JOYCE, THE CASTRATION COMPLEX,
A N D THE NOM DU PERE
Bernard Kennedy
In discussing the work of Joyce it is necessary to highlight the
common themes of father, fathers, and the son in Joyce's work and
connect these themes with the role of the father and its implication for the
son in Lacan's works particularly in the important text of Family Complexes
in the Formation of the Individual. The theme or 'the-me~s of Joyce relies
heavily upon the 'old artificer', the coat and arms of the coat of arms,
carried by, and, through the father. This coat, or arms, can be seen as a
form of indentation of generations upon the psyche of the next generation
and for our purposes on James Joyce, writer, Poet and son of artificer.
John Stanislaus and James, and the many father referents, priests,
colleagues and Ibsen were fatherly figures of influence. Joyce's writings
and narrative style pose questions of a psychoanalytic nature e.g. around
the castration complex and inclusion into language, and the symbolic
order, that lead us to enquire into the role of the formation of the erotics of
narrative, and subject. Perhaps his work is a text outside castration.
This paper will look at the relationship between Joyce and his
father John Stanislaus taking into account Lacan's statement on the Imago
of the father: 'it polarises in both sexes the most perfect form of the ego-ideal'.1 If
one looks at the relationship with the other f/Fathers in the work of
Ulysses and Finnegans wake, and how his connection with these figures
assumed the role of the nom du pere, one can see a theme of father. It is
suggested that Joyce rebelled against the symbolic imprint of his
1
J. Lacan. family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual. (1938). Trans. C. Gallagher.
London, Karnac, 2002. p. 39.
50
f/Fathers, and by uniting with his Father he overthrew the patriarchal
mother 2 .
Search for phallic bearings and castration
As Restuccia suggests, 'in breaking the law he united with his father,
killing the patriarchal mother and marries (sic) his "non-castrating" father'.3
This is an interesting claim, which would express inversely the Freudian
Oedipal concept, the resolution of which betokens the necessary
development of the independence and structuring of the Ego. In his use of
textual images Joyce illustrates that his biblical and Greek images become
representations of f/Fathers, and characters of his generations are relived
and represented, and the word is then the thing in itself where he himself
came into being. In his writings Joyce became himself through his words
and he repaid the debts of his ancestors through his stories, 4 and ideepere
became his own leitmotif. Lacan remarks that 'his art sup-plied for his phallic
bearing' .5 In this creation of a new style of writing, of textual expression, a
search for a perfect language exists, about which Eco suggests that Joyce's
writing might allow humanity escape the post-Babelic labyrinth. 6
This association can introduce us to the connection between the
Tower of Babel and the phallus, the symbolism of Joyce's Tower at the
beginning of Ulysses, and a connection with phallus, castration, and the
fall of the tower, as a crumpled penis, like the experience of Little Hans. 7
All resulting, as the story of Babel shows us, in a confused tongue and a
living outside of speech. His narrative style presents a link between
2
F. Restuccia. Joyce and The Law Of the Father. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989.p.
15.
3 ibid.
4
R. Ellmann. James Joyce. Oxford, OUP., 1980. p. 60.
5
J. Lacan. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book XXIII. Joyce and the Sinthome. (1975-1976).
Unpublished translation, C. Gallagher. Dublin, 2005. Session of 18 th November 1975. p. 7.
6
U. Eco. A Portrait of the artist as Bachelor. (1991). Trans.M. McLaughlin in U. Eco. On
Literature. London, Seeker and Warburg, 2004. p. 103.
7
S. Freud. Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy. S.E., X, p. 37.
51
language, speech, phallus and castration. It would seem that literature, per
se, expresses the deeper unconscious associations in both The Bible - as in
the myth of Babel, and in the story with Abraham and Isaac - and also the
many Greek texts used in Freud's theories. Narrative and the unconscious
are important expressions of subjectivity.
The coats and arms
James Joyce and the themes of his narrative were family themes
culled from his ancestry and from the coat of arms that his father proudly
displayed. 8 This was continued by James with his delight in family
photographs, and these familial myths became his narrative, under the
leitmotif of idee-pere. In his life and work an important item to be saved at
all costs was the coat of arms for his father, and a three generations
picture, for James himself. Colum remembers seeing Joyce's library
request of a book on heraldry. 9 This shows an early preoccupation for
James linking father and son. It is interesting to note how Joyce's father
was to be called James, and not John, and studied medicine, and the son
becomes James, as the father should have been, and attempted at great
cost to revisit the medical desire brought through the family myth. The
father's coat of arms continues in the deed. In this real life drama the
generations are repeating what had gone before.
For Lacan, 'this subversive and critical movement by which man realises
himself finds its most active source in the conditions of the conjugal family'.10 In
his writings, including Ulysses,11Finnegans wake,12Poems and Selected
Writing,13 and Dubliners,14 his relationship with the role of the father, and
8
op. cit. p. 11.
M. & P. Colum. Our Friend James Joyce. (1959). In The Joyce we Knew. Ed. U. O' Connor.
Cork, Brandon, 2005. p. 60.
10
op. cit. p. 43.
11
J. Joyce. Ulysses. (1922). London, Everyman's Library, 1992.
12
J. Joyce. Finnegans wake. (1939). London, Penguin Classics, 1992.
13
J. Joyce. Poems and Shorter writings. (1904). London, Faber and Faber, 1991.
14
J. Joyce. Dubliners. (1914). London, Penguin Classics, 2000.
9
52
its Oedipal resolution, becomes an externalising of an unconsciously
driven topography of internal desire - a representation of his inner
world. 15 It is a type of mapping, bringing together, like a knot, the idea of
pere and ma mere, or map-pere, a boundary searching, set out by the
inherited leitmotif of the coat of arms, the coat which covers, and the arms,
whose reach, is carried by the father.
It is important to note the informing of this coat of arms on the
writer and poet James Joyce, a carrying and bearing of his father who
wanted that name but did not get it. This son who was imitating the
father, unconsciously, but knowingly, because the unconscious for Lacan
never lies. 16 He was determined in his life to embrace the ancestors and
do something with that inheritance seen in that failed attempt at medicine
in Paris. Then we see in this same picture the relationship with John
Byrne, who knew more about James Joyce that anybody else. If we read
Cranly we see the relationship. 17 For Ellman, Cranly in Joyce's work
represents intensity, jealousy, separation, and serious sin. 18 For Lacan
jealousy represents mental identification. 19
The father was the nom-du-pere, the nom-du-guerre, in relation to the
family insignia, precious to the father and the son. Like Jacob wrestling at
Jabbok with the angel, 20 Joyce wrestles through his writings with the
indentations of the coats and arms of his father. A new style is born from
the wrestling, with a psychic limp. This style of text is of non-castration.
Where was the mother? Is Restuccia correct in his Oedipal interpretation?
These are important questions. It is suggested by Restuccia that writing
facilitated the escape from the perceived tyrannical fathers. 21 The style
15
J. Joyce. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (1904). London, Penguin, 1967.
J. Lacan. Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent. (1972-73). Translated by Cormac Gallagher
from unpublished manuscripts. 2000. p. 5. (Held at the library of the School of
Psychotherapy, St. Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin).
17
T. Kileen. Ulysses Unbound. Wicklow, Wordwell, 2004. p. 21.
18
ibid. p. 116.
19
op. cit. p. 13.
20
The New American Bible. Genesis Ch. 32. v. 23-33. New York, Nelson, 1970. p. 35.
21
op. cit. p. 15.
16
53
therefore of his writing adds another level to that escape, as do the topics
and their form, and for Lacan, 'the ink of the learned is very superior to the
blood of the martyrs''.22
His struggle is against a given style of narrative and we know in
psychoanalysis that narrative is the outlet for the self, that speech and
narrative reveal our identifications and transferences, so what then are the
topics laden with in Joyce's narrative, and what precedes and follows
them in his ancestors and offspring? Joyce writes, laden with. His writing
can be looked at as a narrative of topography, he uses biblical texts and
figures, and in his own wanderings, he is like a biblical character.
Incarnation is real, he is concerned about the things in themselves. He sees
the splendour of being and epiphanies. These epiphanies themselves are
manifestations of the within and emerge by way of sudden realisations.
For Restuccia, signifiers are conjoined with single signifieds and
commenting upon the textual style he notes that it is 'a passage along a
metonymy of signifiers where the signified is no longer under the domination of
the signified,23
J. M. Cohen, quoted in Ellman's work on Joyce, verifies a comment
upon this incarnational reality of Joyce in a statement 'he seems to come to
things through words, instead of to words through things'.2* John Stanislaus
Joyce and James Augusta (sic) Joyce - a slip in the naming - a slip with
what effect on his life decisions? In his life he liked paying off his father's
debts and paying for the inheritance. His father was elected trustee of
nothing. 25 What does it mean to be the son of a trustee of nothing, given
the importance of the father in the formation of the individual? And what
does this say of the castration complex as seen through the textual style of
Joyce? What are the semiotics, or 'erotexf of non-castration?
Ulysses was published on the day of Candlemas Day and
Groundhog Day; Finnegans Wake too was given its title on this significant
22
op.cit. p. 3.
op.cit. p. 18; pp. 20-21.
24
R. Ellman. op.cit. p. 4.
25
ibid. p. 16.
23
54
day which was also his birthday. There is a non-accidental symbolism in
that knotting of connections. This would seem to be a true binding of his
works.
So the nom du pere was a nom du guerre, no boundaries and no Law
of the Father, and if Restuccia is correct the mother was the phallic mother
who was the law. The making of the map of Dublin could perhaps be an
inventing on an imaginary level of a form of boundaries, writing as if freeassociating, by day with Ulysses, and, by night, with Finnegans Wake.
The presence of the woman
His confirmation name of Aloysius, who was dedicated to purity,
allows us to ask what this meant regarding his attitude towards the sexual
relationship with women? Perhaps a poem will give us a hint - 'Woman -1
fear this dance is the dance of death faster -I am faint - I fall - The distant music
mournfully murmureth'.26 Freud writes about the dread that a man fears of
the woman, which arises with sexual attraction and desire, and carries a
primeval motif of a taboo which creates a phobia. 27 There is a relation
between sex and death.
This again relates to the issue of castration echoed in this fear of
death by woman. The woman is temptation and doom. Ellman notes that
he blamed his misfortunes on imaginary enemies. 28 His Father adds that if
'that fellow were dropped in the Sahara he would make a map of it'.29 Spoken by
the one who carried the leitmotif of heraldry and its determination.
Joyce's response to Ibsen's commendatory letter was one of great delight
and with his own father, his church fathers, his map-making, and a new
literary father, we can see what identifications underwrite this theme of
father's desire. We could say that the epic style, the biblical imagery, the
departing and journeying was a peripatetic expression of his inners - his
26
ibid. p. 82.
S. Freud. The Taboo On Virginity. S.E., XI, pp. 199-201
28
op. cit. pp. 30-34.
29
ibid. p. 18.
27
55
way of leaving that family portrait and yet keeping it like his father kept
the coat of arms.
This portrait represents the carried knowledge and myths and
aspirations which the father never put down and transmitted in yearning
form of the unrealised these same coats and arms of desire.
Lacan and Joyce and sinthome30
Lacan remarks upon the fact that nature is not one and that English
no longer exists in this writing where the splendour of being is like the
epiphanies. For Lacan, Joyce's art supplies the phallus. 31 The equivocation
in Joyce's work is a weapon against sinthome - something in the signifier
that resonates, and the drives are an echo in the body's response. 32
Perversion - or Fere-verse, a different text, namely of the father,
brings us back through his textual style to the search for his father in his
emulation and imitation. The perversion of literary style is a verse of the
pere. In Lacan's text on the Family we are told that to the extent that the
father is dominant, the most perfect forms of the ego are polarised in both
sexes. In diminished forms this diverts the energy of sublimation into an
ideal of narcissistic integrity. It fixates the progress of reality and brings it
to a halt. 33 This being so there is then a justified link between an erotics of
individual, castration, and its textual expression of unconscious
associations via identifications and transferences. Lacan remarks here too
that the Oedipal drama gives the father the function of sublimation.
Again, in this consideration of Joyce and his f/Fathers we can echo the
statement of Lacan, 'the ego ideal in its purest form is transmitted from Father
30
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XXIII. Joyce and the Sinthome 1975-1976.
Translated from the French from unedited Manuscripts by Cormac Gallagher (2002) and
held at the library of the School of Psychotherapy, St. Vincent's University Hospital,
Dublin.
31
ibid. p. 7.
32
ibid. p. 10.
33
op. cit. p. 39.
56
to son'.34 He further notes that: 'I do think that a great many psychological
consequences follow the social decline of the paternal imago' ?5
For Joyce himself, in Portrait, prays 'Old Father, old artificer, stand me
now and ever in good stead',36 The Joycean themes are a map of the internal
mapping of Joyce. For Lacan, Ulysses is Bloom, a father who seeks a son,
and they pursue one another throughout the whole novel. 37 Another
Lacanian quote gives us something to think about in the area of Joyce and
his Father ergo castration: 'regarding his wife he has feelings of a mother, there
is experienced a suspension between the sexes' 38
So we arrive back where we began, namely with what Restuccia
suggests - 'In breaking the Law, he united with his father, killing the patriarchal
mother and marries his non-castrating father' 39 The erotics of an author
permeate the narrative. In a final underlying of this contention let me
compare Joyce to Oedipus and a situation of castration by blinding. In a
poem of conversation with a Mr. Vance:
Mr. Vance: (comes in with a stick) ....
O, you know, He'll have to apologise, Mrs. Joyce.
Mrs. Joyce:
O yes...Do you hear that, Jim?
Mr. Vance:
Or else - if he doesn't - the eagles'll come and pull out his eyes.
Mrs. Joyce:
O'but I'm sure he will apologise.
Joyce: (under the table, to himself)
Pull out his eyes, apologise,
Apologise, pull out his eyes.
Apologise, pull out his eyes,
34
ibid. p. 43.
ibid. p. 45.
36
J. Joyce. Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. (1904). London, Penguin, 1967.
37
J. Lacan. op. cit. p. 15.
38
ibid. p. 16.
39
op. cit.p.15.
35
57
Pull out his eyes, apologise.40
Address
for
Correspondence:
67 Edenva le Road
Ranelagh
Dublin 6
Ireland
e-mail: b.kennedy@esatclear.ie
40
J. Joyce. Poems And Shorter Writings. (1904). London, Faber, 1991. p. 161.
58