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

Style, Spring, 2001 by Gerald Doherty

From the moment Duffy "raise[s] his eyes from the [news]paper and gaze[s] out of [the] window" of his first-floor room, these nightmarish hauntings begin. (18) The intensity of Duffy's "interior turmoil" (John Paul Riquelme's phrase [118]) sets "A Painful Case" apart from all the other Dubliners stories (the exception, of course, is "The Dead," which enacts a parallel nightmarish haunting of the living by the dead). Initially, tropes of invasive aggression configure this strange psychic infiltration: the "shock" of Sinico's death first "attacks" Duffy's stomach, then his "nerves"--symptoms intensified by the "cold air" that insidiously "creep[s] into the sleeves of his coat" (106). It has its counterpart in Sinico's ghostly insinuations into Duffy's interior spaces, as an uncanny voice in his ear, and as a mysterious touch on his hand. Her eerie return induces the same state of "falling" in Duffy ("He felt his moral nature falling to pieces") as he once induced in her (107).

Have these spectral incorporations a structure? Is there a specific metaphorics that bodies them forth? The answer hinges on one of the story's minor conundrums: why is Duffy--a professional ascetic--habitually associated with scenes of eating and drinking. (19) The text scrupulously records, not only his drinks (hot punches), but, also his usual menus (for lunch, lager and arrowroot; for dinner, corned beef and cabbage). Indeed, the shock-news of Sinico's death coincides with a peculiarly vivid moment of alimentary drama: Duffy is just about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his mouth when his eyes rivet themselves on the newspaper report: whereupon he returns his food to his plate, where it remains as a left-over, an ugly remainder ("The cabbage began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate" [103]). In effect, the matrix of incorporation and repudiation--one that simultaneously ingests and negates--constitutes the pattern of this miniature eating-event.

Food ingestion, of course, is also a classic metaphor for identification. As Freud puts it, we incorporate the desired object by "devouring" it ("Mourning" 258); by "eating" it, we "annihilate" it as such ("Group" 134-35). Duffy too encounters the other in precisely this way, absorbing and assimilating it into himself before he proceeds to expel it. Indeed, the restaurant vignette stages at the literal level the metaphorical incorporation-repudiation dynamics that structure his encounters with Sinico. After his initial assimilation of her, she returns as the symbolic left-over, the ugly rem(a)inder that Duffy's psyche rejects. Food metaphors are thus not simply one set in a "disparate cluster of images" (Tucker 118), that lack proper narrative integration (traditionally critics viewed this as the story's major defect). Rather, they function as meta-tropes that, in subsuming other metaphors, including the matrix of ascent-descent, bestow a fuller significance on them. Re-emerging in the new complex configurat ions that round off the story, they also enunciate a striking colonial truth: the return of the (excluded) other undermines the colonizer's illusion of dominance, transforming his assurance of control into a paranoic fear of its depletion and loss (Fuss 147). In translating "upright" into "fallen," it confuses the delusive distinction between them. This is precisely Duffy's immediate fate. (20)