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

Style, Spring, 2001 by Gerald Doherty

What is here represented as image is enacted as drama, as, in her "little cottage outside Dublin," the irruption of Sinico's desire creates confusion and sudden bewilderment. A symbolic collapse of control (she spontaneously presses Duffy's hand to her cheek) prefigures a literal collapse shortly to follow. As they walk in the Park a week later, Sinico "tremble [s] so violently" that Duffy fears "another collapse on her part" (103). His precipitate exit (he "quickly" bids her goodbye) pinpoints his anxiety: the ethical "fall" that occurred earlier in the "dark discreet room" may indecorously repeat itself as event in the broad daylight of the public park. If identification momentarily puffs Duffy up, desire deflates Sinico: it appears at once as a symptom--a swooning ataxy--and as a pathological burden beneath which she falls to the ground. For the colonized subject, "swooning" is less an index of sexual rapture than a dizzying syncope that traumatizes desire at its source.

The newspaper report of Sinico's death four years later that Duffy reads (as he eats his dinner at the George's Street restaurant) translates the vicissitudes of female desire--its symbolic prostrations--into the crude literal drama of crossing and falling: the report revolves obsessively about these twin motifs, tirelessly reiterating the word "fall." (17) The train configures the irruptive force of desire that prostrates and kills off its object. Transgressively "crossing the line"--symbolically acting out her desire--is the cause of Sinico's fall (104-05).

What the train performs at the literal level Duffy performs at the psychical one, as his subsequent meditation effectively "kills off" Sinico in fantasy ("it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred" [105]). His total disavowal of identification, in effect, consigns Sinico not just to an earthly grave, but to dim regions under the sea: she was "one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low!" (105-06). If "civilization," however, turns its back on these "wrecks" to shore up its own fragile pretenses, these same "wrecks" may return, like the Freudian repressed, to haunt the site of forgetting. Such disturbing returns constitute the major motif of the final part of the story.

3. Ghostly Revenants

Diana Fuss remarks that "[t]o be open to identification is to be open to a death encounter, open to the very possibility of communing with the dead" (1). The love object, for example, returns as a revenant, a spectral reminder of a buried desire, of a lost opportunity. Entombing the other within the self, as Duffy has done, incites a theatrical insurrection, a disruptive uprising that confronts the accuser with his own secret complicity. The colonial dimension of the story, in effect, exacerbates the force of this traumatic invasion, since invasion by the other reenacts the original historical event that initiated the trauma. To be colonized is to be haunted by a phantasmal past that, usurping the space of the present, refuses to rest securely in peace.