages of Stephen Hero that survived Joyce’s probable destruction of his unfinished self-portrait, Stephen’s two confrontations with the Censor represent key moments in the production of his alienation as an artist in the making.¹ In the first instance McCann warns Stephen that his paper on Ibsen must have the permission of Father Dillon, the president of the college, before it can be read before the Debating Society. Whelan, the secretary of the Society, tells Stephen that his paper is “tabu” (SH, 89). Then Stephen defends himself before Father Dillon, who initially denies Stephen permission to read his paper but finally relents (SH, 90–98). In the second instance Stephen realizes that the monthly review that McCann edits is silently controlled by Father Cummins, the benign originator whose “discretionary powers” amount to censorship in spite of his relative open-mindedness (SH, 181–82).

But in Portrait the Censor has vanished, excised in the revision. Is the Censor’s absence as character a symptom of his presence within the artistic process that governs the transformation of Stephen Hero into Portrait or the continuation of Stephen’s story into Ulysses? The role of the state censor in the suppression of Joyce’s writings for obscenity has been outlined at length by others. But have we satisfactorily identified the operation of the censor within Joyce himself as he came back again and again to the story of Stephen D(a)edalus? Have we found the traces of repression—(self)censorship—inscribed in his texts? Do we know what role this repression may have played in the production of Joyce’s modernism? Can we chart the connection between repression and oppression, between individiual psychic processes and the ideological and material structures of the social order, in the making of a modernist artist? Finally, how might such a connection be marked by gender?

I pursue these inquiries by proposing a psycho-political hermeneutic for reading the texts in which Stephen appears. Some of these texts are commonly regarded as “drafts” leading up to the “final” text, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—such as the 1904 narrative/essay titled “A Portrait of the Artist,” and the “Epiphanies,” many of which were adapted for Stephen Hero and Portrait.² Portrait and Ulysses are conventionally read as related but autonomous texts. I suggest that we read these texts as distinct parts of a larger composite “text” whose parts are like the imperfectly erased layers of a palimpsest, one whose textual and political unconscious can be read with a psychoanalytic, intertextual approach. This approach to interpreting Joyce’s Dedalus texts adapts Freud’s concept of the dream-work, his analysis of serial dreams, and his identification of “the return of the repressed” in the drama of transference.³

Freud’s Hermeneutic and the Textual Unconscious

In his narrative of the psychodynamics of repression and desire in The Interpretations of Dreams, Freud personifies the psychic agency that forbids the drive to pleasure in the form of the “censor” or more generally “censorship.”⁴ As internalized agent of the cultural ethos in the realm of necessity, the censor attempts, with only partial success, to silence the forbidden desires of the unconscious. The linguistic processes that Freud calls the dream-work accomplish a compromise between the desire to express and the need to repress what is forbidden. Latent desire, buried deep within the unconscious, is transformed into the manifest content of dream or symptom by the grammar of the dream-work: the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, nonrational modes of representability (such as pictographics, symbolism, narrative juxtapositions, superimpositions, and transpositions), and secondary revision (the interpolation of connectors or structuring principles that arrange and order the dream content). These mechanisms distort the latent wish just enough to evade the censor. Freud himself likens the dream-work’s negotiation between revealing and concealing to the delicate encoding of the political writer who must disguise dangerous content so as to fool the censor, who works on behalf of the oppressive state. He writes:

A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell to those in authority. If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words. … A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion. According to the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship he finds himself compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or he must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise. … The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching will be the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning. (ID, 175–76)⁵

Freud’s hermeneutic in turn fools the censor—undoes the repression of the psyche, the suppression of the social order—by a process that he names “decoding” and variously images as an archaeological dig, a journey into the labyrinth, an unraveling of woven threads, a translation of pictographic runes, a detective analysis of mystery and disguise, a removal of the layers in a palimpsest. Beginning in determinacy, his method ends in indeterminacy. Dreams have “authors,” “intentions,” and “meanings” to be decoded, he affirms. But their “overdetermination” necessitates an “overinterpretation” which never ends. The multiple layers of manifest form and latent content require an infinite regress of interpretation which ultimately leads to the “unplumbable” spot, what Freud names the “navel” of the dream, its contact point with the unknown (ID, 143). His metaphor for the gap or knot in the dream-text and in the text of dream interpretation suggests that the threshold of mystery is a point of contact with the maternal body, the irretrievable site of origins, as well as the origin of what is censored, what is disguised in the grammar of the dream-work. Ultimately, his figurative formulation suggests, the return of the repressed is the return of woman, of that mother/Other, to him forever unknown, untranscribable, untranslatable.

Freud’s method for overinterpretation is fundamentally intertextual. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud rejects what he calls the “symbolic” method of dream interpretation, which analyzes the dream as an autonomous unit with interrelating parts—a method that is strikingly consonant, by the way, with the theory of art Stephen expounds in Stephen Hero and Portrait. Freud proposes instead his psychoanalytic method, in which fragments of the dream become departure points into a labyrinth of associations that radiate without end into the dreamer’s recent and distant past, the linguistic and visual artifacts of culture, and the events of history. The dream’s meaning, however indeterminate, emerges in the dialogic exchange of analysis through a retelling—the creation of a new narrative whose constitutive parts are the intertexts of the individual and cultural past.⁶

Freud also breaks down the autonomy of the dream-text by reading dreams in relation to other dreams, decoding a series of dreams as a composite text. “A whole series of dreams,” he writes, “continuing over a period of weeks or months, is often based upon common ground and must accordingly be interpreted in connecton with one another” (ID, 563). In “consecutive dreams,” one dream often “takes as its central point something that is only on the periphery of the other and vice versa” (ID, 563). Reading serial dreams requires an analysis of the gaps in each that can be filled in by the others—the traces of displacement, condensation, and secondary revision that can be deciphered by juxtaposing and superimposing the texts in the whole series. The resonances among the dreams, the consonances and dissonances, can themselves be read for clues to unravel the disguise, undo the work of the censor. As he writes about dreams occurring in a single night:

The content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole; the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number of those sections—all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of information arising from the latent dream-thoughts. … [T]he possibility should not be overlooked that separate and successive dreams of this kind … may be giving expression to the same impulses in different material. If so, the first of these homologous dreams to occur is often the more distorted and timid, while the succeeding one will be more confident and distinct. (ID, 369)

This formulation of repetitive dreams anticipates Freud’s concept of the repetition compulsion and transference. Repressed desires, Freud later argues in his papers on technique, lead a person to “repeat” patterns of behavior as the person “transfers” the feelings from early childhood onto the contempotary adult scene. The analytic situation triggers the “transference”: the analysand acts out with the analyst the patterns he or she once enacted with others, particularly parents, a repetition that is both a resistance to analysis and the clue that allows the analysis to proceed. The goal of analysis, Freud believes, is to move the analysand from repetition to remembering by “working through” the transference. Once an adult can remember the past, he or she is no longer doomed to repeat it.⁷

Freud’s intertextual hermeneutic is richly suggestive for literary analysis because writing, like dreams, can enact a negotiation between desire and repression in which linguistic disguise accomplishes a compromise between expression and suppression. When the novel is autobiographical—like Stephen Hero, Portrait, or Ulysses—this negotiation is further heightened. Autobiographical selfcreation recapitulates the developmental processes of th...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations for Texts by James Joyce
• Introduction
• Part I Making the Artist of Modernity: Stephen Hero, Portrait, Ulysses
• Part II Repression and the Return of Cultural History: Dubliners and Portrait
• Part III Narratives of Gender, Race, and Sex: Ulysses
• Part IV Incest, Narcissism, and the Scene of Writing: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
• Notes on Contributors
• Index