Upright man/fallen woman: identification and desire in James Joyce's "A Painful Case" - racial studies - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2001 by Gerald Doherty

If Freud configures identification in terms of ascent, he configures female desire as descent. Especially in relation to pathological states (the "perversions"), he projects desire as a lapse, a fall, a regression, a collapse backwards and downwards (Fuss 70). Indeed, in Freud's celebrated case-history of frustrated female desire--"The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman"--the young woman, balked in her romantic attachment to her "adored" older "coquette," throws herself over a wall, and falls on a suburban railway line in a spectacular suicide bid. As Freud puts it, "she 'fell' through her father's fault," since he intervened to forbid the affair ("Psychogenesis" 371-72, 388-89). The girl collapses beneath the unbearable burden of a desire that drags her down to the ground. In "A Painful Case," Sinico attracts a correlative metaphorics of falling: she repeatedly "swoons" and collapses under a burden that seems too heavy to bear, and, of course, she too falls on to a railway line. In so doing , she exemplifies the pathology of desire that the colonial context exacerbates: since it fails to possess its idealized object, desire crumples beneath the weight of its own checks and frustrations. Before exploring Sinico's fate, however, I shall start with the remarkable "ups and downs" of Duffy's attempts to identify with the other.

1. Rising to the Occasion

One striking aspect of the low-key literal description of Duffy's domestic environment (which opens the story) is the ascetic character of the furniture and book shelves that decorate his celibate room (virtually all critics take note of this). But a less obvious factor is also at work in the specific arrangement he imposes on them. A subtle hierarchical principle regulates the order of objects from lower to higher levels of elevation. The exterior landscape--the view from outside the window--already reflects the disposition of interior objects: the disused distillery (from which presumably the gaze wants to break free) draws the "eye upwards along the shallow river upon which Dublin is built" (99). Within the room, the arrangement of the books on the book-shelves is "from below upwards"--with a complete Wordsworth on the lowest and the Maynooth Catechism on the highest shelf (98). Visionary uplift, however ironical its inscription, organizes the arrangement of objects. The incitement to ocular erection has its olfactory counterpart in the "faint fragrance" that rises when Duffy lifts the lid of his writing desk (98). (7) A vertical metaphorics locates a superior vantage point from which he looks down on the prospects unfolded below.

Yet the disposition of Duffy's interior life--of his mental furniture, so to speak--seems to compromise the potential for uplift the exterior description holds Out. Living "at a little distance from his body" not only mortifies (i.e., deadens) Duffy's flesh in the manner traditional ascetic practice is supposed to do (99) it also indicates a fundamental paralysis of visionary ascent, a deflated or blocked aspiration. Fanon's phrase for the paralysis induced by the colonial blocking of the identificatory detour through the other--"a crushing objecthood"--seems peculiarly appropriate here, since, through his divorce from his body, Duffy, in effect, becomes his own object. (8) Indeed his "autobiographical habit" of composing short sentences about himself, "containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense," is a linguistic manifestation of precisely the same kind of "objecthood." Like the conventional narrative mode it resembles (third person, past tense), his life recycles itself withi n the same well-worn grooves, denoting a chronic incapacity for self-transformation. It precludes exactly the upward thrust of identification that opens up fresh horizons and vistas. Duffy's "habit" turns on a tautological or fixed self-relation, excluding the uplifting impact of others, since he merely repeats in the third person understandings achieved in the first one (99).