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English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
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A Joycean Knot Luke Thurston. James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge UP, 2004. 232 pp. Cloth, $75.00. By Julieann Ulin, The University of Notre Dame
James Joyce’s relationship to psychoanalysis was certainly a vexed one. Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann notes that Joyce most likely heard about psychoanalysis from Ettore Schmitz, whose nephew, Dr. Edoardo Weiss, introduced psychoanalysis in 1910 (340n). In Trieste, Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis served as the subject for a number of discussions between Joyce and Paolo Cuzzi, although Joyce argued that Freud’s work had been anticipated by the Neapolitan philosopher Vico. Freud’s influence, nonetheless, may be seen both in Joyce’s recording of Nora’s dreams with his own interpretation supplied and in his numerous references to Freud in Finnegans Wake. Despite the overlap between the new psychoanalysis and his own writing, Joyce outwardly rejected it: “Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? . . . What about the mystery of the unconscious? What do they know about that?” (JJ 436). In Ulysses, especially in the dream sequence of “Circe,” and throughout Finnegans Wake he mocked psychoanalysis:
Joyce was acutely aware of the connections between the project of his own work and psychoanalysis: “‘In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying, does to what you Freudians call the subconscious—but as for psychoanalysis, it’s neither more nor less than blackmail’” (Ellmann 524). He dismissed a friend’s interest in the subject by saying, “Well, if we need it, let us keep to confession” (472). Although Joyce refused psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, his work was not to escape psychoanalysis so easily. In a letter to James Joyce, Carl Jung wrote, “Your Ulysses has presented to the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters” (Ellmann 629). Calling the Penelope episode “a string of veritable psychological peaches” and praising Joyce’s knowledge of women (“I don’t suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t”), Jung ushered in the beginning of psychoanalytic criticism of Joyce’s oeuvre, some good, some bad, some ugly. The most recent addition to this debate, in which Joyce’s own resistance to psychoanalysis is always a major voice, is Luke Thurston’s James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis. Luke Thurston argues that Joyce’s resistance to the application of the hermeneutic of psychoanalysis to his own work supplies an antagonism that opens new areas of inquiry in Joycean studies and literary criticism in general. This should come as good news indeed to over 900 Joyceans who flocked to Dublin for the Bloomsday 100 Symposium this past June 16th. Desiring an escape from the popular image of Joycean scholarship as “a vision of institutional closure . . . trapped in its endless, self-perpetuating cycles,” Thurston divorces himself from either applying psychoanalysis to Joyce’s work or looking for the intertextuality between psychological debates and Joyce’s text (Thurston 7-8). Those projects have been undertaken in works such as Richard Ellmann’s The Consciousness of Joyce (1977) and Jean Kimball’s recent Joyce and the Early Freudians (2003). Thurston argues that an engagement of Joyce and psychoanalysis should not be limited to a discussion of Joyce’s psychological “sources,” but must look to the aesthetic experience based on what Thurston terms the “shock” of the encounter between theory and aesthetic representation. The first section of Thurston’s book, “On Traduction,” focuses on the “encounters” in Joyce that result in an unspeakable scene. This places Joyce in opposition to psychoanalysis, which seeks to determine and ascribe meaning. Thurston reads Joyce’s “An Encounter,” a short story in Dubliners, as an early indication of how his work will “undermine any response that would ape the story’s narrator by striving to re-establish a fantasy of consistent, fully legible authority” (29). Thurston turns to an exploration of Freud’s theories on the aesthetic and Joyce’s “ambiguous enjoyment” of psychoanalysis. On the premise that the roots of psychology are linked with literature, as seen in Freud’s reading of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, Thurston identifies psychology’s desire to uncover and translate what lies beneath the text. Freudian theory emerges as traduction, “or the urge to recuperate, render legible and comprehensible the excessive force of what disrupts” (42). While in his aesthetic writings Freud never posits something untranslatable, relegating that which “defies representation” to the mastery of the author, Lacan’s reading of Hamlet as resistant to a reductive psychoanalytic analysis allows for a “conjunction-disjunction” between psychoanalysis and the aesthetic object. Thurston sets Jacques Lacan apart from those theorists who apply psychoanalysis to “solve” Joyce’s riddles and enigmas: “one of the major instigations of Lacan’s interest in Joyce was what he regarded as a deliberate artistic refusal of psychoanalysis” (Thurston 9). Instead, Thurston argues, Lacan celebrates the “unreadable signature” and the “foreclosure of meaning” in Joyce (83). This unreadable signature suggests a social transgression that withstands the attempts to translate it into discourse. The resulting crisis of meaning, intimately connected with the withdrawal of paternal authority, provides a frame through which Joyce might be read. In the chapters that follow, Thurston treats instances of “conjunction-disjunction” throughout Joyce, when representation is disrupted because of the limits on translation or the subject’s inability to declare “I am” in a manner that sufficiently grounds the self. This “excess” which defies representation, “at once something lacking, irreducible to the text, and yet ‘more than matter’—is what makes the Joycean thing impossible to read or remember in terms dictated by a solitary “I”” (210). This makes Joyce innovative for his active and joyous participation in an aesthetic experience. Showing that Lacan’s treatment of Joyce represents a shift in psychoanalytic treatments of the aesthetic, Thurston then situates Joyce in a literary genealogy of other “unreadables” as found in Shakespeare’s Othello, Hamlet and MacBeth and their appearances in Joyce’s work. Thurston’s reading of Shakespeare’s Iago, his reincarnation in Joyce’s Ulysses, and its relationship to questions of paternal authority and thus origin, is compelling. Thurston’s book represents a clear departure from psychoanalytic criticism that operates as a template to “explain” a work. His understanding of the problems inherent in that model allows him to construct an alternative in which he celebrates the “Joycean knot.” His readings of language and religion in Joyce are especially valuable. The book weaves together Shakespeare and Joyce’s work, especially Finnegans Wake, with Thurston’s lucid discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Jung. As the subject matter, the book is dense at times, but it refreshes the reader by staying close to the literary texts. The promise that psychoanalysis can still offer new approaches to Joyce is fulfilled in this book.
Work Cited Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
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