Passing boldly into that other world of holes: narrativity and subjectivity in James Joyce's "The Dead."

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Sean P. Murphy

Lacanian readings of Joyce's work, as evidenced by the spate of articles and books devoted to revealing the relationships between psycho-analytic theory and Joyce's oeuvre, greatly contribute to the examination of thc role of language and decidedly non-neutral symbolic systems in gender, sexual, historical, and political spheres. Dubliners has come under the attention of several critics who deftly explicate Joyce's collection of stories using various segments of Lacan's dense, complex, and often contradictory thcories.(1) One example of the marriage of these textual and critical phenomena is Garry Leonard's article "Joyce and Lacan: `The Woman' as a Symptom of `Masculinity' in `The Dead,'" in which he remarks on human subjccts' desire for unity saying, "A Lacanian plot summary of `The Dead' would . . . present the story as three attempts by Gabriel Conroy, with three different women, to confirm the fictional unity of his masculine subjectivity" (451).(2) Gabriel's disconcerting encounters with three different women -- Lily, Miss Ivors, and Gretta -- problematize his attempts to achieve subjective unity, a unity that will enable him to deny the fragmentation inherent in svmbolic existence bv enticing validation of what he should be (i.e., unified or whole) from the Other/"The Woman." One important theoretical concern left unexplored, howver, is the manner in which the structure of the narrative mirrors the unity sought by the castrated subject who desires a recovery of the jouissance (sexual gratification/pleasure) lost to the symbolic order and of the unity of the gestalt first perceived by human subjects in what Jacques Lacan labels the "mirror stage." I will extend Leonard's Lacanian reading of "The Dead" to include the important element of narrative structure so as to expand the critical debate surrounding the "cnd."

Subjects in thc mirror stage apprehend in the (m)other or in the mirror an image of bodily unity that is contradicted by uncoordinated lived bodily experiences. Infants immediately enter a dialectical relationship, for they see a shape in the mirror and look to a third entity or factor -- the mother (in this case, the mother is purely a symbolic function; that is, a male can fill the role or position of a mother) -- in order to legitimize unity. In his Ecrits Lacan comments on the fundamental operation of the mirror stage:

The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject

anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him

only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is

certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears

to him above all in a contrasting size (un relief de stature) that fixes

it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent

movements that the subject feels are animating him. (2)

The split between subjects' "turbulent movements" or fragmented lived bodily experiences and ideal images of unity (the ideal ego) embodied in others or in specular images of the self engenders a strong sense of subjective alienation. Subjects desire to overcome this split, but can only approach a fusion of thc primordial form with the lived bodily experience "asymptotically" (Lacan 2). This being the case, one can conclude that subjects may attempt to close the gap between the je or "I" (the thinking subject located in and constituted by symbolic functions, articulations, or networks) and the moi or "ego" (the "me" that is the object of the thinking subjcct or the pre-Oedipal ideal ego that represents subjective unity as opposed to chaotic fragmentation), but the attempts at unification will be met with frustration (Lee 65). Although subjects desire stability and order, subjectivity is fundamentally split.(3) This split becomes a home to the kernel around which thc subjects, desire circulates. Additionally, it is absolutely crucial to an understanding of subjectivity precisely because it is not wholly understood.(4)

Similarly, what Lacan calls the object a does not exist inasmuch as it does not allow for complete understanding, materialization, or symbolization; yet it is, as Slavoj' Zizek argues, thc core of existence, the reason for being, the void that initiates all desire, the hole we futilely attempt to fill with gestures and articulations generated in the symbolic. Attempts to symbolize the real (the register that represents what is left over from/out of the symbolic and imaginary orders) or the object a may succeed in recovering a certain amount or intensity of jouissance, but never through symbolization do subjects eradicate this inherent lack. Eradication of the lack is an impossibility, anyway, because such a process depends for its possibility on a complete symbolic order that has simply to confer the correct signifiers upon the lack in order to incorporate it into its networks, in order to demystify its absence from material existence, in order to symbolize even those things that resist symbolization. Because subjects "know" many signifiers and potential combinations of signifiers in the symbolic register, they essentially remain steadfast in the belief that they can create a perfect whole using a system that is neither perfect nor whole. To play on Zizek's explanation of the fetishistic split between knowing and believing (for example, science and faith in god or any perfect -- i.e., not lacking -- Great Other), in this case the subject claims: "I recognize that I do not know or understand all of the signifiers in the symbolic order, but all the same, I believe that the symbolic order is unified and whole and that it can at least encode/incorporate/explicate/indicate/ eradicate/alleviate my fundamental lack." As we can see, subjects who place faith in the symbolic are doomed from the beginning, for they disavow their pleasure; they ignore the unrepresentability of their desire due to its origin in precisely that which the subjects intend to close: the gap or lack. Gabriel Conroy as he is created/read by many critics who are themselves interpellated into positions of symbolic ecstasy, is onc such subject.(5)