Howard Rouse
The Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s
recent essay, “The Two Tenors: James Joyce and His Father” – included in the
book Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know,[1] a delightful discussion of the
different impacts on their sons of the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce first
broadcast in 2018 on BBC Radio 4 – can be said to function, certainly
unbeknownst to itself, as a thoroughgoing confirmation of Lacan’s two central
theses concerning what we might term Joyce’s paternal problematic.
Lacan’s first thesis is that
Joyce, a “wretch”[2] in this sense, could not have had a
worse start in life. His boozing father, a virtual Fenian fanatic, taught him
nothing, always appealing instead to the “Church diplomatic” of the “good
Jesuit fathers”.[3] This father was “unworthy”,
“failing”,[4] “radically failing”[5] – as Joyce himself failed as a
father for Lucia. And this “paternal abdication” is what accounts for the fact
that Joyce suffers from a “de facto Verwerfung”.[6]
Tóibín provides ample evidence
for the veracity of these claims. Significantly, however, this comes not from
Joyce himself, but instead from the two books of his brother, My Brother’s
Keeper and The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. For what
these texts reveal is that John Stanislaus Joyce, Stanislaus and James’s
father, was an irresponsible, work-shy and feckless man who, after his
financial ruin, used the little money he received from his pension in order to
indulge his own foibles and flaws and deprive his family of sustenance and
support. Worse still, he was perpetually drunken and violent, frequently
threatening “suicide”, attacking his wife – James often came to her physical
defence – and even, on her deathbed, imploring her to die. His basic position
was that of the victim or, as Stanislaus brutally puts it in the diary, “Pappie
is a balking little rat”.[7]
Lacan’s second thesis is much
more interesting, and it is in the confirmation of this thesis that Tóibín’s
essay really enters into its own. If Joyce is a “wretch”, then he is, more
precisely, a “father-tasked wretch”.[8] His writing “must support this
father for him to subsist”.[9] Ulysses, for instance – in Stephen
Dedalus’s simultaneous dismissal of Bloom (“After the father I had, I’ve had my
fill. No more father”) and converging coincidence with him through the
materialism of the signifier (“Blephen and Stoom”) – “is the testimony of how
Joyce remains deeply rooted in his father while still disowning him”.[10] Indeed, it is this exact
coexistence of refusal and recovery, Lacan contends, that constitutes
Joyce’s sinthome. The Name-of-the-Father can be “bypassed”, “on the
condition that one make use of it”[11] – as père-version or as
the Father-of-the-Name.
Tóibín quite brilliantly takes
us through the stages of this use. For if Joyce undoubtedly wanted very little
to do with his father from the age of twenty-two, leaving Dublin and only
returning very rarely – “an instinct I believed in [and we might
relate this to a fundamental Unglauben] held me back from going”, he wrote
in a letter to T. S. Eliot[12] – then it is just as certain that
in his writing he worked to restore as symptom something of the figure or
function of this father. In the story “Grace” from Dubliners, for example,
Joyce’s famous “scrupulous meanness” “personates” the father – to use a term
from Jacques Aubert that I will come back to at the end – as a stumbling,
drunken wreck. Already in “The Dead”, however, Tóibín argues, and this time
through the character of Gabriel Conroy, Joyce generously allows his own
sensuality to interpenetrate with an imagined version of his father’s. And although
a few barbs are still directed at the father, especially in Stephen Hero,
this process is continued in the rewriting of this last book as A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man. For here Stephen’s relationship to his father is
portrayed as being “poetic”, “oddly mysterious and painful”, “melancholy”,
“puzzled”,[13] a puzzlement that does not exclude
of course the more properly psychotic sign of perplexity. Moreover, in both
this novel and, to a much greater extent, in Ulysses, Tóibín shows,
Stephen’s father is “fully socialised”,[14] transferred from the private to the
public domain, a domain where he can behave “suavely”, “coolly”, “mildly”, and
can even, “in the middle of all the acrimony”, “wink at his son so as to make
him his ally”.[15]
In a letter to his benefactor
Harriet Weaver, his finances being almost as unfortunate as his father’s, Joyce
further particularises this picturing of the paternal ally: “I was very fond of
him always, being a sinner myself, and even liked his faults. Hundreds of pages
and scores of characters in my books come from him […] I got from him his
portraits, a waistcoat, a good tenor voice, and an extravagant licentious
disposition (out of which, however, the greater part of any talent I may have
springs) but, apart from these, something else I cannot define”.[16]
Joyce’s talent for
self-definition was not as elusive as he avers, for one of the things he
unquestionably inherited from his father was his jocularity. As he says in
another letter to Louis Gillet, “the humour of Ulysses is his; its
people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image”.[17] In A Portrait, this humour
infiltrates the very description of the father, warts and all, who the comedy
of Joyce’s metonymy reduces to a purely linguistic, and again purely public,
entity: “A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting
politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a
storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a
bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.”[18]
Something, nonetheless, does
evade Joyce, evades him to the degree that the jouissance of this thing
creatively determines the status of his writing as sinthome. This is what
Tóibín’s essay, when read with Lacan, permits us to fundamentally locate. In
two of the above references, Joyce mentions his father’s “voice”, the fact that
he was a “tenor”. And this voice is what penetrates his writing. Specific passages
further confirm this. In Ulysses, for instance, Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s
father, sings, and “[t]hrough the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not,
rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or
whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts
of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each
seemed to from both depart when first they heard […] The voice rose, sighing,
changed: loud, full, shining, proud”.[19] The voice here directly touches, as
Lacan points out, the ears that “can’t be sealed, shut, or closed off”,[20] its resonances directly evoke the
response of the body.
But beyond these specific
references the voice becomes increasingly integral to the whole – this hole
that spits out dissected signifiers – of Joyce’s writing as it progresses.
Lacan tells us that if, typically, the modulations of the signifier through the
voice have nothing to do with writing,[21] then in Joyce’s writing, by
contrast, something of a schizophrenic logic can be perceived in which the
signifier is reduced to the “equivoque”, precisely to “a torsion of the voice”.
“Phonatory identity” is decomposed and exposed to the invasion of the
“phonemic” and “polyphonic” aspects of speech.[22]
Paradoxically, however – and
it is Jacques Aubert who best captures this in his “Presentation at Lacan’s
Seminar” – this process of decomposition is, at the same time, a process of the
re-composition of something of the father. “Everything can personate”, “père-sonate”,[23] in Joyce’s text, he says,
“everything can be the occasion of effects of the voice through a mask”.[24] If Joyce was certainly subject to a
“problematic of legitimacy” in relation to the father, he simultaneously “uses
certainty and brings it onto the stage in its relationship with the effects of
the voice. Even if a word, a paternal word, is challenged at the level of what
it says” – at the level of its enunciated content, we might say – “it seems to
suggest that something of it” – something of its enunciation or, more
radically, vociferation – “passes into the personation, into what lies behind
the personation, into what lies on the side of phonation, perhaps,” – here
Lacan is more exact when he speaks of the “phonemic” and “polyphonic” – “on the
side of something that also ‘deserves to live’ in melody; perhaps precisely
because of this something that in spite of everything has effects on the mother
through melody […] it was in this that Joyce’s father, John Joyce, exulted. But
in this art of the voice, of phonation, perhaps just enough of it was passed on
to the son”.[25]
Two fathers, then, one
foreclosed, and the other “redeemed”, as Lacan emphasises, through a writing
that infinitely opens itself up to the invented intricacies of the voice. “It’s
sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad
feary father”.[26]
[1] Tóibín,
C. Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know. London, Viking/Penguin, 2018. The essay on
Joyce can be found at pp. 133-174.
By Howard Rouse| September 4th, 2019|LRO 173
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