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SHELDON BRIVIC Aristotle defined the psyche, mind or soul, as the primary organization of knowledge in a living being ( De Anima, 412). Without a mind to inform it, life disintegrates into unconnected phenomena, and so psychology implants a mind in its subject. To be unified, a mind must have continuous structural principles, but to be alive, or capable of change, it must combine different interacting forces. Joycean psychology aims to define the mental structures and activities involved in Joyce's work; to see these clearly, we must ask not only what kinds of psychic apparatus are found there, but where they are located in relation to the text. The concept of mind as a dynamic interaction of forms and impulses is maintained today by the theories of psychoanalysis. This definition of mind is generally regarded as essential to understanding Joyce, and most psychological treatments of Joyce's work to date have been analytic. One exception, Erwin R. Steinberg The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in Ulysses, uses statistical analysis of verbal patterns to explain how Joyce represents cognition and association, differentiating the textures of thought of his protagonists. But when he wants to explain motivation in depth, Steinberg turns to an external psychoanalytic source. 1 Significant human decisions involve agencies in the mind that influence each other qualitatively, impulses that change each other's natures. For this reason, the principles that make a psychological system mathematically precise tend to sunder it from real mental action. Of course, effort is being made to bridge the gap between mechanism and mentality. Douglas R. Hofstadter's relation of mathematics and creativity in Gödel, Escher, Bach has excited Joyceans and is likely to stimulate attempts to present Joycean mentality in cybernetic terms. 2 Such an approach rests on the fact that the mind in Joyce is an assemblage of words, but it may go astray in assuming that words are inanimate. At any rate, Joyce himself wondered if a being could be constituted out of a multiplicity of mathematical functions: "howmulty plurators made eachone in person?" ( FW 215.25). Another theory relevant to Joyceans is the bicameral psychology of Julian Jaynes, which is based on distinctions between brain lobes that suggest the differences between Shem and Shaun. 3 Finally, the cognitive psychology of Jean Piaget and others can explain stages of Stephen Dedalus's development and can clarify logical functions involved in Joyce's writing process. 4 I hope these non-analytic approaches can be brought in touch with the essential mental life of the novels. So far, however, the psychology of Joyce has been largely psychoanalytic, and the vital interplay of such analysis seems to mesh with something central in Joyce. Lionel Trilling spoke for many early critics when he said in 1940 that of all modern novelists, Joyce "has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas." 5 Twenty years later the idea of Joyce as a follower of Freud seemed questionable, but it has now been confirmed. Perhaps the strongest indications against Freud appear in Richard Ellmann James Joyce: though Ellmann psychoanalyzes Joyce in his eighteenth chapter, he presents a series of quotations from Joyce disparaging Freud throughout his biography, perhaps because he was struck by statements contradicting a common assumption. From 1966 on, however, a stream of material has supported Trilling's opinion. The letters and personal writings in which Joyce recorded his sexual pathology in detail were followed by the line "Wit. read Freud" in the Ulysses notesheets. 6 Then came Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce, in which Joyce expresses his intention "to enlarge our vocabulary of the subconscious"; 7 in The Consciousness of Joyce, Ellman reports that Joyce bought four books of analysis from about 1910 to 1918. 8 As one of these was Freud Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we now know that Chester G. Anderson was right when he said that Joyce systematically included in Ulysses every kind of parapraxis listed by Freud. 9 Though Joyce mocked the authority of psychoanalysis, he followed its ideas and saw their affinities with his own. The latest source of his analytic thinking is the Joyce Archive. One important passage occurs in one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks: [[ [the autobiographical Shem] identifies se with own penis
oral zone
observing a coitus
our littleman's
ego
totem 10 If these lines are equated with each other, they mean the ego is a phallus, a sensitive zone, a vision of terror and bliss, a god. This would explain such elements as the tumescence and detumescence techniques of the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, by which the mind works as a phallus. Like other notes, these are not a listing, but a theorizing along lines of association posited by Freud. If we grant that Joyce's definition of mind followed a Freudian dynamic, the next step toward understanding the Joycean mind is to ask where it is located. There are at least five levels of mind involved in Joyce's enterprise: the mind of Joyce, those of the characters, those of the readers, what Hugh Kenner calls the mind of the text, 11 and the mind of the language. Each of these may be seen as plural if we grant that language, text, and the individual mind may be divided. Shem is described as being "of twosome twiminds" ( FW 188. 14), adding up to four and rendering every opponent an "octagonist" ( FW 174.17). If each of the five mental levels of the work is related to itself and to each of the others, fifteen combinations are possible, such as reader to character, book to language, one character to another, and Joyce to himself. There is every reason to believe that Joyce was aware of all of these parts and relations and of how they operate in the work. The psychology of each of these connections should be understood in terms of its position and its function in the Joyce world, rather than subjected to some overall scheme for the whole. Of course, some of these junctions represent better possibilities for study than others. For example, there is need for a study of the dynamic relation of the reader's mind to Joyce's text. 12 But the major need is for a theory of the relation of these positions to each other, and the abundant development they all receive in Joyce makes him an ideal subject on which to develop such a theory. Having suggested one framework of possibilities, I would like to move toward the question of what kinds of minds we can locate in Joyce by a consideration of what has been done. In Joyce in Nighttown, the first psychoanalytic study of Joyce, Mark Shechner sees Joyce's personal writings and Ulysses as a series of gestures by which he related to himself. Shechner shows how Joyce made up for the loss of his mother and for his distance from Nora Barnacle by reconstituting his mother and Nora through his work as an internalized function. This function helped him gain control over his mind by allowing him to release perverse fantasies from his unconscious. Shechner, who uses ego psychology, sees Joyce's rational side progressively assimilating his irrational guilt and desire into a self-enclosed structure. 13 My own Joyce Between Freud and Jung focuses primarily on a mental process in the minds of the characters which takes the form of a continuous interaction between opposing forces in all of the works. I see this opposition as expanding from Stephen Dedalus's fear of father and drive toward mother into the opposition between skepticism and myth in Joyce's mind, and this division I see as represented by the conflict between Stephen and Leopold Bloom. I use the theories of Jung, which view the mind as regenerating itself through conflict, to describe the transcendence I find in Joyce's last phase. 14 The idea of covering the range of Joyce's thought by combining Freud with Jung goes back to the classic Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson ( 1944), but I explain how the two theories are related in Joyce. Another combination of Freud with myth appears in Elliott B. Gose's The Transformation Process in Joyce's Ulysses. After a fine treatment of Joyce's use of Giordano Bruno's theory that God is present in the process of transformation in his creatures, Gose explains how the characters and the reader achieve release and regeneration through contact with symbols of transformation which Joyce plants in the text. 15 Thus, he shows how myth implants God in the mind of the work. Despite some drastic differences, Shechner, Gose, and I have a good deal in common. We all make use of overlaps between the minds of author, character, and text. Our positions may be coordinated with the levels of Joycean mentality by one's recognizing the different areas we emphasize: Joyce's ego went on achieving mastery of a world of fantasy while his impulses (projected in characters) continued to divide him, making it necessary for him to believe in the benevolence of myth that appears as a substructure of his text. He was able to embrace immortality in his last phase by decking it with skeptical defenses. Of course, these functions do not exhaust any level. The individuality and compatibility of these works spring from the magnitude of Freud's vision, and there are many opportunities for further extensions. For example, D. W. Winnicott's theory of shared space between mother and child as the basis of creativity could be applied to various levels of relationship in Joyce, as could Heinz Kohut's about idealizing and transmuting internalization. 16 Nor does one need a new analysis for a new approach: Meredith Anne Skura's use of the analytic process as a method of knowledge, for example, might be applied to stages of Joyce's development or composition. 17 But a new factor must interrupt this attempt at a harmonious unfolding. At a distance from these three studies are two based on new French theories. Both of these works mix the ideas of Jacques Lacan with the structuralism and deconstruction to which they are related, and it does not seem that the established framework can accommodate them. Margot Norris The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake uses the model of an empty unconscious over which the structure of language on the preconscious level attempts to impose laws. This follows Lacan's equation of language with the unconscious. 18 Norris shows how the effort of language to assert meaning in the Wake keeps defeating itself. Rather than being in the Wake, the mind she deals with is in language itself, in fact in all languages. The Wake consists of deconstructions of this mind, failures of contact between its elements. Norris discovers important qualities that saturate the Wake, such as "the grace . . . of freedom." 19 It may be asked, however, whether she recognizes more than a part of the intelligence that orders the Wake. Colin MacCabe, in James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, starts with the idea that desire, which he sees as connected to mother, must be repressed to create reality. He then examines Joyce's mounting effort through his career to destabilize language in order to liberate the revolutionary maternal force of desire from the paternal strictures of fixed meaning by releasing the shifting of different meanings in each word. 20 MacCabe is penetrating in describing how Joyce uses language, though he is not usually as well-focused as Norris. Both are brilliant books, and a third could be written on Joyce by use of Lacan's theory of transference. But how do such studies relate to other analytic methods? I do not think that the application of Freud to linguistics will replace Freud any more than his social writings replaced his works on the mind. If one locates mind in language, as Joyce did through the image of the letter in the Wake, it nevertheless remains mind. And all scientific systems for explaining the motivation of the mind in depth are derived from Freud's. In Norris, MacCabe, and Lacan, language is troubled by a disturbing undercurrent called guilt or desire. This indicates the extent to which the Freudian mind has here been transplanted to language, and Lacan insists that his theories are implicit in Freud. It remains to be seen to what extent linguistic theories of the mind will prove more viable than Freudian theory or change its main models. But even if all the mental content of Joyce appears through language, we have to consider that deconstruction is only one aspect of language, an aspect that can be used to demolish theories, but not to support life. The constructive aspect prior to deconstruction includes elements that are not conscious, elements of the drive toward life. Freud used these when he found unconscious libidinal meanings in words. An aggregate of these elements, personality, is vital to Joyce, yet it is excluded by deconstruction. MacCabe says biography must be omitted from consideration in analysis of a text. But he later says that because every text is formed by interaction with other texts, nothing is outside the text, and therefore "the division between author and text cannot be sustained." 21 He admits Joyce as a text, but does not say how this text can be composed without reference to biography. In fact, both MacCabe and Norris describe policies of liberation based partly on Joyce's nonfictional statements. To omit the correspondence between author, text, and reader is to omit communication. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud says, "it can of course only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet." 22 Stephen agrees when he says Shakespeare is "heard" in Hamlet, "the son consubstantial with the father" ( U197). They both follow Aristotle: "from art proceed the things of which the form is in the soul of the artist." 23 The individual mind of the author, which is analogous to one volume in the library of the whole language, is the most specific source for the mental content of the work on all levels. This unique construct selects the interferences that make up the deconstruction of language, a deconstruction which is always shaped by individual neurosis. Think of Robbe-Grillet, who set out to write a literature without imposition and proceeded to create a pageant of obsession. In the case of Joyce the ironic displacements of deconstruction are not only critical, but defensive: they allow him to unleash the vital affirmation of the last phase. How important Joyce's mind is to reading his work is suggested in the Wake: "the melos yields the mode and the mode the manners. . . ." ( FW 57.2-3). Roland McHugh informs us that this refers to the stages of Confucius's learning of the zither: first he learned the melody, then the rhythm, then the mood, and finally "'the kind of man who composed the music. Now I know who he was . . . his eyes when they looked into the distance had the calm gaze of a sheep.'" 24 This matches other passages in Joyce that indicate not only that artistic creation is personal reproduction, but that the final goal of aesthetic perception, the whatness or soul of the object, is defined by the author's mind. A well-known example is the description of Shem that says that if one peers through the mess of mottage, "the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish . . . writing the mystery of himsel. . ." ( FW 184.3-10). This personal depth Joyce refers to continually as the source and goal of art is a principle we use constantly when reading. We could not identify the Confucius quote that provides one of the main meanings of Joyce's line above without knowing Joyce's reading, a biographical fact. Joyce's mind, his structure of associations and impulses, is a substratum of every line of the Wake, the principle that organizes its levels of meanings. The chief obstacle in literary thought to seeing the mind of an author in his work is the theory of intentional fallacy. This idea is valuable as a warning against applying an author's statement to his work where it does not fit, but it is misused to separate an author's thought from his work absolutely--as if the mind did not control the hand because the hand does not always do what the mind wants. Intention is always essentially related to text. If the author's ideas enter his creation distorted, reversed or even indirectly, the method that can explain the transformation between mind and work is psychoanalysis. The common origin of every part of the mental structure of the work in a unique personality is invaluable to the critic, but it does not make all parts subject to the same laws. What I have said about the relation of Lacan and deconstruction to psychoanalysis confirms the earlier suggestion that different schools tend to cover different areas of the entire structure. Various levels and connections in various works will emphasize factors accessible to different theories. This does not mean that all theories are equally valuable. Their value continues to be determined by how well they cover the material--as well as by their consistency and their relation to the major features of depth psychology. Norris's larger sense of context allows her theory to cover the Wake better than MacCabe covers the works he writes about, but his greater knowledge of language allows him to develop Joyce's linguistic techniques more extensively than she. Both theories describe impulses that cannot exist without something larger to contain their deconstruction. Critics, then, should avoid the idea that there is one correct theory for psychologically interpreting literature or even one work. Whatever external authority a theory may have, it must be understood in terms of what function of the work it describes. Norris, for example, remembers the affirmative, mythic view taken by the Skeleton Key and shapes her theory to meet this Jungian view. Recognition of how the minds in the text are divided must be accompanied, to avoid fragmentary theories, by an awareness of how they operate as parts of a dynamic mental unity. Joyce's canon is one continuous expansion of the concept of mind, which grows more powerful and complex from work to work and within each work. Dubliners shows a group of minds controlled by society, not suggesting any possibility of freedom until its last story. A Portrait shows a young man growing aware of such control and using his knowledge to develop an individual mind. In Ulysses, two people come into contact with a mind that unites them, an extraindividual or multi-personal mind. And this dual mind becomes a trinity at the end when Molly Bloom reveals herself as the spirit underlying and proceeding from their relationship. The Wake, which is a dream, takes place within the mind, in a world whose shifting characters are mental impulses. The five archetypal figures of the eternal family in the Wake embody the interacting parts of a universal mind. The relationship of the parts of this, Joyce's most highly developed psychic apparatus, is examined by Margaret Solomon in Eternal Geomater. 25 The Joycean mind thus progresses from a naturalistic nullity to a unity to a duality to a trinity to a quaternity to a quincunx. This multiplication of integrated mental systems was intended by Joyce to express for humanity the maximum possible richness of being. In the depths of this elaboration we can find new principles of mental life and a new understanding of how these principles work together--if we have the flexibility to use every available psychological resource toward the construction of a true Joycean psychology. Notes | 1. | ( Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Pr., 1973), pp. 200-1, 214-15. A more limited use of statistics is John B. Smith, Imagery and the Mind of Stephen Dedalus: A Computer-Assisted Study of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ( Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Pr., 1980). Limitations of space oblige me to omit several books that derive Joyce's psychology from his sources, but do not enter into the theoretical questions I am concerned with. | | | | | 2. | Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid ( New York: Basic Books, 1979); note also Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind's I ( New York: Basic Books, 1981). | | | | | 3. | The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). | | | | | 4. | A useful summary of Piaget's vast work is Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child, trans. Helen Weaver ( New York: Basic Books, 1969). | | | | | 5. | "Freud and Literature", in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society ( New York: Anchor Books, 1953), p. 38. | | | | | 6. | Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum, ed. Phillip F. Herring ( Charlottesville: Univ. Pr. of Virginia, 1972), p. 101. | | | | | 7. | Ed. Clive Hart ( New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), p. 74. | | | | | 8. | ( New York: Oxford, 1977), p. 54. | | | | | 9. | "Leopold Bloom as Dr. Sigmund Freud", Mosaic, 6 (Fall 1972), 23-43. | | | | | 10. | Finnegans Wake: A Facsimile of Buffalo Notebooks VI.B. 17-20, ed. David Hayman , James Joyce Archive, v.{33} ( New York: Garland, 1978), p. 258. Hayman points out this passage in his Preface to Notebook VI.B. 19. | | | | | 11. | Kenner Ulysses ( London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), p. 112. Kenner credits Bruce Kawin with the idea of the mind of the text. It is a good idea insofar as | | | it allows us to see the presence of mind on this level, but I hope it will not be used to reduce the fullness of the dynamic concept of mind to a verbal configuration. | | | | | 12. | See Norman N. Holland, 5 Readers Reading ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1975). | | | | | 13. | Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr., 1974). | | | | | 14. | (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1980). | | | | | 15. | ( Toronto and Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Pr., 1980). Psychoanalysis is subordinate to myth in Gose, as it is in the Skeleton Key. | | | | | 16. | D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Monograph No. 4 ( New York: International Universities Pr., 1971). | | | | | 17. | The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1981). | | | | | 18. | The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis ( Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1976). See Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud", in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan ( New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 146-75. | | | | | 19. | Norris, p. 71. | | | | | 20. | ( London: Macmillan, 1979). In addition to Lacan, MacCabe uses Jacques Derrida, whose "Freud and the Scene of Writing", in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1978), pp. 196-231, should be read by all psycho-critics. | | | | | 21. | MacCabe, pp. 85, 115. | | | | | 22. | The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson ( London: Hogarth, 1953, 1958), IV, 265. | | | | | 23. | Metaphysics, 1032b, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon ( New York: Random House, 1941), p. 792. | | | | | 24. | Annotations to Finnegans Wake ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1980), p. 57. | | | | | 25. | Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Pr., 1969). Another striking treatment of the psychological interactions of the Wake is Randolph Splitter, "The Sane and Joyful Spirit", James Joyce Quarterly, 13 (Spring 1976), 350-65. |
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