Carol Waters - Joyceæs Handling Of The Question Of The Inadequacy Of The Father - English

JOYCE’S HANDLING OF THE QUESTION OF THE INADEQUACY OF THE FATHER “I am confused by Joyce, as a fish is by an apple,” (1) notes Lacan. Over and above a literary reading, he builds a clinical approach which leads him to invent the sinthome.

Joyce weighed down by his father Joyce’s symptom is his father – an inadequate father. Lacan writes: “The symptom depends ultimately on a structure where the Name-of-the-father is an unconditioned element” (2). Stephen, hero of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, an important document on Joyce himself, describes his father thus: “A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past”(3). Joyce names his young hero Stephen Dedalus, a patronym which evokes the Greek architecture of the labyrinth. Stephanoporos, says Jacques Aubert, is the wearer of the crown. This latter could be the royal crown, enabling the wearer to carry the mark of the king by legitimation, but it could also be the famous laurel wreath, or the crown of thorns, worn by Christ and by the martyrs. Saint Stephen sacrificed his life to bear witness to a teaching, which he hadn’t received directly, but to pass on the word of Christ. In this way, he is the prototype of the martyr; the protomartyr; “the first to have born witness without having seen, at the cost of his life” (4). The choice of the father, Simon Dedalus’, christian name is not innocent either. It evokes Simon, the witch, and simony, as a trafficking of sacred objects of spiritual wealth or ecclesiastical responsibilities. This lowers everything to a mercenary level and perverts what touches spirituality and symbolism. This mercenary attitude, the subject of scandal, hides another sin: the sin of pride; the pleasure of knowing oneself to be above others.

The “poisoned” name During a visit to Cork, Simon Dedalus gives his son his point of view on the nature of being a father: “I'm talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I don't believe in playing the stern father. I don't believe a son should be afraid of his father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son” (5). Thus, he defined himself as an equal, another, in an evasion of his role. The purpose of the trip to Cork is the visit to the school of medicine; to the amphitheatre, where his father was a student for a while. James Joyce would try in vain to study medicine in Paris. We can ask ourselves if this interest is based on a desire for social climbing, or a desire for knowledge of a body, and in fact KNOWLEDGE OF THE BODY. They look for the initials S.D., carved into one of the tables – the same initials as Stephen, just as James had the same initials as his father, John Joyce. Stephen sees the word foetus written on a table. The search for the initials is supplanted by his interest in the foetus, not yet named, the promise of life, and escaping investigation by the medical field, then, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Not yet named. For Joyce, the question of naming is central, the importance of the proper noun linked to the effects of the inadequacy of the father, which Lacan interprets as a way of writing a version of the Name-of-the-Father, written as a proper noun, in an attempt at “suppliance”. It is a perpetual game of Hide-and-seek with all the changes in proper nouns: Dedalus, Abraham, Jacob, Bloom, J.J. O’Malley, Virag etc. Bloom’s father, Virag, poisoned himself: “The father’s name that poisoned himself”. The French translation does not allow us to differentiate “himself” from “itself”, giving rise to an ambiguity “which leads us to believe that it’s the name which poisoned itself” (6).

Joyce was looking for fame. He wanted the universities to look after his work for three hundred years, and to become someone renowned, or renamed, which can be interpreted as being named again. It raises the question of the right to existence and creation. Joyce’s father had a wonderful voice, which had an effect on his mother, even if she never set much store by what he said. His voice mirrored something approaching desire; the voice as “a”, cause of desire. Something reached the son in this art of the voice, through phonation. J. Aubert speaks of the meaningful effects of the voice. Lacan agrees. The function of phonation is to re-inforce, and asks the question: “at what stage does the meaning, in its written form, distinguish itself from the simple effects of phonation? It’s the phonation which transmits this proper function of the name” (7). The confessor; perversion Although he lost his faith in the teachings of the church, which Stephen confesses to his friend Cranly, he has trouble freeing himself from the support; the framework of his thinking. His father suggested he rely on the Jesuit fathers, the diplomatic Church, to leave everything up to the confessors – confession “based on the idea of grip; the renewed grip of the Catholic whole, which covers everything; the renewed hold by all that has fallen” (8). To redeem what has fallen is what interests Joyce intensely. The father fallen from on high, it might be said, into decline. The question of the symbolic debt is raised in a crucial way, in the mind of the young artist, in this very particular aspect of the casuistry of Saint Alphonse of Liguori – which consists of the accounting of indulgences, which Stephen calls “the cash register”. “The crucial question for Joyce will be his relationship with the function of confessor – a difficult relationship and function, ambiguous. He is both fascinated and repulsed by the marvellous possibilities for perversion which this represents. Everything the confessor has at his disposal, in terms of language and silence” (9).

Stephen refused the invitation to join the priesthood, put forward by the Jesuit fathers from Belvédère. Nevertheless, he would like to become a redeemer, in other words, the one who redeems and rehabilitates. He wants to rehabilitate his father, which Lacan considers to be a prototype of PERE-VERSION, in the father-son relationship. The “père-version” serves to prevent the psychotic trigger, and acts as a structure which attempts to couple or tie the borromean rings together. In Ulysses, Joyce dismisses Stephen and hands over to Bloom, this transition from one to the other brings in the concept of the Redeemer. Bloom, when talking about his father, says “the one who has my voice and my eyes”. “This shows that they are not only made of the same signifiant, but really of the same matter. Ulysses bears witness to what keeps Joyce rooted in his father, while at the same time renouncing him. This is well and truly his symptom” (10).

Le sinthome Lacan lets us into a secret – his sinthome. It’s Reality, which he writes in the form of a borromean knot, made up of three rings of string: I,R,S. If there is a mistake in the drawing of the knot, there will be just a single ring. If symbolism frees itself, the sinthome is the way to repair that. These three elements, as they are expressed to us, are a metaphor, and this raises the following question: Is it possible to imagine a metaphor from something that is only a number? Lacan answers in the affirmative: “Because of this, the metaphor is called the figure” (11). The metaphor of the chain isn’t written easily. Expressing the Reality in question is the forcing of a new writing, which, through this metaphor, has a symbolic range. It’s a new type of forcing, the idea doesn’t blossom from the imagination, nor is it something completely foreign, it brings home the “Reminiscence”, as opposed to the “Rememoration”. “Rememoration” (cf, Freud in The Sketch) concerns things which are printed in the nervous system, and endowed with letters, whereas “reminiscence” is a phonological symbol, representing the sound of

the language, defined by the distinctive properties which oppose it, and which contrast with the other sounds of the same language (12). Therefore, Joyce committed himself to the path of writing, defined by Lacan in relation to the borromean knot. This writing becomes autonomous. This new writing is absolutely essential to his Ego – meaning the idea of oneself as a body having a weight and a consistency. The sliding, the gliding of Joyce’s imagination is corrected by this Ego, repairing the missing relationship of what doesn’t join together in a borromean way in his case. Through this ingenious writing device, the borromean knot is restored. Here is the artificer in action. He has the voice of a son, a voice which carries a certain know-how concerning the signifiant. In Portrait... Stephen confesses to his friend Cranly, who he compares to a “guilty priest”, his desire “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church : and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning” (13). Lacan considers Joyce’s desire to be an artist as compenstion for the fact that his father was inadequate. He thus allows himself to go into exile; this “never more”, and, as he is leaving Dublin, it is nevertheless towards his father that he turns in a final hope and petitions him: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” (14).