Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis

201 Pages·2016·2.963 MB·English

by  Daniel Bristow

Joyce and Lacan
Daniel Bristow’s book is a fresh and most inspiring engagement with Jacques
Lacan’s late theory, particularly with his reading of Joyce, and of several
concepts resulting from this reading. Bristow takes us through this famously
difficult material with great lucidity and erudition, as well as – perhaps most
importantly – a very clear idea of where he wants to lead us, conceptually, as
well as politically.
– Alenka Zupančič
What happens when the intellectual giant of twentieth-century literature, James
Joyce, is made an object of consideration and cause of desire by the intellectual
giant of modern psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan?
This is what Joyce and Lacan explores, in the three closely interrelated areas
of reading, writing, and psychoanalysis, by delving into Joyce’s own relationship
with psychoanalysis in his lifetime. The book concentrates primarily on his last
text, Finnegans Wake, the notorious difficulty of which arises from its challeng-
ing the intellect itself, and our own processes of reading. As well as the centrality
of the Wake, concepts of Joycean ontology, sanity, singularity, and sexuality are
excavated from sustained analysis of his earliest writings onward.
To be ‘post-Joycean’, as Lacan describes it, means then to be in the wake not
only of Joyce, but also of Lacan’s interventions on the Irish writer made in the
mid-70s. It was this encounter that gave rise to concepts that have gained currency
in today’s psychoanalytic theory and practice, and importance in wider critical
contexts. The notions of the sinthome, lalangue, and Lacan’s use of topology and
knot theory are explored within, as well as new theories being launched.
The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and students
and teachers of literature, theory, or the works of Joyce and Lacan.
Daniel Bristow received his doctorate from the University of Manchester in 2014.
His writing is widely published and covers a range of topics in literature, theory,
and psychoanalysis, and he is co-founder of the Everyday Analysis Collective.
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Joyce and Lacan
Reading, writing, and psychoanalysis
Daniel Bristow
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 Daniel Bristow
The right of Daniel Bristow to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-93806-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67584-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Excerpts from “Double Poem of Lake Eden” and “Crucifixion”
from POET IN NEW YORK by Federico García Lorca. Translation
copyright © 1988 by The Estate of Federico García Lorca,
and Greg Simon and Steven F. White. Introduction, notes, and
translation of letters copyright © 1988 by Christopher Maurer.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Contents
Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Prefatory Remark ix
1 James Joyce, in and out of analysis 1
On all sides, sheeting 1
Hear the other side, see the other side 8
‘Translate your name into German’:
Joyce and the Tweedledee and Tweedledum
of Freud and Jung 15
The old father and the novel artificer 24
2 Was Joyce mad? not by a transparent sheet . . . 39
Joycean ontology 39
Irreducible antagonism 40
The fall 44
Joycean sanity 46
Transparency 46
Opacity 55
3 From Joyce-the-symptom to the sinthome 65
Joycean singularity 65
Symptom 68
Sinthome 79
4 Joyce’s knots: death and sex before the Wake 103
Knots 103
Joycean thanatology → Joycean sexuality 106
Cessation 107
Ricorsi 114
vi Contents
5 Waking the read: the indelible sigla of Finnegans Wake 125
Reading the Wake: writing 125
About to write a letter: a 139
Waking the read: reading 151
6 The object meaning raised to the dignity of the Thing 169
Post-Joycean psychoanalysis 169
Post-Joycean reading 171
Post-Joycean writing 176
Index 183
Figures
Key: < indicates that which position A in the unificatory/separatory
principle splits its contents into.
1.1 Unificatory/separatory principle (A: Position A < 1: Position 1,
2: Position 2) 4
1.2 B-C climactogram 31
3.1 Unificatory/separatory principle (A: Truth/The Fall < 1: Upon,
2: From) 66
3.2 Möbius strip 66
3.3 Unificatory/separatory principle (A: Joyce-the-Symptom < 1:
Symptom, 2: Sinthome) 75
3.4 Diagram of the symptom, the sinthome, and the flypaper sheet 82
3.5 Freud’s ‘comb schema’ 85
3.6 Saussure’s ‘discursive waves schema’ (modified) 85
4.1 The Borromean knot [‘Le nœud borroméen’] 104
4.2 The three rings, separated [‘Les trois anneaux séparés’] 104
4.3 The three rings tied by the sinthome [‘Les trois anneaux
lies par le sinthome’] 105
4.4 The failed knot [‘Le noeud raté’] 105
4.5 The corrective ego [‘L’ego correcteur’] 106
5.1 The ‘full graph’ 132
5.2 Jack B. Yeats, About to Write a Letter (1935) 139
5.3 Multiaxial graph of signifier and signified 140
5.4 Derivation of the fantasy formula from the subject’s
representation between signifiers 143
5.5 Element of the ‘full graph’, showing the objet petit a 144
6.1 Unificatory/separatory principle (A: Joyce’s Writing < 1:
Upon, 2: From) 169
6.2 Sliding scale between dumbfound (interdit) and flabbergast
(soufflé) 172
6.3 Unificatory/separatory principle (A: das Ding < 1: envers,
2: endroit) 175
Acknowledgements
This book is for Fiona, without whom it would not have come to be. It is dedicated
to Jeremy Tambling, Ian Parker, and Liam Harte, for coaxing it into shape during
its becoming. My thanks are owed, too, to so many: my father and stepmother,
Ian and Zoë Bristow, and mother and stepfather, Nicola and Rob Pithouse; Tim
Fernandez, for friendship and producing figure 13; Sally Nall, for redoing the
knot diagrams; Alfie Bown, Isabel Palmer, Tristan Burke, James Smith, David
Alderson, Daniela Caselli, Véronique Voruz, Frances Balmer, Ellen McWilliams,
Fiona Peters, Richard Stamp, Ashley Beaven, Mike and Cina Minney, Alex Bris-
tow, Kunal Modi, Lindsey Miller, Gwion Jones, and Brendan Duddy, who all
contributed in so many ways; Adrian Price, for the invaluable correspondence
concerning Seminar XXIII; Cormac Gallagher, Richard Klein in New York, and
the staff at Karnac Books; and Fritz Senn and Sam Slote, for correspondence
concerning Joyce, and to the latter for making the Finnegans Wake fonts available
to me. Last to Kate Hawes at Routledge, and Kirsten Buchanan, Aiyana Curtis,
Susan Wickenden, and Chris Mathews, whose editorial assistance has been above
and beyond anything I could have expected.
Prefatory Remark
The aim of this work is to investigate some of the concepts in the late thinking
and psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in relation to James Joyce. Concepts
covered include firstly the ‘envers’ – or the ‘other side’ in English – which is dealt
with at length within chapters 1 and 2, and which leads to the construction of a
theory of ‘enverity’, the aim of which is to demonstrate other sides’ combinatory
roles in processes of truth, and how a two-sided structure inevitably involves a
third element which unites and separates the two sides. Secondly, the sinthome –
Lacan’s successor concept to the symptom, which takes up a more fundamental
and irreducible position in the subject’s psychic and somatic makeup – is referred
to consistently throughout in chapter 3, as are the types of knot in which this
concept finds its place, in chapter 4. Thirdly, a theory of writing, as a ‘discourse
without speech’, is introduced in relation to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Lacan’s
concept of lalangue, in chapter 5. Finally, a theory of reading and writing, in
relation to the interplay between meaning and jouissance in the Lacanian the-
ory of sublimation, makes up chapter 6, the final chapter of this work, which
aims to stress the centrality of the Lacanian notion of dignity in processes and
events of creation (or in ‘living, laughing, loving and leaving’, as it is in Joyce’s
quadrivium).
The conjunction ‘with’ tends to be used most commonly in Lacanian parlance
when putting two names critically together, but it is ‘and’ that has been selected
for the title of this work, as between Joyce and Lacan – between Joyce and psy-
choanalysis – there is a friction such as seems to demand this particular unifi-
catory/separatory connective. Chapter 1 of this work begins by establishing the
tripartite structure of the envers, and by bringing it into relation to the functioning
of Lacanian discourse – so as to give something of a grounding in the ever-shifting
mode of articulation of the key theorist here under discussion – before going on
to situate Joyce in relation to psychoanalysis, in his own day, during which his
ambivalence towards the practice was made clear to all, and up to the present, in
which he finds himself occupying a vital position, subsequent to Lacan’s interven-
tions on the author in the mid-1970s. It then moves into a discussion of the role of
the father, and Names-of-the-Father, in relation to Joyce’s notion of the artificer in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in its links to the sinthome (the concept