University of Tulsa Psychosis Lacan Sublimation Joyce's "Exiles

University of Tulsa
Psychosis Adumbrated: Lacan and Sublimation of the Sexual Divide in Joyce's "Exiles"
Author(s): Ellie Ragland-Sullivan
Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, Joyce between Genders: Laconian Views
(Fall, 1991), pp. 47-62
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25485238
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Psychosis Adumbrated: Lacan and Sublimation
of the Sexual Divide in Joyce's Exiles
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan
University of Missouri-Columbia
T he year-long Seminar on James Joyce (Le Sinthome, 1975-1976)

that arose from Jacques Lacan's friendship with Jacques
Aubert not only produced new ways of thinking about the
writings of James Joyce, but a new differential axis for psycho-
analytic thought. 1 After reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Finnegans Wake, Lacan mapped a fourth order he called that of
the Symptom (E). 2 He called the knot that unites the Real, Symbolic,
and Imaginary of each person's signifying chains, the sinthome-the
order of the particular. Using the Medieval spelling of the word
(sinthome) particular to the Romance evolution of the French lan-
guage, as opposed to the learned late Renaissance reborrowing of
the Greek root which has remained in the language as "symptome,"
Lacan demonstrated his theoretical point in language itself. One
must not lose sight of the distinction between the two. The Symp-
tom is the order of the knot, that extrinsic or visible aspect in a life
that points to something gone awry in the sexual non-rapport. The
sinthome bespeaks the particular, concrete, but enigmatic, emptying
of jouissance into language, being, and body, jouissance left over from
the cut. And the sinthome tells the paradoxically lost story of an
intertwining of gender, sexuality, and language, coalescing as the
subject, if not the substance, by which a life coheres as a seeming
unity. The actual "truth" is the discontinuity which dwells in symp-
toms, jouissance, and the object a. The "truth" of a life does not
emerge, in other words, from well made narratives or well formed
memories.
Joyce the artist confronts his readers with a literature that inspired
Lacan, in giving new meaning to the analytic concept of the symp-
tom, to reconceptualize sublimation as well. Departing from Freud's
notions, where sublimation is roughly equated with repression,
Lacan works with the sublime in terms of the object a. But what is the
object a? The object a means different things in Lacan'.s teaching.
47
Indeed its meaning is precise and different in each of the three
orders, although its functions overlap in the associational chaining
of the Borromean necklace. 3 In a general sense one might describe
the object a as an inaccessible and forever shifting limit, a condensed
kernel of jouissance-that which is closed to the effects of sense and,
thus, lies outside the transference-at the heart of every signifying
chain. Slavoj Zizek calls the object a the sublime object, "the im-
passive, imaginary objectification of the Real." 4 That is, the object a
is inert and veiled, the impossible kernel that cannot be spoken, but
which, nonetheless, evokes desire around which fantasies are elab-
orated. These, in turn, drive language to try to capture "it," say it,
embody it. But the object a is not itself the ephemeral "it" people
chase. Where one finds a petit a, one finds an excess injouissance. But
by identifying with an object a, one is in a moment of temporal
pulsation a subject of jouissance.
If we are to enter into Lacan's reading of Joyce, into how it differs
from literary interpretations of whatever stripe, we will read within
a context where authors write in order to speak to the opaque Other
(the place of what they do not know about themselves, the uncon-
scious) beyond their readers. Jacques-Alain Miller has called the
traits of the "beyond" in language, the insignia5 of the Symbolic and
Imaginary that include bits of the Real. Lacan described the Real as
that which "does not consist and which only exists in the knot." 6
When characters speak in novels or plays, Lacan does not mistake
them for the author (literary history), nor for the many splintered
voices of a society (Bakhtin), nor for rhetorical tropes (de Man), nor
for language traces (Derrida), but for the enigmatic traits in the text,
the object a which materializes language at the level of jouissance
effects. Language serves characters as a medium for trying to find
jouissance by deciphering desire. Indeed, Lacan says art is the quin-
tessential artifice, raising to its highest power the ciphering way
language uses us. Joyce wrote literature in an effort to decipher the
mystery of his symptoms, l:mt, in Lacan's opinion, never went far in
deciphering these symptoms because he believed in them. 7 Indeed,
he clung to them rather than trying to rid himself of them.
In Extimite Jacques-Alain Miller elucidates the meaning of this
object a, new in the history of thinking problems of subjects and
objects. It denotes, he says, a logically inferred consistency at the
level of libido. Its impact is, thus, corporal. And it proceeds from the
Real of impasse and impossibilities via the Symbolic to the Imagi-
nary. Catherine Millot has written: "At the place of the foreclosed
truth, the Real rises. If in life, Joyce saved himself thanks to the
imaginary of perverse fantasies and idolatry, writing allowed him to
48
have access to the Real as impossible."8 But this does not mean that
Joyce's writing is impossible. As Jacques-Alain Miller points out, the
object a is not the impossible, is not the Real itself. Rather, it is seen
between the Real and the Symbolic. It shows the contortions of the
Symbolic trying to designate the Real through naming some object
which is not quite sayable or visible. One can stop right here and
mention Joyce's play Exiles as continually stumbling over the object
a, the stopper or limit placed on the jouissance proper to a symptom.
The questions constituting the play are: what is freedom? truth?
trust? adultery? sexual attraction? love? suffering? We meet the
object a in language all the time, Miller says, as a function of the
Symbolic trying to master the Real.
I shall argue that the enigmata in Joyce's art unveil, even from his
earliest creations, the object a produced by what Lacan called Joyce'.s
non-sinthomal psychosis, his unanalyzable symptom. By "non-
sinthomal psychosis" Lacan meant that foreclosure of the paternal
reference, the poverty surrounding the Father'.s Name in Joyce's own
life, is compensated for by his art. 9 Joyce could certainly not be called
psychotic by clinical criteria or in terms of his art per se. He never
experienced a psychotic rupture with social reality. Nor are his
writings, even Finnegans Wake, the deliria of a pre-psychotic re-
organization of the fundamental fantasy from which each of us
projects the world. By contrast, Judge Daniel-Paul Schreber's efforts
to reunite the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary orders in his language
produced a kind of science fiction universe. Yet Schreber's Memoirs
are not self-consciously written as science fantasy because he be-
lieved his impossible fictions. Indeed, having identified with the
jouissance of a fantasy where nothing is lacking, Schreber could not
build enough coherence between Symbolic conventions and his
new fundamental fantasy to link himself to the sanity of the rules
and law we call social norm. 10 Joyce's art, on the other hand- his
creations shown to the Other-enabled him to inscribe himself in
the Symbolic, thus keeping himself from identifying only with the
jouissance attached to the symptoms Lacan claimed we love more
than ourselves. Why would we love our symptoms above all else?
Because the jouissance they produce functions as a glue, giving an
Imaginary consistency to our lives. By identifying with the repeti-
tions of familiar things, making of them objects of jouissance, one
creates a kind of consistency. For this reason, Lacan linked the
symptom to the death drive or the unconscious masochism common
to us all.
In any text brushed by psychosis-either the actual sterility of
psychotic language or a non-sinthomal psychosis wherein sublima-
49
tion produces art-the object a appears in the language as enigmatic
meaning, meaning which does not conform to social expectations of
a familiar story or typical family drama. In this sense, the language
of Exiles vacillates and fades, letting us glimpse in a moment of
crossing the Real in the object a hidden behind what the fantasy
would ordinarily cover over. 11 The object a coats fantasy and lan-
guage with jouissance effects. Whether the object a functions as the
cause of desire in the Symbolic and Imaginary($< >a) or as the
creator of discontinuities in the Real, it functions as a plug or point of
limit in language and fantasy. In this way, it produces the semblance
of consistency, whether it functions to replace lack, respond to
desire, or fill up the hole created by the radicality of loss itself. Or, as
Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, the referent of all language, of creation
itself, is the vacuousness of language, the void. 12 But paradoxically,
the continual and palpable emptying out of the void positivizes itself
as jouissance (negative) effects that appear as an excess in an other-
wise smooth flow of symbolization. The excess paralyzes the spon-
taneous movement of language and appears as an object a. There
one finds a question, an enigma, or a paradox.
In Finnegans Wake where Symbolic Order grammar is shattered
and syntax twisted, Lacan said the only object holding language,
artist, and story together is the voice. We must keep in mind that
Lacan defined the voice as a Real object. Such objects are detachable
at the level of jouissance effects. The voice, for example, is separable
from the vocal cords qua biological organ that make language seem
to be their natural product, a biological artifact. That is the organ
that seems to produce an object actually dwells in another libidinal
register from that object-product. Not only do voice and language
inhabit different registers of meaning, so do the eye and the gaze,
breast and hunger or desire, and so on. Lacan first discovered loss
producing desire at the moment of the cut. Henceforth, loss gives
rise to a gap of opacity. The point is this: loss does not disappear.
Cuts make losses that tie body and world together at the level of
effect by a knot. The knot is made up of unary traits as signifiers.
And it produces the object a, 13 or an excess in jouissance. But at the
level of cause one finds opacity and enigma whose non-sens, none-
theless, includes loss in meaning both at the level of the referent and
places loss in the middle of a word itself.
The voice begins to build associations in the Real (la lalangue) at the
level of effect long before one has any idea of why rhythms, tones,
accents (or silences) in language cause nostalgia, fear, or anxiety,
among other responses. In the gaps between one signifier and
another, one finds the subject represented as a meaning that tran-
50
scends signification, a meaning Lacan called a sens that arises from
desire seekingjouissance. In Exiles, written during 1914 and 1915, the
voice already functions as a link between Joyce the author (in some-
thing of the guise of Richard the protagonist) and the women in his
life, setting forth the structural basis on which Richard judges
women, against the measure of hatred he holds for his mother. This
hatred, I would suggest, still binds Richard to his mother insofar as
he measures the other women in his life in terms of his outrage at the
dicta issued by his mother's moralistic fervor. Richard's mother's
voice of rectitude (the superego tone) drove him from his homeland,
he says (E23).
Beatrice, by contrast, is cast in a positive light. Although her
attraction does not lie in her voice, her proximity to music foretells
the unifying thread in Finnegans Wake where one finds links among
music, a murmuring in language that joins it to the rivers and winds
of nature, and the voice itself as a libidinal organ. In Exiles Beatrice
plays the piano and gives Archie, the son, music lessons. Indeed,
the supposed reason for her visit to Richard Rowan on his return to
Ireland is to resume Archie's music lessons. Robert Hand, Beatrice's
cousin, and himself a pianist, describes Richard's wife, Bertha, the
sensual woman with whom he wants to make love, as resembling
something beautiful and distant like "the moon or some deep music"
(E32). He says to Bertha: "Your voice! Give me a kiss, a kiss with your
mouth" (E35). He seems to think he can imbibe her voice by kissing
her mouth, reminding us of how important Nora's voice was to
James Joyce-to the point he nicknamed her "Nor-voice."14
Good voices and bad voices-their tones, their sexual overtones-
play a role in considering the language of Exiles as bearing psychotic
insignia. Indeed, the clear transparent language of the play takes on
the meaning of opacity at another level: at the level of a force field of
structure where issues surrounding desire speak loudly about the
meaning of male/female gender difference. By reading in terms of
Lacan's topological structure of desire, the idea of a weakly inscribed
Name of the Father in Exiles suggests the foreclosure of a Father's
Name in the Symbolic that points to the problematic of psychosis.
If one considers Lacan's thesis that what is foreclosed in the
Symbolic returns in the Real, then preoccupation with the impos-
sibilities in the sexual relation (the non-rapport which is the Real)
points to too little identificatory distance from the mother, in the
name of some signifier for a father qua difference itself. By viewing a
person's saga of desire in these terms, it makes sense that the driving
force in all Joyce's texts would refer to the author's own symptoms
around matters of the paternal metaphor by which theory Lacan
51
rewrote the meaning of the Oedipal myth in reference, rather, to the
Real of desire and loss.
Lacan gave Joyce the name "Joyce le sinthome." But what was his
symptom? That he remained rooted in the problem of what a father
is, all the while denying it, Lacan said. 15 Lacan saw all his work as a
long testimony to this. As early as Exiles, written about the same
time as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce approached
something which, in Lacan's view, remained the central symptom
for him: the symptom created by the poverty typical of the sexual
relation. That is, there is no relation for man to woman written as a
harmonious formula in the unconscious. 16
Colette Soler clarifies what Lacan means by this expression or
axiom:
There are certainly bodies, biological bodies of different genders, and

signifiers related to sex: man and woman, father and mother, as well
as those which erect sexual ideals, such as "virgin," "whore," "wife,"
and so on. None of these inscribes the object which would annul the
sexual lack, and they all fail to compensate for the hole, for "the
partner of jouissance is unapproachable in language." The result is that
one seeks; that's why one speaks and why there is even satisfaction in
blah blah blah, unless one finds a ... replacement. That is what the
symptom does: it plugs up the "there is no such thing" of the no-
relationship with the erection of a "there is." Given that the appropri-
ate partner for jouissance is lacking, a symptom puts in place some-
thing else, a substitute, an element proper to incarnate jouissance .17
But, Lacan says, this poverty in the hoped-for sexual relation does
not take just any chance form for James Joyce. It takes the particular
one that ties him to his femme, to the woman Nora, during the period
in which he composed Exiles. There can be no better term than
"exiles" to express the non-rapport which is the theme of this play
where Beatrice wants Richard who wants Beatrice, but they only
manage to exchange letters for nine years. Robert wants Bertha from
before.her exile from Ireland with Richard, and Bertha wants Robert
but remains true to Richard. 18 Indeed, the question of the sexual
non-rapport is posed in its extreme form in that this play is about a
possible adultery within a marriage that is not one, except in terms
of common law. At this level, the play also asks the question about
why a relationship (married or not) would function as a rapport-
which it does in terms of Bertha's sexual fidelity to Richard- even
though the rapport of social legality or even the bond of early love
and passionate sex no longer obtains.
Of Exiles, Lacan says that the non-rapport is this: that there is truly
no reason that "a woman among others" be seen as one's own
52
woman. As Jean-Michel Rabate has put it: "Joyces 'central symp-
tom' ... discloses the deficiency proper to the sexual rapport." 19
Joyce poses this question for himself, in any case, in Exiles. In the
case of Bertha (who bears many similarities to Nora), this one
"woman among others" is also the one who may have a rapport with
any other man. In Exiles the other man, the one that Joyce imagines,
is Robert Hand. And, indeed, Richard gives Bertha/Nora the right to
choose between two different men who want her for different rea-
sons. In my view, Bertha satisfies Richard because she can accept the
shame of living outside the law, while remaining faithful, truthful,
loving, and sexual, thus enabling Richard to project onto her-to live
through her-his irresolvable conflicts about fidelity to the Church,
fidelity to a phallic mother, sexual attraction to unacceptable
women, and a deficiency around the problem of a worthy Father's
Name.
At this same period Joyce asked many questions about manhood.
What is a man's career? Is he, James Joyce, the artist, not just an
artist? Why does a lover choose one woman and not another? Is
Bertha the woman, or just any woman, as her attraction to Robert
Hand (a typical man) would suggest? Indeed, Lacan's theory that
decision or choice are responses that come from the Real, that is
from ones Being as symptom, casts a different light on the prob-
lematic of choice when raised in a literary context. Insofar as the
symptom is itself a symptom of the lack of harmony in sexual
relations, one's choices of love partners and one's erotic attractions
briefly lift the enigmatic veil from the Real, Lacan says. Pieces of the
Real fall onto the vectors of the Imaginary and Symbolic as object a,
revealing glimpses of the unconscious that lies between closures of
the Symbolic and the Real. At a general level, the essentialized
Woman of male fantasy is the answer a man finds to his identity
question about masculinity. Although there is no~ Woman, the
woman (or women) a man chooses is symptomatic, not only of his
relation to the Real, but also of how he answers Freud'.s question
regarding what a father is. Lacan's view of Joyce'.s answer is based on
the idea that "because our imaginar_Yt our symbolic and our real, for
each of us, are still dissociated, in order to knot them a Name-of-the-
Father is required. 1120
That Richards portrayals of fathers (memories of his own father
and. his view of his relationship with his son) are over idealized
suggests that Joyce writes in this play to try .to find out what a good
enough father is, to compensate for a flaw in the Imaginary father
who defines a child's value in the Symbolic in terms of lineage and
reputation of the famil_Yt thereby giving position in the social order.
53
In this sense any Imaginary Father, as interpreted by the mother,
conveys the quality of jouissance (too little, too much, enough) that
supports a viable ego fiction and worthy proper name (or not) for the
child. If the mother forecloses the actual Fathers Name from the
Symbolic, she bequeaths her child a weakness in distinguishing
between the masculine and the feminine, a problem that returns
later as a weight of too much jouissance, too little difference: the
condition Lacan named psychosis.
Wherever one finds psychotic traits - either psychosis itself or its
successful sublimation in art-it is accompanied by what Lacan
called a pousse-a-la-femme. In the terms of Lacan's topological logic, if
the Fathers Name is foreclosed or weakly inscribed, then primary
identification is with women, far beyond normative mother/child
bonding. Psychosis, by contrast to the neuroses, is defined, then, as
a lack of lack, as a deficiency in desire, a petrification within the
Other. This fixation to the Other's jouissance causes speech, bodily
movements, even relations with others, to fall almost completely
under the law of the Real. In the neuroses, desire responds, rather,
to the fact that something lacks in being. Desiring is a reaching out to
others to fulfill that lack, which plays around distinctions to be made
between the masculine and the feminine. The issue is not heterosex-
ual or homosexual object choice per se, then, but one of how the
masculine and feminine constitute the subject of desire as nor-
mative, neurotic, psychotic, or perverse.
From a Lacanian orientation, one can actually see loss functioning
in language, producing ephemeral forms of an object (a), lures
meant to satisfy but serving instead as the formal envelope of a
symptom. The fading in and out of language of an authors funda-
mental fantasy surfaces as a detour around the drive for satisfaction,
showing that something-the object a-is left over, some excess in
jouissance that goes beyond the experience of satisfaction or resolu-
tion (or their lack), doubt and fading being the constants in the
history of stories, not answers and solutions. Moreover, this some-
thing extra concerns the sexual difference that gives rise to desiring
responses in the first place, that leave traits (features or strokes) in
language: normative repression of the unconscious that Lacan
wrote as nor-male (and called the master discourse), the shape of
desire particular to the neuroses of hysteria or obsession, to perver-
sion or to psychosis.
Indeed, Lacan saw the raison d'etre of art as trying to say, hear, or
see this something more, this excess that hides our own secrets from
us, while showing us where to look for them. And secrets are
important in Exiles from the start. On his return to Ireland, Richard
54
blames Beatrice, the woman to whom he had written letters for nine
years while in Rome, for her secret engagement to Robert Hand.
Beatrice replies that she had been only a child, and first cousin of
Robert as well. Richard's reply is somewhat bizarre: "A child? Are
you sure? It was in the garden of his mother's house. No? ... You
plighted your troth, as they say, with a kiss. And you gave him your
garter. Is it allowed to mention that?" (E21). Three things are obvious
in this exchange. First, Richard (intellectual) is fascinated with why
Robert (vulgar) would be attractive to the female sex (both Bertha
who is sensual and Beatrice who is spiritual). Perhaps if Richard is
taken as Joyce's alter ego-or the enigma of Richards enunciations, a
matheme written Ee - Joyce's play could be taken as an effort to
resolve a conflict he finds in himself between the vulgar, sexual side
and the intellectual, spiritual side.
In the second act when Robert says "the kingdom of heaven is like
a woman" and Richard replies "that longing to possess a woman is
not love," Robert speaks a normative male discourse in declaring
that the law of love is the law of sexual possession, indeed, that "It is
nature's law" (£62-63). Robert even opines that at the Final Judgment
God will say that humans were not made for monogamy but to give
themselves to each other freely (£64-65). Richard questions whether
this should apply to women as well as to men. Indeed, working out
feelings about whether men and women are alike in separating sex
from love (or not) is one major burden of the play.
Second, Richard's emotional overreaction in interpreting what
plighting a troth might be: a childhood exchange of a kiss and a
garter. Generally "plighting a troth" means becoming engaged to
marry. Childhood experimentation with romance hardly qualifies as
undertaking the serious business of preparing to marry; that is to
exchange words of commitment one with the other which will be
witnessed by the Other. Yet, why is one more serious than the other?
What is marriage? Third, Richard questions Beatrice's reply, ''I was a
child," by asking: "Are you sure? It was in the garden of his mothers
house" (E21). Richard's words place Robert's proposal within the
domain of a mother's desire. But what gaze is really at issue? Is it not
the gaze of Richards mother, suggesting that in life (as well as in art)
what one says about sex, love, and betrothal tells us something
about the place from where one desires: speaking as a normative, a
psychotic, or a neurotic?
Within a Lacanian orientation, Richard takes cognizance of what
Lacan calls the Real as it appears fleetingly in language. One plights
one's troth in the Real of the gaze, in reference to the lane of the
drives, not just in the Symbolic Order of words. 21 At this level, the
55
drives continually perforate laws, beliefs, the totality of doxa, the
legality of wedded sexuality, and any other myth or convention.
That is, jouissance-the only substance of which Lacan admits-
cannot be legislated. It is the absolute we seek in desire, what we
drop from the objects we identify with in the Real, objects that fill in
the void at the paradoxically empty center of doxa. Indeed, doxa
become so many cultural and mythical answers to countless human
lacks and losses. In Colette Soler's words:
This void is found in analytic experience at every level-first of all as
the subject's lack, the first effect of speech being to transform the
living being into the subject of the want-to-be, which we [Lacanians]
symbolize with the minus phi (-<I>) of castration. It is also found as a
consequence of this first level, as the lack of the object which would
plug up this crack or fissure. This is what Freud closes in on with his
theory of an object which is always substituting for an originally lost
object. We recognize in this formulation that it is simply the subject's
lack which gives the object its importance. 22
From the start of the play, Richard sees sexual relations in the
realm of the Real, not the Symbolic. Indeed Exiles is a paradox
concerning a would-be adultery to be committed by a woman who is
not married to her husband in the Symbolic (legally, so to speak). Is
Joyce simply crazy not to see this contradiction? Just imagining
things to amuse his readers? No. Nor is he merely an avant-garde
freethinker. Is he, as Hugh Kenner asks, working with the problem
of ethical freedom via Ibsen, Schopenhauer, and others? 23 I would
say that while he pinpoints flaws in Catholic theology, he also
indirectly stumbles upon a logic in the Church that concerns the
Real, not the Symbolic; it is seeing this that makes Joyce an artist.
Indeed, why does a lover become a common-law wife after seven
years? Why does such a wife become semi-legal? One might say that
Joyce cum Richard is worrying the order of the Real by trying to
decipher the two problems posed by Freud-What do women want?
What is a father?-and that Joyce's art is a monument to the se-
riousness of these two questions. Richard approaches these ques-
tions by asking what a woman is; pitying his and Bertha's "godless
nameless child" (E24); pitting ideal father/son relations against the
brutality of his feelings toward his own mother who lived by the
rigidity of normative principles, driving him and his '"black protes-
tant,' the pervert's daughter" (E24) from their own home country.
Lacan's Joyce confronts us with the problem of the artist whose
inventions and creations are efforts to make the object a appear, to
work with the sublime object that produces discontinuities in seem-
ingly whole systems or totalized experiences. Lacan described Joyce
56
as not registered in the unconscious, as a writer who unburdened
himself of the weight of excess jouissance-that which does not make
meaning but is closer to something like mania - by coming to em-
body the sinthome itself. In this way; Soler writes, "Joyce has im-
posed on his commentators, for centuries to come, the weight of
meaning that his work forecloses." 24
In Exiles, the strangeness of some of Joyce's ideas bears witness to
the particularity of his sinthome. Although one could argue that
Exiles is not a strange play (when one stops to think that Richard's
entire preoccupation is to say to himself what the difference is
between a man and a woman, in terms of sexuality and love), one
will grasp that the problematic at issue here not only concerns the
mere restrictiveness of social norms but also a genuine confusion on
the character's part about a question that would not trouble a nor-
mative person, like Robert, for whom a man is a man and a woman is
a woman. Nor is Richard's confusion that of the neurotic. The
hysteric's question concerns gender, but at the level of trying to sort
out where she identifies as a woman and where she identifies as a
man. The obsessional's identity question concerns how to retrieve
some masculinity from his identification with the jouissance of death.
The pervert's question bears on whether he can be the total fulfill-
ment of an other by sexual prowess alone. Only in psychosis are the
lines of sexual difference completely blurred.
If psychosis is, as Lacan taught, the condition of having foreclosed
the Name of the Father in the Symbolic, only to have it return in the
Real as unbearable jouissance, one finds some traits in Richard's
suffering, which he calls, citing Duns Scotus, "a death of the spirit"
(E68). He thinks he has killed Bertha, metaphorically speaking, not
because he has betrayed her sexually, or because she gave up every-
thing to follow him, but because he has not given her the same
sexual freedom he has taken for himself (E69). If psychotic traits
suddenly appear as atypical statements about love or sex, as gender
confusions and conflations, what one hears in this passage is not
just a diatribe on conventional morality but Richard saying that a
woman is no different from a man. From then to the end of the play
he will try to impose his desire for proof of this hypothesis on Robert
and Bertha: his desire for her freedom and his betrayal.
From the 1970s on, however, Lacan argued that foreclosure of the
signifier for the Father's Name was not sufficient cause to explain
psychosis. Although the Real returns in the symptom to satisfy
superego demands for the right to jouir in the field of the Symbolic,
and the object a returns in the Real by way of the Imaginary in
fantasy; in psychosis, something else occurs. The Real becomes
detached from the Imaginary and Symbolic as hallucinatory voices
and images. Lacan learned from Joyce's art that a psychotic episode
can be avoided by identification with the symptom itself; such
identification is a final effort to deny the failure to negotiate desire in
the Symbolic and Imaginary. 25 This theory led Lacan to rewrite his
formula regarding "no sexual relation"; no signifier for gender in the
unconscious, no One representation inscribed for woman or man.
Because every subject is the subject of a symptom, thanks to the
particularity of the sinthome, the sinthome itself may stand in for the
fourth term which Lacan had previously called the Father's Name.
Jouissance becomes a kind of pure Symbolic signifier which makes
representation possible.2.6 In this theory, Joyce's sinthome itself be-
comes the knot, tying together the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary
orders in an overlapping requisite to any semblance of cohesive
functioning, however vacillating such cohesion may be. 27 In the case
of Joyce, the sinthome produced an art oflimits, even of desperation,
an art which revealed our Real perplexity when asked to value or
interpret language at its breaking point.
In the second act, Richard's confused commands to Bertha be-
come increasingly contradictory: Free yourself. Have no secrets
from me. Make love with Robert and tell me, but you could have kept
it a secret, he says. At the beginning of the third act Richard does not
know if Bertha has committed the adultery on the previous night or
not. He goes out onto the strand where he says he has heard voices
"jabbering since dawn" (E98). Now one could say this is just fiction,
has nothing to do with life, is a metaphor, and on and on. Or, one
could say Joyce is recording an experience he has had of hearing
voices. We do know that in psychotic episodes, voices return from
the Real into the Symbolic, as if from the outside, as if detached from
the mental life of the person hearing them. Let us suppose that the
possibility of Bertha/Nora's infidelity-her fidelity giving Richard/
James a guarantee of his manhood-could unravel a fragile ego,
splinter a tenuous name, into anonymous voices that speak like
demons, haunting and persecuting. "Woman-killer! That is your
name," says Bertha to Richard (E103). When Robert comes to reas-
sure Richard that no adultery has occurred, Richard speaks of
"Hearing voices about me. The voices of those who say they love
me." "And what did they tell you?" Robert asks. "They told me to
despair," Richard replies (E109). Finally believing Bertha, Richard
calls her his "bride in exile" (Elll).
At a Lacanian level of hearing, an exile could be one who identifies
with the extimate object a, at least at the level of gender identifica-
tion. Joyce is exiled from the unconscious, the place from which one
58
knows who or what he or she is. At another level, Richard tells
Bertha he does not want to leave Ireland again, not just yet, because
he is wounded.
I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul. ... It is not in the

darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding
doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in
body and soul in utter nakedness-for this I longed. And now I am
tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me. (£112)
In the desire uttered in pain by Richard, I hear the desire for

Oneness, for a symbiotic unity (soul virginity). I would agree, then,
with Catherine Millot who says that Richard does not want to live
with doubt, but "to evacuate it, to eliminate it. "28 Only by eradicating
doubt-God, Woman-from his psychic torment can Richard hope
to avoid the subject division he barely negotiates and live with the
comfort of certainty for which he strives, and which is a hallmark of
psychosis. Yet, the double bind for Richard is not so different from
that of the psychotic who makes just enough links to remain in-
scribed in the Symbolic by his dependence on the women he loves/
hates.
In "Notes by the Author," Joyce says of the love Richard seeks that
to" achieve that union in the region of the difficult, the void and the
impossible is its necessary tendency" (£114). He goes on to define
Richard's ideal salvation in a Bertha who could only understand the
chastity of her nature by losing it in adultery (E119). But one must
also understand the Richard who is against women and, like
Schopenhauer, is fighting for his own emotional dignity in which
they [women] are involved (E120). One can hear overtones of
Lacan's description of the sexual non-relation here, of his theory that
men and women belong to different races. But the part that suggests
traits of psychosis in the play is Richard's insistence that his dignity
lies in finding a woman who will be like him, some amalgam of
Bertha and Beatrice; that is, in foreclosing the sexual difference. One
might even see Richard's hatred of his own mother expressed early
in Act One, and Joyce's description of Richard's relation to the
mother ("He does not use the language of adoration and ... would
scarcely have been associated with his mother had it not been that
the Italian church discovered, with its infallible practical instinct, the
rich possibilities of the figure of the Madonna" -£120-21) as efforts
to break away from the primary object that weighed down Joyce the
author in the Real: too little distance from the mother'.s desire. From
such a perspective, Joyce the man is Joyce the artist, one and the
same in their exile from the land of Symbolic distance and neutrality.
59
When asked about his own father, John Joyce, James answered
with William Blake's scornful term for philosophers who stifle the
creative principle: "Nobodaddy."29 At the Imaginary/Symbolic level
one can hear the scorn of the artist for the would-be systematic
thinker, just as Richard scorns Robert, the journalist. At the level of a
resonance in the sound of the word itself, Joyce is answering the
question about who his father is with the English word "Nobody."
Lacan says Joyce took upon himself the mission of decomposing and
destroying the phonetic identity of language, not identifying with
the word, with the Symbolic order of language and law. But after his
father's death, Joyce wrote a letter saying: "It seems to me his voice
has somehow got into my body or throat. Lately, more than ever-
especially when I sigh" (Letters III 250). 30
To destroy language is to destroy the Name of the Father, insofar
as the name is contiguous with the order of words and laws. Yet
there is a remainder, an object a of the Real, a leftover piece of the
father: his voice. And Joyce cannot destroy that irreducible kernel at
the heart of each of his interlinked chains. For in its jouissance, this
voice is inscribed on his body and bores into his flesh. In Exiles Joyce
dramatizes the suffering of a psychosis which never became one by
showing the logic of a paradoxical dilemma. Richard tortures the
woman he loves. Insists on fidelity. Desires infidelity. Tries to tran-
scend the need for a social law by living outside it, but still cannot
escape it. The drama never moves, I would suggest, because Joyce's
own dilemma has not yet at this date (or in this genre) found its route
to an invention worthy of his sinthome. Rather, Richard seems to
dialogue, while actually his voice goes on and on in a monologue.
Sheldon Brivic thinks Richard's presiding power over the play is the
result of his freedom. 31 I would suggest, rather, that Richard's mono-
logue betrays the petrification in James Joyce's language, in the
language of one who is enmeshed in-cest, in a psychic incestuous
bond with the mother. One could discern the language of symbiosis
excluding the law of difference, or the fantasies of rapport with
which most couples make do. The Scylla and Charybdis of James
Joyce's dilemma would be the despair that animates his grandeur:
the law he cannot escape is no law at all.
NOTES
1Jacques Aubert, ed., Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin, 1987).

2Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII (1975-1976), Le Sinthome, Un-
published Seminar.
3 See Russell Grigg, "Lacan on object relations," Analysis, 2 (1990), 39-49.
60
4 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989),
p. 185.
5 Jacques-Alain Miller, Ce Qui Fait Insigne, Unpublished Course, 1986-87.
6 Le Seminaire, January 13, 1976.
8 Catherine Millot, "Not Yet Virgin," in this issue, p. 45.
9 Carlos Lajonquiere, et aL, "Quelques questions sur la prepsychose," in
Clinique differentielle des psychoses: Fondation du champ freudien, ed. Lilia

Mahjoub-Trobas, et al. (Paris: Navarin, 1988), pp. 11-24.
10 Daniel-Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, ed. and trans.
I. Macalpine and R.A. Hunter, intro. Samuel Weber (Cambridge: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1988). See D.P. Schreber, Denkwiirdigkeiten eines Nerbenkranken
(1903; rpt. Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1973). See also Sigmund Freud, "Psycho-
analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoides)" (1911), Standard Edition, XII, 3-82.
11 Jacques-Alain Miller, Extimite, Unpublished Course, 1985-1986. See
also "Extimacy," trans, E Massardier-Kenney, Prose Studies, 11 (December
1988), 121-30.
12 Jacques-Alain Miller, "Language: Much Ado About What?," in Lacan
and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher
(New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 33,
13 Jacques Lacan, "The subversion of the s~bject and the dialectic of desire
in the Freudian unconscious" (1968), in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 314-15.
14 Edna O'Brien, "She was the Other Ireland," review of Brenda Maddox,
Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, New York Times Book Review, June 19, 1988,
p. 33.
16 Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XX, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 17.
17 Colette Soler, "Literature as Symptom," in Lacan and the Subject of
Language, p. 216.
19 Jean-Michel Rabate, "The Modernity of Exiles," in European Joyce Studies
I, ed. Christine van Boheemen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), p. 25.

2° Claude Leger, "J. J. and son," Quarto, Les psychoses, 28/29 (October
1987), 55,
21 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: WW. Norton, 1977),
pp. 67-68.
22 Soler, p. 215.
23 Hugh Kenner, "Exiles," in Dublins Joyce (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter
Smith, 1969), pp. 69-94.
24 Soler, p. 218.
25 J. Aramburu, et al., "Journal: 'Le Seminario Lacanio' de Buenos Aires,"
Ornicar? 33 (1985), 170-73.
26 Adriana Grisolia, "James Joyce y el nombre del padre," Revista del cercle
psicoanalic de Catalunya, 5 (1988), 29-31.

27 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, "Lacan's Seminars on James Joyce: Writing as
Symptom and 'Singular Solution,"' in Psychoanalysis and . . , , ed. Richard
Feldstein and Henry Sussman (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 85-86.
28 Millot, p. 45.
61
29 Leger, p. 56.
30 Also referred to in Leger, p. 58.
31 Sheldon Brivic, "Structure and Meap.ing in Joyce's Exiles," JJQ, 6 (Fall
1968), 49. Brivic points out that critics have observed that Richard seems to
control virtually all of the action of Exiles.
62

University of Tulsa Psychosis Lacan Sublimation Joyce's "Exiles

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University of Tulsa Psychosis Lacan Sublimation Joyce's "Exiles

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University of Tulsa

T he year-long Seminar on James Joyce (Le Sinthome, 1975-1976)

There are certainly bodies, biological bodies of different genders, and

I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul. ... It is not in the

In the desire uttered in pain by Richard, I hear the desire for

1Jacques Aubert, ed., Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin, 1987).

9 Carlos Lajonquiere, et aL, "Quelques questions sur la prepsychose," in

Clinique differentielle des psychoses: Fondation du champ freudien, ed. Lilia

I. Macalpine and R.A. Hunter, intro. Samuel Weber (Cambridge: Harvard

I, ed. Christine van Boheemen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), p. 25.

psicoanalic de Catalunya, 5 (1988), 29-31.

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