THESIS TITLE ‗Towards the Undecidable‘: A Reading of the texts of James Joyce, Sean O‘Casey and Paul Howard through the Deconstructive Lens of Jacques Derrida NAME: CLARE GORMAN AWARD: PhD INSTITUTION: MARY IMMACULATE COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF LIMERICK SUPERVISOR: DR EUGENE O‘BRIEN SUBMISSION DATE: JUNE 2011 i DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis represents my own work and has not been submitted, in whole or in part, by me or any other person, for the purpose of obtaining any other qualification. Signed: Clare Gorman Date: 26/08/2011 ii ABSTRACT This thesis provides a comparative and contrastive perspective on the works of James Joyce, Sean O‘Casey and Paul Howard, with particular thematic focus on their portrayals of Dublin. Joyce provided a vision of Dublin in the early 1900s, as a modern metropolis which was, for him, a center of paralysis. O‘Casey put on stage the tenement life of the mid-1900s while Howard depicted contemporary upper-middle class Dublin society. The three writers used very specific forms of language, with Joyce capturing the middle class dialect, O‘Casey depicting the ordinary working classes tenement life and Howard portraying the twentieth first century upper- middle class spoken idiom. I will examine specific contextual aspects of the works of this Dublin trio in terms of their shared but different articulation of a Dubliner. In addition to this the thesis is theoretically-driven by Derrida‘s concept of hierarchical oppositions, and by how the history of Western discourse has been based upon that of binary logic, which can be dismantled through a close reading practice which deconstructs these binaries by looking for irruptive elements of the text which can then produce what Derrida sees as ‗undecidables‘. Hence the argument of this thesis is to analysis three major binaries, namely high/popular literature, speech/writing, and maleness/femaleness through the texts of Joyce, O‘Casey and Howard in order to display how binary logic can be dismantled to the point of undecidability in each case. I argue that each of these writers exerts a destabilizing effect upon the notion that binaries are arranged into a violent hierarchy and will demonstrate that, when dismantled, the binary elements are interdependent as opposed to mutually oppositional. Hence I am referring to an order that is lacking structure by introducing Derrida‘s notion of ‗undecidability‘. I aim to iii prove that there is not a bond of purity attached to either half of the hierarchical opposition, and that their inherent asymmetrical value-systems are not givens, but rather constructs, which can, in turn, be deconstructed and I will analyse how each of these writers liberate such notions of undecidability in their work. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Dr Eugene O‘Brien whose encouragement, guidance and knowledge of literature and theory has been of enormous value and continues to inspire me. From the outset his support has been irreplaceable. Thank you to Dr Arthur Broomfield, whose love of literature and theory has been infectious and his ongoing encouragement and interest in my research is much appreciated. My fellow English postgraduates for their friendship thanks are due. I am grateful to the staff of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, for allowing me the opportunity to partake in such a vibrant and progressive research community. Thank you also to the students of Mary Immaculate College who have brought my learning beyond the covers of any book. I am indebted to my parents, for their support and ongoing belief in me as a person and my endeavours. Finally, thanks to Kevin for his patience and valuable technical assistance. v TABLE OF CONTENTS General Introduction ...................................................................................................................1 Chapter One Theoretical Perspective ......................................................................................... 15 1.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 15 1.2 Deconstructive Strategy ................................................................................................... 19 1.3 Applied Deconstruction – Dublin South/North? ............................................................... 43 1.4 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 55 Chapter Two: High and Popular Literature ................................................................................ 56 2.1 Individualistically Created Canon .................................................................................... 56 2.2 Literature as Pharmakon .................................................................................................. 70 2.3 The Responsibility of the Reader ..................................................................................... 81 2.4 Breaking the Margins: Close Reading .............................................................................. 87 2.5 United by the Scolding of the Public Eye ....................................................................... 100 Chapter Three: Speech and Writing ......................................................................................... 111 3.1 Phonocentrism: a privileging of speech .......................................................................... 111 3.2 Readings of Philosophical Works .................................................................................. 114 3.3 Applied dismantling of the opposition speech/writing .................................................... 122 3.4 Joyce speech/writing ..................................................................................................... 127 3.5 O‘Casey speech/writing ................................................................................................. 138 3.6 Howard – speech/writing ............................................................................................... 148 Chapter Four: Maleness and Femaleness ................................................................................. 162 vi 4.1 The Theory Underpinning male/female duality .............................................................. 162 4.2 The Male/Female opposition applied to the text – Joyce ................................................ 166 4.3 The Male/Female opposition applied to the text – O‘Casey ........................................... 199 4.4 The Male/Female opposition applied to the text – Howard............................................. 216 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 216 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 245 Primary Sources ...................................................................................................................... 245 Works by James Joyce ........................................................................................................ 245 Works by Sean O‘Casey ...................................................................................................... 245 Works by Paul Howard ....................................................................................................... 245 Works by Jacques Derrida ................................................................................................... 246 Secondary Sources .................................................................................................................. 248 vii General Introduction James Joyce is described by Jackson Cope as the ‗father of modern literature‘ (Cope, 1981: 1), and justifiably so, as he reshaped the form of the short story through his publication of Dubliners, and has recreated the form of the novel in Stephen Hero, the abandoned forerunner to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and the trans-generic work that is Finnegans Wake. In these works, Joyce provided a critical analysis of the family, of the state and of the city of Dublin: the city that for Joyce was the source of ‗hemiplegia or paralysis‘ (Cope, 1981: 2). Joyce envisaged himself as a ‗socialist artist‘, and he is known to have attended the meetings of the Irish Socialists in Dublin up until 1904 (Wawrzycka and Corcoran, 1997: 84). His thematic focus on the city of Dublin was unusual in a literary landscape where much of the work being done focused on rural Ireland, and was attempting to find some sense of prior Irish identity in that landscape. Joyce ‗stripped away not only the façade behind which people in Dublin lived their little lives, but he did this by stripping away all unneeded detail‘, and his writings ‗abound in sharp social observation‘ (Costello, 1980: 108). In contrast to ‗the peasants of the Irish Revival, beloved by Yeats and Pearse‘ who ‗belonged to a dying nineteenth-century World‘, Joyce‘s Dubliners ‗belong, in their dreams and ideas, to the world of the twentieth century‘ (Costello, 1980: 113), and these dreams were those of lower middle class people who had to work for a living. In essence, Joyce‘s Dublin was a modernist city. A similar thematic focus on the portrayal of this city made the dramatist Sean O‘Casey ‗as much if not more of an Irish shake-scene at the end of the century as