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

The linear narrative paradigm may be so appealing because it mirrors reading subjects' desire to recover unity and jouissance lost in the gap between the je and the moi. However, Joyce does not allow readers to experience the traditional sense of closure at the end of "The Dead," for Gabriel does not recover the jouissance that existed prior to his entrance into the symbolic order (castration). Rather, he (like the critics) places his hopes of attaining perfect unity or "wholeness" in an alternative Other (the west) to provide legitimation for his own faulty sense of unity. Gabriel metaphorically replaces one "whole" object with another in thc hopes of achieving subjective unity, a unity that will allow him to "pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, [rather] than fade and whither dismally with age" (Joyce 223). Unfortunately, until he recognizes and accepts his radically contingent and imperfect "whole" identity and the imperfections of (lack in) the Great Others to which he looks for validation, Gabriel, and the critics who read him, will find the west and "that other world" to be "whole" worlds full of holes and gaps, much like his own subjectivity.(8)

(1) For a short bibliography of recent Lacanian readings, see Earl Ingersoll's article listed in the "Works Cited." Of particular interest to psychoanalytic critics are the books by Earl Ingersoll and Garry Leonard, also listed in the "Works Cited."

(2) Earl Ingersoll's brilliant article commences with a reference to Leonard's insightful essay. Ingersoll writes: "Now that Leonard has begun the application of Lacan to `The Dead,' I would propose shifting the ground from the more clearly psychoanalytic `Lacan' to those aspects of his Ecrits which allow for explorations of the interrelations of literary genre, the tropes of metaphor and metonymy, and insights into gender" (41). I, in turn, propose shifting the ground back to the "clearly psychoanalytic `Lacan'" in order to demonstrate the ways in which the construction of language informs human subjectivity. I would like also to explore the politics of temporality and linearity, an area I believe has been neglected, for people assume time is natural and linearity logical. I assume both are constructed and privileged for political reasons.

(3) This is not to say, as Deleuzc and Guattari argue, that schizophrenia is thc exalted state of the postmodern subject. Lacan's notion of the point de capiton (quilting point) elucidates a conception of points from/at which meaning issues forth. These points of meaning, like the upholstery pins on a couch, give form to the shapeless mass of desire and subjectivity. See Lee 61-62, 66-67, 70-71, 115-16. For a discussion of Lacan's conception of the subject, which differs from the modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the subject in significant ways, see Marshall W. Alcorn's article.

(4) This claim parallels Lacan's idea, articulated in Book I of his seminars, that "What matters, when one tries to elaborate upon some experience, isn't so much what one understands, as what one doesn't understand" (73).