Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jacques Aubert The Letter
Jacques Aubert The Letter
JACQUES AUBERT
latter in the work of the former. According to Lacan the Name-of-theFather is a concept at the heart of the symbolic order and process: it does
not of course mean that a given subject may be identified in terms of
family name, but rather describes the key structural function of naming.
On the other hand, James Joyce, all along his various, experimental
texts, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through Exiles and
Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, seems to be groping in search of the right
name for the subject at the center of his creation, Stephen Dedalus,
Richard Rowan, Leopold Bloom, Shem the Penman, etc., as if, again in
his case, the function had been more important, indeed more essential,
than any actual patronymic.
A Portrait of the Artist: the Unnameable?
James Joyces earliest production corroborates such an interpretation, and
helps us to assess his literary programme. A Portrait of the Artist
(1904) is the first text that he offered for publication, in January 1904, to
the editors of the newly-created Dublin magazine, Dana, subtitled A
Magazine of Independent Thought. They, W. K. Magee, best known,
especially to readers of Ulysses, as John Eglinton, and F. Ryan, refused
it. Typically, various explanations have been given for their decision.
According to Magee himself, he read it in his office at the National
Library, in Joyces presence, and explained that he could not publish
what he himself did not understand.4 Stanislaus Joyce thought that the
refusal was due to the sexual episodes James alluded to,5 adding that his
brother thought that they objected to the fact that the text was too selfcentered. As a matter of fact, the three explanations converge: the idea
that Joyce was engaged in a very personal meditation on the enigma of
sex, on the very possibility of writing, of giving scriptural, logical form
to the relation between the sexes.
The title of the manuscript is remarkable in at least two respects.
First, it is dated 7 January, in other words the day after Epiphany, a
coincidence that any reader of Joyce is bound to find highly significant:
the author is indeed writing a memorial post-script to a major individual
experience, he is hard at work taking stock of that experience, in a selfanalysis of sorts formulating the general orientation and the basic points
of his artistic programme. Then, we must observe that the so-called
subject of this portrait remains nameless all along the sketch, although
it is possible to argue that he ultimately manages to formulate one, to
write it out.
10
JACQUES AUBERT
11
will take him some time to traverse, as it were, this position, to fly by
the net of imaginary identifications, the first of which being Stephen
Dedalus, in which he shows himself still a prisoner of the Church
(wasnt Stephen the first martyr of the Church, who assumed the
symbolic position of staking his life for something he had not
experienced directly: Christs predication and message?). The Blooms
were to be the next step, temporarily, presenting the human condition in
all its complexity, and embody two aspects of it: Womans inaccessible
jouissance as well as mans phallic jouissance.
Language comes in as a substitute for meaning (Jacques Lacan)
James Joyce obviously came to the same conclusion as Lacan, basing
himself on his own most personal experience as a young man immersed
in Catholic culture and theology: an ambiguous experience assuredly, in
which Nego, to be read as N . . . ego, is not a pure and simple
negation of Credo, but invites a new apprehension of language. The
suggestion is that writing may, or in the case of somes artists should, be
approached from its most paradoxical and enigmatic angle, namely the
letter, which is by nature not simply non-sensical, but radically horssens, beyond the realm of meaning, whatever the culture, Jewish or
Roman Catholic (a chorus of . . . gibberish and . . . clamour): an angle
which is most probably what Joyce described as the cunningest angle.
Joyces inquiry and discovery developed in stages, with several
turning-points: The Dead, which provided a long-eluded final
punctuation of Dubliners;6 the whole process of writing Ulysses, where
some of the episodes in particular, or some stylistic experiments in
general, indicate a definite shift towards a general manipulation of letters
to be given fuller scope in Finnegans Wake.
A curious parallel may strike the modern reader. James Joyce came
across Freud and the Freudian approach to the unconscious in Trieste
(when Ferdinand de Saussure, not so far away, was teaching a new
approach to language). Jacques Lacan remembered attending public
readings of Joyces works in Adrienne Monniers bookshop in the 1930s
(at a time when modern linguistics was developing decisively). I feel that
the parallel suggests an essential connection, in modern culture, between
writing and deciphering, between the letter and the unconscious: a
connection of which the 1904 A Portrait of the Artist bears
unmistakable traces.
12
JACQUES AUBERT
Notes
1
N.B. The present paper has been presented on the occasion of a lecture
delivered at the Sminaire de la Bibliothque of LEcole de la Cause
Freudienne, Paris, 11 April 2005.
2
Le Seuil, 2005.
3
Le Seuil, 2005, p. 14.
4
See William Kirkpatrick Magee, Irish Literary Portraits (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1935).
5
See Stanislaus Joyce, The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce,
ed. George H. Healey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).
6
See Jacques Aubert, Dun Joyce lautre, Lacan, lcrit, limage
(Paris: Flammarion, 2000). A Spanish translation of this volume was published
in Mexico a few years ago.
13