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

Style, Spring, 2001 by Gerald Doherty

As Duffy looks down from the crest of Magazine Hill (a fresh vantage-point), he sees "some human figures lying" prostrate in the shadow of the park wall. At this point, the key ocular metaphorics gives way to an oral metaphorics as a means of apprehending this disquieting new image. No longer a conspicuous fall to the earth, desire is now an earthy food orgy--a sexual feast--that defines the nature of Duffy's own alienation, but onefrom which his (identificatory) repudiations exclude him. "Gnaw[ing] the rectitude of his life" (biting frustratedly at its hard bony texture), he feels that "[n]o one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast" (107). Like Sinico, he too is an excluded remainder, a mere residue, one doomed to contemplate at a distance the pleasures others enjoy.

Duffy now looks down for the last time: he sees "a goods train [...] like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness [...] he hear[s] in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name" long after it has passed out of sight (107). This uncanny metaphor (it identifies Sinico as a worm burrowing its path through the undergrowth) once again "buries" Sinico, returning her back to the darkness Out of which she arose. It annihilates her, this time as a spectral rather than a physical presence: "He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear" (107). Such a return completes the logic of the symbolic ingestion already begun: it is an evacuation, a kind of excremental discharge that empties Duffy of the pathological contamination through which his former identification defiled him, and by which Sinico once again "falls" down to the ground: he becomes, as it were, the ontological void to which his successive devoidings consign him: "He listened aga in: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone" (107). As such, he also exemplifies the ultimate fate of the colonized subject: disavowing identification with others, he is a mere remnant or leftover, a subject without desire, excluded from the dynamics of self and other that brings the desiring self into existence.

Notes

(1.) Here I adapt the definition of identification that Freud gives in "Group Psychology": "identification endeavors to mould a person's own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as model" (135).

(2.) My justification for the use of the masculine pronoun is an entirely pragmatic one: to avoid a seemingly endless proliferation of pronominal forms (he/she; his/her), and thus to create a more readable text.

(3.) Mimicry of course may be read in contradictory ways: as a sign of subjugation (the tribute of imitation the colonized pay to their masters) or as a sign of subversion (the ridicule the colonized lavish on an overpowering and oppressive authority). For discussions of the role of mimicry in the colonial context, see Brantlinger (60) and Bhabha "Of Mimicry" (125-33).

(4.) Here I invert the Freudian chronology, which locates desire as the initial spur to identification. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (46-48).