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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 JOYCE'S DOCTRINE OF DENIAL: FAMILIES AND FORGETTING IN DUBLINERS, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, AND ULYSSES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University B y James S. Brown, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1993 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Morris Beja Sebastian Knowles Adviser \/ Barbara Rigney Department of English ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Morris Beja, Sebastian Knowles and Barbara Rigney for their patient help and advice; to Sarah Pines, for many valuable suggestions and words of encouragement; and to my parents, for their ongoing support. VITA November 23, 1964 .......... Born - Ellwood City, Pennsylvania _1986 ....................... B.A., Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania 1986-1992 ................... Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University 1992 . ..................... Visiting Instructor, Denison University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................ ii VITA........................ ................................ iii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: TALES OF BRAVE ELLIPSES .... 1 N o t e s ............................. ............. 41 II. DUBLINERS: SUPPRESSION, OPPRESSION, AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED ................. 43 Stories of Childhood .......................... 50 Contexts for Milly Bloom . ..................... 75 Unhappy Returns .............................. 88 N o t e s .......................................... 108 III. STEPHEN HERO AND A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FATHER IN THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL ................ 113 Repressive Revision in Stephen H e r o .......... 113 Paternoster, Patria, and Paterfamilias .... 137 N o t e s .......................................... 183 IV. ULYSSES: REPRESSION REVISITED ............... 190 Telemachiad, the Library, and B e y o n d .......... 192 Dearest Papli: Leopold and Milly Bloom . 223 Homecoming: Resolution in "Circe," "Eumaeus," and "Ithaca" .......................243 Notes ................................... 268 CONCLUSION .......... 275 WORKS CITED .......... .......................... 279 iv CHAPTER I Introduction: Tales of Brave Ellipses Like Homer's Odyssey before it, Joyce's Ulysses is-- among the other things it is--the story of a son and a father. In the Odyssey, Telemachus, speaking of the Odysseus he has never seen, comments on the ultimate indeterminacy of paternity: "My mother says I am his son, but none / can know for sure the seed from which he's sprung" (Odyssey 1.270-271); in Ulysses, Joyce elaborates this theme. While the degree to which Ulysses is a "Homeric" work has of course been the subject of much debate, the association evoked by its title alone suggests that Joyce's novel can be read at least on some levels as a son's search for his father, and a father's search for home. Stephen Dedalus is to some degree a Telemachus figure, and Leopold Bloom is a latter-day Odysseus. But just as the nature and degree of the relationship between the Odyssey and Ulysses is still disputed in spite of Stuart Gilbert's Joyce-approved exposition of the Homeric parallels, the nature of the father-son relationship shared by Bloom and Stephen--if indeed there is such a thing in Ulysses-- has been a perennial subject of controversy among Joyce critics. Its final "yes" notwithstanding, the novel ends on a note of ambiguity; the effect of the union between Bloom and Stephen--or the failure of such a union to occur-- is unclear (and is in any case subordinated to Molly's dreamlike interior monologue). This dissertation is intended to participate in the ongoing psychoanalytic dialogue about paternity in Joyce; instead of concentrating only on the relationship between Stephen and Bloom, however, this study looks first at family relationships in Dubliners, and then at the families of Stephen and Bloom as they are portrayed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, locating them within the system of family interactions which Dubliners comprises. Specifically, I will explore the nature of repression as a theme and as a narrative device in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and, in the process of doing so, to answer these questions: first, if Stephen Dedalus is in some manner fatherless in Ulysses, why is Simon Dedalus such a prominent and even engaging character throughout the novel? The portrayal of Simon seems all the more remarkable after his steady decline in station (and in Stephen's--though not, as we shall see, in the narrator's--sympathy) in Portrait. Similarly, why is Milly Bloom kept entirely offstage in Ulysses? Why is Bloom perceived to be effectively childless when one of his first acts on June 16, 1904, is to read a letter from his 2 daughter? The answers to these questions, as well as to the broader question of Joyce's perspective on the significance of the family in the destiny of the individual, can shed much light on Joyce's oeuvre, from the realism of Dubliners to the dream poetry which concludes Ulysses and points to Finnegans Wake. The repressed family anxiety of Dubliners, suggested largely through the ellipses and omissions which characterize these stories, becomes the more overt subject of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel about coming to terms with family, Church, and state. In Ulysses two of the protagonists are tempted, during the psycho­ logically climactic "Circe" episode, to behold their repressed, forgotten fears; and Finnegans Wake, finally, turns repression fully into a literary device.1 Without trying unduly to psychoanalyze the historical James Joyce, this study follows the development of repression and forgetting as devices in his fiction. Freudian psychoanalytic theories--particularly the discussion of parapraxes which constitutes the bulk of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life- -are used to trace the connection between families, repression, and forgetting in Joyce's prose work through Ulysses. Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious are also used to shed light on some of Joyce's protean narrative strategies. The idea of applying the principles of psychoanalytic literary criticism to the works of James Joyce is not a new one; early reviewers connected Joyce and Freud almost immediately,2 and facets of psychoanalytic theory have been applied to Joyce's works with varying degrees of rigor and success at least since 1930, when C.G. Jung was invited to write an introduction for the German translation of Stuart Gilbert's study, James Joyce's Ulysses.3 Early Freudian studies of Joyce's work include Frederick J. Hoffman's 1945 "Infroyce," which discusses Joyce's exposure to psychoanalytic theory between the writing of Portrait and Ulysses.4 All of this is not to suggest, of course, that the subject of psychoanalytic interpretation is closed as far as Joyce's critics are concerned. Within the last two decades, in fact, there have appeared no fewer than seven book-length treatments of the intersections of Joyce with (most commonly) Freud, Jung, and more recently, Lacan. Each of these books has its merits; none, however, treats fully the portrayal of families in Joyce's works prior to Finnegans Wake, and none discusses in detail the linked phenomena of repression and forgetting as they are depicted in and enacted by Dubliners, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. The critical studies represent in microcosm (if belatedly) the evolution of psychoanalytic criticism itself, from the generally simplistic, shocking, and self-consciously iconoclastic Freudian efforts of Edmund L.