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

Style, Spring, 2001 by Gerald Doherty

Duffy's verbal asceticism, however, has larger resonances, that point to a radical disavowal of all socio-political ties. He rejects exactly those group identifications through which the individual finds his own "ego ideal" and integrates himself into the larger community (Freud "Group" 161). Indeed his relation to the Irish Socialist Party is played out in terms of a politics of failed leadership, since he can neither assume the rhetorical role of the leader nor verbally persuade others to accept him as such. Instead, with intellectual and class-ridden condescension, he looks down on the "score of sober workmen" who compose the group. Though he aspires to be a "superman" (Henke 36)--a unique figure among a small-working class faction--he discontinues his attendance at meetings at once when the group splits into three and their preoccupation with wages falls far below his idealized aspirations. Because colonialism reinforces the pathologized split in the colonized subject's identifications, in place of a sin gle charismatic figure, a trinity of non-charismatic ones, racked by internal dissension, appears. (9)

In the same way, Duffy' s disavowal of identification with the "obtuse middle class" reflects the same highbrow contempt for what lies hierarchically beneath his superior vision--his "careful scorn" of their ethical and cultural judgments (they entrust "their morality to policemen" and their "fine arts to impressarios" [102]). Debarred from the role of leader, Duffy chooses a Nietzschean-style self-exile and alienation). (10) The frustration of the aspiration to lead--to prestige and power at the top of the colonial hierarchy--dooms the colonized subject to a perpetual horizontal or ground-level vision.

Initially Duffy's encounters with Sinico hold out the potential for uplift denied him in the socio-political sphere. His first meeting with her occurs, paradoxically, at exactly the moment the text seems to write off this potential. It represents Duffy as the quintessential non-vertical man, one for whom the prospects of anarchic exploit or adventure (like "robb[ing] his bank") never arise. As a consequence, he lives out his life horizontally, or, as the text puts it, "his life roll[s] out evenly--an adventureless tale" (99). (11) Indeed, Duffy's ceaseless perambulations about the flat Dublin suburbs confirm the text's diagnosis: as with Dublin itself, no "revolutionary" impulse will ruffle Duffy's life in the foreseeable future. (12)

Duffy's identification with Sinico, however, contradicts this prognosis. It takes the classic form of a displacement upward, an aspiration towards an ego-ideal, the potential ascent up an ontological ladder to vertiginous heights. As the "warm soil about an exotic" (102), Sinico already occupies the fertile ground-space that thrusts Duffy upwards into regions of light he had never penetrated before. A vertical metaphorics tracks Duffy's dizzying progress. Not only does his "union" with Sinico "exalt" him; in addition, he sees himself "in her eyes [...] ascending to an angelical stature" (102). Duffy's supreme moment of revelation (he identifies himself with the angels), however, coincides with a supreme moment of blindness. Though officially he lacks a "church" or a "creed," his aspiration to angelic love conforms to a medieval Roman Catholic theology that identifies love with a spiritual ascent to the sexless state of the angels and thus negates erotic fulfillment. (13) Duffy is as blind to the religious id eology that regulates his sexual drive as he is to the colonial one that frustrates his political aspirations to leadership. (14)