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Upright man/fallen woman: identification and desire in James Joyce's "A Painful Case" - racial studies - Critical Essay
Style, Spring, 2001 by Gerald Doherty
In her stimulating reading of Frantz Fanon's anti-colonialist book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Diana Fuss analyses the strategies through which colonialism pathologizes the colonized subject. By excluding that subject from the fruitful self/other dynamics that creates subjectivity, colonialism polices "the boundaries of cultural intelligibility"; in so doing, it also determines which individuals attain "full cultural signification" and which do not. Through its dissemination of an imperialist power-knowledge, it arbitrates who shall (or shall not) have "unfettered access" to a rich self-identity. If, as psychoanalysis claims, the "I is an Other," then "otherness constitutes the very entry into subjectivity" (Identification 141-43). But what happens when, as in the colonized context, this entry is blocked or severely curtailed?
In effect, two striking pathological symptoms emerge, the first involving identification, the second desire. In the first, identification loses its radical force and its impetus--its power to remodel the self. (1) By depriving the colonized subject of the detour through the other that generates a complex fictive awareness of the self s polymorphous potential, colonialism impoverishes his sense of identity. (2) Because the colonizer alone propagates those idealized figures--national, cultural, religious--that function as models upon which he can mould his identity, his is the sole prerogative of identifying with them. The colonized subject, by contrast, either disavows identification with these (for him) ambiguous figures--they belong to the cultural domain of the oppressor-or he identifies solely at the level of mimicry, obeying the colonizer's injunction to be like, and unlike him at the same time. (3) Such disavowal, however, is also a mark of his subjugation, since it merely reinforces existing power-inequ alities.
In the second, colonialism impairs the transformation of the desire to be like (identification) into the desire to have (possession) the idealized object. (4) While the colonizer's desire flows without major impediment from one state to another (he is free to act out his desires), the colonized subject experiences only a block: an obscure shadow falls between one and the other. Because identification brings desire into being (Borch-Jacobsen 47) and precipitates incipient action, the colonizer has the monopoly of desire, since he alone can follow its path to its predestined fulfillment: he alone can indulge the voracious desire to assimilate the other in the near-certainty of its satisfaction. (5) For the colonized subject, by contrast, desiring is itself ambiguous, because it is sundered from any immediate prospect of possessing its object: the birth of desire, as it were, coincides with its traumatization.
The present essay has a narrow critical aim and, after this introduction, rarely lifts its eye from the Joycean text. My first task will be to read "A Painful Case" in the light of those pathologizations of identification and desire I outlined above. In dramatizing the vicissitudes of both these processes, the story highlights a crucial distinction between them. If James Duffy symptomatizes the impairment of identification (basically he disavows it), Emily Sinico symptomatizes the fate of desire, whose prospects of fulfillment are blocked. In effect, the story genders these processes, attributing failed identifications to the male and frustrated desires to the female.
My main task, however, will be to link these two processes to the basic metaphorics that structures the plot. While Duffy insistently attracts metaphors of elevation, Sinico attracts those of falling: ascent is his mode of organizing his world, while descent is hers. Duffy's failed attempts to occupy the higher ground match her repeated sinkings down to the ground. Their separate dispositions confirm the colonial pathology I have sketched Out: his aspirations to rise meet an impassable block, while the burden of her thwarted desires makes a fall seem inevitable. Because, their status as colonized subjects ensures that his frustrated identifications complement her frustrated desires, they engage contrapuntally in a kind of danse macabre with each other.
In a remarkable manner, these two major narrative vectors (ascent/descent) correspond closely to the rhetoric of rising and falling that Freud deploys in his theorizations of identification and desire. Freud, as Fuss notes, typically configures identification in terms of height: "identification works as a displacement upward; the ego elevates itself through identification, imagines itself always in relation to a higher ideal" (69). Indeed Freud's sole extended analysis of identification (in "Group Psychology") occurs almost entirely within a matrix of "ego ideals" and "superior powers" to which the ego strives to approximate, and whose "perfections" it emulates (139-41). The idealized figure (Freud calls him "the leader") commands identification, and "raises his hearers to the level of imagination" ("Group" 170). Whether at the level of the sociopolitical or the sexual, the aspiration towards a superior goal is the major spur to transforming the self through identification. Indeed one striking aspect of Dubli ners is the virtual absence of such idealized figures, that conventionally offer the characters rich cultural aspirations and goals. (6) "A Painful Case," in particular, highlights the radical impoverishment, even fossilization, of the self in the absence of idealized detours through the other. Duffy's failed identifications generate that traumatized exile from the self and from the larger community that is one crucial aspect of the fate of the colonized subject.
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