Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Kevin J.H. Dettmar

No one has read and written about Dubliners more carefully than Garry Leonard; by my count, Leonard has written about 50% more on Dubliners than Joyce wrote in Dubliners. In Reading Dubliners Again, Leonard subjects Joyce's 15 stories to a scrutiny they've never before received, and the results are often fascinating; the book is full of delightful small discoveries that should change, in important ways, our readings of these stories, and perhaps more importantly, change us as readers of the stories.

As his title suggests, Izonard's particular angle of vision is that provided by several key texts of Jacques Lacan, especially the two volumes of his Freud seminar published in English translation in 1988. Lacan's persistent emphasis on the ways that language shapes our "real-world" experiences makes his writings an intriguing framework through which to reread these often read and taught stories. Leonard gets "Two Gallants" right, for instance, in a way I've never seen done before; he's also especially good when analyzing Joyce's stories of frustrated sexual desire "Araby," "A Painful Case," and "The Dead"). And Leonard's reading of "Clay" is as good as we're likely to see, building nicely on Margot Norris's justly celebrated 1987 PMLA article ("Narration Under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's `Clay'") to reveal the spots where even Norris's biases creep in and taint her analysis just a touch. "The narrator," Leonard writes of "Clay," "is a magician who promises not to hide anything from us -- to lay his cards on the table. And he can do so without fear of discovery because readers so badly wish to be tricked." Persistently, Leonard implicates us in our reading of Dubliners, insisting that we see our own foibles mirrored in those of its characters. Leonard's book perform not simply a psychoanalysis of Joyce's characters -- common,enough, and of somewhat dubious value -- but simultaneously puts us on the analyst's couch. "Rarely in fiction do characters suffer as exquisitely for the benefit of a reader as they do in Dubliners," Leonard remind us, "and I propose that readers explore their kinship with the characters' moral paralysis rather than self-righteously suggest various cures for it."

For many readers, Reading Dubliners Again will be made less accessible, less useful than it might have been, by Leonardo's heavy use of Lacan. The book's cover elliptically suggests this problem:.a close-up of Lacan's familiar face fills the frame, with a small, faint photograph of Joyce superimposed over Lacan's left temporal lobe. The iconography of the cover suggests that Joyce is just a figment of Lacan's imagination,a kind of afterthought; and Leonard's text, while certainly not arguing this, can be seen at times to operate according to a similar logic.

One consequence is that Leonard sometimes seems to be reading the edition of Dubliners that Joyce and Lacan co-authored. When he suggests, for instance, that the schoolmaster Father Butler in "An Encounter" presents to his students "a monolithic and seamless narrative of normal masculinity," Leonard is reading far in excess of Joyce's scrupulously mean text; and in the course of the book he is willing to assert a number of small "facts" that I would argue are not in evidence: that Maria (in "Clay") is a virgin, that the Old Josser in "An Encounter" masturbates, and so on. Neither of these particular assumptions is outrageous; indeed, they're quite reasonable, and quite traditional, ways to fill in frustrating lacunae in Joyce's texts. Ironically enough, these spots of interpretive surfeit are a feature Leonard himself teaches us to be on lookout for; as he argues regarding the many ellipses in "The Sisters," "Filling in the blank spots, after all, does not transcend the boy's narration; it merely replaces it with [the reader's] own." Because Leonard argues sp forcefully for keeping one's nose close to the text, his infrequent supplementation of Joyce's stories is all the more disturbing.

Perhaps the reason for this inconsistency is that, at some level, Joyce and Lacan teach us to read rather differently. Joyce, talking about his method of observation and interpretation in Dubliners, wrote to Grant Richard of his conviction that "he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard"; it is, on the other hand, fundamental to any psychological theory of reading that texts must indeed be "deformed" in order to counter the distortion imposed upon the material by the writing subject. Joyce cautions against, as our students would call it, "reading too much into" these stories; Lacan was one of the century's great overreaders, arguing, as Leonard writes, that "interpretation operates in the same manner as desire."

Of course, we're in no way obliged to read, Joyce's stories according to the very few strictures he left us on that topic; the final proof of (and Lacan's) method is in his readings, and by that test, he's done extremely well indeed. Page for page, story no one will teach you more about Dubliners -- both those that inhabit Joyce's stories,, and more importantly all of us honorary Dubliners who read and teach Joyce's stories -- than Garry Leonard. If the analysis is sometimes tough hoeing, be assured that it's justified by the plentiful harvest waiting at the end.